Better Call Saul 3.05 | Chicanery

Better Call Saul 3.05 | Chicanery

Maquette of Constantin Brancusi’s studio by Joe Fig.

Noir subgenres

- Fantasy noir: Pour another one, Joe. My dragon left me for some clean-shaven cape-wearing foreign hero with an accent so thick you could hear the fake passport in his voice.

- Existential noir: these are mean streets to have an empty life in, kid. Thinkers nurse a hangover from their disgust of life for fifty years then roll over and die. This is how we run things in our city. Play it again, will you.

- Southern Gothic Noir: look at yourself, boy. They’ve got names for people who carry the Bible like that. They’ve got names for everything around here. And if you don’t get it the first time the walls will whisper it back to you.

– Noir Mythology: She was a priestess at some local temple. One of those temple only people who pray for a pint of bourbon and a life insurance go to. And she had a face that meant trouble, make no mistake. But not after Zeus turned her into a cow. Not after Zeus turned her into a cow.

- Noir meta-Shakespeare: Characters like us, Horatio. We weren’t born to grow old and mean. We faff around, we mix a stiff one, and then we die. But when we die, we die hard and we make sure we bring the whole damn city down with us.

- Noir Milton: Heaven looked high class from fifty feet away but from five feet away it looked like the kind of place meant to be seen from fifty feet away. Stay there long enough you get a double pint of Hell’s Bells. Real hell is my business now. Real hell is how I make my nickel.

- Noir William Blake: She was the sort of tiger a bishop would paint crosses on his front door against. You can’t tell anything from tigers like that. She could have had the sheriff in the back room. She could have been making millions. But you could tell she burned bright in all the right places. Oh, she burned bright all right.

- Noir Dylan Thomas: Alright, old man. Amateur hour is over. You go down kicking and screaming or you don’t go down at all, you get my meaning?

- Noir Keats: Outside, the Autumn smelled of politics: it asked only for the highest types of men and had nothing to offer them but bleating lambs and the song of crickets. The sort of autumn that shares his smokes and his wife with the maturing sun. “I don’t like Spring,” the kid said. “That’s all right, sonny boy. I ain’t selling it.”

- Noir Edgar Allan Poe: You could tell from the way he sauntered in the bird meant business. He had the kind of beak that could drive a nail through your forehead. Didn’t string more than two words together but he knew all the right ones all the same. He knew which ones stung. “I don’t want no birds in my room,” I said, loud enough for hell to hear. But birds like that don’t just scram. Birds like that stick to you like a bad divorce from a Hollywood diva.

La nuit américaine (1973), dir. François Truffaut

Kubrick by Kirby. Jack Kirby art from the 2001 A Space Odyssey Marvel Treasury Special 1976

Georg Gerster, Ball Players, Santa Barbara, CA, 1974