Noirdom

Looking back on how addictive the Noir dramas were last winter, I’ve tried to understand why I’m not quite so enthusiastic about watching the latest offerings; there’s an absence of that ‘enjoyable anticipation’.

Friends chatted about the mid-week drama London Spy; derivative in that it ‘used’ a real life crime with all its spiky nuances to attempt to put some energy into the action; slow moving in that the energy failed to materialise.   One viewing, and a brief dip into subsequent episodes, sufficed.  This ‘wee dizzie’ channelled me towards the Saturday evening Nordic Noir classic where, surprisingly, I found attention drifting, the drama unsettling, and an urgent need for a handful of carbo-laden comfort food accompanied by sips of a soothing red.  Unfortunately, said red precipitated (as it oft times does) an undertone of weltschmerz.

James Bond action movies and Arne Dahl psychological thrillers are arguably, in today’s unreal reality, to a degree, obsolete.    We no longer have to search out fantasy land and its oh so addictive adrenalin rushes; the ‘drama’, ‘the set’, are now present on our very own streets.   It’s not ‘pretend’ any more, it is enacted in the places we love, the places we play in, the places we felt safe in.

Paris – my favourite city – the city I’d take a lover to;  argued politics in cafés on the Boul Mich;  spied fragments of ‘another world’ through a chance glimpse of a fountain playing courtyard behind great iron gates off a pavement; longed for exquisite items in little shops in the Marais…    My Paris – the city where childhood lemonade was flavoured with crème d’methe; where as teenagers we danced on cobble stones on Bastille day and stole a sailor’s cap.

That Paris, of such precious memories, was transformed so few days ago into a reality TV Noir – and I don’t honestly know how much time has to pass before I will return to searching out those Nordic Noir spiky tales with their psychological conundrums.

So…   are we sitting on the brink of a future where the only safe social space is a Facebook café?

Chris