Dramatine -- a colourful noir of night

Once upon a nightly blue, a girl named Quon makes a danube. She has neither logic nor strife, but upon her desires she explores a life.

Bright lights in the big city awake at night — Ville de Québec. One summer evening, Quon finishes the last bite dinner and follows an unconscious urge to walk the city streets, bumping into the sleazy folk; including inept minutemen, caffeine-addled clergy and one-armed one-legged fortunists. As seconds lapse, seconds into minutes into hours, we follow this dreamer girl into provoking situations; the comedic, the dazzling and the romantic. In the end, a pair of dice splash into the river as the sun dawns.

An experiment with a Noir tale, despite my inexperience with Noir. I wonder what you would think about this premise? Is it bland? Black? Or blasphemous?

edited 25th Nov '10 8:26:27 PM by QQQQQ

Sounds cute and intriguing, but I'm not sure I would call it noir. Your writing style, the things you describe, the way your settings work, always end up sort of...light. I wouldn't say fluffy, but it's kind of optimistic and sensual in a way that doesn't quite embody the spirit of noir. Noir is a genre in black and white and blood-red. It's got structure and shadows and grit. Your writing always seems to find the brighter side of things, but misses out, in doing so, on the gutteral depravity of it all.

I really think you should write this, but "a colourful noir of night (night of noir? or was that intentional?)" either way, is a contradiction in terms. A colorful night of black. You can't have it both ways, but honestly, I would love to read either.

edited 25th Nov '10 9:31:36 PM by DaeBrayk

It might be true, Dae, that noir must hold an unmatched cynicism. Noir comes from its 'blackness,' yes? But black can come in other flavours as well. Black as absence of colour, or black because of an excess of colour.

Maybe I seem like a Wide-Eyed Idealist. But I would sooner acknowledge the 'bad' in the world and say that more than 'badness' lies beyond — than turn a blind eye in ignorance, or say that 'badness' is all there is in life. (To the cynics here, feel free to ignore that statement.)

I imagine this story as a noir, not for the Johnny Gossamer detectives, or the crooked criminals with conspiracies, but for the adventure Quon has through the night — voyeuristic and pointless. Wandering here and there, the atmosphere filled with poignant emotions. And when it's all over, you're spacing out, utterly deflated, with that melancholy soundtrack echoing through the halls of your mind like an empty ballroom, with only you left sitting at the bar. The dance is done, but the mood lingers, and there's not much you can do but sit and sigh.. and realize you're a little bit older.

Colourful noir of night is intentional, yes.

edited 26th Nov '10 12:18:07 AM by QQQQQ

Right, but that isn't the Film Noir perspective. Read our article to have a better idea of what that involves. A noir is a struggle for survival, a desperate attempt to keep your skin and your morality intact in a world where everyone lies, everyone's corrupt, and everyone has an agenda. There is no sense of wonder to it, only edge-of-your seat tension as the last few bright flames of hope in a desolate wilderness begin to flicker and die.

Yours is... dreamlike, a joyous exploration of the stranger side of city living where the only true, lasting sadness is that you can't properly, permanently engage with that weird other-world. Now, you can write that if you want, but it ain't noir in the slightest.

It's more than acknowledging the badness. It's being so steeped in evil and corruption and the filth of society that even the very worst of characters can act as protagonist because this character, in the noir city, is the very best they've got. I wouldn't call what I write (I had to change the characters name to Jeremy Derringer, btw) noir. It's magical realism with noir influences and it comes closer to parodying noir than to actually being it. Also, dreamlike is exactly the word I was looking for. I love your writing style, don't get me wrong, but its not noir. Watch the movie Chinatown (or is that neo noir? I won't pretend to know the difference). You won't have some symphony echoing in the ballroom of your mind. You're just going to feel kind of hollow, and kind of sad. Noir is one of the few genres, IMO, that actually makes the fictional world worse than the real one.

More or less. Noir, by default, is black. You can certainly catch the way they write, but it'd come out as a parody of it in this case.