Good people are always so sure they're right

Sunday, June 26, 2022

“Noir” is a life one wants to live and something that we are drawn to, but other times ‘noir” finds us. Culture, politics, and alienation are the ingredients that make a great ‘Noir narrative.  It is equally a genre that is highly visual. We can use the word “Noir.” We have an obvious picture of what that could mean.  For some, it is femme fatal dressed in something black and white. For others, it could be a scary version of architecture.  For me, it is a combination of both, but I never have a problem with a femme fatal.  In fact, as a species or type, I like them a lot.  When I heard about Barbara Graham, the accused and executed killer, who was a “seagull, ” a prostitute that hung out near naval bases and had a bad hard life that was nothing but crime and vice.  Including her parents, who were just like her, ruthless as they come. There is something sexy about that, and Barbara was stunning, wrong, and therefore sexually appealing to me.

Barbara and her equally wicked drug-addicted boyfriend and their other friend broke into a house owned by a woman who was reported to have a great deal of jewelry and cash.  They couldn’t find the money and eventually killed the older woman.   The losers never win, and of course, they were arrested.  It was pointed out that when the police arrested Barbara, she was only dressed in her panties, which in the 1950s must have been the hottest thing to read in a newspaper.  Barbara’s last words at her execution were, "Good people are always so sure they're right, ” which strikes me as the perfect noir thing to say as you are about to leap into the unknown.  What is fascinating about her is not Barbara but how the world responds to her.  In reality, her life was wasted since birth, yet, our culture needs the Barbara Grahams of the world to keep us in line.  Or, at the very least, on the same moral ground, which of course, murder is wrong, sex is not good unless it is with socially responsible adults, and most importantly, God forbid if hard drugs are involved.  Nevertheless, all these taboos are almost like pornography to me.   What we desire is to belong, whether that family or society is correct or not -we need to be part of someone else’s dream, fantasy, or reality and live through their lives.

In the male version of “Noir,” desire is Peter Lorre.  The great German actor worked with one of my (dark) heroes, Bertolt Brecht.  On top of that, he played a child murderer whom one can be sympathetic toward, even though his crime is taboo and unmentionable.  He is so cruel that the criminal and police world works together to search for and destroy the Lorre character.  Hinting that the biggest sin may be the alliance between crime and police, but nothing can be worse than a child killer.

Peter Lorre was someone who had a series of problems in his actual life that included a severe addiction to morphine.  Yet, he pretty much worked till his death.  A year or two before he passed to the great beyond, there was a German actor by the name of Eugene Weingand, who resembled the great Lorre and tried to change his name legally to Peter Lorre Jr.  Lorre objected to it, and also the studio American International Pictures which had Peter Lorre under contract.   The court ruled that Weingand was trying to cash on Lorre’s name and refused his case.  When Peter passed away, Weingand claimed to be the son of the actor, and even though he lost his case, he still used the name “Peter Lorre Jr.”   When he died in Texas, he was hosting a horror show under the Lorre Junior name.

My name, “Tosh Berman,” is also under suspicion because there is another Tosh Berman out there who got a series of bad presses, and I have not met or known him.  Yet, the casual reader on the Internet may confuse the two identities.  It should be clear to everyone that the only crime I admit to is a bad sentence here and there.  Over the years, I have been attracted to the writings of Colin Wilson, who documented all sorts of horrible crimes and wrote a classic called “The Outsider.” Although I prefer his “Adrift in Soho, ” but that’s here or there.  But what is interesting is that he pretty much spent his entire life and career focusing on those who went across the line between taste, honor, sex crimes, and murder.  Overall I much admire his work, and yet, as a writer and one who is attracted to the darkness that is out there, I still try to keep at least one toe on the light.