Three things

[mrissa]

First, I am distraught: they changed the formulation of my shampoo. Now in addition to other things it smells like roses. Mrissas do not smell like roses. Unless they have been walking through a rose garden. As a generality: no. So we have a full bottle (minus one use) of shampoo that will probably get given to a shelter, because: no roses. (It's not that I dislike the smell of roses. It's that I have very firm ideas about what does and does not smell like me, and roses are not on the list. Also, because of my olfactory focus, I really need scents to harmonize, and roses do not go well with my current conditioner, shower gel, deodorant, lotion, and laundry detergent. At least not optimally. It's easy to dismiss these concerns as unimportant when you don't smell at least five layers on every person you meet.) So I'm going to have to go buy shampoo tomorrow, and I'm likely going to have to stand in the store smelling the different possibilities, because they changed the formulation of the formerly correct possibility. Sigh. All I want is for these scents to be stable! Is that too much to ask?

Second, I am a dirty rotten liar or at least mistaken: markgritter wanted to grill tonight instead of having chicken soup, so we did, and also it's very difficult to make oatmeal raisin cookies when someone has eaten all the raisins and didn't buy oats even though they were on his last grocery list. So: tomorrow. I will go to the store in the morning and come home and make cookies in the afternoon. (This has the pleasant property of allowing me to abort-mission on the cookies and serve poor Mike -- and also porphyrin and Roo, but I spoil them differently -- ice cream for his dessert if it turns out I don't have time for cookies.)

Third, something hit me when I was looking at the comments you-all made in response to my noir question. I'm not doing a pure noir or pastiche, is the thing: I'm using some of the elements and some not. The setting is not this world at all. So sometimes noirish stuff just can't happen that way, and sometimes it can happen in a fun similar way, and sometimes it's dead on. The thing that hit me as I was reading along is: where are the middle-aged women? All the women are "dames" and "dishes." They may be the plucky unnoticed brunette secretary or the blonde femme fatale, but they're all youngish sex symbols. I had heard people talking about middle-aged women being invisible, and I think this is what they mean. A wisecracking waitress, maybe, or someone's mother, but an actual character? Where? How? It just doesn't go.

I can't write a novel without middle-aged women. I don't mean I don't want to, although that, too. I mean I can't. Even my YA novels have middle-aged women who are people, though not main characters kind of by the default of the form. (Or to put it another way, if the main character was middle-aged of any flavor, I would probably decide that what I had was an adult novel rather than a YA.) But in the culture I'm dealing writing about, if you tried to treat a middle-aged woman as invisible, she would have the wherewithal to demand and receive satisfaction of you for it. In this culture, middle-aged women's honor does not come from not sleeping with anyone but their husbands. I mean, duh. Why would it?

(Honor can matter a great deal in a noir book. Mostly by its absence, but that counts.)

I didn't think about it that way when I was writing the first stuff related to this world, and I likely won't much later. I didn't think about it that way with my other worlds, either, and I don't expect to in the future unless something brings it up like this noir stuff did. I think that's probably a good thing. I think it's a good deal worse to have to sit down and consciously remember that a large category of people do, in fact, count as people. Still, their noir absence looks very strange all of a sudden.

Comments

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

I guess I never thought of the word "dame" as implying that a woman is young. I fact, I think of a "dame" as at least 35 to 45.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I do think movies are worse that way than books or radio...not that Garrison Keillor does the most authentic noir, but "Guy Noir" has middle-aged women quite frequently.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If a modern person used it that way, I think so, but, "She was a pretty good-looking dame," does not mean my mom in noir terms.

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

I guess my picture of a dame in a hard-boiled detective series is Bertha Cool, who was certainly no young thing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had never heard of Bertha Cool before this week and am having a great deal of difficulty with the name.

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

It's a very 1930s-40s name, isn't it? My grandmother was a Bertha, but it's one of those names you never hear anymore.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had a great-aunt Bertha who was the epitome of uncool, so it's the combination.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that female detectives are not very noir-typical, at least not in the older examples of the genre/sub-genre/whatever-it-is.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Interesting that you think that the women are young... in my experience of noir (admittedly limited) women are often divorced, widowed, or somehow "experienced." In the golden age of noir (mid 20C) it wouldn't have been appropriate to put nubile young virgins into peril, so the women are always in someway "damaged goods." Why not middle-aged women? There's always Emma Peel!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But it also looks to me as though those "experienced" women are roughly my age, because it's a world where people get cynical incredibly quickly.

Emma Peel is extremely far from what I'm thinking of at all. The jumpsuit -- slacks at all! -- just doesn't seem like it/they fit the hard-boiled thing.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Noir is the trauma of a World War following a Depression played out as hard people looking out for themselves; the social rules are transmuted, suspended or tossed out altogether. You know all that. What is missing in film noir isn't middle age as much as any sense that middle age has value for a female. Far from it; middle age is a woman's worst nightmare. If you aren't young enough or pretty enough to find a man or a job you are in a world of trouble, sister. There's no safety, no sense that the future holds anything but more pain and deprivation. The older the women, the meaner and more damaged they are.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Far from it; middle age is a woman's worst nightmare.

And that is exactly the kind of world I am incapable of writing.

So maybe it won't come out all that noir, despite the detective and the blonde and the thugs and all. Because I just don't think I can think that way, and I'm pretty sure I can't make these people in my head think that way.

[drabheathen.livejournal.com]

Two words: Sunset Boulevard.

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

I'm another who needs to have her scents harmonious. Right now, I seem to be in a citrus/cocoa butter stage. Makes for interesting moments when people pass by me and say, "I smell chocolate!"

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Coincidentally, someone else on my reading list posted this link to a compendious film noir site: http://www.briansdriveintheater.com/filmnoir.html
though I don't know if it's likely to resolve the age issue.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Regardless, thank you.

[greatestofnates.livejournal.com]

Children are also absent unless they are streetwise adults in small bodies.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is true, and also difficult for me.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

Yes, I don't think of middle-aged women as absent from noir. I do think rich, attractive, well-dressed middle-aged women (and I mean attractive middle-aged in a pre-plastic surgery sense) fit very comfortably into the role of "dames". I guess I think in terms of the sexy 20-something who caused the successful 40-something businessman to divorce his first wife, and now it's 30-40 years later, and she's held on to him, and he's dying, and she's in a fight with the children from the first marriage over something or other. Or, the son from the first marriage has taken over the business gradually, and the husband has said something that has raised her suspicions and now she needs help. So there's still a heap of stereotypes in there, but they still result in the existence of older women in the stories.

I agree movies are worse, in that they don't cast older women, but that's hardly a problem exclusive to noir movies.