Dead Bodies, Dead Words: Stereotype and Cliché in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me and Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend
On the publication of Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend (hereafter referred to as DW), the Sunday Tribune suggested that it be read “among women only, and highly feminised women at that” while She said not to let men read it because “they’ll probably die of guilt.”1 These comments acknowledge the potential political impact of the text but also fear that impact. This text, along with Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (TKM), is a disturbing exploration of serial murder. They both use ‘dead language’ as part of these explorations. Therefore, this essay will examine the causes and uses of stereotype and cliché in these texts. Stereotype is the generalisation of people and ideas, while cliché is the mode of language that enables the expression of those generalisations. Both texts use and re-use these devices for deliberate effect, forming separate types of resistance to a society that encourages this dead language. This essay will argue that neither text can escape the effects of stereotype or cliché, leading to the conclusion that their chosen form, Noir, is bound up with the conventions that exist in any popular genre. Consequently, the texts struggle to produce an original answer to the fraudulent societies they portray, repeatedly falling into nihilism. This nihilism sees no solution to the corruption of capitalist society, resulting in a laissez-faire attitude to political problems, expressed by Lou when he says of his brother’s likely murder by the wealthy Chester Conway, “It was just one of those things.”2
The argument will make use of Freudian notions of the Oedipus complex and penis-envy. Freud’s theory of penis-envy says that at the Pre-Oedipal stage, the young girl compares her clitoris to the penis of a young playmate and, seeing that she has smaller genitals, feels this “as a wrong done to her and a ground for inferiority.”3 The theory can be criticised as relying too heavily on the quantitive nature of the comparison between penis and clitoris, as a qualitive one might find the clitoris superior (better protected, the only organ designed purely for pleasure, more nerve endings than the penis). As in DW, Men are ruled by the values of quantity, “The smaller the man, the bigger the ego.”4 Kate Horney, looking at the psychiatric effects of the social roles women are expected to play, suggests that the penis-envy theory is “fatalistic because the repercussions of the concept of penis envy reinforce the conditions that caused it in the first place.”5 Thus, this theory, like much of Freudianism, can be seen as gender-biased, mistaking society’s preconceptions of women, their situation within a specific culture, as their natural psychological condition.
In both texts, pre-written stereotypes are imposed upon characters without their consent, although the cause is different in both texts. In TKM, the name of Lou Ford’s hometown, Central City, implies that its values are central to America, although this seems to contradict its fear of those from the mainstream of urban America. Its conservative notions of masculinity are backed up by the real threat of violence, “…you’re a man, a man and a gentleman, or you aren’t anything. And God help you if you’re not.”6 Lou plays along with many of these values, performing without adherence, such as when he says that African-Americans should be sent back to Africa.7 As with Bella, the difference that Lou sees between himself and the rest of his society is that he acts out what they only think. Hence, the bum will not kill him, because he is “just like everyone else. He was too nicey-nice and pretendsy to do anything really hard.”8 TKM parodies the narrowness of Central City’s fear of the Other, a gun permit “had been issued in Fort Worth, but it was all legal enough”.9 The suspicion implied in “but” is satiric given that Fort Worth is in the same State as Central City. The town’s political workings are parodied in the narrator’s cynical attitude that the magistrate, Howard Hendricks, was elected by focusing on the shrapnel wounds he received in the army.10 That the shrapnel is in Hendricks’s “ass” is a satiric comment on the worth of the political system that supports him, as is Lou’s suggestion that he use an X-ray of the wound as his campaign flag, although this is also a plea for honesty.11 Chester Conway’s money, the law “that ain’t on the books” is what controls the town.12 This corruption is endemic and centralised, “the place where the law is apt to be abused most is right around a courthouse.”13 The detailed description of the oil boom that struck the town and left it abandoned might imply that capitalism itself is to blame, but this description then focuses onto Joyce’s house, shifting the blame unfairly onto her, and women in general, as Lou does throughout the rest of the text.14 This stunted political critique leads to a nihilistic pessimism that the world will not improve because “no one, almost no one, sees anything wrong with it.”15 Hence, Lou exposes the corrupt nature of the society he lives in, yet also manipulates this moral bankruptcy to hamper the investigation into his murders.
DW has a strong sense of environment, of a timid English despair where all over the country people are “Shrieking softly so the neighbours won’t hear.”16 Elliot Leyton says that England’s murder rate is extremely low compared to other Western countries because of “the culturally programmed internalisation of shame and fear”.17 Thus, in usual circumstances, British inhibitedness keeps people from killing each other. What separates Bella from mainstream English society is that she is honest about her misery. Brighton itself is a transient space, its artificial glitz glossing over desolation, and is a typically nihilistic Noir environment for Bella to operate in, “Rights don’t exist…You only have what you can defend, and if you can’t defend it you don’t have it.”18 The image of the three young stockbrokers burning a homeless woman with the Financial Times is a potentially Marxist symbol of the murderous effect of capitalism on those at the bottom of its hierarchy, but is an image that the narrator of DW interprets as the inevitable effects of patriarchy.19 This is because, unlike for Lou, the structure of Bella’s society does not work to her advantage; rather it is on the side of men, enabling the stockbrokers to say with some accuracy, “We’re the law.”20 Bella herself is the result of a conservative upbringing, where girls are taught that “Whatever you lose, you never lose your manners.”21 These polite, middle-class values show in the ideological content and phrasing of “Nasty, brutish people who didn’t pay their taxes.”22 She is fixed as a passive female, adverse to complaining, when she understates her situation as “I get fairly depressed in my basement.”23 Thus, Tim can command her to “Be a good girl” and she interpolates this role, “She was sorry she’d offended him.”24 She willingly reworks her image to suit male desire, wearing a corset, having “powdered and shaded and highlighted.”25 This passivity is her “bourgeois phase”.26
Patriarchal attitudes function through stereotyping, for example in TKM’s use of the Femme Fatalle trope, “Here was a little lady who got what she wanted, and to hell with the price tag,” an unfair description of Joyce, whose main flaw is that she is too trusting of the murderous Lou.27 Lou takes a delight, as the lads out on the town in DW do, from sexually dominating women to the point of causing pain, “She was all sort of blushy and shy and shamed like. And she had to take it kind of easy when she sat down”.28 The text defines Joyce by an absence of its idea of femininity by remarking on her “unpainted face”, as if this were an unnatural state warranting special mention.29 Lou is angered by Joyce’s status as a sexually active woman, “…she’d been all set to lay, and it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if I hadn’t had a dime”, implying that it is acceptable for women to have sex to earn money, but not for pleasure.30 Also, the term “all set to lay” makes Joyce’s sexual excitement sound automatic, as if female sexuality were a microwave oven. Lou’s attacks are general, as he hates “all womankind”.31 He refers patronisingly to Amy’s “pretty little face”, linking with Norman’s laughter at “little Bella’s little joke” in DW.32 Lou’s aim in the text is to silence women; the last thing he says to Amy being “Just don’t say anything more.”33 TKM backs up Lou’s assumptions about female sexuality and the silencing of women when he grabs Amy’s crotch to shut her up and she gives an appreciative “You s-stop or…Oh Lou!”, the italics emphasising her pleasure in being silenced in this manner. This animalistic reaction is reinforced by the imagery of “she swarmed up against me.”34
Julia Kristeva argues that male disgust of the female body stems from the fear of being cast back into the mother’s womb, from which the child separates itself in order to enter the Symbolic realm, saying that “Menstrual blood…threatens the relationship between the sexes within the social aggregate”.35 Thus, the dentist in DW hates women’s menstruation, “that stinking woman smell”, while TKM’s Amy refers to Joyce’s “dirty insides”.36 Male stereotypes trap women into fixed roles, often with negative qualities attached. Thus, Stan equates being feeble-minded with being “Generally womanish.”37 Bella is generalised as “no one special” and “Bella nobody”.38 This generalised status allows Tim to say “You’re all the same.” and regard Bella as he does the images of women in his pornography magazines.39 The final rapist, Jake, categorises women into basic types, “Screamer, kicker, gabber, wetter”, an indication of the violence that can attach to negative stereotyping.40 Women who are outside male categories are even more vulnerable to attack. Thus the three stockbrokers attack the old woman because she does not conform to their notions of being a “lady”.41
Men are also fixed into pre-written positions, albeit positions of relative power. The Iranian Clairvoyant Nimrod is portrayed using stereotype, as an exotic, Eastern guru who moves with “oriental grace” and has “demonic” eyes, suggesting that Bella is making a Faustian pact.42DW’s critique of men is made general. Thus, Tim is “ordinary” and “accentless” while Norman is generalised by his name suggesting that he is ‘normal man’.43 Likewise, the three stockbrokers are almost interchangeable, identified only by the labels quiet, short or bitter; while the final rapist has a featureless “blank” face.44 What links these men are biologically determined traits, “What they want they must possess. What they can’t possess, they must penetrate. What they can’t penetrate they must destroy.”45 This determinism is because men are seen as controlled by their penises, “You’ve got a cock, and the cock is king.”46
Unlike with Bella, the stereotype imposed on TKM’s Lou Ford endows him with power. He must maintain this stereotype against his wishes because society cannot accept his ‘real’ self. The label for this role is “old dumb Lou from Kalamazoo”.47 The community looks up to this image of Lou as an inspiration, “…you are good, you make others so.”48 His surname, Ford, alludes to the car manufacturing company Ford, an archetypal pillar of American respectability and the values of capitalism. Lou always acts according to what looks best for him, ironising his statement that he “naturally” did not take a day off after coming back from Fort Worth.49 The narrator emphasises Lou’s external performance of normality, linked with Expressionist notions of the inside outside, by repeatedly mentioning Lou’s cigarettes, baths, breakfasts and cups of coffee. Similarly, it is in terms of performance that Rothman at first dismisses the idea of Lou as serial killer because he “don’t fit the part.”50
TKM attempts to extend Lou’s self beyond society’s stereotype of him. His sexual initiation by his housekeeper, Helene, is an explicit allusion to Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, as is the fact that Joyce and Amy look similar to her.51 There is an awareness of the importance of the symbolic castration by the Law of the Father when Lou tells Amy that he was sterilised as a child.52 Yet this is a falsehood. Thus, the text is ambiguous enough to leave open the possibility of a Foucaultian interpretation, that Lou’s illness has been created by the attempts to define it; with the lawyer Billy Bob Walker admitting that “the only legal definition we have for insanity is the condition which necessitates the confinement of a person.”53 Hence, Lou’s supposed Oedipal transgression only became important because “Dad made it mean something.”54 Other interpretations could be put forward to explain Lou’s actions. His hatred of woman and fondness for Bob and Johnnie could be the result of a repressed and resented homosexuality, hinted at when Lou gives Bob a back massage, lights his phallic cigar for him and then hires a bedroom on the train for them both.55 This is backed up by Lou’s inability to maintain an erection with Amy and the fact that he takes “male hormone” could be interpreted as an attempt to make himself more heterosexual.56 Certainly, performance and diagnosis are linked, with Lou himself expressing strong doubts:
We might have the disease, the condition; or we might just be cold-blooded and smart as hell; or we might be innocent of what we’re supposed to have done. We might be any one of those three things, because the symptoms we show would fit any one of the three.”57
Lou’s ‘real’ self is set up as an antidote to the fixed role he is forced to play in society. This version of Lou works out calculus problems “just for the hell of it”, a phrase implying awareness that this is unusual and revealing behaviour.58 Yet there remains an absence behind Lou’s logical structure of killings. He diagnoses himself as having Paranoid Schizophrenia, which is a moral confusion leading from a disintegration of the self.59 According to Kenneth Payne, Thompson’s use of Lou is to “seek to legitimize the schizophrenic consciousness”.60 Yet Lou’s italicised second voice seems to suggest Multiple Personality Disorder, rather than Schizophrenia, as does the title. The phrase “Two hearts that beat as one” also supports this two personas notion.61 Analyses such as Payne’s are a convenient method of providing an explanation for Lou’s actions, allowing him to confidently assert that Thompson “narrates from inside” the schizophrenic state.62 Yet this state is simply another set of frozen clichés, this time from Lou’s father’s psychiatry books. Mark Seltzer says that the notion that Lou imitates normality, whilst keeping his real self hidden, relies on a simplistic notion of the autonomy of the self from the trappings of society.63 Lou’s resistance fails because it exchanges one imposed, fixed stereotype for another.
In DW, Norman works in “Clinical psychology”, a field that has attempted to define and categorise people, with, as already stated, a bias against women.64 This allows Norman to diagnose his wife with “low self-esteem” and remove himself from any responsibility for their separation.65 Bella commits violence upon this field by killing Norman, in a symbolic representation of what women in society should put into action. Yet this action is contradicted by the text’s explicit acceptance of Bella’s Freudian definition, “…she experienced…a pang of purest penis-envy.”66 Unlike Freud, Teresa Brennan interprets penis-envy symbolically, as phallus-envy, saying that “The penis is the perfect emblem of the ability to project a visual image on to the other…to secure the attention that maintains identity…penis-envy is the envy of the being who is able to receive that attention.”67 This interpretation allows penis-envy to be a cultural phenomenon caused by patriarchal society, rather than the ‘natural’ psychology of the female. Bella’s penis-envy seems power-envy when she says of Tim, “You lucky, lucky man, with your fearless, open, unlocked window that lets the air swirl in.”68 Similarly, Bella’s gun is “the only phallus worth having” because it is the only one to bestow true power.69 Yet Bella does envy the physical penis, saying “…a willy would indeed have been wonderful.”70 Her mocking of Norman’s flaccid penis as the “phallic god that failed” mistakes the symbolic phallus for the biological penis. This leads to an emphasis on the penis as having power, rather than the phallus as a symbol of it.
Norman’s nickname for his penis, “Percy”, parodies him and undermines the notion of cock-as-king.71 This emasculates him in such a way as to put him in the traditional ‘feminine’ role. Likewise, he has a “weak, wet, woman’s mouth”, the alliterating ‘w’ sound emphasising his femininity, reversing the disgust of liquid ‘female’ juices that Kristeva identifies, although the disgust itself remains legitimate.72 The grotesque image of Norman’s erection, “The slug gradually became a reptile” removes male notions of the penis as object of female desire, but does not remove it from its status as an object containing power within itself.73 When Norman’s penis is fully erect, there is a shift in the terms used. They move from the satiric “Perce”, to become abstracted as his “excitement” and finally, when fully erect, becoming his self, “you’re enormous” (my italics), with Norman linked phonetically with the word enormous.74 Thus, the text places no less emphasis on the supposed power of the biological penis than it accuses men of doing. According to psychiatrist Van Ophuijsen, female patients displaying the symptoms of penis envy “Express a wish to take possession of a person…or they have the feeling that they wish to penetrate someone else”.75 Certainly, Bella would like to dominate someone as the men who walk past the hotel brag of having done, and, although this could also be a wish to urinate on them rather than rape them, the desire to project onto the Other remains the same. However, her lack of a physical penis means that she is “anatomically incapable of expressing herself in the way that she wished.”76 By accepting the theory of penis-envy in the terms that Freud understood it, DW undermines the political side of Bella’s motives by allowing a reductive, gender-biased explanation of them.
Bella’s quest is exhilarating in the short-term but politically insufficient in the longer term. Her actions do not change the structure of domination, for example when she pushes the gun into the short stockbroker’s stomach, as if committing rape, while he shakes “with fear, like she used to shake.”77 As Bella takes the dominant ‘male’ position, she shows similarities to those who are ostensibly her enemy, undermining her attempts at creating an alternative position from which to critique. Thus, Bella admires the bitter stockbroker’s pride and kills him “the way she would choose” for herself.78 Likewise, there is symmetry of thought between Bella and Jake, “They didn’t know how slow they were…She tried to move her arm, but didn’t know how slow she was.”79 They seem telepathically linked, with him releasing her fingers “as if he’d read her mind.”80 Bella at first contrasts with categorising, male order because within her killing spree “There wasn’t any pattern…Everything was random”.81 Yet she later systematises her killing with a “black mark” points system and moves from the messy hammer to the clinical gun as her weapon of choice.82 Her system is likened to an established institution, “the driving licence”, demonstrating a failure to move beyond categorising systems.83
DW might not have a Grand Narrative but it certainly has a ‘Grand Narrator’, interpreting Bella’s tale in a dramatic light. The name Nimrod refers to the biblical founder of the city of Babylon, the architect of the Tower of Babel. His name comes from “the Hebrew verb ‘Nimrodh’ which is translated, ‘Let us revolt’”.84 Thus his name is an allusion to a tradition of defying authority — in this case, that of God. The narrator sees Bella’s quest as similarly revolutionary, saying that “Bella has begun to break every rule they ever made to keep her down.”85 The narrator idealises her, “God bless you, Bella. God bless you for reclaiming the night.”86 This reclaiming is a political act affecting all women, “She bludgeoned him for all her silent sisters.”87 The narrator asserts Bella as political revolutionary by denying other interpretations, saying that she is “not a monster. Nor a nutter. Nor psychotic.”88 Behave, or the Bella will get you.”89 This status as “the Bella” makes her a blank space to be filled by the narrator, “I looked inside myself and there was nothing there, so I thought I’d camp in the empty space.”90 Thus the narrator of DW sees Bella as a feminist heroine, children see her as a monster under the bed, whilst newspapers would see her as a Myra Hindley figure. Elliot Leyton says that the British press manipulate public fear of homicide to “quite inappropriate” levels.91 This is particularly the case for female killers, as the crime writer Natasha Cooper says, “Sexist of all is violence done, or imagined, by a woman. But any woman who provides such a frisson must expect to be condemned for the very excitement she arouses.”92 Yet Bella wants to become a headline, giving herself imaginary alliterating tabloid nicknames, “Brighton Bella. Boadicea Bella.”93 She wishes she could complete the “Cinematic” quality of her murder of the three stockbrokers by cocking her gun, further establishing her actions as part a pre-written structure, with a pun on “cocking” that links this structure to patriarchy. She also wishes that she could capture the scene on camera, showing a desire to perform for the surface image of her actions. She thus becomes a pre-written image of female threat, “A dark-eyed siren from the deep.”94 Her actions lose their power to resist and slide back into male categories of ‘dangerous’ female behaviour.
If Lou and Bella’s attempts to throw off the shackles of stereotyping through their self image-making fail, their different uses of cliché may bring them closer to this goal. Cliché is the language of convention, and Noir, as with any popular genre, has a close relationship with convention. Seltzer calls cliché “the condensed form of mass-mediated interiority”, the loss of individual interior difference.95 Lou Ford becomes a linguistic thief in order to express his conventional persona, “I pick up lots of good lines at prayer meetings.”96 He talks in the clichés of the mainstream he despises, “Haste makes waste, in my opinion. I like to look before I leap”, passing them off as his own thoughts, symbolising his supposed loss of individuality.97 These clichés run into each other, merging to the point of being senseless, “we’re all in the same boat and we’ve got to put our shoulders to the wheel and pull together.”98 Lou accepts society’s clichés and performs them as his own because they bring him comfort, “It had always made me feel better to come here, back from the time I was kneehigh to a grasshopper.”99 Similarly, he says that using clichés “helped to take the tension out of me.”100 Lou’s clichés numb people into bored acceptance, giving him the freedom to continue his murders. Cliché, the production of dead language, is linked with murder, the production of dead people. It is a substitute for violence but it is also symbolic of violence itself, described as “Striking at people”.101 The pun on “You slay me” is a foreshadowing of Joyce’s death and another indication of this link.102 If Lou’s killings run contrary to his society, as the text states that they do, then it is by using society’s language against itself that they are achieved. Hence, Lou speaks in cliché when he murders Johnnie, “A time to live and a time to die.”103
However, male violence does not run contrary to patriarchal societies; rather it is an essential, underlying ingredient of them. In DW, Bella and Norman’s ‘making-up’ scene, following him hitting her, is in script format to shown its pre-written nature.104 The rules of the clichéd conversation have been determined as part of the war of the sexes, to legitimize Norman’s use of violence. He also uses stock phrases to prove his status as an intellectual, saying as he turns on the light switch “Let there be light.” and the narrator sarcastically commenting “You could see why he’d almost made professor.”105 The clichés that give Lou and Norman power respectively in the two texts also easily define Bella at the beginning as a ‘shrinking violet’, with the statements that pain is not “her cup of tea” and that her life is “no bed of roses.”106 Clichés tranquillize her as she runs through them, like a mantra learned when young, “Look on the bright side. Make the most of what you’ve got. (Homely Homilies have always helped her),” “Homely” here relating to Homme meaning male.107 Male language, the Symbolic as Kristeva sees it, is a set of rigid rules and like the rules of society that Bella breaks by killing, she breaks them as well, “No Queensbury rules, if you’re Bella.”108
Thompson’s Lou Ford believes himself to be against such rules, attacking newspaper clichés despite using them himself, exclaiming that Joyce “hadn’t, for Christ’s sake, ‘loved not wisely, but too well’.”109 Clichéd language supports stereotypes by generalising and essentialising people into groups, for example the clichés “newcomers” and “old timers” leave no possibility of liminality; not even for Howard Hendricks who is considered a newcomer, even though he has lived in the town for eight years.110 Clichéd language supports Lou’s patriarchal ideas of women, “…you wouldn’t find a girl as pretty and well-built as Amy Stanton in a month of Sundays.”111 Amy’s stammering is proof that it is her that society’s language contrasts with. Yet Lou associates the use of dead language with her, “I figured she’d been gabbing and nagging about nothing, as usual.” leading him to believe that “I knew almost to a word what she was going to say.”112 Thus he incorrectly sees Amy as naturally speaking the language of the mainstream, rather than performing it as he does. Yet as we have seen, Lou’s ‘real’ self, which is opposed to cliché, is in fact an absence. Lou emerges as nothing but stereotype and cliché, therefore he cannot live once his control of society’s language breaks down into “ha, ha, ha”.113 Thus, the reversal of cliché works against him, as when Bob Maples expresses that Lou is trapped, “it’s always lightest j-just before the dawn”, his stammering a further breakdown of Lou’s standardised language.114
Rather than the men the phrase originally identified as its subject, it is DW’s Bella who “was born free and is everywhere in chains.”115 Phrases famous for being rallying cries against the established order are implicitly criticised for overlooking women, Bella being described as “the original collective. To each according to his needs.”116 The text inverts famous phrases and well-known clichés, reclaiming them for women, “One small step for Bella, but a huge leap for womankind.”117 There is a rewriting of the meaning of famous phrases, a rejection of their original forms, “She could never take an eye for an eye…She wants an eye for a tooth, and a life for an eye.”118 Here Bella goes further than the original phrase. She undercuts the authority of fixed phrases and dead language, “They say the best die young, which goes to show how much they know.”119 Reworked phrases contain slivers of humour that the originals do not, “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Men with thin skulls shouldn’t try to involve randomly selected women in their fantasies.”120
DW re-uses male phrases against men, saying of Tim “There’s a time to come, and a time to go.”121 The meanings of these phrases are distorted, Bella saying of looking back at her basement from Tim’s house that “travel broadens the mind.”122 This shift in meaning undercuts the original intention. The murderous reversal of female-male roles is self-consciously expressed through the application to men of clichés reserved for women, “I want you to shut your eyes and think of England.”123 There is an attempted murder of male phrasing at the very end, when Bella stabs the rapist’s “throbbing heart of darkness, not to coin a phrase.”124 Yet this quotation is ambiguous, as it is a restatement of a male phrase as well as a denial of one. The text attempts to break through the anaesthetising effects of cliché, “You shake with fear. It’s not just a phrase”, allowing the reader to think again about a phrase they have heard repeatedly.125 As the form of cliché must remain in order for it to be cliché, the only true resistance it can achieve against male language, and the structures of patriarchy it underwrites, is from this originality of intended meaning.
In TKM, Lou’s clichés co-exist with an authentic depiction of Texan speech patterns, with sentences beginning “Well” and phrases such as “crawled out of a hog wallow wearing a gunny sack.”126 The narrator stumbles over words as if they were being spoken aloud in conversation, “ten-twelve years ago.”127 The language depicts a rural, passive type of life through the imagery, “We just drifted together like straws in a puddle” in a similar way that Raymond Chandler’s famous similes capture a sense of the tense, urban atmosphere he writes about.128 Thompson’s language is a deliberate comment on the validity of cliché, and through that of the pulp fiction that makes use of it. There is an explicit attack on obscure and elitist writers, presumably those books which constitute the cannon, parodied as writing of “stars flashing and sinking into a deep, dreamless sea.” which contrasts to Thompson’s supposedly accurate realism of “how it was.”129 Pulp emerges as clearer and more democratic than the obscure writers that the city “book reviewers” prefer.130 Yet there is a jealousy in Lou’s attitude to cerebral language, as after using it himself, he comments “Nicelines, huh? I could talk that way all the time if I wanted to… I used to could talk that way all the time.”131 The tension between “Could” and “used to” shows that Lou’s attitude to florid language is in reality too ambiguous to maintain his critique of it. The linguistic resistance of TKM may be an attempt to fight for the validity of pulp fiction, yet it confirms that two of its devices, stereotype and cliché, by their pre-written nature, cannot bring any resistance to the level of originality where that fiction can seriously challenge notions of the Cannon. If this battle is to be fought, it must not be on this ground.
TKM’s attempts to use psychoanalysis to critique mainstream society fail because the psychoanalysis used is a fixed part of that society, including its stereotypes and clichés. In DW, Bella sees the forces of stereotype as patriarchal in nature, yet cannot avoid her actions becoming stereotypical themselves. The most complete resistance that DW achieves is a linguistic one, yet the text remains constrained by its pulp form, by the requirement to provide the short-term exhilaration of Noir over a more total political critique. Cliché, the use of pulp language, comments on Noir, as pulp literature. Although DW does not escape cliché, it allows its reinterpretation. TKM’s Lou Ford feels oppressed by the forces of cliché, failing to realise how much those forces are stacked in his favour. DW gives an effective demonstration of the bias of male forms of language, while TKM identifies those forms as oppressive, yet misidentifies their target. Lou associates cliché with women while Bella associates it with men. The real culprit is the mass-media society created under Late capitalism, the same forces that have produced popular genres such as Noir. Ultimately, Noir itself emerges as too bound up with capitalism to move beyond it; too complicit in its role as pulp to critique beyond stylish and nihilistic pessimism. The murders and others crimes that populate Noir are always going to be tools of reaction rather than of progress, no matter how well-intentioned they might be.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brennan, Teresa, The Interpretation of the Flesh — Freud and Femininity (Great Britain: Routledge, 1992)
Browne, Angela, When Battered Women Kill (USA: The Free Press, 1987)
Cates, Dudley F., The Rise and Fall of Nimrod (1997), cited at http://www.cwd.co.uk/babel/nimrod.html
Cooper, Natasha, ‘Women and Violence cited at http://www.crimetime.co.uk/features/natashacooper.html
Horney, Kate, cited in Kurzweil, Edith, Freudians and Feminists (USA: Westview Press Inc, 1995)
Knelman, Judith, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press (Canada: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 1998)
Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez, (USA: Columbia University Press, 1982)
Leyton, Elliot, Men of Blood: Murder in Modern England (Great Britain: Constable Company Ltd, 1995)
Payne, Kenneth, The Killers Inside Them: The Schizophrenic Protagonist in John Franklin Bardin’s ‘Devil Take the Blue-Tailfly’ and Jim Thompson’s ‘The Killer Inside Me’ (Kuwait: EBSCO Publishing, 2003) — handout from David Law seminar
Seltzer, Mark, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (USA: Routledge, 1998)
Thompson, Jim, The Killer Inside Me (USA: Orion Books, 2002)
Van Ophuijsen, cited in Teresa Brennan, The Interpretation of the Flesh — Freud and Femininity (Great Britain: Routledge, 1992)
Zahavi, Helen, Dirty Weekend (Great Britain: Macmillan London Limited, 1991)
Sunday Tribune and She cited in Zahavi, Helen, Dirty Weekend (Great Britain: Macmillan London Limited, 1991)
REFERENCES
1 Sunday Tribune and She cited in Helen Zahavi, Dirty Weekend (Great Britain: Macmillan London Limited, 1991), p. i
2 Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (USA: Orion Books, 2002) p. 17
3 Teresa Brennan, The Interpretation of the Flesh — Freud and Femininity (Great Britain: Routledge, 1992), p. 11
4 Helen Zahavi, Dirty Weekend (Great Britain: Macmillan London Limited, 1991), p. 156
5 Kate Horney, cited in Edith Kurzweil, Freudians and Feminists (USA: Westview Press Inc, 1995), p. 36
17 Elliot Leyton, Men of Blood: Murder in Modern England (Great Britain: Constable Company Ltd, 1995), p. 9
32 Thompson, p. 28 & Zahavi, p. 98
35 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez, (USA: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 71
36 Zahavi, p. 129 & Thompson, p. 52
60 Kenneth Payne, The Killers Inside Them: The Schizophrenic Protagonist in John Franklin Bardin’s ‘Devil Take the Blue-Tailfly’ and Jim Thompson’s ‘The Killer Inside Me’ (Kuwait: EBSCO Publishing, 2003), p. 254 — handout from David Law seminar
63 Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (USA: Routledge, 1998) p. 161
75 Van Ophuijsen, cited in Teresa Brennan, The Interpretation of the Flesh — Freud and Femininity (Great Britain: Routledge, 1992), pp 39-40
84 Dudley F. Cates, The Rise and Fall of Nimrod (1997), cited at http://www.cwd.co.uk/babel/nimrod.html
92 Natasha Cooper, ‘Women and Violence cited at http://www.crimetime.co.uk/features/natashacooper.html
