'The lights of Hollywood glimmered in the cut, a mirror reflection of the stars of all galaxies everywhere. He thought about all that was bad out there. A city with more things wrong than right. A place where the earth could open up beneath you and suck you into the blackness. A city of lost light. His city. It was all that and, still, always still, a place to begin again. His city. The city of the second chance' Michael Connolly, A Darkness More Than Night
I'll begin this year's blog entries with a brilliant passage from Michael Connolly's Harry Bosch series crime novel A Darkness More Than Night. It is an evocative introduction to the first topic film noir which begins next week. For me it also encapsulates some of the key themes of the module- the dialectic of control and disorder, of dark and light, life and death and justice and injustice. It also captures the ambiguous relationship between the individual and the city- here detective Harry Bosch is repelled by the city yet drawn to it's promises- rebirth, the second chance, freedom.
