Entry 8: Neo-noir Protagonist Similarities

I found "The Kidnapper Bell" and "City of Commerce" both to be interesting stories, the former more so. The main characters had a few similarities, though it did take me a while to find their comparissons. Unlike the darker-intent protagonist that we are used to in some works of noir, these two protagonists didn't fully set that mark of a criminal anti-hero. They were both flawed though. The protagonists show obsessive behaviors, they have a drug. Our almost nameless protagonist Jim from "The Kidnapper Bell" was very easily drawn into getting involved with the woman he was having an affair with, because he desired her. She tells him as she's trying to get him involved with the murder, "Didn't you ever want something so bad that, well, it's not that you'd be willing to do anything, it's that each step adds up and soon you find that you're over the line, somewhere you shouldn't be? You've got to help me, Jim," and to that it says that: "He does not say anything. His mind is already made up." It is his desire, his obsession in wanting to have sex with a beautiful woman that mess him up. In "City of Commerce" Nick has a poker-playing issue that goes as far as to risking his career and marriage. After unfavorable events occur with the exception of winning bigger than he usually does, he confesses: "Because there was nothing like a night spent playing poker: it was the great equalizer, the great humanizer, and the great eraser of differences. Except when it wasn't. But the hope remained for every numbers nerd,.. every hack screenwriter, and all the other poor saps out there who woke up one morning only thinking about cards and subsequently went about overturning their lives." He then leaves everything in his life behind and pursues a plan of living in those odds. With these points we could conclude that a neo-noir protagonist is obsessed with things that don't do him any good, and it's those addictions that drive him to a distorted fate. It is that mentality that taint these protagonists from being "good" and therefore having a dark edge to their personas, damaging their personal lives overall.