Not a satire, but a deconstruction. The writer / director, Rian Johnson, says in the commentary track that his original intent was to simply to find a new set of visual cues for film noir, so that people would be forced to treat it as fresh rather than overly familiar. He sort of implies that he wasn't thinking of that as a deconstruction ... but it is.
The only reason we don't treat the dialogue conventions of film noir as artificial and unrealistic is because we are used to them. This movie reminds us that they are artificial, unrealistic ... and still awesomely cool. The same is true to an only slightly lesser degree of the complications of the plot.
Another of the artifices of film noir is that the criminals are much more interesting and attractive than in reality -- especially the femme fatale -- and in a real high school the drug-dealing culture would be immensely less interesting than it is here. Again, a heightened reality in film that is much more interesting than real life. Brick forces us to recognize these conventions for what they are and appreciate the genius of those who originated him (especially Dashiell Hammett).
The other really cool thing is that the emotional conflicts and mixed feelings of a character like Laura (does she have feelings for Brandon or not?) absolutely mirror those of a high school student, but they would be complicated by trivial teen stuff, not adulterated bricks of heroin. So the movie does not ring untrue emotionally to the high school experience; it just transmutes it into this other reality.
Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.
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Barbed_Wire_Strawberry
13 years ago
it actually does ring true in a number of ways, heavily real emotional film with brilliant acting and fairly meaningful teenage themes (isolation, unwanted pregnancy, drugs etc), but emvan you have a lot of good points, it was something of a deconstruction of the genre but also showed a lot of love to it.
Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride
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