carlos-m.net

This was written during the second semester of my sophomore year at Johns Hopkins University for Hard Boiled Fiction and Film Noir with Dr. John Irwin.

Carlos Macasaet
Dr. John Irwin
220.399
9 April 2003

The years 1967 – 1976 witnessed the rise of a neo-modernist movement in American film. The films depicted confused characters wandering aimlessly through situations beyond their comprehension and control. They were self-reflexive and analysed the relationship between representation and reality. This ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ in turn witnessed a resurrection of film noir. (Spicer 130-133) Following the creation of two other retellings of hard-boiled detective fiction, The Long Goodbye in 1973 and Chinatown in 1974, writer David Zelag Goodman and director Dick Richards collaborated in 1975 to tell the story of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940). Although the film is set in the same 1940’s America as the novel, it differs from other film adaptations of hard-boiled detective fiction. The classic antecedent films noirs to Farewell, My Lovely such as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and Edward Dmytryk’s adaptation of the same novel, Murder, My Sweet, focus on the ethical paths the protagonists chose and the moral decisions they face while unravelling mysteries in a seedy and corrupt world. However, Farewell, My Lovely goes beyond testing Marlowe’s mettle in a morally ambiguous environment. It tells the story of a man searching for meaning in a dynamic world where the only constant is death.

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The following is an excerpt from an article on the use of quantum computing which I found in the online edition of The Economist:

“The trick is to find a way to describe, in a manner useful to computer scientists, the unitary transformations that underlie a program. Dr Bettelli has managed to do it using object-oriented programming—long a buzzword among software developers.”

Any programmer knows that object-oriented programming is nothing new. It has been around and in widespread use for quite some time. But what struck me about the quote was not a lack of knowledge of the computing industry. What struck me was that the author seemed to go out of his way to use the word buzzword. This led me to the conclusion that in addition to terms such as information lifecycle management, action item and bioinformatics, the word buzzword has become in itself a buzzword.