Sunday e-mail, Christmas Eve
What to expect this week; five noirish bullet points
A very merry Christmas to all Crime & Psychology readers! What delights can you look forward to as you recycle your wrapping paper, pick a mince pie off the rack, and pour a well-deserved glass, (or flagon or carafe,) of your favourite Christmas beverage?
You’ll be delighted to learn that not even Christmas can slow down or stop your Wednesday newsletters from Crime & Psychology! Father Christmas (or Santa Claus, if you prefer) will be bringing you the second of our two newsletters about the social psychology of groups. We’ve looked at conformity and Social Identity Theory – now it’s time to delve into the dark heart of things and think about Criminal Social Identity, dehumanisation, even genocide.
Remember, if you like the newsletter, please share, restack, or click Like. It all helps encourage me to go on with this free project.
If those topics don’t sound particularly festive, well, you can quickly get back into the spirit by looking over this week’s bullet points…
Merry Christmas to you.
Jason
This week Crime & Psychology recommends the five best noir films to enjoy with a mince pie, chunk of plum duff, or just a glass of that nice Christmas Ale that comes out at this time of year:
1. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Shane Black, 2005 – Perhaps the most ludicrously entertaining postmodern film noir ever made. Also, there’s Michelle Monaghan and Robert Downey Jr. There’s a cast that knows how to keep Christmas, if any cast alive possesses the knowledge.
2. Bad Santa, Terry Zwigoff, 2003 – Without doubt, the best Christmas film ever made (and, yes, I’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life). Bad Santa has got Billy Bob Thornton, too, so you can do nothing but love it. Make sure you see the first one, though, because the sequel does what sequels do.
3. The Grinch, Scott Mosier & Yarrow Cheney, 2018 – A harrowing tale of individualism crushed by the forces of conformity. A violent little girl snares an innocent but unloved recluse who just wants to go about his day. She absorbs him into the local hive-mind by forcing him to sing horribke songs. At the end, his spirit crushed, the old gentleman is forced to apologise for doing nothing worse than just being himself.
4. Violent Night, Tommy Wirkola, 2022 - To be honest, perhaps not quite as good as the other films on this list. Psychology, though, recognises the ‘recency effect’, and anyone who saw this in the cinema at the time of its release is probably still flinching from the violence inflicted on everyone’s baubles.
5. Blast of Silence, Allen Baron, 1961 – If all that happiness and jollity isn’t your thing, you could either try wrecking the Christmas tree in the town square and stealing all the presents, or you could check out this grim little story of rats, strangulation, and ambush. Merry Christmas!