IVIV (13) scene one question

[John Bailey]

Mark quoted:

"a fury Doc understood would provide the balance he needed to coast
through this"

I was equally thrown by Doc's need to "coast through this"...

So the balance is required but that balance isn't the ultimate goal -
that'd be a need to "coast through" the situation. Is keeping cool,
keeping things smooth, really a great motive for murder? Doc could've
cuffed Puck without administering the heroin.

Wanting things to play out coolly during a violent confrontation is a
bit more Dirty Harry than I like.

Then there's justifying your actions by comparing yourself to a
tradition of cartoon characters...

Which could very well be ironic in this scene. Except cartoon
characters are treated with some degree of respect in P's novels, and
of course his own characters have been often noted as excessively
cartoonish.

Maybe Doc's self-justification makes moral sense in the world of IV,
but IV's just a cartoony fiction itself so we shouldn't go furiously
killing baddies and use it as our ethical defence.

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 3:06 AM, Robin Landseadel
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:
> On Nov 8, 2009, at 7:44 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>> Could knocking Puck out have been enough to escape from, as often is
>> enough in other noirs---yet, I think that other P.I.s often get too violent
>> in escaping is another genre staple, anyone?, anyone?
>
> Doc left air in the syringe. Puck was killed. Adrian winds up dead from the
> wounds inflicted by Doc's gun. Doc is a Badass, the language used just prior
> to Doc stomping on Puck makes that abundantly clear:
>
>        It took a lot of squirming and muscle strain and semi-
>        headstands to get even one of the shims to fall out of his pocket,
>         but finally Doc worked himself out of the cuffs, creaked up off
>        the bed, and had a look atound. There wasn't much to see. The
>        door was designed not to open from the inside, and there was
>        nothing to force it with. He pulled the folding chair under the
>        overhead light fixture, stood on it, and unscrewed the bulb.
>        Everything went very dark. By the time he managed to get back
>        down off the chair, he was in the middle of some kind of
>        flashback, possibly from that elephant dope they'd given him.
>        He saw old familiar images, like spirit guides sent to help him
>        out, Dagwood and Mr. Dithers, Bugs and Yosemite Sam,
>        Popeye and Bluto, rotating violently inside intensely saturated
>        green and magenta clouds of dust, and he understood for a
>        second and a half that he belonged to a single and ancient
>        martial tradition in which resisting authority, subduing hired
>        guns, defending your old lady's honor all amounted to the same
>        thing.
>
>