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Wednesday, February 3
PARTY GIRL
by
Lloydville
on Wed 03 Feb 2010 02:40 AM PST
Although it has its defenders (Johnathan Rosenbaum among them), Nicholas Ray's 1958 film Party Girl hasn't got nearly the reputation it deserves. On the surface it has a familiar plot -- a mob lawyer motivated by love to break free of his past -- and it's a period film, set in gangland Chicago in the 1930s. It's shot in Cinemascope and Metrocolor. For all that, it's pure Fifties, and very noir. In traditional movies with the same theme, even Polonsky's dark Force Of Evil, a decent world is waiting to embrace the repentant mobster. In Ray's film, as in all real noirs, things aren't so simple. The cops are bunglers, the moral lines are always blurred -- at the climax, the hero makes a last desperate attempt to save himself and his true love with yet another phoney lawyer's trick, just like the ones he used to save guilty thugs from justice.
The tone of the whole film is brutal, cynical -- the world it depicts is a maze with no center, no escape . . . except one, the love of a good woman. The good woman, contrary to the conventional wisdom, is a recurring type in films noirs -- almost as common as the femme fatale. We find her in classic noirs like The Dark Corner and Ray's own On Dangerous Ground -- a force of salvation for the boxed-in, royally fucked male protagonist. In this film, Cyd Charisse's good girl is not so good -- she's as cynical and lost as Robert Taylor's corrupt lawyer. The role is a perfect fit for Charisse's slightly opaque screen persona, and a perfect match for Taylor, who can be equally opaque.
Their somewhat wooden styles, as Rosenbaum points out, have never been put to better use dramatically. It's actually touching when they recognize each other as kindred spirits -- people in whom the flames of hope and passion have been all but extinguished. Their psychic wounds are mirrored in recurring images of physical disfigurement -- in Taylor's slightly crippled leg, in the threat of using acid to mar the mask-like beauty of Charisse's face.
The Metrocolor isn't used for glamor. The colors are garish, lurid, sometimes deranged. The film was produced by Joe Pasternak, who usually handled musicals at MGM. Charisse, who plays a showgirl, is given a couple of production numbers that look like the covers of Les Baxter LPs come to life. The choreography is crude but shows off Charisse's icy erotic quality to great effect -- the numbers are almost like parodies of Minnelli's exotic style.
Ray uses Cinemascope brilliantly, with lots of subtle camera moves that quietly direct our attention to action unfolding within the wide frame. There's a powerful gangland rub-out montage that almost certainly influenced the one at the end of Coppola's The Godfather. There are first-rate performances in supporting roles by Lee J. Cobb and John Ireland.
It's a great film, one of Ray's best, and is now available on DVD for the first time through the Warner Archive. Fans of Ray and of film noir in its last, Baroque phase (best exemplified by Welles's Touch Of Evil) shouldn't miss it.
Sunday, May 3
AU REVOIR, FILMS NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Sun 03 May 2009 10:35 AM PDT
Tony D'Ambra, creator of the ever-useful and ever-interesting films noir blog has decided to call it a day -- he's rolling down the Venentian blinds on the site, pocketing his revolver, lighting a cigarette and stepping out into the dark streets to meet his fate alone.
Even though there will be no new posts, I'm hoping he'll keep the archived content online, and the link to his site, over there on the right, will stay up as long as he does.
Tony made invaluable contributions to my own thoughts about the noir tradition, for which I will always be grateful. His footsteps on the wet pavement, between the pools of reflected neon light, will always echo in my mind.
Saturday, December 20
UNNERVING
by
Lloydville
on Sat 20 Dec 2008 07:25 AM PST
Matt Barry over at The Art and Culture Of Movies has recently posted an insightful short review of Orson Welles's Touch Of Evil. He calls it an unnerving film, which it certainly is, but points out that one of its most unnerving aspects is the way Welles goofs on our expectations of what a gritty little film noir should be.
The film's extreme stylization both seduces us into its nightmare world and distances us from it as an aesthetic creation, all at the same time. Touch Of Evil was not quite the last classic noir -- I think you'd have to give that distinction to Odds Against Tomorrow, which came out a bit later -- but its self-consciousness about the form was a sure signal that the tradition had all but played itself out. One definition of a neo-noir is that it's at least as concerned with commenting on the form as with working inside it. In some ways, Touch Of Evil was the first of the neo-noirs.
Tuesday, December 16
BOOMERANG!
by
Lloydville
on Tue 16 Dec 2008 02:31 AM PST
Ivan Shreve over at the ever wise and amusing Thrilling Days Of Yesteryear writes, "The argument over whether or not Boomerang! is a legitimate film noir will rage on until eternity." Of course it will. Arguments about what films are or are not noir are almost always irrational and thus can never be settled in any reasonable way.
The general idea is to parse any film made in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s searching for reasons to call it noir. The use of shadows, the element of crime in the plot, any suggestion of moral ambiguity or darkness in the characters is usually enough to qualify a film for the designation. The truth is that film noir is no longer a descriptive or analytic term but one of approbation -- it means "a film which is cool, a film I like". Sometimes it just means an old film in black-and-white which isn't a comedy or musical.
It would be far more logical to ask a simple question up front -- is there some other established genre or tradition into which a particular film fits? If there is, there's no conceivable reason to tag it as a noir. Doing that just makes film noir a term so vague as to have no real meaning at all.
As it happens, Boomerang! fits nicely into a very distinct tradition usually called docu-noir. The tradition was virtually invented by Louis de Rochemont, who happens to be the producer of Boomerang! De Rochemont made his name producing the March Of Time newsreel series, essentially a breezier and more entertaining variant of the standard newsreel. He then became a producer of features at Fox. His first film, the docu-noir The House On 92nd Street, set the pattern for the new form.
Docu-noirs were police or government-agency (or sometimes newspaper) procedurals, usually based on real events and filmed in a quasi-documentary style, often in the locations where the real events occurred. Although they dealt with the same post-war anxieties that fueled the classic films noirs, they were radically different kinds of films, because they took the point of view of the authorities and they insisted that the official institutions of society could combat society's ills.
[Caution, plot spoilers ahead . . .]
The protagonist of a docu-noir might encounter corruption within the institution he served, but his personal integrity was always a match for it and allowed him to ensure that justice was done in the end. There was often, as in Boomerang!, a subsidiary character (played by Arthur Kennedy, above, in this case) who resembled the protagonist of a classic noir, an innocent man wrongly accused, dragged down by fate or official misconduct, but we never saw the story through his eyes -- we saw it through the eyes of the official (or dogged reporter) who would save him.
There are no such saviors in classic noirs -- the whole burden of which is to involve us emotionally in the nightmare of the trapped man, to show us the world from his point of view, to make us feel its oppressive weight. The protagonist of a classic noir might or might not survive his nightmare, but such salvation as he occasionally does find is likely to be provisional -- there is rarely any suggestion that the world which generated his nightmare is ever going to change.
This is light years away, existentially, from a film like Boomerang!, where the hero has a dark night of the soul, chooses to do the right thing, defies the corruption of his bosses, frees the innocent man and goes on to become the Attorney General of the United States. It is, in short, a film which questions and criticizes but ultimately vindicates the American legal system, affirming the efficacy and ultimate triumph of moral action within it. If Boomerang! is a film noir then I guess Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is a film noir, too, and we need some other term to describe movies like Detour, Out Of the Past and Thieves Like Us.
Friday, October 10
UPDATE: FILM REVIEWS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 10 Oct 2008 10:03 AM PDT
I've just updated the links in the Film Reviews A-Z section (to the left) -- which now covers 114 films. The Film Noir Master List has also been updated to incorporate some recently viewed titles.
Check them out.
Saturday, September 13
FILM NOIR REVISITED
by
Lloydville
on Sat 13 Sep 2008 02:53 AM PDT
It's sometimes noted, quite correctly, that the artists who made what we now think of as the classic films noirs were entirely unfamiliar with the term, and indeed had no conception that they were working in a distinct tradition. They thought of the movies they were making as crime thrillers.
This is occasionally cited in support of the idea that the term film noir is a category created by cinéastes after the fact, and therefore inauthentic, misleading. It certainly was created (or at least popularized) by cinéastes after the fact, but that doesn't mean it's inauthentic or misleading. Such a view fails to take into account how genres and traditions arise, which is a complex process -- a combination of historical and cultural trends, influence and imitation among artists, and simple commercial calculation. All these factors can combine to create distinct new forms, and in the case of film noir I think they did.
Two early films, which I would not call films noirs, nevertheless set the tone for the new form -- The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity. The Maltese Falcon was a fairly standard work of hardboiled detective fiction but it had a twist. In hardboiled detective fiction, the world might be a dark and messy place, but the detective had a code of honor which made a kind of grim moral sense amidst the darkness and the mess.
Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon had such a code and he stuck by it -- but Huston allowed him more than a trace of doubt as to whether the code had any ultimate meaning, any ultimate value. This was something new in the crime thriller, in hardboiled detective fiction -- this hint of existential uncertainty.
In Double Indemnity, essentially a domestic murder melodrama, Billy Wilder offered a portrait of middle-class American life that was unremitting in its bleakness, its moral vacuousness. I'm not sure that Wilder had any particular message to convey by this -- he just sensed that in the midst of the global horror of WWII audiences were looking for sterner stuff in their melodramas, a darker vision of ordinary life that would accord with the experience of civilization as a whole gone suddenly mad.
Both films were commercially successful -- proof that audiences were at the very least receptive to darker visions, to stories that raised the most disturbing (and unresolved) questions about morality and society. Both films were also well-received critically. This gave other film artists a kind of permission to experiment with similar themes -- within the confines of the crime thriller. They got very creative within those confines after WWII, when a generation of men scarred by war came home, and when the specter of nuclear annihilation became a reality for everyone.
They didn't think, "We're going to create a new kind of existentially challenging crime thriller." They just inflected the crime thriller with a new mood. Audiences responded, and formulas began to solidify. Film artists imitated each other, got turned on by each other's work. Elements that worked in one film got incorporated into other films, given new twists. It was a combination of playing it safe commercially but also pushing things as far as they could go within familiar territory -- testing how much darkness the public really wanted.
It turned out to be quite a lot -- so much so that that during the Fifties filmmakers began to realize that the darker themes could be incorporated into other genres besides the crime thriller, as they were, for example, in the domestic melodramas of Sirk, in the Westerns of Ford and Mann. When that happened, the classic film noir more or less played itself out. Its usefulness as a cultural escape valve had ended. Any kind of film in the Sixties could deal with existential angst, with moral bewilderment, with political or social criticism, in more direct terms. America had internalized the darkness of the film noir -- the resulting culture wars were just a matter of time.
Film noir had a beginning in the global dislocations and moral derangement of WWII, and an end in the open social and political critiques of the Sixties. There had never been anything quite like film noir before WWII, and there has never been anything quite like it since the Sixties. It was, and remains, a distinct tradition.
[With thanks to Tony D'Ambra at films noir for some thoughts that provoked the above meditation . . .]
Tuesday, August 5
FORCE OF EVIL
by
Lloydville
on Tue 05 Aug 2008 03:46 AM PDT
This
extraordinary film is, generically, a late-cycle crime melodrama, but
it's quirky and original enough to transcend the genre pretty
thoroughly. John Garfield plays a crooked Wall Street lawyer who
crosses the line between representing organized crime figures and
collaborating with them. Like the great Warner Brothers gangsters
of the 30s, he's a tough guy on the make who chooses a life of crime,
but he thinks it's going to be "respectable", white-collar crime -- until he's dragged
into the violence and thuggery that underpins the rackets he believes he
can manipulate.
This distinguishes him from the gangsters of the 30s, gives him a kind
of innocence, though it's innocence of a curious sort. He and a number of
the film's characters make a distinction in their minds between
"honest", harmless criminality, mere corruption, and the "evil"
criminality of men who resort to violence. This takes us very
close to the territory of the true film noir, where all of society has lost its moral bearings, where the lines between right and wrong have been hopelessly obscured.
Abraham Polonsky, who directed and co-wrote the film, is not quite venturing into that territory, however. His outlook is more political -- less concerned with moral bewilderment and confusion than with the wholesale structural corruption
of American society.
The lines between good and bad are ultimately very clear in Polonsky's universe,
and he posits off-screen forces that are gathering to fight the
corruption of the system, forces which Garfield's character will eventually decide to join.
The protagonist of a true film noir
never has this route out of his predicament. His plight has more to do with
existential uncertainty than with political or social problems in
need of practical reform. At the same time, though, Force Of Evil is
suffused with the atmosphere of a true noir,
since the forces of good are never personified dramatically -- the
crusading special prosecutor Garfield finally turns to never appears on
screen.
Force Of Evil points the way to Coppola's Godfather films, which, like this one, are in the gangster tradition but with a crucial twist -- they concentrate not on the
battle between good guys and bad guys but on the creeping moral decay of the bad
guys, seen from their point of view.
We don't revel in the
transgressive behavior of Garfield's character, or of Michael Corleone
in the Godfather films, as we
reveled in the transgressive behavior of Cagney's bad guys, in
confident expectation that they will be brought to justice in the end. Garfield's character in Force Of Evil,
like Michael Corleone, is punished by forces within himself and close
to home. Far from going down in a blaze of outlaw glory, he rots
from the inside, slowly. Polonsky offers Garfield's character a
way out, through social action and personal reform -- Coppola, less
political, less didactic, less optimistic perhaps about American society, offers Michael Corleone nothing.
Wednesday, April 9
DAISY KENYON
by
Lloydville
on Wed 09 Apr 2008 03:53 AM PDT
Fox home video has been releasing a lot of terrific DVDs in their Fox Film Noir
series -- great transfers of entertaining films with generally
excellent commentaries and brief featurettes about the movies and their
creators. They're running out of films from their vaults which
can plausibly be called noir -- except that these days, apparently, just about anything can plausibly be called noir.
Daisy Kenyon, the 23rd title in
the series, is an extremely interesting film by Otto Preminger from
1947 which could plausibly be called domestic noir,
though it doesn't involve crime or violence in any significant
way. It's basically a soap opera centering on a very complicated
love triangle, but it's disturbingly dark, in ways that wouldn't have been
conceivable in Hollywood before WWII.
Joan Crawford plays a career girl in New York who's having an affair
with a married man, played by Dana Andrews, a charming self-centered
lout. Neither character seems to feel any moral qualms about the
affair, and Preminger presents it with an almost cynical nonchalance
that's strikingly adult and modern.
Crawford meets an equally charming but somewhat unstable returning war
vet, played by Henry Fonda. Fonda's character feels that the
world and everyone in it has become dead, and isn't sure if this
feeling has to do with the loss of his wife in a car accident or with
his experiences in combat. The war, and its collateral moral damage, are also referenced in an off-screen subplot in which
the Andrews character defends a Nisei war vet whose farm was stolen
from him while he was off fighting for his country, heroically, in
Italy. He loses the case.
According to Preminger's biographer Foster Hirsch, these elements
were not prominent in the novel on which the film was based. It
was Preminger and his
screenwriter who chose to associate the moral confusions and neuroses
of the characters with the broader anxieties of post-war American
society, issues of guilt over the price of victory, over the
psychological wounds suffered by the soldiers who won that
victory. It's a theme one finds
in many noir and noir-inflected films of the time, sometimes explored explicitly, as it is here, sometimes only by implication.
Perhaps Preminger was too explicit. Daisy Kenyon
was a box-office disappointment. Without the cover of the
crime-thriller genre, elements of which figure to one degree or another
in most other domestic noirs, the film's investigation of post-war American angst may have cut too close to the bone for contemporary audiences.
The mood of the film is almost unbearably tense and unsettling,
eventually involving child abuse and a scandalous divorce trial played
out in the tabloid press. There had always been soap operas like
this in American movies, of course, but there was always a clear sense
of when moral boundaries were being crossed and what the consequences
would be. Daisy Kenyon plays out in a world in which moral boundaries seem to have been erased.
The Spanish title of the film translates as "between love and sin"
but the tale offers few clues as to where one stops and the other
begins. The romantic triangle is resolved at the end, more or
less, with everyone doing the "right" thing -- but there's hardly a
sense of moral triumph. We feel that all the characters are going
to remain adrift in a morally ambiguous universe, trying to walk a line
that none of them can see clearly. This is noir territory, all
right, but strictly domestic, and explored primarily from the point of
view of the female protagonist, which distinguishes it from the classic
noir cycle.
Tuesday, March 25
AWESOME DEAL GOING DOWN
by
Lloydville
on Tue 25 Mar 2008 10:13 AM PDT
Volume 4 of Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection
is currently on sale for $29.99 all-in from Amazon -- no sales tax, of course, and no
shipping charges (if you choose Super Saver Shipping). Ten films,
all interesting, including several noir classics and one masterpiece, They Live By Night -- for less than $3 a film. Entertainment doesn't get much cheaper than this.
Monday, February 4
CLASH BY NIGHT
by
Lloydville
on Mon 04 Feb 2008 12:39 AM PST
There's a terrific short review of Fritz Lang's Clash By Night, maybe the greatest of all domestic noirs, recently posted on the web site films noir. It has this sublime evocation of the film's themes -- "Sexual abandon and existential entitlement are put on trial and found empty."
Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard are certainly the most entertaining domestic noirs, but Clash By Night offers far more complex insights into the ways post-WWII anxiety corroded relations between the sexes.
Check out the review here.
Monday, January 21
SCARLET STREET
by
Lloydville
on Mon 21 Jan 2008 06:23 AM PST
This film by Fritz Lang, from 1945, is essentially domestic noir -- the story of an unhappy, ordinary middle-aged married man led into a life of deception and, ultimately, crime by a fetching femme fatale.
It was Lang's favorite among the films he made in America and has a
considerable reputation but I find it curiously dead emotionally and
lacking in real suspense.
The problem is that the fatal femme
is so obviously on the make, so obviously not attracted to the ordinary
man, so cynical and so dumb, that we feel only pity for the guy, a pity
laced with scorn. We can see what attracts Walter to Phyllis in Double Indemnity
-- the two are hot together -- and even if we suspect that Phyllis
might be using Walter, part of us thinks it might be worth getting used
by a woman like this. This implicates us morally and emotionally
in Walter's transgressions, makes us care about his fate.
It's impossible to care about Chris in Scarlet Street
on that level -- watching his life come apart at the seams is like
watching a train wreck from a distance. It's fascinating and
horrifying but we're not involved. In Double Indemnity, like it or not, we're passengers on that trolley hurtling towards the end of the line.
The ending of Scarlet Street
achieves a kind of tragic power, because things go so horribly
wrong, and Chris's moral collapse is so complete and so bleak.
It's not a genuine tragedy, though, because in a genuine tragedy we
could imagine ourselves in Chris's place. In Scarlet Street we're denied that identification, that implication in his fate.
Saturday, October 20
MORE ON FILM NOIR AND THE DEATH OF GOD
by
Lloydville
on Sat 20 Oct 2007 05:55 AM PDT
Although, as I wrote earlier, I don't see film noir
as expressly concerned with theological issues, there is a
sense in which the idea of "the death of God", as a kind of
metaphorical expression for existential bewilderment, gets close to the
heart of the tradition.
Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour, a low-budget thriller from 1945, was arguably the first true film noir.
It offered a vision of the world as a moral maze from which there was
no exit -- an image that accorded well with the unconscious dread which
gripped America in the wake of WWII and in the shadow of nuclear
apocalypse.
In this light, it's interesting to look at Ulmer's The Black Cat,
a strange Universal "horror film" from the early 30s. There, the
source of the horror that ensnares its innocent protagonists is a
modernistic version of the old dark house -- which sits on the site of a
ghastly battle from WWI, somehow infected by the mass slaughter that
took place there.
This may not be enough to prove that Ulmer saw a connection between the moral chaos of Detour and the horrors of WWII but it certainly suggests
that there may have been an unconscious association of the two
ideas in Ulmer's mind.
Certain modern commentators want to see film noir
as a phenomenon with essentially political implications -- something
that's not hard to argue given the leftist leanings of many of the
great masters of the noir tradition, a number of whom were eventually blacklisted. But seeing film noir
as essentially political expression I think sells the phenomenon short. Film noir reflected
an existential dread far deeper than politics could encompass.
"The death of God" gets closer to expressing this than "the corruption
of Capitalism".
Curiously enough, the French critic Luc Mollet said that Ulmer's whole body of work
expressed "the loneliness of man without God". A recent essay on
Jules Dassin's Brute Force, included in Criterion's DVD edition of the film,
quotes Mollet dismissively and ironically, suggesting that he was just
offering a kind of smokescreen for the political underpinnings of the noir vision. But I think it makes more sense to see the nutty, irrational Stalinism of many noir
filmmakers as a smokescreen for the more comprehensive psychic
dislocations of post-WWII America, in which Communism and Stalinism
were just faddish, ill-conceived replacements for a God who seemed to
have abandoned the world in the desert outside Los Alamos, New Mexico,
after clearly announcing, at places like Auschwitz, his plans to retire
permanently from the world's affairs.
If film noir were simply a
reflection of the politics of its leftward-leaning makers, it ought to
be terribly dated today, after the demystification of Communism and
Stalin, those ephemeral shibboleths for which the Hollywood radicals martyred
themselves. But film noir
still speaks to us as strongly as it ever did -- perhaps because "the
loneliness of man without God" still troubles the spirit, while the
passing of Stalin and Communism go conspicuously unlamented.
[Thanks again to Tony D'Ambra of films noir whose posts on film noir and the death of God prompted the thoughts above -- and to Michael Mills' classic film blog for the Detour advertising art.]
Thursday, October 18
FILM NOIR AND THE DEATH OF GOD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 18 Oct 2007 03:27 AM PDT
In
a comment here (and currently on his own web site films noir) Tony
D'Ambra posts an intriguing quote from Mark Conrad about the connection
between film noir and existentialism:
"My proposal, then, is that noir can also be seen as a sensibility or
worldview which results from the death of God, and thus that film noir
is a type of American artistic response to, or recognition of, this
seismic shift in our understanding of the world. This is why Porfirio
is right in pointing out the similarities between the noir sensibility
and the existentialist view of life and human existence. Though they
are not exactly the same thing, they are both reactions, however
explicit and conscious, to the same realization of the loss of value
and meaning in our lives."
[This is from Conrad's book The Philosophy of Film Noir: Nietzsche and the Meaning of Noir: Movies and the ‘Death of God’.]
I agree with the gist of the quote, and with Tony's assertion that film noir
and existentialism have a lot in common -- though I'm not sure
that there was a direct influence on the former by the latter. I
think Conrad is on the right track when he locates the essence of film noir in a particular moral orientation to the universe and not in a style or in subject matter.
I'm also not sure that the death of God is quite the right way to explain film noir, though -- except as a metaphor for "the loss of value and meaning in our lives". Film noir,
to me, is more about moral bewilderment as a social phenomenon, with
social causes, than about loss of faith in God. It's about male
insecurity and fear of women, about a creeping dread that the world
isn't what it seems to be, doesn't work anymore -- if it ever did.
These sorts of feelings have theological implications of course, but
they don't lead automatically to atheism or to existentialism -- not in America, with its
strong Protestant tradition, which has always preached what the
theologian Paul Zahl calls a "low anthropology", holding that the world
is intrinsically corrupt, redeemable only by supernatural Grace.
Hitchcock's The Wrong Man is an apt illustration of what I mean. The film is pure noir
-- except in its denouement, when the protagonist is saved not by a
good woman or luck or some kind of desperate action but by the direct
intervention of Jesus. This is not a whole lot more improbable
than the ways some other protagonists get saved in the film noir tradition.
We needn't go this deep, however, to find the core, and the enduring appeal, of film noir.
The feelings it deals with, though brought to the surface by the
peculiarly horrific experiences of the generation that suffered through
WWII and afterwards lived in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, are
common to all men and women at some moments of their lives.
Such feelings may lead to atheism, to philosophies like existentialism
-- or to religious epiphanies like the one Saul had on the road to Damascus. Because film noir
is art, not theology or philosophy, it is not concerned with such
outcomes. It is only concerned with the feelings, with certain particular conditions of the heart -- with bringing
them to the surface and allowing us to engage them.
Tuesday, October 16
THE WOMEN IN FILM NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 16 Oct 2007 01:18 AM PDT
In my last post I quoted James Ellroy's brilliant summation of the message of film noir -- "You're fucked." One of the ways "you're fucked" in film noir is that most of the women you're going to meet in the shadowy backstreets of noir's
dark city are going to be smarter and stronger than you are. They
may use their power to save you, they may use it to destroy you, but
the situation is going to be beyond your control.
This view of women was obviously a projection of male anxiety and
insecurity in the post-WWII era. There are some extraordinary
female characters in the film noir
tradition, but usually they're not quite real -- they are demons, or angels,
summoned up out of troubled male psyches. A film doesn't need a femme fatale to be noir
-- they're absent in many classic films in the tradition -- but it does
need a sense of male helplessness. It's a comprehensive
helplessness, in the face of society and the universe itself -- tough,
powerful women are just one manifestation of a general existential
dread.
When the situation is looked at from the woman's point of view, we leave the territory of noir
-- move into another tradition, typically that of the psychological
suspense thriller, of the Hitchcockian variety, which is often
presented from the viewpoint of the female, with whom we
identify. This tradition predated noir and is in fact connected to works of Victorian Gothic fiction, such as Jane Eyre.
It deals with more traditional female anxieties arising out of the
contradictions of an insecure patriarchy. To me it makes no sense
to call this sort of movie film noir, even though it may tap into the same mood of existential dread that pervades the classic noir.
As I've observed before, it took the neo-noir Chinatown to look back on the noir
tradition and try to imagine the effect of its male insecurities on
women -- but this was never really a conscious concern of classic film noir.
Monday, October 15
THE MESSAGE OF FILM NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Mon 15 Oct 2007 12:19 AM PDT
In my last post I wrote:
I would argue that pulp fiction, hardboiled fiction, from the
20s and 30s is something different from the wartime and post-war films that are, to me at least, the heart of the film noir tradition. Film noir
drew on that fiction, just as it drew on the 30s-era crime melodrama
and conventional detective fiction, but it became something new.
So what was new about it?
James Ellroy summed it up best when he observed that the basic message of film noir
is "You're fucked." It's an existential message, philosophical
(or perhaps theological) in nature. Another way of putting it
might be "The world is fucked, at its core, and there's nothing you can
do about it." You might temporarily survive the predicament this
puts you in, or it might destroy you, but the predicament isn't going
to change.
This represents a profound divergence from the traditional "hero's
journey", in which an everyman faces tests and ordeals in the pursuit
of wisdom, of meaning. It also represents a divergence from the
"outlaw ballad" tradition of the 30s-era crime melodrama, in which we
explore the underworld and revel in the transgressive behavior of
society's rebels -- all the while confidently expecting the rebel's
death and a reassertion of humane values. In true noir, those traditional values have evaporated.
You have to ask yourself why such a radical divergence from earlier
traditions happened in the post-WWII era, and the answer to me is
obvious. The basic message of war, and particularly of combat, is
"You're fucked." The soul-shaking experience of hearing this
message delivered in the most brutal terms doesn't go away after the
war ends, even if it ends in victory. It is not subsumed in
feelings of patriotism or in the satisfaction of having done one's duty.
It endures forever. In the case of WWII it had a macabre
objective correlative -- the atomic bomb, the image of the mushroom
cloud, which summed up the enduring sense of existential dread that had
infected American society, and in particular its returning war vets.
Film noir was an arena in
which that existential dread could be engaged safely -- and there was
something exhilarating about the exercise, the exhilaration of dealing
with an urgent but buried anxiety. The existential dread I'm
speaking of here didn't define post-war America but it was there, and
it couldn't be talked about directly in a world that was desperately
trying to get back to normal. But it could be faced in art -- most especially in film noir.
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