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Friday, June 29
MALE ANXIETY AND FILM NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Fri 29 Jun 2007 08:39 AM PDT
The anxious, existentially befuddled male is at the heart of film noir.
Caught in a trap that's not always of his own making, but almost always
worse than he deserves, he stumbles around in a maze with no
exit. Sometimes he's destroyed by a powerful female, against whom
he has no defenses, sometimes he's saved by a powerful female operating
out of unaccountable charity. In either case, the situation is
ultimately out of his control, which on some level makes each type of
female equally threatening.
Some people have located the source of this paradigm for male anxiety in the new economic status women achieved by entering the
workforce in large numbers during WWII, but this is a very superficial
explanation for the mythology of noir. Eddie Muller, probably the best and certainly the most entertaining commentator on film noir, points out that the good girls of the tradition are almost always working girls, while the femmes fatales are almost always looking to get something for nothing, and certainly not a paycheck for an honest day's work.
The male anxiety embodied in the tradition clearly derives from a
deeper source -- the moral discombobulation of war itself, the
spiritual exhaustion this particular conflict induced, and the
inconceivable fact of the atomic bomb which raised moral issues and
created fears that the human psyche was ill-prepared to engage.
The ravaged psyches of Americans in the aftermath of a "good war", a good war they won, so vividly explored in film noir, in some ways says more about the nature of all wars than any works of art which dealt with the conflict itself.
Saturday, June 23
NOIR AND EXISTENTIALISM
by
Lloydville
on Sat 23 Jun 2007 12:57 AM PDT
Tony D'Ambra, on his informative films noir
web log, questions my recent post on The Genealogy Of Noir for not paying sufficient attention to the influence of European Existentialism on the
style. I think he's got a valid point here, though the subject is
complicated. Existentialism itself was influenced by Poe, via
Baudelaire, and Hemingway's proto-existentialism, expressed most purely
in his early short stories, directly influenced film noir -- and of course these short stories preceded the seminal writings of Sartre and Camus.
The influence of Hemingway on noir is of course most distinct in Robert Siodmak's The Killers,
based on the Hemingway story. The story was published in 1927 and
reflected a bleak view of human virtue, which is shown to consist
largely of facing death with stoic conviction. This decidedly
unromantic attitude was clearly a product of Hemingway's experiences in
WWI, and resonated precisely with the mood of the generation which had
just fought a second world war.
We can't see the existential dread that informs film noir as simply a product of Europe, an import, even though, as D'Ambra points out, many of the crucial filmmakers in the noir tradition were refugees from the European catastrophes of
the 30s and 40s. This view wouldn't explain the extraordinary
popularity of the form with American audiences for almost two
decades. Film noir must
have reflected anxieties buried deep in the post-war American psyche,
aroused by the sheer horrific spectacle of total war on a global scale
and by the unthinkable reality of the atomic bomb.
Although Siodmak's film softens Hemingway's story by giving us a
positive, resourceful guide through the moral maze that ultimately
destroys the Swede, the film approaches the condition of pure noir
because Lancaster's Swede is the star part in the picture -- it's his
bleak fate we identify with, not that of the successful insurance
investigator played by Edmund O'Brien.
Lancaster, after all, is the one who gets to put his arms around
Ava Gardner, for which going to Hell seems a small enough price to pay
-- and once you start thinking in those terms, you're already caught up
hopelessly in the maze of the noir's dark city.
Tuesday, June 19
THE GENEALOGY OF NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 19 Jun 2007 12:39 AM PDT
American Gothic
In the broadest perspective, film noir belongs in the
long tradition of American Gothic fiction, that dark vision crystallized
in the tales of Hawthorne and Poe. A kind of counterbalance or
reaction to American optimism, this tradition can have an almost savage
quality, as though the decision to explore the shadowy realms of the
American psyche has led to a determination to follow that path to its
uttermost end, to the absolute limits of nightmare.
D. H. Lawrence saw in this tradition a desire to ritually enact the
decay of European culture as a kind of psychic prelude to
the birth of a new culture. Leslie Fiedler saw the darkness at
the
center of so much American art as the product of a stunted manhood,
which
embraced despair and death because it could not find its way to
maturity.
However the tradition is explained, it must on some
level reflect the enduring contradiction between America's ideals and
its actions. The nation's founding document, announcing that all men
are created equal, was written by a man who owned slaves. In the gap
between a radical, transformative announcement such as this
and its author's actual life, corrosive subconscious anxieties are
bound to breed.
The Genre Of the Grotesque
Europe's own literal effort at self-destruction in WWI,
and the anxiety this produced in a nation that both rejected the old
world and still looked to it for guidance, led to a curious new genre
in American movies, reminiscent of Poe -- the genre of the grotesque.
In this genre, grotesque figures, deformed or
mutilated, enacted tragic scenarios of revenge against the "normal"
world, in a vain attempt to assert a private nobility, a private
honor. This genre made a star of Lon Chaney, who specialized in tragic
grotesques, and is often read as a precursor to the horror film of the
30s, but it was really something else -- a way of dealing with the
images of death and disfigurement associated with the Great War, a way of
expressing the fear that civilization had been deformed by the
conflict. Audiences of the 20s could not help but have associated
Chaney's misshapen characters with the mutilated veterans of the
battles in France.
This genre died out with the coming of sound, mutated
into the campy Grand Guignol of the classic horror film, but it's worth
noting it here because it represents the same sort of coded response to
WWI that the film noir represents to WWII -- a way of nursing wounds
that nominal "victory" had not healed.
Crime Drama
The underworld crime drama of the 30s was a response
to the Depression and to all the social ills it spawned and exposed.
It allowed us to enter the underworld of American society -- to revel
in the destructive rebellion of underworld thugs, expressing a rage
against the system felt by many, while still containing them within a
conscious code of values which demanded their death, which still
posited
forces of order and decency which would prevail in the end.
Hardboiled Detective Fiction
A variant on the crime drama was the pulp detective
fiction of the 30s and 40s which sent a knight errant into the dark
streets, the moral chaos of American life, in search of truth and rough
justice. Such fiction most often involved a mystery to be solved, and
its solution constituted a triumph over the moral chaos. Pulp
detective fiction allowed us to take a brief vacation on the wild side
in the company of a guide who was sure to get us home safe again.
Noir
Film noir, as it evolved after 1945, in the wake of a
war America participated in fully, sending millions of its young men
and women into the fray, and in the wake of the sheer unimaginable fact
of the atomic bomb, drew on the traditions of the crime drama and
hardboiled detective fiction, but it became something different.
It lost its faith in the forces of order and decency,
and in the reliability of its protagonist guides. It posited a moral
maze which had no logical solution, no center and no exit points. It
offered the frisson of pure existential dread without an easy cure.
Fiedler's spiritually stunted males became easy prey
to strong women -- femmes fatales who could destroy a man at will. (In
film noir, a strong woman might just as easily save a collapsed male,
but purely as an act of generosity -- not because the male deserved
saving.)
A
protagonist in a true film noir might find himself fated for
destruction by a corrupt justice system, by an innocent mistake, by a
malevolent coincidence or by some dark inner compulsion which he can't
control. In all cases, he finds himself in a labyrinth with a compass
that has lost its pointer, a thread that runs out short of escape.
Near Noir
There are many films called noir today which don't
really fit the definition offered above. They are variants of the 30s
crime drama, docu-noirs like The House On 92nd Street, for example,
which may borrow the expressionistic visual style of the true noir but
ultimately validate the agents of the state who will set things right
in the end. There are also a number of noir-inflected detective
mysteries, like Laura, for example, which give us a reliable guide
through the moral maze and bring us safely out of it at the end.
This is true even of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, the most noir of the classic detective thrillers. Sam Spade does the right thing in the end, rejects the femme fatale
and remains true to his essentially decent code. But he's more
neurotically conflicted about this code than the average hardboiled
detective -- you get a sense that he's beginning to suspect it's all
pretty meaningless. In that existential anxiety we see the roots
of the true film noir.
There are, in addition, many films, like Leave Her To
Heaven, which explore the existential anxiety of post-WWII America from
different perspectives than the true noir. These films -- Double
Indemnity is another of them -- usually offer sociopathic protagonists
whom we find both compelling and repulsive, the attitude we had to the
underworld thugs of the 30s crime drama, even though their crimes play
out in middle-class homes rather than on the mean streets of a city.
True Noir
In the true noir, we can identify totally with the
protagonist -- not least in his fated doom, or provisional salvation,
in a world that has gone terribly wrong, for reasons that aren't clear
and that it probably wouldn't help much to understand.
Sunday, June 17
NOIR, NOT NOIR: DOUBLE INDEMNITY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 17 Jun 2007 12:17 AM PDT
Double Indemnity is generally seen as one of the first (and one of the best) films noirs but I don't think it fits comfortably into the category. It shares with the true film noir protagonists who are infected with a moral corruption that destroys them. Unlike a true film noir,
however, the film doesn't present this corruption as part of a
universal human condition, or as the result of a breakdown of humane
values in society as a whole. In the true film noir
the doomed hero is often sped along to destruction by honest mistakes
or innocent choices, and just as often is given no course of positive
action which would save him. When he makes bad choices they're
frequently motivated by a position of powerlessness in the social
order, particularly economic hardship or unjust persecution by the law.
In Double Indemnity, Walter
Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson live comfortable lives.
Their passion and their greed are not presented as responses to any
kind of social oppression, unless it's the sheer boredom of
middle-class life. They're simply selfish, amoral people.
The film can be read as a critique of middle-class American life,
seeing the corruption of the adulterous lovers as a product of the
spiritual vacuity of their class, but to me the tone of the film is
more peevish and bitchy than political. You get a sense that
Chandler and Wilder, who did the adaptation of Cain's book, hate their
bourgeois characters because they're stupid and tacky -- that it's
snobbery that ignites the engine of the narrative. Certainly
there's no sympathy involved and no rage directed at the system which
produces such people.
Made during WWII, the film taps into the creeping spiritual malaise and
suspicion of civilization, as well as the sense of the existential
impotence of men, that would inform the postwar film noir
-- and it portrays one of the most fatal femmes in the entire history of cinema. But I think these things are mostly the result of coincidence, an intuition about the temper
of the times that allowed Chandler and Wilder to indulge what was
primarily a personal prejudice against their social and intellectual
inferiors. To them, I think, Walter Neff's biggest crime wasn't
murder -- it was his dumb salesman's jokes and the self-satisfied way
he delivered them. Phyllis Dietrichson's one unforgivable sin was the cheap blonde wig.
I'm talking here about the philosophical mood of the film, the
attitude of the creators, but of course those things are transformed in
the film itself, whose dark undertow of suspense and fatal
miscalculation is so powerful that it transcends the bitchiness of Wilder and Chandler, evoking an anxiety far deeper than the snob's fear of bad taste. Double Indemnity, finally, achieves the precise effect of a nightmare, while not venturing into the precise nightmare landscape of the true film noir.
Friday, June 15
NO EXIT
by
Lloydville
on Fri 15 Jun 2007 10:15 AM PDT
"What we all dread most," said G. K. Chesterton's detective priest Father Brown, "is a maze
with no centre."
The
mood of existential dread that gripped the American psyche in the wake
of WWII was largely unconscious, and so it expressed itself in
irrational ways -- in the hysteria of the Communist witch hunts, for
example, and in the mythology of the film noir,
which characteristically sent an impotent man into the heart of a
nightmarish moral labyrinth from which there was no escape.
There was a variant on the classic noir
paradigm which sent a cop or a government agent into that same dark
underworld, but he was armed with the positive values of the official
culture and backed by its official institutions -- he not only escaped
from the labyrinth, he straightened it out, brought it into the light
and broke its evil spell.
The first film of this kind, and a model for all the rest, was The House On 92nd Street
from 1945, an F. B. I. procedural about the uncovering of a Nazi spy
ring operating inside the U. S. during WWII. It had a
quasi-documentry approach and was obviously designed to reassure
Americans that their government had the issue of existential dread well
in hand. It's a taut, entertaining thriller, with fascinating
location photography, but its celebration of the F. B. I.'s
omnipotence and infallibity couldn't, even at the time, have been a
profound assurance to people who felt that something had gone terribly
awry with the world -- something that the Allied victory in the war
hadn't really set right.
This feeling was addressed but not answered in genuine film noir,
which is what gave the form its power -- turned its image of the urban
labyrinth into an enduring variation on an ancient myth.
Interestingly, the terrifying image of the maze with no center, and no
exit once entered, can also be found I believe in the best films of
Frank Tashlin -- all comedies.
In The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,
Tashlin offers a satire of post-war American culture which also has no
center and no exit point. These movies mock modern media from within the
modern medium of film, which is itself mocked, deconstructed, leaving us
with no reliable perspective from which to judge any of their judgments.
They savage the modern rat race but also savage anyone who tries to
escape it. In Tashlin's vision, as in film noir, American culture is a maze which can't be navigated, in which every passage circles back on itself.
In Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,
for example, Tashlin attacks modern advertising and product placement
on television, then proceeds to plug his own earlier film The Girl Can't Help It
within the new one. Tashlin's films are funny but deeply
disturbing. Their vision of America is profound and just as noir as the dark streets of the great films noirs.
The fact that Tashlin's darkness is rendered in garish, overheated
Color by Deluxe is just one more of the radically disorienting ironies
of his method.
[For more on The Girl Can't Help It, go here. The image of the labyrinth in film noir is discussed helpfully in Nicholas Christopher's book Somewhere In the Night.]
Friday, June 8
NO SUCH THING
by
Lloydville
on Fri 08 Jun 2007 07:35 AM PDT
Someone once remarked that there's no such thing as a bad film noir. It's a strange propostion and the strangest thing about it is that it's pretty much true.
I've just watched over 30 films noirs
and none of them was anything less than a wondrously entertaining
B-picture. There are some clunkers that are labelled films noirs but really aren't -- like Otto Preminger's Whirlpool,
for example, which is in fact a Hitchcockian suspense thriller made by
a man who had no clue as to how Hitchcock created suspense . . . but even among the faux noirs, films that are noirish only in visual style, for example, most have dialogue and images that are thrilling.
I'm not sure how to explain this consistency of quality except by suggesting that noir
represented such a release from the thematic and stylistic conventions
of the traditional studio product that filmmakers responded with an
outburst of pent-up creativity and daring. They must have known
that they were inventing a new kind of film, even if it didn't have a
name yet, and the fact that there were no set rules for this kind of
film made it hard for the studios to wrestle it into a set
formula. Films noirs
were relatively cheap to make, and people couldn't seem to get enough
of them, so the studios stepped back and let the experimentation
continue -- for almost 20 years.
The first film that displayed the characteristic visual style of the noir was a fairly routine murder mystery called I Wake Up Screaming (above) from 1941. Double Indemnity, from 1944, gave us protagonists who were morally currupt to the core. Neither was, to my way of thinking, a genuine film noir, but Double Indemnity
was a radical indication that a change was on its way -- that audiences
could accept a darker view of the world than the Hollywood studios had ever been
willing to embrace.
As early as 1945, in Edgar G. Ulmer's no-budget thriller Detour,
the combination of an exaggerated, expressionistic visual style and a
sense of the world as morally unhinged at its core produced a template
for the classic film noir, a vehicle for the subterranean mood of existential dread that gripped America in the wake of WWII.
None of the movies made about the war itself ever expressed as
eloquently its psychic cost to a generation of Americans as did the
movies we now call film noirs.
They crackle with the excitement of artists suddenly allowed to deal
with truths that couldn't be addressed in the official view of
things. Corporate entertainment tends to gravitate towards the
official view of things but there are times when the official view of
things diverges so radically from the actual mood of the audience that
accommmodations have to be made. Film noir was one of the most radical of those accommodations.
Wednesday, June 6
LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN
by
Lloydville
on Wed 06 Jun 2007 12:47 AM PDT
[Note -- this post contains plot spoilers and shouldn't be read if you haven't already seen Leave Her To Heaven.]
Leave Her To Heaven
is one of the strangest films ever made in studio-era Hollywood. The tension
between its text and its subtext is so violent that it can induce mild
dizziness. It's sometimes called, unhelpfully I think, a film noir.
It's certainly a dark film, despite its gorgeous Technicolor
photography, and it deals with some of the same cultural neuroses that
inform the noir tradition, but it comes at them from a different perspective -- a female perspective.
At the heart of the film is Ellen, played by Gene Tierney -- a
beautiful, narcissistic psychopath. We're told early on that
Ellen wrecked her parents' marriage by her obsessively close
relationship with her father. The minute we hear this
extraordinary bit of information our perceptions should be alerted that things
aren't always going to be what they seem in this film -- though I
imagine that it's mostly women who pick up on it, and perhaps only
subconsciously.
Think about it. A grown man allows his marriage to be ruined by his obsessively close
relationship with his daughter -- and the child is blamed. This
strikes me as a kind of emotional code, alluding to the phenomenon of blaming
women for the psychic and moral failings of men.
Ellen will go on in the course of the film to do horrible things -- she
will murder a crippled boy, her husband's brother, she will induce
the miscarriage of her own unborn child and she will try to frame her
innocent cousin for murder. She becomes a monster and no rational
consideration can induce us to sympathize with her -- but we do.
We do because of the coded text embedded in the overt one.
In the film, Ellen falls in love with and marries Dick, apparently
because he reminds her of her father. Cornell Wilde is
brilliantly cast in the role. He looks like a hunk but is a kind
of black hole on screen, with a blank face and eyes that express little
more than hurt and bewilderment. He's further un-manned in the
narrative, which makes him a fumbler, insecure around Ellen, easily led by
her and only too happy to retreat to the female company of her mother
and cousin, "good" women but good in a bland, smug way.
Dick has a crippled younger brother who comes to live with the
newlyweds -- sleeping in the room next to theirs behind a wall so thin
that he can talk to them through it without raising his voice.
Dick doesn't seem to comprehend why this situation makes Ellen
uncomfortable. When the brother is finally moved out to a guest
house Dick secretly invites Ellen's mother and cousin to come visit,
another intrusion on their intimacy, and once again can't understand why this disturbs Ellen. He whines out
his reasoning -- "I thought you'd be pleased!" -- without the slightest apparent awareness of Ellen's point of view, much less her right to be
consulted on such things.
Ellen over-reacts, of course -- drastically. She lets the brother
die in a swimming accident. But part of us understands why she
does it. All the people around her are so drippy, so dull and, in
the case of the men, so weak, that part of us wants her to kill them
all.
This is how the deep tension of the film is created -- by giving Ellen
real grievances, maddening and suffocating, while at the same time
giving her responses that we can judge as thoroughly
reprehensible. Men are allowed to righteously condemn a woman who
sees through male weakness, women are allowed a vicarious revenge
against those same weak men.
The film starts on a train and climaxes in a courtroom, but in between
it plays out in a series of glamorous vacation homes, shot in wild,
almost lurid color. The whole film is like a paean to the
well-decorated second home -- a glossy magazine-spread celebration of
bourgeois comfort and excess. But Ellen makes us feel the
oppression of those homes -- they are for her what the urban labyrinth
is to the lost souls of film noir, and they're lit with the same expressionistic exaggeration.
Gene Tierney was an actress of limited range but she turns up in some
of the great films of Hollywood's golden age, radiant and unforgettable --
this film, Laura, Heaven Can Wait and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
She had a unique quality on screen, part aristocratic, part down to
earth, always suggesting a secret that will never be revealed.
That quality, and especially it's sense of impenetrable mystery, is
what allows us here to project onto her our unconscious approval of her
wickedness.
While not a true film noir the movie fits nicely into a category that might be called domestic noir -- along with Shadow Of A Doubt and Double Indemnity,
both made around the same time. In these films, the nightmare of
moral chaos doesn't play out on dark city streets but in middle-class
homes . . . yet the existential dread invoked is almost exactly the
same.
Tuesday, June 5
THE DARK CORNER
by
Lloydville
on Tue 05 Jun 2007 03:43 AM PDT
"I feel all dead inside. I'm backed up in a dark corner and I don't know who's hitting me."
With this little speech, the hardboiled private-eye protagonist of Henry Hathaway's The Dark Corner, from 1946, leaves the world of 30s pulp fiction where he was born and enters the realm of the film noir.
He's lost the romantic nobility of the traditional private eye, summed
up by Raymond Chandler when describing his idea of the hero in a work
of detective fiction -- "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,
who is neither tarnished nor afraid."
The hero of The Dark Corner, played by Mark Stevens, is
tarnished by a past frame-up for manslaughter, almost unhinged by the
memory of his impotence in the situation, his sense that it will follow
him forever and destroy him in the end. He's a tough guy, not
afraid of taking his licks but gripped by the dread of a consuming
darkness he doesn't understand and so can't control. The film
documents what is for him essentially an existential nervous breakdown.
His secretary, played by the still luscious, pre-ditzy Lucille Ball, mothers him,
bucks him up, challenges him to get his act together. She saves
him -- but it's clear enough that she could shatter him, too. Her
strength is a gift which he can't match. She has, in other words,
all the power of a femme fatale -- she simply chooses not to exercise it.
The male neurosis and confusion at the heart of the film constitute a
deconstruction of the traditional figure of the hardboiled private eye,
the wisecracking knight errant of Chandler's fiction. This
private eye is "wailing on the margin of nonentity", in Blake's great
phrase, held back from the abyss only by Ball's unaccountable faith in
him. You just have to imagine her losing her patience to project
yourself into the darker universe of even bleaker noirs like Out Of the Past, where the fatal femmes rule.
Saturday, June 2
ON DANGEROUS GROUND
by
Lloydville
on Sat 02 Jun 2007 02:07 AM PDT
Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground is a problematic film noir on many grounds but in an odd way it helps define the genre. More precisely, it helps us realize that film noir
isn't really a genre at all but a way of identifying a particular
strain of post-WWII dread as it came to infect many different kinds of
film.
This strain was characterized by a sense that the world had gone
hopelessly wrong, that existing paradigms for male identity were
suddenly useless in terms of setting anything right, that women, faced
with the existential nullity of men, were sudddenly in a position to
destroy them at will.
It's this profound and comprehensive existential dread that distinguishes film noir
from the dark pulp fiction of the Thirties, which investigated the
corruption of American society through the eyes of cynical but
personally incorruptible men like Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, or the
crime thrillers which gave us glimpses of the underworld while still
positing forces which could combat and contain it.
These popular forms took us on a tour of the wild side, the dark side of American culture, but the film noir suggested that there was no other side.
On Dangerous Ground violates every standard rule of Hollywood storytelling, and eventually most rules of the noir
tradition. The dream logic that propels the narratives of all
great suspense thrillers is stretched beyond conventional bounds --
just as in dreams sometimes incidents occur which make us realize, even
in the middle of the dream, that we must be dreaming.
Robert Ryan plays a cop on the edge of a total breakdown, overcome by
the sheer meanness of streets which can't be policed effectively except
by adopting the rules of the bad guys. For his own good he's sent
out to a rural community to help with a murder investigation, but
there's nothing redemptive about the country he enters. Bleak,
snow-covered, peopled by vicious, suspicious, isolated farm-dwellers,
it's just as soul-killing as the city he's left. It reminds one
of the landscape of Bergman's Winter Light -- a place where the soul shrivels and dies.
But then he meets a woman, played by Ida Lupino -- not the traditional femme fatale who waits to ensnare and destroy lost men in many films noirs
. . . but a blind woman paradoxically attracted by his distant,
unengaged treatment of her. His failure to pity or patronize her
gives her a sense of power, encourages her to trust him,
irrationally. And that trust saves him, gives his existence some
meaning.
The film, made at RKO, was much meddled with by studio head Howard
Hughes, which may account in part for its disjointed tone. Ray
disowned the film in later years, saying that Ryan's redemption
involved a miracle and that he didn't believe in miracles.
But the film believes in this particular miracle, and that's all that
counts. And even the miracle fails to violate entirely the dark
vision of the film noir,
since it presents us with a love that's possible only because both
partners in it are disabled, outsiders, in touch finally with their own
despair because they're able to recognize it in each other.
You could call it a religious film -- and you wouldn't be far wrong.
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