6. FILM NOIR

FILM NOIR: NOT WHAT IT SEEMS      

“ You may think you know what you’re dealing with – but believe me, you don’t.”

                                                                                           – Chinatown, Robert Towne 

Film noir is the most elusive of film genres to pin down.  It resists easy definition because it is defined less by conventions of setting and plot and more by style and mood. Film noir   (literally “black film”) was the phrase coined by French critics in the post-WWII period to describe those wartime Hollywood movies in which they detected new dark themes and  attitudes. The classic period of film noir is considered roughly to date from 1945 to 1955; but the appeal of  film noir obviously endures as is demonstrated both by the number of re-makes of film noir classics such as The Postman Always Rings Twice ( Rafelson, 1981), D.O.A. (Morton, Jankel, 1988) and by the number of contemporary films such as  The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995) and L.A. Confidential (Hanson, 1998) that might be described as “neo-noir”.

Film critics and scholars have attempted to define film noir’s meaning and appeal with mixed results. Film noir’s origins can be traced to two main sources. Visually, its cinematic style was shaped by German Expressionism, whose roots date back to the post-WWI period during  which films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Weine,1919) and M (Lang,1931) were made. Film noir’s verbal style derives directly from the “hard-boiled” American fiction of such writers as Hemingway, Hammett, Chandler, and James M. Cain; some of whom wrote the screenplay adaptations of their work themselves. It is no accident that these forms of German cinema and American fiction surfaced simultaneously following the First World War; nor a coincidence that film noir reached its peak following the Second World War. Underlying these artistic forms was the doubt, fear, and fatalism born of global conflict and economic depression. Society and conventional ideals were called into question by these catastrophes; an individual was shown to be at the mercy of forces much greater than himself. This was a common existential background that any inhabitant of the twentieth century could share.

Paul Schrader in his essay, “Notes on Film Noir” makes a number of useful observations of how film noir’s sylistics functioned in the service of its fatalistic themes. Realism and expressionism were combined by shooting on location, mostly at night, while using unnatural and expressionistic lighting. Oblique and vertical lines were favored over horizontal lines, to emphasize a sense of instability and fragmentation. Romantic narration and the complex manipulation of chronological time was used to reinforce a sense of doomed fate and predetermined outcome. Stock themes of film noir consisted of:  the Black Widow; the killers on the run; doppelgangers; and “the serviceman who returns from war to find his woman dead or unfaithful, his business partner cheating him, and society in general to be something worth less than fighting for.” Film noir heroes feared the future, lived day to day, and longed for the past (attitudes very common to combat veterans, I might add). The insecurities and fears of the film noir hero were submerged beneath the character’s and the genre’s sense of style.

While conceding that film noir is an “unwieldy category”, Schrader insists that fim noir is a specific period of  Hollywood film history, the late 40’s, early 50’s.  It consisted of three phases: 1) Wartime (1941-1946) –  the era of the private eye; 2) Post-War Realist (1945-49) – which dealt with urban crime and corruption; and 3) the final phase (1949-53) – which was characterized by “psychotic action and suicidal impulse.” Schrader’s insistence that film noir is of a specific historic time  and geographic location makes no more sense than insisting horror is a genre consisting only of horror films made in Hollywood in the 1930’s; or that only Westerns made by John Ford, starring John Wayne are Westerns. Certainly, these are the classical examples of these genres, but that is a very different statement than the one Schrader is making.

Janey Place in her essay, “Women In Film Noir”, characterizes the  dominant world view of film noir as “ paranoid, claustrophobic, hopeless, doomed, predetermined by the past…morality is relative: values and identities constantly shift.” Unfortunately, for the most part, she seems to regard film noir as nothing less than being part of an eternal male conspiracy (“the ideological operation of the myth”) to control and destroy strong, sexually assertive, independent women. While admitting her own preference for “strong, dangerous…exciting” femme fatales of over the quiet, virtuous heroines of film noir,  Place lacks all understanding for any male’s attraction to the character she so admires, nor any concession of women’s attraction to the male equivalent, the man with the dark, criminal past. She is closer to the truth when she describes women in film noir as representing “man’s own sexuality, which must be repressed  and controlled if it is not to destroy him.” Place states that “self-absorbed narcissism”  is the transgression  the femme fatale is punished for, when actually it is the transgression that both the woman and her male partner are punished for.

Frank Krutnick in his essay, “The ‘Tough’ Investigative Thriller”  raises the issue of masochism and self-abasement in his discussion of Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947). To Krutnick, the film  is “ not so much the story of a transgressive female as it is of a ‘tough’ hero who causes his own destruction…”.  The hero, Jeff,  uses the femme fatale, Kathie, as his means of abdicating responsibility in his life; it is “his insistence upon waiting upon [ her to] determine the course of the relationship” and his life, that marks his love for her as a “masochistic fantasy”. While she may be manipulating him (and others) for her own ends, he is the primary instrument of his own downfall,  and she operates as his pretext.  Krutnick notes the association in film noir, of the erotic woman with death; this can also be understood in reverse, as the allure of self- destruction, the fatalistic abdication of personal responsibility.

What defines film noir?  As Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote and directed Body Heat (1981) said, “It’s all up for grabs.” Certainly, film noir is not limited by time or geography. It could be argued that film noir originated with Dr. Caligari in 1919 and that continues as a viable genre up to the present; even as film noir influences can be seen in this year’s  leading Oscar winner, American Beauty (Mendes,1999). Film noir movies have been made all over the world: from France, Breathless (Godard,1959) and Shoot the Piano Player (Truffaut,1960); in Japan, Kurosawa made an outstanding trio: Stray Dog (1949), The Bad Sleep Well (1960), and High and Low, (1962); from England, The Third Man (Reed,1949) and Mona Lisa, (Jordan, 1986); from Holland, The 4th Man (Verhoeven, 1979); from Germany, The American Friend (Wenders, 1977).  Nor is film noir limited to gender: in Sudden Fear (Miller, 1952), the heroine Joan Crawford  is set up for murder by her husband; and in Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945) , Crawford plays a mother who sacrifices everything for her manipulative daughter; and in perhaps the greatest film noir movie made, Chinatown (Polanski, 1974) it is Faye Dunaway who is the ultimate victim and John Huston who is the genre’s worst villain. As his character  tells J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson): “ Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.”

What is film noir? Why does it endure? The core element of film noir is deception; things are not what they seem to be. It is a journey beneath the surface appearance of things. All  is suspect, not to be trusted; not society, the law, the romantic Other, not even oneself. The outcome is in doubt: evil can, and often does, triumph. Film noir will continue because it  remains a potent form of artistic exploration of the human condition. The blackness of film noir refers not to a city street at night but to the dark recesses of the human heart.