7
THE NOIR MEDIASCAPE
“There is nothing but trouble and desire.”
HAL HARTLEY, Simple Men, 1992
One day in 1993, Emmy Award–winning filmmaker Ara Chekmayan visited a Pennsylvania fleamarket, where he discovered a statuette that looked exactly like the Maltese Falcon. Chekmayan purchased the black bird for eight dollars, and not long afterward, believing it to be one of two identical props that had been used in the famous 1941 Warner Brothers movie, he offered it up for auction at Christie’s, who estimated its value at fifty thousand dollars. Before an auction could take place, however, a Los Angeles collector pointed out that identical copies of the statuette could be purchased at forty-five dollars apiece from a book dealer in Long Beach, California. (In that same year, my wife bought one in a Westwood bookstore and gave it to me as a Christmas present.) Chek-mayan immediately withdrew his rara avis from sale, and the entire unhappy adventure was noted in People magazine.
The central irony of this story lies in the well-known fact that the “original” Maltese Falcon was itself a fake. Dashiell Hammett’s novel can be read as a parable about art and surplus value, showing how a fetish object is created through the sheer power of myth. (Notice also that many of the villains in films noirs of the 1940s were dealers or collectors of fine art.) The irony deepens, however, when we realize that a similar myth has now accumulated around the classic Hollywood cinema. Contrary to what Walter Benjamin hoped in the 1930s, mechanical reproduction has not destroyed the “aura” of exhibition art; instead, the transitory but highly fetishized images of a bygone movie industry have become collector’s items or museum pieces. Even the property warehouses of the old studios contain valuable objects. A kitschy statuette originally intended to represent a worthless imitation has been transformed into “the stuff that dreams are made of,” if only because Humphrey Bogart touched it.
There is nothing new about this process. The twentieth century offers many examples of mass-produced trivia that become rare and valuable with the passing of time. (Walter Benjamin himself was a collector of popular children’s books that eventually became prized items.) But Chek-mayan’s falcon illustrates two points about the film noir that are worth emphasizing: first, the falcon provides concrete evidence that Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s have become historical artifacts, possessed of a certain artistic or cultural cachet; and second, it reveals that these same thrillers can spread their aura across different media, becoming valuable as other things besides movies. The Maltese Falcon may have begun as a book and a couple of films, but it can become a statue in a museum, or practically anything else.
In effect, the idea of film noir spreads so widely that it helps to constitute what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls our “mediascape,” which is made up of both the “capabilities to produce and disseminate information” (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, computers, and so on), and the images created through such media.1 We might even say that noir itself is a kind of mediascape—a loosely related collection of perversely mysterious motifs or scenarios that circulate through all the information technologies, and whose ancestry can be traced at least as far back as ur-modernist crime writers like Edgar Allan Poe or the Victorian “sensation novelists.” Of course, not everyone in the world is aware of the term film noir, and people find different uses for the things they read or see. Even so, self-conscious forms of noirish narrative continue to appear all around us, blurring the line between our fictional and real landscapes and contributing profoundly to the social imaginaire.
This phenomenon is especially evident in the postmodern environment, where dark Hollywood pictures of the 1940s and 1950s provide motifs, images, plots, and characters for every sort of artifact. For example, the slightly upscale regions of the leisure market frequently draw upon the memory of noir. Bernard Herrmann’s music scores have been adapted into concert pieces by prestigious conductors; ambitious novelists such as William Gibson, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, J. P. Ballard, Paul Auster, and Susanna Moore self-consciously allude to the noir literary tradition; the lurid illustrations for pulp magazines provide inspiration for the cover art on the annual “fiction issues” of The New Yorker; Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, and other crime writers of the 1940s have been published in fine editions by the Library of America; and in March 1993, the O. K. Harris Gallery in New York featured an exhibit by artist Arson Roje, who executed a series of hyperrealistic, eerily colored paintings of publicity stills and lobby cards from the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon. Nor is this borrowing limited to middlebrow, institutional, or “authentic” arts. Film noir served as a minor reference point for Guy Debord and the situationists in Paris, who entitled one of their most famous manifestations The Naked City. More recently, the moods and images commonly associated with noir have influenced such cult TV shows as The X-Files and Millennium. The CD-ROM industry offers guides to Chandler, as well as interactive narratives such as The Dame Was Loaded (1996), which allows the male viewer to play the role of a private eye. Meanwhile, the World Wide Web is filled with information sites about every variety of pulp fiction and psychological melodrama.
The vaguely subcultural world of American comic books has shown an especially marked interest in retro-noir fantasies. Paradox Press, a special division of DC Comics, publishes “graphic novels” in a noir format, and Frank Miller, whose The Dark Knight Returns helped to fuel the Batman craze of the 1980s and 1990s, has produced a series of Mickey Spillane–inspired strips entitled Sin City. (Miller has probably exerted a strong influence on neo-noir as a whole—chiefly because of the way he fuses the black-and-white lighting patterns of the 1940s with the hard-body, exaggeratedly sexual poses in contemporary action movies.) Ironically, Mickey Spillane also inspired Ms. Tree, one of the longest-running private-eye comic books in history, which features a feminist private investigator and single mother named Michael Tree. Indeed, the amazingly durable Spillane, who began his career in the comic trade, has written futuristic versions of his original “Mike Danger” stories for a company called Tekno Comics, and in 1996, these illustrated tales of sex and vengeance were being discussed as a movie from Miramax pictures.
If Miramax were to distribute a Mike Danger film, it would be contributing to the low end of a motion-picture cycle that began in 1989 with Batman and threatens to die off in the late 1990s with productions like Barb Wire (a sort of noir Barbarella). Over the past decade, Hollywood has regularly issued summertime adventures based on the dark side of comic strips. The formula has not always been profitable, but it accounts for such mildly entertaining if extravagant movies as Dick Tracy (1990), The Shadow (1994), and Batman Forever (1995), all of which are aimed at an audience of older children and adults. The major films in the cycle are derived from slightly infantile and outmoded sources, but in true postmodern fashion, they create glossy, show business “events,” featuring award-winning actors like Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino and lavish sets by Anton Furst and Joseph Nemec III, who employ a style known in the business as “noir lite.” High production values and straightforward comic-book heroics are mingled with over-the-top performances, double-entendre dialogue, dystopian satire, and a good deal of directorial self-consciousness (as in Batman’s allusions to Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang). The result is a pop-art spectacle that tries to provide something for almost everybody, enabling the more sophisticated adults to feel knowledgeable while they regress into nostalgia and childhood fantasy.
As we have seen, modestly budgeted and somewhat nostalgic versions of feature-length film noir have also become a staple of cable television. A typical 1996 picture, Café Society (distributed theatrically in 1997), is described as follows in the Showtime program guide: “The year is 1952. New York City’s El Casbah nightclub, where Manhattan’s fabulously wealthy gather to wallow in the gluttonies of success. One of them, Mickey Jelke (Frank Whaley), is heir to a tremendous fortune when he turns 25. Ask undercover agent Jack Kale (Peter Gallagher) about him, however, and he’ll tell you he believes Jelke to be part of a big pornography ring. Then there’s Patricia Ward (Lara Flynn Boyle), another society kid who’s probably not what she seems to be. Three characters, one film noir triangle. Coffee?” In some cases, a similar nostalgia (if it is, in fact, nostalgia) extends even to the city streets, which are transformed by the tourist industry into simulacra of old Hollywood sets. The San Francisco tourist office provides a “Dashiell Hammett walking tour” to complement its “Victorian Architecture tour” and “Flower Power tour.” Fans of The Maltese Falcon can visit a dark alley near Union Square, where a brass plaque memorializes the scene of a famous crime. “On approximately this spot,” the plaque reads, “Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O’Shaughnessy.”
In one sense, the circulation and transformation of noir motifs is merely an exaggerated expression of modernity itself. The various aspects of the leisure economy have always been related, and film styles or genres have always tended to mirror or influence other types of entertainment. The pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s offered many of the same things— westerns, melodramatic “love stories,” tales of crime and horror—that could be seen in theaters or heard on the radio during that decade. Even in the 1940s and 1950s, the barely articulated noir sensibility was not confined to movies or literature; on the contrary, it spread across every form of narrative or protonarrative communication. As one instance, consider Entertainment Comics, better known as EC, which in the early 1950s took direct aim at the libido of adolescent boys, specializing in black comedy (Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror), grotesque “speculative fiction” (Weird Science), and anarchic satires of pop culture (Mad and its short-lived clone, Panic). At one point, EC adapted a number of dark short stories by Ray Bradbury, and it nurtured a group of stylish, groundbreaking illustrators who borrowed conventions from noirlike movies and pulp magazine covers. The entire EC line was unusually sexy, violent, and iconoclastic. Its two most obviously noir venues, Crime Suspenstories and Shock Suspenstories, were filled with restless suburban marriages, neurotic killers, and corrupt police who administered third-degree punishment to innocent civilians. Drawn in an angular, chiaroscuro style, EC’s ten-cent crime anthologies often showed voluptuous women being murdered or tortured, but they also gave vivid treatment to controversial issues such as race prejudice and drug addiction.
Not surprisingly the success of EC prompted an outcry from guardians of morality. In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham wrote a best-selling exposé of the comic industry, The Seduction of the Innocent, which led to a full-scale Senate investigation headed by Estes Kefauver of Tennessee.2 EC’s major competitors quickly appointed a censorship board administered by moral czar Judge Charles F. Murphy, which denied an official “seal of approval” to any comic that used words such as crime, horror, terror, and weird. In response, EC killed off its leading titles and experimented briefly with a melodramatic but “educational” volume called Psychoanalysis. In 1955, it converted its most popular genres into twenty-five-cent “picto-fictions” for adults— among them, Crime Illustrated: Adult Suspense Stories and Shock Illustrated: Adult Psychoanalytical Tales. The company disappeared at about the same time as classic film noir, although its most popular offering, the parodic Mad, metamorphosed into a relatively sanitized and uninventive “magazine.” Then in the 1980s, with the relaxation of censorship and the reconfiguration of the marketplace, some of its original volumes began to resurface as expensive reprints for nostalgic older adults and affluent teenagers; the volumes were a strong influence on Stephen King, and they eventually inspired a movie and a cable TV series called Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996). Nearly a third of the shows in the series were adapted from the original EC crime comics and were directed by such figures as John Frankenheimer, Walter Hill, and Robert Zemeckis.
Television and radio have also been crucial to the history and dissemination of noir taste. EC was inspired in part by the dark or horrific radio dramas of the 1940s—especially by CBS’s Suspense, which featured the major Hollywood stars of its day. Following in a tradition established by Orson Welles at the same network, Suspense devised ingenious ways to motivate retrospective forms of first-person narration: a dead man (Robert Taylor) leaves a manuscript in a shoe box; an invalid (Agnes Moorehead) makes desperate telephone calls to several people because she suspects that she is about to be murdered; and a killer (Peter Lorre) breaks into a police station and holds the cops at gunpoint, forcing them to listen to the weird story of his crimes. The series often adapted novelists such as Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain, and at least two of its original scripts—Cyril Endfield’s “The Argyle Inheritance” and Lucille Fletcher’s “Sorry, Wrong Number”—were later turned into films noirs. Many of its episodes (marketed today as nostalgia radio, with the commercials intact) still have a power to entertain. Among the more com-pellingly bizarre shows of 1949, for example, were “Consequence,” starring James Stewart as a doctor who tries to escape a bad marriage by faking his death; “For Love or Murder,” starring Mickey Rooney as a murderous, romantically infatuated jazz musician who hears drums in his head; and “The Bullet,” starring Ida Lupino as a career woman whose success causes her jealous, ex-convict husband to threaten to shoot her.
Suspense was the immediate forerunner of Alfred Hitchcock’s hugely successful TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s; indeed, one of its most admired episodes, a 1942 adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s novel The Black Curtain, was filmed by The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962, under the direction of the young Sydney Pollack. Meanwhile, film noir’s most celebrated character type, the hard-boiled private eye, remained a staple of entertainment programs on both radio and television from the 1940s through the 1980s. On radio in the period between 1948 and 1952, Dick Powell was singing-detective Richard Diamond, and Howard Duff was a particularly effective Sam Spade. One of the earliest examples of such characters on TV was Charlie Wild, Private Eye (1950–1952), a production of CBS, ABC, and Dumont, which freely adapted Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade adventures, concealing the literary source and changing the hero’s name because of the HUAC investigations into Hollywood communism (Kevin O’Morrison played Wild, and Cloris Leachman was featured as Effie Perinne). Later in the decade, David Janssen was Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1957–1960), Philip Carey was Philip Marlowe (1959–1960), Darren McGavin was Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1957–1960), and Craig Stevens was Peter Gunn (1958–1961).
The best-known police procedural on U.S. radio and television from 1949 until the early 1970s was Jack Webb’s increasingly bland and conservative Dragnet, which evolved from He Walked by Night (1949), and which, in its later episodes, costarred Webb and Harry Morgan, who had acted together as a pair of heavies in another film noir called Appointment with Danger (1951). (Webb’s wide-screen and color movie version of Dragnet in 1954 was also inflected with noirlike photographic and performance conventions, as was his 1955 movie and radio series entitled Pete Kelly’s Blues.) Other TV productions derived from classical noir include Naked City (1958–1963), the BBC’s Third Man (1959–1964), and Mike Hammer, who resurfaced in a successful series featuring Stacy Keach (1984–1987). In the same years as the last of these shows, ITV in London produced a series of artful, atmospheric adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s short stories, featuring Powers Boothe as Philip Marlowe. At this point, the classic private eye was becoming an antique, but he could be brought up to date by transforming him into a somewhat yup-piefied, postfeminist type, as in Robert B. Parker’s Spencer novels and TV show (1985–1988) and in John Sayles’s exceptionally good series of TV dramas entitled Shannon’s Deal (1989–1991). He could also become a certified born loser, as in a made-for-cable thriller like Third-Degree Burn (1989).
It would require a small book merely to list all the burnt-out police officers and philosophical private eyes in American pop culture over the past three decades. Both genders and nearly all sexual inclinations have been represented by such figures, and every large city in the country has been mapped by them. Among the cop shows and criminal adventures on U.S. television, The Fugitive (1963–1967) and Miami Vice (1984–1989) are particularly important to the history of noir.3 Consider as well two expensively produced British exports, Cracker and Prime Suspect, which not only depict a society in decay but also make the detective protagonists seem almost as darkly compulsive as the criminals. These and some of the other examples I have mentioned are sometimes only remotely noirlike, but we should recognize that they all have familial connections with the classical thrillers of the 1940s, which they often acknowledge. The eponymous hero of Cracker, for instance, has a Bogart poster on the wall in his house. When producer-director Blake Edwards turned his highly successful Peter Gunn TV series into a rather bad movie called Gunn (1967), he staged the climax in a hall of mirrors that was reminiscent of The Lady from Shanghai. In one episode of the Mike Hammer TV series in the late 1980s, director Ray Danton did the same thing, achieving somewhat better results than Edwards on a lower budget.
At the very least, we need to recognize that noir is a much more flexible, pervasive, and durable mood, style, or narrative tendency than is commonly supposed and that it embraces different media and different national cultures throughout the twentieth century. Contrary to what Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward tell us on the first page of their indispensable encyclopedia of Hollywood noir, the form in question does not constitute “a self-contained reflection of [post–World War II] American cultural preoccupations,” and it is certainly not “the unique example of a wholly American film style.”4 The term film noir was used in France in the 1930s (if not earlier), and it was first applied to the American cinema by the French; in fact, a great many of the Hollywood films designated by the term were remakes of European pictures, made by émigré directors and writers. Certain of the characteristic expressions of film noir—especially the never-ending cycle of policiers and criminal adventures—have been produced by virtually every medium and every cinema in the world, and no doubt they will continue to be produced. If, as Jean-François Lyotard and others suggest, postmodernity is merely a restaging of modernist preoccupations on the grounds of contemporary technology and economics, then noir is likely to be with us for a long time to come.
This being said, the contemporary American scene has distinctive features that mark it off from the past. We can never know exactly how audiences in the 1940s and 1950s viewed the dark movies of their day, but it seems obvious that we view those same films differently, in contexts far removed from the ones for which they were originally intended. The postwar films noirs now occupy the same shelf space in video stores and the same time slots on TV as last year’s Hollywood thrillers; their reception, furthermore, is mediated by an extensive critical discourse (as in the case of this book), which gives them a certain status. Some people regard them as artistic visions of paranoia and entrapment; others view them in a spirit of Reaganite nostalgia for the glamour and simplicity of pre-Vietnam America.
In certain instances, the classic films noirs also provide contemporary audiences with material for what Barbara Klinger calls “mass camp.” Anyone who has watched Laura or Out of the Past in a crowded university auditorium will know that such movies require a suspension of disbelief best achieved at home or in a select revival theater. Some of the most serious lines of noir dialogue, written in the spirit of hard-boiled poetry or psychoanalytic profundity, have become unintentionally funny. (Peggy Thomson and Saeko Usukawa have published two amusing and nostalgic volumes made up entirely of dialogue from classical noir: The Little Black and White Book of Film Noir [1992] and Hard-Boiled [1994].) Where Laura is concerned, the camp effect is at least partly intended—any movie that puts Clifton Webb, Judith Anderson, and Vincent Price in the same drawing room is inviting a mood of fey theatricality. In the 1940s, however, camp was a marginal or subcultural style, risking criticism or censure. Today, as Klinger observes, the camp sensibility has been fully democratized by changes in social attitudes about gender and sexuality, by the liberalization of censorship rules, by the critical legitimization of pop art, and by the culture industry itself, which has learned how to market old products in new ways. Camp in the late twentieth century has therefore acquired a kind of “mainstream chic-ness,” especially evident in the Batman blockbusters, which is grounded in the audience’s sense of superiority over outdated conventions. An almost completely ahistorical mode of reception, it is marked by a strong tendency “to embrace what is perceived as mediocrity for a transient, disinterested form of recreation without group affiliation or political bite.”5
The only classical films noirs that seem relatively immune from mass-camp readings are pictures such as The Asphalt Jungle, which take place largely outside the studio, in a virtually all-male milieu, and convey an astringent, somewhat ironic attitude toward heterosexual romance— hence a more serious cult following can develop around a postmodern caper movie like Reservoir Dogs. It should be noted, however, that even the most condescending forms of mass camp involve affection for the things they mock. Contemporary audiences who laugh at Mildred Pierce or Double Indemnity remain at least partly under the spell of the films. The naïveté of these viewers lies not so much in their amused attitude, but in their implicit assumption that contemporary pictures based on similar themes are somehow more realistic, less burdened by artifice or sentimentality.
In point of fact, most examples of neo-noir are less artistically sophisticated and politically interesting than the films they emulate. Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat treats sex in a manner appropriate to the post-Code era, employing naturalistic acting and a somewhat elliptical cutting style; even so, its narrative structure is conventional, its characters familiar, and its Florida location merely decorative next to Double Indemnity’s Los Angeles. In comparison, a picture like David Mamet’s House of Games (1987) might seem different. An oneiric, sinister, and sometimes radically ambiguous movie, House of Games is filled with oddly lobotomized performances and artfully repetitious dialogue that echoes Ernest Hemingway without trying to copy him (“I’m a writer. I’m a sort of writer.” “Oh, so you’re a writer. What do you write when you write?”). It nevertheless provides a classically proportioned, “three-act” drama with a strong sense of closure, and most of its themes and stylistic effects are taken straight from Hitchcock. The story centers on an arctic, upper-class female who suffers from more neurotic compulsions than Marnie; the editing combines Kuleshovian effects and omniscient, “bird’s-eye” perspectives; and the entire staging is designed to create an expressionist atmosphere of eroticized suspense and impending violence. No doubt House of Games is a more fastidious and ostentatiously experimental picture than anything by Brian DePalma, but in the last analysis it is vulgarly Freudian, lacking the passion that makes a director like Hitchcock something other than a superbly skilled, misogynistic technician.
The same adaptation of traditional formulas, with a slightly revisionist twist, can be seen in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992), the two most commercially successful films noirs ever made. Interestingly, the two pictures have a good deal in common: both are directed by Europeans; both star the actor-producer Michael Douglas, who has a talent for portraying angry white males (he even makes the ruthless tycoon Gordon Gekko in Wall Street seem vaguely sympathetic); and both, despite their patriarchal implications, feature stunning performances by women. Alex, the psychotic one-night stand in Fatal Attraction, and Catharine, the Sadeian woman in Basic Instinct, are among the most frightening femmes fatales in the history of movies—chiefly because they are viewed without the constraints of old-fashioned censorship and without the mollifying romanticism of Hollywood in the 1940s. Neither film, however, represents an advance over earlier models in terms of style or sexual politics.
Glenn Close has said that she regards Fatal Attraction as a film noir, especially in its original version, which ends with Alex’s suicide.6 Unfortunately, because of negative reactions from preview audiences, Paramount and director Adrian Lyne reshot the grim conclusion, turning Alex from a vulnerable character into a Psycho-style killer, and then restoring Douglas’s family to a secure if chastened happiness. (Paramount and Billy Wilder also softened the ending of Double Indemnity, but the more superficial and commercially adroit Lyne had certain advantages over Wilder: after the theatrical release, his “director’s cut” was marketed to video stores in laserdisk and VHS formats, adding to the studio’s revenue.) The first version of Fatal Attraction is in fact an unsettling study of a disturbed woman who at first seems menacing but eventually becomes a scapegoat for the bourgeois family. The film cleverly invites its audience to identify with Michael Douglas, and then shifts the point of view and emotional emphasis toward Close, who gives Alex a plausibility and psychological complexity beyond anything imagined in the script. And yet, despite these virtues, and despite considerable narrative tension and technical sheen, the director’s cut of Fatal Attraction is in many ways a less ironic and morally ambiguous treatment of infidelity than André de Toth’s modestly budgeted Pitfall (1948), a classic noir grounded in a staunchly conservative view of the nuclear family. Pitfall relentlessly supports conventional morality, causing its restless protagonist (Dick Powell) to pay for the rest of his life because of a single, twenty-four-hour indiscretion. At the same time, it uses the married man’s involvement with another woman to reveal tensions between social classes, and it portrays the ostensible femme fatale (Lizabeth Scott) in quite sympathetic terms. Perhaps more significantly, it makes suburban America seem like an iron cage for both the wife and the husband.
Basic Instinct was also marketed in two versions, but the video release was designed merely to give the audience an extra forty-two seconds of nude sex. Few mainstream Hollywood films have so deliberately flaunted their aspirations to soft-core pornography, and few have provided a clearer instance of how the masculine gaze generates fantasies of desire and castration. Basic Instinct is filled with explicit, foregrounded instances of what Laura Mulvey calls “sadistic voyeurism” and “fetishis-tic scopophilia”—most obviously in the early scene in which the sexy young Catharine Trammell (Sharon Stone) sits on a raised, spotlit platform and allows a group of male detectives (representing the point of view of the audience) to look up her dress. Predictably, this scene initiates a narrative that is both Hitchcockian and Sternbergian, oscillating between the protagonist’s need to investigate and punish the woman and his equally important need to adore her and be destroyed. (Director Paul Verhoeven previously explored similar themes in The Fourth Man, a 1984 film noir made in Holland, in which a brief moment of male frontal nudity reveals the need to protect the phallus in both its real and symbolic senses.)
Throughout, Basic Instinct wears its noirlike sexual qualities on its sleeve, mixing psychological drama with pure spectacle. Like a perverse musical, it uses a deadly love affair between a rumpled, chain-smoking detective and a wealthy, provocative murderess to motivate a series of sadomasochistic “numbers” and several theatricalized displays of decadence. Also like a musical, it celebrates the union of a male and female who come from different worlds—a policeman and a criminal who are trying to achieve the “fuck of the century.” Although the policeman is a fairly conventional antihero, the criminal is a decidedly postfemme fatale, resembling a cross between Sade’s Julliette and Madonna. Catharine Trammell is not only a great beauty but also a hedonist, an intellectual, a bisexual, and a serial killer who openly mocks Freudian attempts to explain her behavior. She is, moreover, a pure machine-woman in the tradition of Phyllis Dietrichson, her evil redeemed only by Stone’s witty performance and by the film’s refusal to condemn her transgressions. At the end, she and the detective (who shares her taste for violence) are suspended in a moment of infinite erotic deferral, with an ice pick hidden under the bed. As R. Barton Palmer observes, this conclusion is reasonably complex in its treatment of sex and gender and “very much in the tradition of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.”7 But the comparison with Hitchcock (which Verhoeven deliberately encourages) also serves to remind us of important differences: Basic Instinct offers its audience a distinctly latter-day form of surrealism, without the equivalent risk of censorship, without the swooning cult of romantic love, and virtually without the Freudian unconscious.
Such films come dangerously close to the kind of cultural recycling and transformation described in a well-known passage from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), in which the daughter of a 1960s left-wing filmmaker (lately turned FBI agent) visits the newly constructed “Noir Center” shopping mall in lower Hollywood. Designed to resemble the Bradbury Building, the mall contains, among other things, a mineral-water boutique called “Bubble Indemnity” and a perfume store called “The Mall Tease Flacon.” To the young woman, it seems as if yuppification has run to “a pitch so desperate” that she can only hope the whole process is “reaching the end of its cycle.” She grows particularly angry because of what film noir represents in her own historical memory:
She happened to like those old weird-necktie movies in black and white, her grandfolks had worked on some of them, and she personally resented this increasingly dumb attempt to cash in on the pseudoromantic mystique of those particular olden days in this town, having heard enough stories…to know better than most how corrupted everything had really been from top to bottom, as if the town had been a toxic dump for everything those handsome pictures had left out.8
Pynchon is correct when he says that the “weird-necktie” style died sometime in the late 1950s, concurrent with the passing of the old studio pictures, only to be replaced by a variety of ahistorical, slickly commodified, and often “dumb” imitations. Except on television and in direct-to-video formats, the highly rationalized genre system gave way to a kind of shopping-mall cinema made up of superproductions for the masses and boutique pictures for specialized audiences. Most of the big pictures in the neo-noir category have been filled with comic-strip villains, loud explosions, and dialogue that consists mainly of “Fuck you” and “No, fuck you!” For their own part, the boutique movies are often less about characterization and social milieu than about seductive production designs, flamboyant camera effects, and spectacular sexual violence. One example is Peter Medak’s Romeo Is Bleeding (1993), which features Lena Olin as the sexiest one-armed dominatrix in the history of cinema, but which never rises above the level of a clever pastiche. A slightly more effective case in point is Larry and Andy Wachowski’s Bound (1996), which takes its visual cues from Frank Miller’s artfully self-conscious Sin City comic books. (Cinematographer Frank Pope creates a starkly graphic palette of black, white, and gray for this film, adding occasional touches of red for blood and green for money.) On the surface, Bound is sexually unorthodox, inviting us to fully identify with a lesbian couple who are seeking revenge on a distinctly unpleasant male; what is really at stake, however, is a fairly conventional male pleasure of watching two beautiful actresses as lovers—something that Bound does far better than the big-studio remake of Diabolique in the same year.
But the current situation may not be quite so dumb as Pynchon suggests.9 The category of noir has a long and complex history, and it provides images, moods, and stylistic techniques that can be adapted and transformed by good, bad, and indifferent pictures from every level of the marketplace. Speaking purely of the American commercial cinema, it would be difficult to find a better treatment of the doppelgänger theme than David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), a more disturbing depiction of criminal violence than Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), or a more disconcerting presentation of a psychopath than Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991). These pictures may be subject to criticism on aesthetic or political grounds, but so are the classic films noirs. Whatever we might say about the 1940s and 1950s, the better contemporary thrillers seldom leave out the “toxic dump” of social or moral corruption; indeed, some element of anger, fear, cynicism, pessimism, or nostalgie de la boue seems necessary to the form. Notice also that film noir has always been subject to appropriation by a variety of constituencies; in the past few decades, it has affected high-end productions such as Batman, independent pictures such as John Dahl’s Kill Me Again (1989), and imports such as Bill Bennett’s Kiss or Kill (1997)—the last of which represents a particularly effective use of old formulas. Noir has also been a favored subject of vanguard or deconstructivist filmmakers. Sally Potter’s Thriller (1979) and Manuel DeLanda’s Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller (1980) are indebted to classic models, as are a number of “crossover” projects, including David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Hal Hartley’s Simple Men (1992), and Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994).
The best contemporary films noirs seem to me to come from the middle range of the industry, represented by the last few pictures I have mentioned, where modest production values and a relative lack of hype allow directors to explore art-cinema values within the context of familiar narratives. In the United States, the somewhat incestuous relationship between the Sundance Film Festival, The New York Times, and distributors like Miramax and Fine Line has encouraged movies of this type. Each fall and winter, independently produced, noirlike pictures are shown at Sundance, written about in the Sunday Times, and distributed to big cities, where they usually share the same venues with English or Australian imports, Masterpiece Theater–style adaptations, and the few subtitled offerings that manage to find exhibitors. Such films are roughly analogous to the “hybrid” thrillers of the 1950s, and they generate reasonable profits because they fill at least two niches in the market: they appeal to a sophisticated audience, but at the same time they serve as general entertainment in the video stores.
There are so many of these hybridized films that I cannot list them all here. As a way of concluding my description of the noir mediascape, let me offer a brief discussion of three recent examples, which might be termed “independent” or “art-film” noir. In a sense, the three have little in common, but that fact should not trouble us. The idea of noir, after all, can accommodate many different things.
Example 1: The Grammercy Pictures–Universal release of Steven Soder-bergh’s Underneath (1995) is a remake of Robert Siodmak and Mark Hellinger’s more elaborately produced Criss Cross (1949). While he was working on this film, Soderbergh explained to a reporter from The New York Times that “the ideas behind noir…are interesting to me, not pastiche or homage.” He had no special desire to imitate Siodmak, he said, nor to prove “my shadow’s longer than yours”(6 February 1994). Perhaps for that reason, The Underneath is most effective at the points where it diverges from the earlier film. Soderbergh, who is the uncredited author of the screenplay, changes the locale from Los Angeles to present-day Austin, Texas, thereby replacing the 1940s urban jungle with a slightly eerie background of suburban houses and nondescript streets. He also gives more emphasis to the working-class characters’ domestic relationships and marginal jobs than to the suspense plot, which involves a botched armored-car robbery. Most strikingly, he transforms the drifter-protagonist (Peter Gallagher) from a romantically obsessed and rather stolid type (originally played by Burt Lancaster) into a weak-willed homme fatale.
Soderbergh’s antihero, Michael Chambers, is a compulsive gambler who has run away from home to escape his debts. As the film begins, we see him returning after a long absence, finding a job as an armored-car driver, reading self-help books, and attempting to reestablish connections with the people he left behind. His policeman brother (Adam Trese) envies and despises him; his widowed, still attractive mother (Anjanette Comer), who has always favored him, is about to marry a boring but dependable man (Paul Dooley); and his former lover Rachel (Alison Elliot), whom he abandoned, is living with a sadistic and intensely jealous small-time gangster (William Fichtner). As in the 1949 production, the plot concerns a deadly triangle between Michael, Rachel, and the gangster, who become duplicitous allies in a robbery scheme. In this case, however, a fourth character is introduced—a sweetly pretty young woman named Susan (Elizabeth Shue), who is attracted to Michael, and with whom he has a casual affair. Soderbergh also adds a new development to the conclusion, making the film seem a bit more in tune with the 1990s: Rachel tricks Michael into killing the gangster and then leaves Michael behind to die, reminding him before she goes that he once abandoned her. After all these years, she says, she has begun to understand “the appeal of walking away.”
Michael Chambers emerges from the film as an ineffectual, superficially attractive character who finds himself sliding into a trap of his own making. In several respects, he resembles his mother and Rachel, both of whom are caught in unhappy, small-town relationships, and both of whom are petty gamblers, obsessively playing the Texas lottery. Actually, everyone in the film lives a life of quiet desperation, grasping at vague hope for a jackpot. If this malaise is not immediately apparent, that is because The Underneath, like Criss Cross, presents most of the action from Michael’s point of view, using flashbacks and bizarre camera angles to heighten the sense of individual neurosis. The hospital sequence creates a truly Kafkaesque atmosphere of paranoia and black comedy, with the characters at Michael’s bedside viewed subjectively through an extreme wide-angle lens, and the set designed in asymmetrical, Caligari fashion.10 (At one point during the subsequent kidnapping, the world turns completely upside down.) Although Soderbergh abandons the 1940s convention of subjective, voice-over narration, he experiments quite effectively with a visual stream of consciousness, creating a good deal of spatial and temporal dis-orientation. In the opening sequence, for instance, we see Michael through the green windshield of an armored car as he drives along a highway; then we see him in the back seat of a taxicab, gazing unhappily out the window; then we see a conversation between him and Susan aboard a Greyhound bus, where he once again sits alone beside a window. The chronology of these images is not clear, and there is a disjunction between sound and visuals; thus we hear the conversation aboard the bus before it appears on the screen, and we continue to hear it over a shot of Michael and Susan as they part company at their destination.
FIGURE 63. Noir remade: Alison Elliot, William Fichtner, and Peter Gallagher in The Underneath (1995). (Museum of Modern Art Stills Archive.)
Throughout, The Underneath keeps its audience slightly off balance, joining the conventions of historical film noir with the more complex modernism of a New Wave director like Alain Resnais. Soderbergh’s greatest strengths, however, are at the level of realist character and mood (especially in scenes involving repressed sexual tension), and for that reason the mechanics of the crime-movie plot keep overriding or frustrating his film’s more interesting qualities. The problem is especially evident in the last scene. As she drives off with the stolen loot, leaving Michael to ponder his wasted life, Rachel stops at a convenience store to buy groceries and a lottery ticket; in the parking lot, we see the boss of the armored-car company (Joe Don Baker), who has been secretly responsible for financing the entire robbery scheme and who now plans to murder Rachel. This blatantly ironic twist is out of keeping with the wit and obliqueness of the earlier parts of the film. Even though it reinforces the recurring themes of gambling and failure, it makes the narrative as a whole seem too pat or generic—in one sense, too faithful to noir.
Example 2: No such problem affects Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade (1997), which was not marketed or reviewed as a noir, although it easily could have been. Thornton, the writer, director, and star of the film, previously cowrote and acted in One False Move (1994), an exciting low-budget thriller set in rural Arkansas. He also wrote and acted in “Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade” (1993), a sinister, black-and-white short subject directed by George Hickenlooper, which was rephotographed in color and with different camera angles to make up the opening sequences of Sling Blade. Reviewers have described the completed feature-length version of this story as “Faulknerian”—a somewhat strained comparison that nevertheless properly evokes Thornton’s interest in southern gothicism. (We should recall that William Faulkner himself was a noir novelist and that some of the classic films noirs, including Frank Borzage’s Moonrise [1949], are set in the rural South.) Indeed, had the Miramax distribution company been given their way, Sling Blade would probably have looked even more noirlike. It was shot in only twenty-four days for a cost of 1.3 million dollars and was originally intended as a sort of regional art movie for the video stores; Miramax, however, paid ten million for the rights and wanted to speed up the action along more commercial lines. Fortunately, Thornton resisted; as a result, he was able to explore certain “dark” motifs in a theatrical venue while avoiding a generic classification.
Sling Blade is a straightforward narrative performed at a deliberate, contemplative pace that seems anathema in contemporary Hollywood. Using long takes and a relatively static camera, photographer Barry Markowitz shoots the film chiefly with available light, immersing the interiors in a musty gloom and often illuminating figures with a single table lamp. This style is perfectly keyed to the central character—a slow-witted loner named Karl Childers (Thornton), who, when he was quite young, murdered his mother and her lover with a garden tool. During his childhood, Karl was locked in a shed by his parents and at one point was forced by his father to bury the still living body of his newborn brother. At the beginning of the film, he is pronounced “cured” and is released from the state mental hospital into the town where he was born, his only possessions a set of books that he has read over and over: the Bible, a story by Dickens (“that ’un about Christmas”), and some practical repair manuals. What follows is to some degree a sweetly comic wild-child story, involving Karl’s attempt to adjust to the “big world” of laundromats, fast food, and low-budget supermarkets. During his wanderings about town, he befriends a small boy named Frank (Lucas Black), and he forms a bond with Frank’s divorced mother, Linda (Natalie Caner-day), and her closest friend, the gay manager of the store where she works (John Ritter). But Linda has an alcoholic boyfriend (Dwight Yoakam) who repeatedly bullies the group; as this character becomes more violent toward Frank, Karl’s history threatens to repeat itself.
FIGURE 64. Art film or neo-noir? Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade (1996). (Museum of Modern Art Stills Archive.)
The suspense in Sling Blade derives from our awareness of Karl’s past, but the tension is intensified by Thornton’s performance. Frowning, stooped, and plodding, his speech filled with grunts and nervous twitches, he seems rather like an unsentimental Forrest Gump. Unless he tells us through sudden bursts of guttural dialogue, we cannot know what he is thinking; and even after we become aware of his innate sweetness, we can never be sure what he might do if he were to become intensely disturbed. As Doyle, the vicious, self-loathing boyfriend, Yoakam is equally remarkable. A construction worker and would-be leader of a surf-rocker band, Doyle spends much of the film lounging in Linda’s house, drinking beer and abusing not only Linda but also the boy, the “retard,” and the “queer.” He exudes a lazy, feline charm, but like most bullies he is a transparent manipulator and a bit of a coward. Karl’s response to his accelerating threats is determined and almost passionless. After a touching farewell to Frank, he goes to the repair shop to fashion a “sling blade” out of a broken lawnmower. Late at night, while Frank and Linda are away, he walks to Linda’s house and confronts Doyle—who, as usual, is reclining in an easy chair. The scene is played quietly, in a discreet long shot, and Doyle offers no resistance, even instructing Karl on how to dial 911 after the killing. The physical relationship between the two men— one of them standing at the left and the other seated at the lower right— reminds us of an earlier moment, when Karl pays a visit to his aging father (Robert Duvall), who sits in an easy chair and feebly, contemptuously flicks his tongue at his son. Karl says that his father is beyond execution because he is “already dead.” But in slaying Doyle, Karl is obviously reaching deep into his own past. The fatal blows are simple and swift, aimed outside the frame, at a figure whose body we never see. Karl then goes into the dimly lit kitchen, where, after calling the police, he eats a few of Linda’s biscuits, first smearing them with mustard.
Sling Blade is not without flaws (it makes the southern town look improbably nice and almost completely white), but it creates an unusual moral fable, rendered in an austere, sometimes amusingly digressive style. Clearly, such a film does not need to be called noir. Even so, Sling Blade tells an oedipal story involving murder; it deals with a character who cannot escape his past; and it uses low-key lighting to generate a gothic mood. If nothing else, it shows that familiar motifs of noir can be given new and mildly unorthodox applications. Perhaps for that reason, and perhaps because it was something of a populist movie, it became a surprise hit. At some point, Miramax must also have recognized that an actor-director from Bill Clinton’s Arkansas (with a name like “Billy Bob,” no less) could be highly marketable; in any case, Thornton was suddenly transformed into a celebrity, and his screenplay won an Academy Award.
FIGURE 65. Noir as a dream: Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway (1997). (Museum of Modern Art Stills Archive.)
Example 3: David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) makes a vivid contrast to both of the foregoing pictures and is somewhat easier to describe because its plot does not depend upon the achievement of a goal or the solution to an enigma. A thoroughgoing pastiche, this film brims with allusions to three decades of noir, which it uses to create a dream narrative. Significantly, the screenwriter is Barry Gifford, who worked on Lynch’s earlier pastiche, Wild at Heart, and who once wrote an entertaining book about film noir, The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1988). Between them, Lynch and Gifford seem determined to evoke a sense of pure “noirness.” Almost every image and every character in the film has an archetypal quality: a nocturnal road out of Detour and Psycho; a “Lost Highway Motel,” where a woman may or may not be dead; an exploding house on stilts like the one in Kiss Me Deadly; an alienated jazz musician who might be a killer; a brooding rebel-without-a-cause who lusts after a gun moll; a sadistic gangster who is obsessed with porn movies and prostitutes; a woman’s mutilated body, reminiscent of the Black Dahlia; and not one but two femmes fatales—the first a redhead like Gilda, the second a blond like Phyllis Dietrichson.
These allusions are treated skillfully, but they did not please American critics, who felt that Lost Highway was excessively dehumanized and self-reflexive. To some extent, I would agree. The film can also be criticized because it relies too much upon the nowadays predictable methods of postmodernist art and because it clearly indulges in a semiporno-graphic, male-adolescent fantasy.11 Even so, it seems to me an intelligent and weirdly beautiful picture that generates a powerful atmosphere of desire, terror, and dread. Throughout, Lynch’s control of sound and image is worthy of his work in Blue Velvet, but in this case he takes greater risks with his audience, completely suspending narrative logic and never abandoning the feeling of a dream. His characters abruptly change their identities or become doubles, his plot twists back upon itself like a serpent, and his cool technique transforms familiar generic motifs into something almost musical or poetic. The total effect is closer to the avant-garde poetry of Eraserhead (1978) than to any of Lynch’s subsequent work, and it has the audacity to run against the formally conservative grain of the contemporary art cinema.
To a certain extent, Lynch returns us to the issues in chapter 1 of this book. Whether he intended to or not, he has created something very close to the ideal film noir as the surrealist-inspired French might have imagined it in the decades after World War II. In other words, he gives us Hollywood sex and violence (suggesting far more than he shows) without the excuse of a realistic narrative; he mixes black, deadpan humor with horror; he utterly disorients his audience, never giving them an explanation for bizarre events; and he fetishizes everyday life, making a series of California living rooms and anonymous roadways seem truly uncanny. In the process, he also creates twin femmes fatales (both played by Patricia Arquette), who occasionally metamorphose into a creepy and rather androgynous male (Robert Blake). In “female” shape, this composite figure is the ultimate fetish object—a voluptuous, fleshy tease with vampire teeth, as stylized and heartless as an American automobile from the 1950s. Even when she is nude, she never removes her wigs or her six-inch heels.
No American thriller has ever gone so far to achieve the “disappearance of psychological bearings or guideposts” that Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton regard as the main objective of film noir. And yet, despite all its disquieting effects, Lost Highway merely takes us where we have already been. Unlike the ideal cinema of surrealist criticism (or the work of a director like Luis Buñuel), it looks backward to an imaginary past, preoccupied with pop art and the dream imagery of affluent America in the last decade of film noir. It deals impressively with primal anxieties, but it seems to have no destructive anger, no specific politics, no purpose other than regression. Both the filmmakers and the characters keep circling around the same familiar bank of images, drawn like moths to a flame. Thus, for all its horror, sexiness, and formal brilliance, Lost Highway ultimately resembles all the other retro noirs and nostalgia films of the late twentieth century: it remains frozen in a kind of cinematheque and is just another movie about movies.
Whatever their limitations, the films I have described are more true to their initial premises than Curtis Hanson’s slickly directed adaptation of James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential (1997)—a big-budget, highly publicized, and critically overrated feature that begins in darkly satiric fashion and then segues into crowd-pleasing melodrama. The three policemen who function as antiheroes in this picture—a “celebrity crime-stopper” who moonlights as advisor for a TV show called Badge of Honor, a brooding roughneck who beats up suspects, and a gung-ho idealist who cleverly manages his career—are eventually transformed into righteous avengers, and are much more sympathetic than the equivalent characters in Ellroy’s novel. In the concluding scenes, the good guys dangle the bad guys out of office buildings or mow them down with shotguns, and vigilante justice triumphs over official corruption. Hanson and co-scriptwriter Brian Hegeland even devise a happy ending in which the battle-scarred roughneck drives off into the sunset with his true love, an exprostitute with a heart of gold.
Unlike Chinatown, which it vaguely resembles, L.A. Confidential uses the past superficially and hypocritically. On the one hand, it attacks Hollywood of the 1950s, making easy jokes about the “reality” behind old-style show business; on the other hand, it exploits every convention of the dream factory, turning history into a fashion show and allowing good to triumph over evil. The film’s primary appeal seems to be its stylish “look,” and this may explain why, upon its release, the tributary media of the consumer economy—magazines, trade bookstores, radio shows, and CD recordings—were flooded with reminiscences of noir, all of them designed to profit from a trend. Even so, L.A. Confidential was only a modest commercial success. The man in charge of marketing the picture for Warner Brothers had a concise way of explaining why it never became a box-office bonanza: “The bulk of the audience who enjoys film noir are directors, film students, critics and the most ardent, generally upscale film enthusiast” (quoted by David Ansen, Newsweek, 27 October 1997). Another, equally good explanation is that L.A. Confidential is merely nostalgia, lacking the complex historical relevance that Roman Polanski and Robert Towne were able to achieve in the pre-blockbuster years at the end of the Vietnam War.
Questions of value aside, both L.A. Confidential and the intermediate-budget films noirs are deeply symptomatic of today’s cinema. Art pictures like the ones I have described, some better and some worse, will continue to appear on theater screens, as will the noirish blockbusters and the hard-boiled action movies. If this diverse mixture of things does not exactly constitute a genre, it nevertheless coheres around a taste and a set of market strategies that are ongoing and relevant. It might help if I could end my survey of the late-twentieth-century mediascape with a spectacular insight into why such tastes are important—a Rosebud in the heart of the furnace, as it were, followed by a slow tilt upward to reveal the smoke of corruption in the sky. But the truth is, the history of noir is not over, and it cannot be given a single explanation. No doubt movies of the noir type have always appealed strongly—but not exclusively—to middle-class white males who project themselves into stories about loners, losers, outlaws, and flawed idealists at the margins of society. The different manifestations of noir, however, can never be completely subsumed under a single demographic group or psychological theory.
Given the current situation, debates over whether specific films are “truly” noir, or over the problem of what makes up a film genre, have become tiresome. There is, in fact, no transcendent reason why we should have a noir category at all. Whenever we list any movie under the noir rubric, we do little more than invoke a network of ideas as a makeshift organizing principle, in place of an author, a studio, a time period, or a national cinema. By such means, we can discuss an otherwise miscellaneous string of pictures, establishing similarities and differences among them. As I argue throughout this book, every category in criticism or in the film industry works in this fashion, usually in support of the critic’s or the culture’s particular obsessions. If we abandoned the word noir, we would need to find another, no less problematic, means of organizing what we see.
But I would also argue that even if noir is only a discursive construction, it has remarkable flexibility, range, and mythic force, maintaining our relation to something like an international genre. In America, the musical hardly survives except in animated cartoons, and the last important western was Clint Eastwood’s distinctly noirlike Unforgiven in 1992. (Perhaps significantly, the urban-centered romantic comedy remains a popular form and sometimes functions like the flip side of noir.) All the while, the themes of the old thrillers—one-way streets and dead ends, mad love and bad love, double crosses and paranoid conspiracies, discontents in the nuclear family and perverse violence in every corner of the society—are as topical as ever and still productive of good films. We may feel a special melancholy when we view the seductive black-and-white films of the 1940s; such films, however, contribute to a recurring pattern of both modernity and postmodernity. The dark past keeps returning. It will do so long after this commentary has ended and the theatrical motion picture has evolved into some other medium.