Film Noir

William Luhr

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781405145954
  9781405145947
• eBook ISBN:
  9781444355932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Film Noir offers new perspectives on this highly popular and influential film genre, providing a useful overview of its historical evolution and the many critical debates over its stylistic elements.

• Brings together a range of perspectives on a topic that has been much discussed but remains notoriously ill-defined
• Traces the historical development of the genre, usefully exploring the relations between the films of the 1940s and 1950s that established the "noir" universe and the more recent films in which it has been frequently revived
• Employs a clear and intelligent writing style that makes this the perfect introduction to the genre
• Offers a thorough and engaging analysis of this popular area of film studies for students and scholars
• Presents an in-depth analysis of six key films, each exemplifying  important trends of film noir: Murder, My Sweet; Out of the Past; Kiss Me Deadly; The Long Goodbye; Chinatown; and Seven

Chapter 1

Introduction

The ominous silhouette of a man on crutches approaching the camera that appears under the opening credits of Double Indemnity (1944) provides a prototypical image for film noir (Plate 1). Something is wrong – with the man's legs, with the man, with what will follow these credits – and the grim orchestral music accompanying the image reinforces this impression. The silhouette applies not to a single character but to three men in the film: one a murderer, one his victim, and the third an innocent man set up to take the blame for the crime. All three are drawn into this ugly vortex by the same seductive woman who exploits them and orchestrates their doom. The dark silhouette also menaces the viewer's space – it comes at us, it somehow involves us in whatever is to happen, and whatever it is won't be nice. Something is wrong.

Plate 1 Double Indemnity – credits: Silhouette of a man on crutches approaching the viewer. © 1944 Paramount Pictures, INC.

This image appeared at the dawn of film noir, before the term was even coined. Double Indemnity establishes one, but only one, paradigm for the genre. It concerns an adulterous couple who murder the woman's husband for insurance money; in doing so, they generate their own doom. Everybody loses. The story is told mostly in flashback by the guilty man at a point just after he killed his lover and was, himself, shot by her (Plate 2). This retrospective storytelling strategy, heavily reliant on voice-over narration, was innovative at this time and shapes the viewer's response to the film's events in three significant ways. First, it presents the story not from an “objective” perspective but rather from its narrator's perspective, drawing us into his anxieties, moral failures, and feelings of entrapment. It makes our main point of identification not someone who conformed to contemporary Hollywood moral codes but rather someone who violated them. This eliminated traditional viewer security in presumptively identifying with the main characters. Even if such characters in traditional movies were doomed – as when, for example, A Tale of Two Cities (1935) ended with Sydney Carton going to the guillotine – those movies presented that doom as heroic and uplifting. But the doom of many characters in film noir is neither noble nor uplifting, and viewer empathy with such characters can be destabilizing.

Plate 2 Double Indemnity: Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) speaking into a dictaphone. © 1944 Paramount Pictures, INC.

This leads to disorienting situations such as one in Double Indemnity when the couple, having just murdered the woman's husband, prepare to flee the crime scene in her car. She turns the key but the car will not start. The two look tensely at one another since this simple, unexpected problem could lead to imminent discovery. She tries again and fails again, increasing the tension between them, as well as in the viewer. The scene is shot and edited in such a way as to draw us into their anxiety, to encourage us to want the car to start. Consequently, after having just witnessed the couple murder the woman's husband and then drag his body onto railway tracks to be mangled, we are suddenly maneuvered into fearing that these cold-blooded murderers might not succeed with their grisly crime. The investment of much film noir in an individual rather than “objective” point of view shifts the viewer away from the position of moral security that earlier Hollywood films tended to offer and disconcertingly toward sympathy for the devil.

A second effect of the retrospective narration is to undermine suspense concerning the story's outcome. As the film progresses, we watch not to see what will happen but rather to see what has already happened. We know from the outset that the couple's scheme (which comprises most of the film's storyline) is doomed because the guilty narrator reveals that it has already failed. However high the couple's hopes rise during the flashback story, we know all along that those hopes are fruitless (Plate 3). Traditional crime/mystery films had centered upon the solver of the crime, the one who acts to rectify the wrong done to society; they had not centered upon the person who committed that wrong. Such films generally moved their narrative in a forward direction, starting with the crime or its discovery and progressing to the detective's solution of the case, with the viewer uncertain as to the outcome until the conclusion; this film, to the contrary, moves us backwards, over what has already happened. This strategy does not seek to engage us either with the puzzle of figuring out “whodunit” (as with traditional murder mysteries) or with wondering whether or not the criminal will succeed (as with “caper” films); we already know the answers to those questions. Instead, the film entices us into voyeuristically dwelling upon the ugly specifics of the way in which these two people ruin their lives and those of others. We are watching what has already gone wrong.

Plate 3 Double Indemnity: Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) enticing Walter into murder. © 1944 Paramount Pictures, INC.

A useful analogue to the viewer's position in such films is that of a reader of a tabloid newspaper. A cliché about “whodunit” mysteries is that the ending should not be revealed lest the reader lose all interest in the story. After all, why read on if you know the outcome? Double Indemnity and much of film noir operate on different premises. In a tabloid the headline and the opening sentence serve to grab the reader's attention but, at the same time, eliminate suspense. “Man Murders Lover and Her Husband, Confesses and Loses All!” And yet tabloid readers avidly read on, not to see how the story turns out, which they already know, but rather to voyeuristically learn more about the sordid details of the case.

A third effect of the narrational strategy is to infuse the narrator's dark mood into all that we see. He is in physical and psychological pain, grimly aware that he is probably dying and certainly ruined because of the failed activities he describes, and we are largely confined within his point of view. His voice-over narration runs throughout the film and becomes particularly disturbing during scenes that depict his younger self preparing for and committing his crimes. His somber, present-tense, narrating self provides a stark contrast to his earlier, optimistic self, and that contrast destabilizes everything we see and hear. Further darkening his perspective is the fact that he is confessing his crimes to his mentor and boss, a friend he respects and has betrayed. He exists in an almost post-mortem zone, without hope or a viable future.

This narrative strategy underscores the centrality of point of view structures to film noir. Film after film concentrates upon the doomed plight of an individual as presented from that individual's perspective, so we get not the story but, rather, that person's perception of the story. This shift away from presumptions of pure objectivity was not unique to film noir; it was widespread and part of the cultural ferment of the times. It appears in presumptively factually based biographical films like Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), which presents George M. Cohan's life primarily through his retrospective description of it, and even documentaries. Frank Capra's seven Why We Fight films (1942–5), for example, while constructed primarily of documentary-style footage, made no attempt to conceal their propagandistic agendas. Although they present their images as having the status of “reality,” those images are clearly organized to support the films' points of view. The increase in flashback sequences in Hollywood films of this time underscores the growing interest in exploring individual points of view. A wartime drama like Passage to Marseilles (1944) is famous for having flashbacks within flashbacks, something virtually unthinkable in Hollywood film a decade earlier. Furthermore, this shift away from presumptions of objectivity appears in many modernist art forms, from fiction and poetry to painting and sculpture, and modernism provided the dominant cultural context for film noir.

Much of film noir invites us to experience its stories from the inside out. Many films underscore their narrator's subjectivity with the soundtrack presence of that person's voice interwoven with scenes dramatizing events in that story; the subjectivity is further underscored by Expressionistic visuals evoking the narrator's nightmares, feelings of entrapment, and hallucinations. This focus upon interiority, particularly upon that of doomed people struggling to contain their own escalating panic, often foregrounds distortions of perception as well as states of paralyzing despair. This accounts for the preponderance of nightmares and of hallucinations in film noir and for the particular value that Freudian theory had not only in the conceptualizing of many of the films but also for the ongoing study of the genre.

In the Double Indemnity credits, the silhouette ominously approaching the camera resembles something from a nightmare. Its relentless movement toward the camera suggests that it will overwhelm us; it will draw us into it or itself into us. This is immediately followed by the appearance of the main character, who begins his confessional narrative. As one of the three men symbolized by the silhouette, he is bringing us into his darkness.

Much of the appeal of film noir involves its masochistic erotics of doom, its ability to draw viewers into nightmare-like, paranoid narratives of degeneration and failure. Where many genres, such as the Western, romantic comedy, or coming-of-age films, explore the prospect of a successful future for sympathetic characters, film noir tends to present flawed characters without a future and show how their past went wrong. It bucks the cliché that Hollywood films must end happily; film noir cued its audiences in multiple ways to expect these films to end badly, very badly.

Film noir's allure resembles that of tragedy or the horror film, forms which invite their audiences to watch worst-case scenarios unfold. For their initial audiences, films noirs resembled nightmares in contemporary life. They were set in and about “today.” Although they evoked the audience's deepest fears about all going wrong, they did not engage the supernatural as did horror films. Film noir invoked dark forces, from within individuals or from criminal conspiracies or social injustices, but rooted those forces in the everyday contemporary world of domestic or business antagonisms, psychic disturbances, criminal schemes, and political machinations. Within the growing hysteria of many characters, such forces often assumed mythic dimensions, and those fears infused the films with an atmosphere of unseen but malevolent presences. This environment of doom, evil, and failure paralleled the troubled subjectivity of many of the films. It generated the sense that the characters' deepest fears were becoming palpable. Even films noirs without a retrospective narrational structure, like Scarlet Street (1945) or The Big Sleep (1946), often establish an atmosphere of generic doom. Many of the movies, like Mildred Pierce (1945) or Crossfire (1947), resemble traditional mysteries in that they begin abruptly with an unexplained murder which the viewer can only partially see. The remainders of the films involve the unraveling of the mystery of who committed the crime. However, where the atmosphere of doom would dissolve in traditional mysteries (such as those featuring Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, or Hercule Poirot) when the crime was solved, in film noir it lingers on, suggesting a world pervaded with ongoing, ineradicable forces.

Although this book concludes with detailed analyses of six exemplary films noirs, it also uses Double Indemnity throughout as a reference point for multiple perspectives upon film noir. For example, it is one of many films dominated by the point of view of a doomed character. These characters exist on the penumbra between life and death; although most of them are alive, they have resigned themselves to imminent death. Following this logic to an extreme, Sunset Boulevard (1950), directed by Billy Wilder six years after he directed Double Indemnity, is bizarrely narrated by a character who...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Film Noir
• New Approaches to Film Genre
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Historical Overview
• Chapter 3: Critical Overview
• Chapter 4: Murder, My Sweet
• Chapter 5: Out of the Past
• Chapter 6: Kiss Me Deadly
• Chapter 7: The Long Goodbye
• Chapter 8: Chinatown
• Chapter 9: Seven
• Afterword
• References
• Further Reading
• Index