Film Noir

Hard-boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization

Jennifer Fay, Justus Nieland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415458122
• eBook ISBN: 9781135263843
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Media Studies

The term "film noir" still conjures images of a uniquely American malaise: hard-boiled detectives, fatal women, and the shadowy hells of urban life. But from its beginnings, film noir has been an international phenomenon, and its stylistic icons have migrated across the complex geo-political terrain of world cinema. This book traces film noir's emergent connection to European cinema, its movement within a cosmopolitan culture of literary and cinematic translation, and its postwar consolidation in the US, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.

The authors examine how film noir crosses national boundaries, speaks to diverse international audiences, and dramatizes local crimes and the crises of local spaces in the face of global phenomena like world-wide depression, war, political occupation, economic and cultural modernization, decolonization, and migration. This fresh study of film noir and global culture also discusses film noir's heterogeneous style and revises important scholarly debates about this perpetually alluring genre.

1
FILM NOIR AND THE CULTURE OF INTERNATIONALISM

In this chapter,we track noir’s relationship to the idea of national culture in three broad historical moments. First, we discuss noir’s internationalism in the interwar period that followed the world-wide depression.We begin here because this era was marked by intense debate about the fate of Western democracies and individual freedom itself in a climate of radical politics, rising fascisms, and restrictive, often violent versions of national community in the US, France, and Italy. Second, we examine noir’s global currency in the wartime and immediate postwar period, when American films noir became forcibly linked to a culture of political occupation in France, Germany, and Japan, and to an ambiguous critique of the new, postwar global order dominated by America and its linked midcentury promises of democratic and economic freedoms. Third, we discuss the longer postwar period (from midcentury to the present) in which so-called “historical” film noir was made new as it circulated globally – as both a commercial product and a beloved critical object – in a range of countries (Mexico, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, India, Iran, and Hong Kong) that were becoming “modern” at different speeds, and under the pressure of the monolithic American example.

PART I: DISLOCATING JAMES M. CAIN’S THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

In the Preface to this book,we listed the surprising iterations of Cain’s novel.This section concerns a more restricted ambit of Postman’s global travel, discussing Cain’s original novel, its relationship to French filmmaker Jean Renoir and his 1938 noir La Bête humaine/The Human Beast, and Luchino Visconti’s adaptation Ossessione (1943), a film whose sensibility is indebted both to Renoir and to Cain. By examining Cain’s dislocations in the interwar period, we begin to sketch a more accurate picture of the phenomenon of film noir as heterogeneous, polyglot, and, indeed, cosmopolitan.We see this in the way a noir sensibility has, from the 1930s to the present, articulated forms of emotional attachment beyond one’s country of origin, and in its special relationship to a putatively universal “modern man” forged in the shadow of global catastrophe – the mass destruction of world war and the new “shared” global reality of atomic annihilation. But we also see it in the particular international movements and imaginative scope of its central artists and artworks. Even in seemingly modest cultural products like The Postman Always Rings Twice, then, we begin to observe how the noir sensibility’s particular traits and local visions are produced in a culture of translation, transnational cultural flows, and cross-cultural imaginings.

Pulp Modernism in the 1930s: Between the New and the Real

In making this sort of a claim about a novel like Cain’s, we draw on a growing body of scholarly work that has recast American hard-boiled writers as “modern” experimentalists steeped in the highly innovative aesthetic cultures of early-twentieth-century modernity.¹ Because so many canonical films noir were adaptations of these novels, the new critical picture of novelists like Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler has enabled film historians to demonstrate noir’s privileged relationship to aesthetic modernism – a broad and politically diverse explosion of experimentation across the arts from the late nineteenth century through World War II and beyond.The 1930s were a period of crisis in the history of modernism, as the formal experiments of its high period in the 1910s and 1920s were increasingly seen as insufficiently populist, realist, or local to document the dark and desperate realities of a world-wide depression. So-called “high modernism” in the West was a cosmopolitan phenomenon, hatched in major metropolitan centers like New York, Paris, and London, where artists of various nationalities flocked and enjoyed access to cultural products from around the globe. Because “high” modernist art tended to be quite allusive, abstract, and stylistically challenging, it was often just plain difficult to read and comprehend, and therefore frequently dismissed as elitist or apolitical. However, rather than think about the urgent political demands of the 1930s as the cause of modernism’s exhaustion, it is more accurate to understand the decade as host to modernism’s transformation as it converged with a range of documentary,“ realist” artistic practices.As a result, the cosmopolitan vision of Anglo-European modernisms became more realist and preoccupied with the local, and various realisms became imbued with a spirit of cosmopolitan innovation. In the process, both modernism and realism became acutely noir in tone.

The Postman’s migrations in the 1930s exemplify these sorts of convergences. In Visconti’s Ossessione, Postman is at the heart of a modern and cosmopolitan mode of Italian realism. Renoir’s interest in Cain is part of a heady intermingling of noir realisms and modernisms in the politicized French film culture of the 1930s.And Cain’s original novel is a particularly good example of modern American writing’s turn toward vernacular, realist style in the name of a hard-boiled nationalism. Cain desired what we might call an “organic” national culture, a form of cultural expression rooted in the people, surging naturally from and reflecting an authentic,national spirit.² Yet the very noirness of Postman stems from the way the lure of some vital common expression finds itself confronted with the phantom of national culture, a specter that haunts the book’s transnational travel. The “Americanness” of Cain’s novel is challenged not only by the novel itself, but also in the way the book travels as a sign of both cosmopolitan liberation and worldly corruption in France and Italy.

Noir’s Displaced Persons

Despite Cain’s efforts to ground national culture in the “authentically” American vernacular of tough-guy prose, the social world of Postman is decidedly uncertain and unstable. This, perhaps, is why Cain’s story has traveled so well and so widely, and why his particular noir sensibility has been so given to global translation and local inflection. Cain’s lean and speedy plot itself eschews stability. Frank, a vagabond and petty hustler, and Cora, the proprietress of a roadside tavern in California, fall hard for each other. The lovers plot to kill Cora’s husband, Nick, a Greek immigrant, for his insurance policy, and eventually succeed after an initial botched attempt. The authorities are suspicious, and eventually manage to turn the couple against each other before the pair is saved, inheritance intact,by the wiles of a savvy defense attorney. Having pulled off their risky plan, the pair is unhappy and more insecure than ever: Cora wants a home and business, and Frank longs for his life on the road.When Cora discovers she is pregnant, the lovers reignite their passion and plan a life together, but their future is scrapped when Cora and her unborn child are killed in a car accident, and Frank, wrongly convicted of Cora’s murder, is sentenced to die at the hands of the state.

The plot makes clear that Postman is a story about rootless people and, more importantly, a restless modern existence pervaded by chance and desire, risk and accident.This is most obvious, of course, in Frank’s itinerant hustling. Frank’s vagabondage and his sexual appetites are metaphors for each other – twinned species of wanderlust that lead him first toward Cora, then away from her (as when he and Madge Allen, trainer of wild circus cats, get away to Mexico for a time), and then, tragically, back to Cora again. His eros is excessive, risky, and a consistent challenge to the versions of “rooted” social life modeled by Cora and Nick’s domestic arrangement at Twin Oaks, both a marriage and a business. In this way, Cain uses the threat of Frank’s rootlessness in a fashion consistent with period understandings of the tramp’s erotic impropriety, which, as Michael Trask has argued, consistently likened the vagabond’s excessive desire to “the risks of dislocation and comingling that imperiled the imagined community of national culture.”³ As Trask explains, these transient bodies, and the kinds of class instability and contamination they indexed, helped the era’s social scientists come to terms with the modern mobility of class relations themselves.This uncertainty was made painfully acute in the context of the Great Depression, which laid bare the catastrophic effects of a fluctuating capitalist world market.

But Frank is not the only figure of transient, modern personhood in the novel. Cora herself is a transplanted Iowan, winner of a highschool beauty contest that earns her an ill-fated trip to Hollywood.Her dream of stardom denied, she quickly resorts to working in a hash house and moonlighting as a prostitute. Cora’s desire for domestic security amounts to a desperate,murderous agenda of upward mobility haunted by the constant risk of a backward slide into destitution. So she marries Nick Papadakis, “the Greek,” a well-meaning, unsuspecting sap whose “greasiness” and “smell” disgust Cora, making “her feel she wasn’t white.”⁴ These are the drifting anchors of The Postman’s social and cultural world: a lustful vag, a desperate climber, and an immigrant who has swallowed the American Dream, hook, line, and sucker. Some of the more influential accounts of modernity have identified part of the dynamism of modern life in the movements of people – their dislocation, displacement, or migration from tradition or ancestral home.Anthony Giddens, an important sociologist of modernity, coined the term “disembedding” to refer to modernity’s “‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.”⁵ This term suggests that, in the modern world, not only are people like Frank, Cora, and Nick literally on the move, displaced from locality, tradition, and origin. More profoundly, they are also subject to abstract, intangible, social networks and systems that seem distant from them, but that nonetheless powerfully determine the course of their lives more than their individual desires or actions.

For Giddens, the key agents of modern disembedding are the “expert systems” – the vast governmental and corporate bureaucracies peopled by professionals and experts like lawyers, doctors, and insurance agents. Such modern systems exist, in principle, to secure the conditions of modern social life by reducing risk and the cost of accidents. In the United States of the 1930s, the force of these systems intensified under F.D.R.’s New Deal, a series of aggressively interventionist regulatory regimes and benefits programs, such as social security, designed to assuage and reverse the effects of the Depression. As Sean McCann argues, the tradition of 1930s American hard-boiled crime fiction was particularly cynical about this version of the welfare state. At the same time, hard-boiled fiction and the state shared an understanding of the American citizen as neither a totally free agent nor a passive victim, but rather as a member “of various population groups whose interests were represented by a complex web of interlocking and competing national bureaucracies.”⁶ These knotted systems are most evident in the novel’s extended subplot concerning the legal battle between the lawyers involved in Nick and Cora’s case and the three insurance companies carrying policies on the Greek’s life. Cain insists that Cora and Frank are victims not just of their sexual passion, but of precisely these competing systems of expertise and their challenges to individual agency. Ironically, the system of modern justice acquits Frank and Cora of the murder they actually committed, but executes Frank for the accidental death of Cora.

Postman offers a vision of local culture and individual agency as curiously devoid of particularity – dislocated and abstracted from the specificities of local context. For Cain, paradoxically, the cultural specificity of America is that there is no specifically real, authentic America – its distinct lack of uniqueness makes it unique. The Twin Oaks tavern is “nothing but a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California.”⁷ In the novel’s disembedded terrain, the concrete particularities of local places give way to a more abstract sense of space. So, when Frank presses Cora to ditch her husband and “blow,” he can only appeal to “anywhere,” “all over,” or “anywhere we choose,”⁸ just as Cora’s vague desire to “be something” is matched by an equally indistinct wish “to go somewhere else.”⁹The inauthenticity of place is doubled at the level of individual desire and agency. Cora realizes, late in the novel, that her and Frank’s ideal of romantic love is doomed in their mass-produced environment:“We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces.That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords.”¹⁰

In these terms, the novel’s picture of individual freedom needs to be understood in the context of the hard-boiled novel’s vexed populism – a form of politics organized around an appeal to the interests and values of common, ordinary people. Marc Vernet, for instance, has argued that the very modernity of hard-boiled individualism – incarnated in the figure of the detective, that iconic noir protagonist – emerged in the 1930s to mediate a “contradiction inherent in the economic and political system of the United States” that the Depression had made newly urgent: between the putative rights of the individual citizen and that citizen’s sense of the pervasive power of broader networks – economic concentrations, expanding bureaucracies and other expert systems, and a newly interventionist state.¹¹ However, if hard-boiled populism is tied to a particular strand of American nationalism, its deep anxiety about the fate of democratic citizenship was shared by continental populisms of the interwar period. In Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine, the problem of the citizen’s relationship to the abstracted systems of modernity – so pressing for Cain’s “couple of Fords” – replays itself in the film’s murderous love triangle between a railway man, his lover, and his “wife,” Lison, who happens to be a train. In its anatomy of the world of the locomotive, one of modernity’s most storied emblems, Renoir’s noir is also an elegy for a prewar populism derailed by the seemingly unstoppable forces of global war.

Poetry and Politics in Interwar France: the Case of Jean Renoir

The first international adaptation of Postman was initially submitted to Jean Renoir, who would urge Visconti to adapt the film after Pierre Chenal had made his own French version (Le Dernier tournant) in 1939. As we’ll see, Visconti’s Ossessione reads Cain’s noir novel not only through Renoir’s stylistic influence and political sensibility, but more specifically through Renoir’s film La Bête humaine (1938). In fact, Visconti was attracted to Cain’s novel, in part, because of its narrative and tonal resemblance to La Bête humaine, another pessimistic story about adultery, murder, and compulsive behavior, and featuring the same amorous triangle of husband, wife, and lover on the move.¹²

At first blush, Renoir may seem an unlikely practitioner of a noir sensibility.The terms most often applied to his work are “humanist” and “realist,” adjectives that seem ill suited for f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Film Noir and the Culture of Internationalism
• 2 Critical Debates
• 3 Film Noir Style and the Arts of Dying
• 4 Fragments of One International Noir History
• Appendix