Somewhere in the Night

Nicholas Christopher

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439137611
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Film noir is more than a cinematic genre. It is an essential aspect of American culture. Along with the cowboy of the Wild West, the denizen of the film noir city is at the very center of our mythological iconography. Described as the style of an anxious victor, film noir began during the post-war period, a strange time of hope and optimism mixed with fear and even paranoia. The shadow of this rich and powerful cinematic style can now be seen in virtually every artistic medium. The spectacular success of recent neo-film noirs is only the tip of an iceberg. In the dead-on, nocturnal jazz of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, the chilled urban landscapes of Edward Hopper, and postwar literary fiction from Nelson Algren and William S. Burroughs to pulp masters like Horace McCoy, we find an unsettling recognition of the dark hollowness beneath the surface of the American Dream.Acclaimed novelist and poet Nicholas Christopher explores the cultural identity of film noir in a seamless, elegant, and enchanting work of literary prose. Examining virtually the entire catalogue of film noir, Christopher identifies the central motif as the urban labyrinth, a place infested with psychosis, anxiety, and existential dread in which the noir hero embarks on a dangerously illuminating quest. With acute sensitivity, he shows how technical devices such as lighting, voice over, and editing tempo are deployed to create the film noir world. Somewhere in the Night guides us through the architecture of this imaginary world, be it shot in New York or Los Angeles, relating its elements to the ancient cultural archetypes that prefigure it. Finally, Christopher builds an explanation of why film noir not only lives on but is currently enjoying a renaissance. Somewhere in the Night can be appreciated as a lucid introduction to a fundamental style of American culture, and also as a guide to film noir's heyday. Ultimately, though, as the work of a bold talent adeptly manipulating poetic cadence and metaphor, it is itself a superb aesthetic artifact.

Picture first, flickering before you, impeccably photographed in rich tones of black and white, a sleek young woman with long dark hair, a cream-colored dress, low-cut and sashed, and a large, flat white hat that conceals her face. With a confident gait she is crossing a sunlit plaza in Acapulco in late afternoon toward a cool, dark cantina. This is our first glimpse of her.

It is also the hero’s first glimpse, gazing out at her from the cantina where he has been sitting sleepy-eyed, sipping a beer. A onetime private detective, he has been sent to find her, for a sizeable fee, by another—truly dangerous—man, the urbane gangster, many steps removed from his crimes, who is her lover. After that first look at her, we know from his face that our hero will never take this woman back to the other man, dangerous or not. He knows it too. He is talking to us directly, by way of a voice-over, even as we are watching him, at a corner table, watching her. His voice is far away in time, distanced from the scene before us, reflecting back. Deep, smooth, and languorous, it is a voice with no future—only the past.

“And then I saw her,” he says, pausing a beat, “coming out of the sun …”

Into the darkness that will be the prime element of their time together. A darkness inside and outside the two of them that will first enmesh, then (seemingly) liberate, and finally entrap them. The teeming, multifarious darkness of film noir. As her face becomes fully, clearly, defined in that shadowy cantina, we see just how beautiful she is.

Our hero does not speak to her, but they exchange glances, and that night he is sitting at the same table, waiting for her. “I even knew,” he observes drily, “that she wouldn’t come that first night.”

But the next night she does come, and for two days he’s had nothing to do but fill her out in his imagination. When she enters the cantina, his voice drops a notch.

“And then she walked in,” he tells us, “out of the moonlight, smiling …”

And he keeps referring to her as emerging from various sorts of light. As a glowing, luminescent image. Almost otherwordly. Always striding into darkness. Always, after that first afternoon (the last afternoon of his life before her), at night.

The following night, on a deserted beach, surrounded by the nets of fishermen hung on poles to dry, our hero waits for her, not sure she will keep their assignation. He stands amid the nets like a netted fish himself. A fish she has netted. The surf rolling in behind him. The sand white as powder. Lunar. Wind whistles through the oarlocks of the upturned skiffs and rustles the sharp dune grass as he grows restless in a pool of shadows.

“And then suddenly she appeared,” he says with a lift of anticipation, “walking through the moonlight, to me …”

To him.

Sitting under one of the nets together, he embraces her for the first time. And the net seems to thicken and close in on him, transformed into a spider’s web. She the spider and he the fly. And who is really embracing whom?

When she begins to tell him of the danger they are running, the terrible vengeance that awaits him for betraying the man who has sent him (whom of course she herself has betrayed many times over), he cuts her off with a long kiss, murmuring, “Baby, I don’t care.”

With that, there is no turning back for him.

They make love in her beach house during a rainstorm. From the wicker door, opening and slamming in the wind, to the bedroom door, their discarded clothes are crumpled together. In the ensuing days, they become inseparable. He can’t get enough of her. He sends misleading telegrams back to New York, to the man who sent him, his employer, saying he can’t find her. With some cheek, he tells us, “I sent him a telegram—I wish you were here—and then I went to meet her again.” Then he sends no telegrams at all. The two of them decide to run away together, but on the day of their departure, the man they fear—and that fear has grown palpably now—arrives unexpectedly, en route elsewhere on gangland business, and nearly catches them together. He is having a drink with our hero when she enters the hotel lobby—out of the glaring sunlight—and he does not see her. And then he returns to New York.

The two lovers slip out of Acapulco that night, by ship, for San Francisco, where they live for a time anonymously. Fearfully, cocooned in blackness. In all their time together, they never feel safe. And as was inevitable, as they both knew would happen, the man who sent our hero to find her sends another man (our hero’s former partner in New York) to find both of them.

The ex-partner runs into them at the racetrack. They try to give him the slip, separating and driving cars—each of them taking a different route—to a rendezvous at a cabin in the woods. Our hero is convinced he’s not been tailed, and he waits for her on the porch of the cabin. She drives up and parks her car. And still she’s coming to him in the darkness, striding out of the light. Not sunlight or moonlight this time.

“And then I saw her,” he says, “walking up the dirt road in the headlights of her car …”

But another car pulls onto the dirt road from the highway, its headlights off, and snakes up through the trees. Something our hero had not counted on: his ex-partner has followed her.

The ex-partner confronts the two of them in the cabin, threatening blackmail. If they pay him off, he won’t expose them. There is a fistfight between the two men during which she, effortlessly and unnecessarily, shoots the ex-partner dead. Stunned by her cold-bloodedness, our hero looks at her as if for the first time. Then, in the ensuing confusion, she flees, leaving him to bury the dead man’s body. And to take the fall for her.

Under cover, he remains on the West Coast, then changes his name and opens a gas station in a small rural town. Time passes. He lives simply and quietly. He gets engaged to a local schoolteacher with whom he likes to go fishing—in broad daylight, at a freshwater lake. With no nets in sight. Always in daylight, the sun shining so whitely as almost to blank out the terrain, making us wince. For as in many films noirs, it is the mundane, daylit world that seems unreal, while the night, complex, frictional, sensorially explosive, stimulating in its contrasts, envelops us with an exotic, often erotic, pleasure. “The night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does,” Jorge Luis Borges writes in Labyrinths. Idle as in unexplosive, sensorially dull.

The extended prelude, like an elaborate mating dance, first in Mexico, then, especially, in San Francisco, sets up the true heart of the film: the hero’s quest within the labyrinth of nocturnal San Francisco several years later. Discovered by chance in his new life by a minion of the man he fears, forced to leave behind his rural surroundings and his fiancée and to reassume his former identity for a single night, he is despatched on a bizarre, murky mission, to recover some incriminating tax documents that could put the man he fears into prison for life. It becomes a very long night indeed through which our hero plunges headlong—a night that can be seen as a microcosm of the many vast and varied, endless nights that backdrop all films noirs. In fact, among these films, Out of the Past is an oddity in that much of its narrative is constructed of nonurban flashbacks (Mexico, the desert, the small town) that frame the dense, purely urban sequence which is the film’s crucible. What is not unusual is the jagged, fragmented mosaic in which these flashbacks are arrayed; like the voice-over, it is another distancing device that makes the action, and the orbit of the characters, that much more alienated, remote, and unstable.

When we first see him in San Francisco that frenzied night, our hero’s rustic clothes have given way to the old trenchcoat and softbrimmed fedora of his New York days; his mild, small-town manners have been swept aside by wisecracking and tough talk. A cigarette dangles from his lip. He squints out from behind its curl of smoke with a clenched jaw. Alert to danger, on his toes as we have not quite seen him before, he nevertheless has a look of doom in his eyes and seems to be carrying a dead weight on his shoulders. He is stepping back into the past, and instinctively he knows that means fulfilling the dynamics of the past, which have merely been suspended—like his true identity—during his years in hiding. He knows that just by being in that city under such circumstances, he has burned his bridges to his new life. That the circle of his fate, which had been left open for a time, is about to be closed, and there is nothing he can do about it. Though he tries.

Among the myriad people he encounters in the night is his former lover, who is now back living with the man he fears (who, she claims, is blackmailing her too). She also claims still to be in love with our hero. But this time he recoils. When he finds himself alone with her in a darkened room, his tone is no longer worshipful, and he’s no longer talking about that ethereal light from which she was forever emerging, into his presence. In his mind, she has fallen miles since then, from shining angel to something considerably less.

“You’re like a leaf,” he tells her with disgust, “that blows from one gutter to another.”

Often in film noir, men veer along a zigzag path with regard to the femme fatale, from reverence to loathing, in truth reflecting (and projecting) more than anything else their feelings about their own condition, their own entrapment, as the walls seem to close in around them. While many times serving as the agent of that entrapment, the femme fatale is always its dark mirror.

The downtown San Francisco in which our hero finds himself could not be more claustrophobic. It is a collapsing, involuted landscape, architecturally and emotionally. The walls that have not already closed in seem to be in the process of doing so before his (and our) eyes. The maze confronting him consists of rain-slicked streets and sidewalks canopied by iron trees; of caged catwalks, rattling fire escapes, dank basements, and twisting corridors; of after-hours office buildings, swank forbidding apartments cluttered with objets d’art, and a barren apartment containing only a corpse. Everywhere he goes, shadows are elongated, stairwells steep and winding, and elevators dimly lit; terraces are overhung with thick vines and vacant lots are surrounded by impenetrable foliage. And all the alleys are blind alleys. Our hero in his dark night of the soul has many stations through which he must pass (any one of which might be the terminus) and innumerable characters, on a broad demonic scale, who seek to impede or implicate him, or to grease the skids for his destruction.

There is the woman, his former lover, busily orchestrating his frame-up, casting illusions, manipulating and double-crossing others (truly she seems to have as many arms as a spider, working simultaneously), all the while professing her undying love for him. Is it a coincidence, or a subliminal association on the screenwriter’s part, that the name of this archetypal spider woman is Kathie Moffet—a couple of vowels differentiating it from the celebrated nursery rhyme character, Miss Muffit; “when along came a spider and sat down beside her….”

There is the second woman, a lesser agent of the man he fears—a sort of minor-league femme fatale—who attempts to seduce and distract our hero, even while maneuvering him deeper into trouble; but he rebuffs her. Her name, while we’re at it, is Meta, a word whose definitions include “transformation” and “involving substitution”; for surely she is a disguised, temporary surrogate for the spider woman, who is otherwise occupied. In fact, the two women are explicitly linked when Kathie, making a telephone call within the sea of shadows that is Meta’s apartment, pretends to be Meta, imitating her voice and even wearing her hair up (for the only time in the film) as Meta does.

And, streaming into our hero’s path throughout, there is an infernal rabble that might have slipped en masse from one of the panels of Hieronymous Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” Thieves, extortionists, and strong-arm men, bouncers and grifters, a diminutive embezzler, a pimp who’s expert with a knife, a junky informer, and an icily professional hit man with an unnerving, unwavering smile plastered on his face.

But no cops anywhere to be seen. No pedestrians or bystanders—innocent or even neutral. Not a single uncomplicitous, untainted character except the mute cabbie who briefly shuttles our hero between several points along his dizzying path. Stores and businesses are closed. The absence of a general population is, by implication, a statement of contempt. That is, the great mass of citizens, faceless and oblivious, who will flood the streets at rush hour, en route to dead-end jobs, prisoners of the humdrum, are asleep, disconnected from the energy of the night, their windows sealed and curtained to the streets below. The city we see is the one they have blocked out, stripped of illusions: a jungle of tangled steel, oppressed by harsh weather, treacherously constructed, in which the only order is the unnatural order; the fittest, by necessity, are the most devious and most ruthless. The only motivation is the criminal one. The only law, survival.

Our hero does some maneuvering himself, punches and counterpunches, improvises with ingenuity, attempts a frame-up of his own, manages to kill the hit man in self-defense, and actually, futilely, gets his hands on those elusive tax documents, but he does not survive.

He lives on for a while, scrambling against the odds, but his death is foreordained. His circle has already closed. He entered the city on a dangerous, hazy errand (if it hadn’t been those documents, it would have been something else) and wound up framed for murder, a hunted man, a fugitive whose “wanted” photo is on the front page of every newspaper in California, including his small town’s gazette where his fiancée sees it. He’s no longer merely a man with a predatory past and fabricated present, but one with no future. It is only a matter of hours before the other woman, the spider woman, has killed both her lovers: first, the dangerous man, shot in the back in his cavernous living room overlooking the desert, and then our hero, shot in the groin behind the wheel of his car, before she herself dies in a hail of police bullets. The three principals—three corners of a rotten triangle—are violently killed, unredeemed, in a chaotic, darkly duplicitous world, which if not within the confines of the inferno is surely within throwing distance.

While Out of the Past may have been my first model for, and threshold to, the film noir, a more precise abstract, or bare-bones formula (somewhat in the manner of a film treatment) of the genre, can be drawn. It might read like this:

It is night, always. The hero enters a labyrinth on a quest. He is alone and off-balance. He may be desperate, in flight, or coldly calculating, imagining he is the pursuer rather than the pursued.

A woman invariably joins him at a crucial juncture, when he is most vulnerable. In his eyes she may appear to be wreathed in light, beatific—a Beatrice—guiding and protecting him. Or duplicitous—a Circe—spinning webs of deceit and leading him directly to danger. Often she is a hybrid of the two, whose eventual betrayal of him (or herself) is as ambiguous as her feelings about him. Others seek overtly to thwart him, through brute force or subtler manipulation, or to deflect him into serving their ends. His antagonists are figures of authority, legal or criminal, that loom out of his reach, or else misfits and outcasts in thrall to the powerful. However random the obstacles in his path may seem, the forces behind them are always more powerful than he.

At the same time, the majority of people he encounters are powerless, and either indifferent to him, or terrified of being drawn into his orbit. When someone does extend him a helping hand, it is usually one of the most downtrodden—crippled, blind, destitute—who have little to lose, though for assisting him, they may pay with their lives. Crime as a constant, and vice and corruption, flourish in every stratum of society through which he passes. The farther he progresses, the more clearly his flaws come into focus. Whatever his surroundings, he remains isolated. The acts of nobility and high-mindedness we customarily associate with heroes in other forms are a luxury he can seldom afford.

He descends downward, into an underworld, on a sprial. The object of his quest is elusive, often an illusion. Usually he is destroyed in one of the labyrinth’s innermost cells, by agents of a larger design of which he is only dimly aware.

On rare occasion—and here the woman may play the role of Ariadne in the myth of Theseus, leading him out as well as in—he reemerges into the light with infernal (but often unusable) tools to apply in the life he left behind. But scarred as well, and embittered, with no desire to return to the labyrinth, even were he equipped to do so. More likely, if he survives at all, he is a burnt-out case. And the woman, also like Ariadne, is certain to be abandoned, or destroyed in his place, sometimes sacrificing herself for him, in the end as ignorant as he of that larger design in which they were pawns.

From this classic model of the film noir, dozens of variations radiate. The hero is always an American between the ages of twenty-five and fifty. The labyrinth is an American city. The time is 1940 to the present, with a special concentration on the years 1945-1959.

In Out of the Past, the voice-over is essential to the film’s overall impact. Narrative technique is particularly refined in film noir. Most of the films adhere to an investigative formula (in the broadest sense: psychological, oneiric, and dramatic) through which information is disclosed to the hero. The substance of this information—messages, conversations, thoughts, and raw data—itself comes to constitute a vast, invisible labyrinth that must be penetrated by our hero; inevitably it traps, not only him, but all those around him. The voice-over, on the simplest level, is the device by which the hero shares not only that information, but also his methods of absorbing, distilling, and even deflecting it. In other words, even while his actions reveal much about him, the voice-over shows us how his mind works. It is the oral mapmaking of his journey through the labyrinth.

Dead men tell no tales, the saying goes—but not in film noir, where the hero may narrate his own tale, fluently, from the grave. In Out of the Past, this nearly occurs, but, in fact, the voice-over disappears when the narrative arrives at the film’s putative present—its coda, really—when Bailey stops relating his story to his fiancée and goes off to his final, fatal rendezvous with Kathie. There are other noir films in which it is clear from the first scene that the voice-over narration will be a posthumous one. The hero is clearly dead, and now he’s going to tell us how he died. By way of imaginative voice-overs—alternately presenting facts, uncovering motives, probing his own psyche—the hero will guide us back into the labyrinth, retracing the path he followed to his destruction. He does so with varying doses of bravado, self-deprecation, and fear. His voice is usually an amalgam of many elements, at once knowing, sardonic, soothing, obtuse, arch, resigned. That it is invariably a streetwise voice is ironic, for the story he tells is one in which his street wisdom seems to have failed him on account of willfulness, arrogance, or a host of other character flaws which surfaced in the crucible that preceded, and precipitated, his entry to the labyrinth. This sort of voice-over becomes all the more poignant, and ghostly, when we realize that, as in classical mythology, it is a man’s soul that has reentered the labyrinth. In effect, this serves to broaden the films’ spiritual implications, bringing the totality of the hero’s experience—including the manner of his death—into play in recreating and investigating the essence of his life. We come to see that the most “hard-boiled” noir narrator is the one who will most boil down the facts to achieve that essence.

As with most film noir protagonists, the posthumous narrator is possessed by what Leslie Fiedler, in asserting the primacy of the Gothic influence on American literature since 1800, defines as “images of alienation, flight and abysmal fear.” Speaking from the grave is a device Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe often employed. In film noir, in the context of a large city, this device has a particularly powerful distancing effect: the narrator is far removed from us—literally in the beyond—and from his corporeal self. It is as if he is gazing back into the maze of Los Angeles or New York from a distant mountaintop—or a remote planet—with an all-seeing telescope. He can offer us asides. Jump around in time. Send us up the wrong path. Or create a sudden detour. Most significantly, the very discrepancy between the time in which the action on screen is occurring and the time in which his voice is addressing us creates an element of tension, and coldly unsettling dislocation, even before the tensions of plot and characterization manifest themselves.

Take three such films that employ a hero’s posthumous voice: D.O.A. (1950), directed by Rudolph Maté, and Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), both directed by Billy Wilder. All three are set in Los Angeles (...