Fatalism in American Film Noir

Some Cinematic Philosophy

Robert B. Pippin

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780813931890
• eBook ISBN: 9780813932019
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

The crime melodramas of the 1940s known now as film noir shared many formal and thematic elements, from unusual camera angles and lighting to moral ambiguity and femmes fatales. In this book Robert Pippin argues that many of these films also raise distinctly philosophical questions. Where most Hollywood films of that era featured reflective individuals living with purpose, taking action and effecting desired consequences, the typical noir protagonist deliberates and plans, only to be confronted by the irrelevance of such deliberation and by results that contrast sharply, often tragically, with his or her intentions or true commitments. Pippin shows how this terrible disconnect sheds light on one of the central issues in modern philosophy--the nature of human agency. How do we distinguish what people do from what merely happens to them? Looking at several film noirs--including close readings of three classics of the genre, Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai, and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past--Pippin reveals the ways in which these works explore the declining credibility of individuals as causal centers of agency, and how we live with the acknowledgment of such limitations.

1

TRAPPED BY ONESELF IN JACQUES TOURNEUR’S

Out of the Past

The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.

—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

Jacques Tourneur’s masterpiece, his 1947 Out of the Past (thought by many to be the paradigmatic film noir), is packed with what most now agree are elements deeply characteristic of the noir archetype: a man lives under a new name, trying not just to hide, but sincerely to become this new person (the entire film is about whether one can ever get “out of the past” and into a future or whether one is always “fated” to be who one essentially was and is). There is a voice-over, flashback narration in the film, and nothing is more typical of noir than this device. We shall have occasion several times to return to the question of the meaning of such a device. There are various complex double- and double-double-crosses. The plot is hard to follow; often even baffling, and we are as much at sea about what is happening as the male lead.¹ Much of the action is framed as a tension or even choice between a “good woman” in a “normal,” domestic, near rural setting, and a “bad woman,” a creature of the city, the night, perhaps the modern woman of the future (she appears as if materialized out of the light and seems real only in the shadows) and certainly a femme fatale (she is responsible for the deaths of five men in the movie). The major male lead seems both tough and competent, and oddly passive, easily entrapped again and again by the “spider woman.” (Mitchum embodies the somewhat “passive agency” and weak intentionality typical of male noir leads discussed in the introduction.) And the movie ends with an ambiguous final choice that forces the issue of how to act in the light of greater suspicions about fatalism and that seems both liberating in a way and yet also resigned to a bleak, inescapable fate.

We need, though, a quick plot summary, and we need to have some sense of the incredible visual feel of the movie before we can understand what these elements have to do with the agency theme.

A well-dressed man in a convertible drives into a gas station in a very small town and announces that he is looking for the owner, Jeff Bailey, who, it turns out, is off fishing on his lunch hour with the “good girl” character, the blond and wholesome Ann (Virginia Huston). We learn quickly that Ann had been the longtime sweetheart of a local game warden, Jim (Richard Webb), and that Jeff’s arrival has created a great deal of unease about the stranger in their midst, especially for Jim, who fears his longtime girlfriend is drifting away from him. But we learn this in a way that seems intended to emphasize unusually abstract relations among “seeing,” “hearing,” and the truth. (In a conversation at the lunch counter, the nosy waitress, in teasing Jim about the amount of time “his girl” is spending with Jeff, says she only “says what she sees,” and Jeff asks if she is sure that she doesn’t just “see what she hears.”) The boy tending the gas station is a deaf-mute (and we learn quickly that Jeff alone in the town can understand sign language, can hear by seeing, in other words, instead of what we will learn to suspect people in the town do, see only what they hear). In these opening scenes, we are impressed by how quickly the kid comes to understand, by merely seeing, that Joe, the gangster, is dangerous and so is on his guard right away. All it takes is the stranger’s reaction to a police car passing by, and the completely revealing, arrogant way he tries to get the kid’s attention or demand information by flicking a match at him. (See fig. 1.)

We learn that a gangster and gambler, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), who had employed Jeff before, wants Jeff to come visit him, and it is a request that Jeff apparently cannot refuse. It is immediately clear that Jeff had been in effect hiding out in the small town of Bridgeport and by mere chance (a force that will play a great role in all the major events) has been discovered.² On the way to Whit’s mansion near Lake Tahoe, Jeff, who has changed clothes and thereby also rather abruptly, in one step, changed from peaceable rural gas station operator to private eye, complete with trench coat and fedora, decides to tell Ann, who is riding along, about his past, something he had clearly hoped was over and that he could hide from. The flashback/voice-over section of the film begins, and we go back in time.

Jeff and his partner in a New York detective agency had been hired three years earlier by Whit to find one Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer, in a fantastic performance), his girlfriend, who shot him four times and, he says, stole forty thousand dollars from him. Jeff tracks her down to Acapulco and beyond; they circle each other warily for several scenes, he falls for her, and thinks that she falls for him. It all begins with the archetypal noir scene in which the hero first sees the femme fatale. He is stunned as if stung; the earth moves; he turns into a quivering lap dog; or so it all seems (see fig. 2).

Like this one, femme fatale entrances in noirs often suggest the extreme view of a magical spell or mysterious erotic power that can render the male forever afterward a mere dupe, a passive victim of such power, a nonagent. The femme fatale theme is far and away the most written-about issue in film noir criticism, and there is much more to say about it, but at least these entrances do demonstrate how utterly a life can be altered in a single moment. Even doing nothing about what one feels still alters everything, because doing nothing now becomes a fateful decision, an event that then shadows everything else one does. One cannot now act in complete indifference to how one’s fate has been altered, where “cannot” in this one of its many fatalistic senses means that such indifference would make no sense in one’s life. The depth of the feeling is such that one could not recognize oneself in any such picture of indifference and so cannot act indifferently.

It is also important, in this noir and many others (like The Lady from Shanghai), that the lead characters are shown to be gamblers; Jeff and Kathie begin to bond at a private gambling casino in town that Kathie has discovered, and in that somewhat reckless sense, they gamble that they can escape and elude Whit (himself a professional gambler). And later they reveal themselves because they cannot, apparently, stay away from gambling (it is what they are), and they go to the horse races, take a chance in a public place.

That is one way of dealing with the perceived uncontrollability of fate—placing bets and living with the consequences—and for that reason gambling assumes a kind of existential importance in many noirs.³ That is, one accepts that one does not really control the future, the chips will fall where they may, but one rather bets on what will happen and tries also to get some small “edge,” especially counting on the fact that those in the square world do naïvely believe they can affect types of outcomes, manipulating that faith to their own advantage. The Gambler by Dostoyevsky is probably the most well-known treatment of such a type as a kind of emblematic figure, disillusioned with the square world, representing themselves as living out a kind of existential truth, but gamblers and the gambling mentality show up frequently in noirs.

Jeff and Kathie sneak back together to San Francisco, where they hide out in a cabin in the woods, eventually daring to go to that public place that seems so suited to them, the race track, and are accidentally (chance again) discovered by his former partner, Jack Fischer. (We are later given to believe that Jack has tracked them at least to the Bay Area.) He then manages to follow Kathie to their remote cabin in the mountains, demands the forty thousand he believes Kathie has stolen (it is clear that Jeff does not believe she stole it, simply because that is what she told him). Jack insults Kathie, Jeff hits him, and they begin to fight. As Jeff seems to gain the upper hand, suddenly a shot rings out. Kathie has killed Jack and insists that it was necessary because she knows that Jeff would never do it. He would have let Jack live and so greatly endangered them. (Or, Kathie is no doubt thinking, Jack might have been able to convince Jeff that Kathie did steal the money.) As Jeff lights a cigarette and tries to figure out what to do, Kathie bolts and disappears. Jeff discovers in her purse a bank book with an entry for forty thousand dollars (see fig. 3).

We exit the flashback and return to the present. Jeff has finished his story, kisses Ann good-bye, and heads into Whit’s mansion, where he is shocked to discover that after all this, there is Kathie at the mansion; she had returned to Whit sometime after fleeing the cabin.⁴ Whit proposes one more job for Jeff, something to clear the books and free Jeff from the debt he owes Whit for having double-crossed him by running away with Kathie. Jeff had traveled to Tahoe, we are to suppose, only because he thought Whit might know something about Fischer’s murder and Jeff’s role in it. He says as much to Ann in the car. (During this first exchange with Whit, Jeff also tries to lecture Whit about what modest capitalism, let us call it, is; what enterprise in the world of responsible individual agents amounts to. He sells gas, makes a little profit, buys groceries, the grocer makes a little profit. By silent contrast, Whit represents what I think we are meant to assume is the “truer” version: that capitalism is actually at its core massive high-stakes gambling, that Whit embodies it—real capitalism—rather than stands outside it, and that the “yeoman farmer” and small businessman fantasy is just that, a fantasy.) When, after the initial conversation, Whit does not bring Fischer up, Jeff turns him down flat and prepares to leave, clearly relieved. But when he has seen Kathie, he knows he’s trapped. He can never be sure that Kathie did not or will not tell Whit either the truth (that he is an accomplice in the murder) or even the lie that he, Jeff, killed Jack. So he is, as Whit says, “back in the fold.”⁵ In yet another sense he is not in charge of his future, and this again largely because of his past.

After the breakfast confrontation, there is a subsequent scene at the Tahoe mansion where Kathie tries to explain herself, and Jeff responds. It is in a way an unusually harsh response, and it catapults the film into a new and much more sophisticated psychological register. Kathie pleads (as she did at the breakfast table) that she “had no choice” but to return to Whit, and Jeff contemptuously accuses her of being like a leaf blown from one gutter to the next. (See fig. 4; this view of Mitchum, a kind of half profile from behind, and so a withholding of vital information about his reactions and attitudes, is typical.) But it emerges that Jeff’s bitter response has its own ironies because Jeff is just as guilty of what she is saying about herself. He, too, “can’t help” being back in Whit’s control, not to mention, later, Kathie’s control. (Kathie is in this scene lying about virtually everything. What is interesting is that Jeff is in essence lying, too, to himself about this break with Kathie, as we discover later.)

So Jeff feels he has to help in Whit’s plan; that, again ironically given his disdain for the (quite plausible) excuse when Kathie uses it, he “has no choice.” Whit’s tax man in San Francisco, Leonard Eels, who has helped him cheat the IRS, is now blackmailing Whit, and Whit has concocted a plan, in cahoots with Eel’s secretary, Meta Carson (Rhonda Fleming), for Jeff to sneak into Eels’s office and steal the incriminating documents.⁶ We learn later that this is all a frame-up, that the real plan is to murder Eels and pin it on Jeff, both getting the documents back and getting revenge on Jeff for double-crossing Whit. In a very complex set of plot developments, Jeff discovers the frame-up and foils it. After Eels has been murdered, Jeff, hiding in Meta’s apartment, overhears Kathie and learns (but could hardly be surprised by this point) that she is part of the frame-up. But the scene in which he figures it all out and confronts her has the same self-contradictory structure as the earlier one. We notice again (1) how bitter is Jeff’s condemnation of Kathie for “changing sides” so quickly; and (2) how quickly Jeff himself changes sides at the end of the scene. (He thinks she is acting in a way completely inconsistent with any way he would act; then he acts that way [see fig. 5].) The lighting and staging of this scene are also quite beautiful; very lush black and whites.⁷ And Kathie expresses at the end the naïve ideal that undergirds the whole movie: starting over, escaping the past, “as if nothing had happened.”

Jeff does recover the documents (with Kathie’s help, adding to the complications)⁸ and proposes a once-and-for-all escape deal to Whit, who accepts. Jeff returns briefly to Bridgeport to say good-bye to Ann. (Interestingly, he lies to Ann, saying that when he saw Kathie again he “felt nothing,” when we have just seen him “melt” yet again, admitting that he doesn’t hate her and kissing her in a way that hardly seems strategic.)⁹ That Ann is not quite as naïve as she seems is shown later, when she must know in some more assured way from the kid that they were not in fact running away together, a question that indicates she did not completely believe Jeff, or at least has her doubts. They died in the car together after all, suitcases and all.) In the meantime the ruthless Kathie, after that declaration of love to Jeff, nevertheless sends Joe to kill Jeff, a plan that is foiled by the kid, who happens to see Joe preparing to shoot Jeff, and hooks Joe’s arm with a fishing line and pulls him off a cliff to his death.

Jeff returns to Tahoe to find that Kathie has also killed Whit and that she has undergone a remarkable, even flabbergasting visual transformation, returning us to the theme of what one “sees” and how dependent it is on what one has heard, knows, or believes. After we have just seen her at her most glamorous and beautiful and alluring, she has now almost completely desexualized herself,¹⁰ as if to emphasize how she now holds all the real power cards, is “running the show,” a hyperagent, does not need to depend on sexual allure (on the passive power of the beloved) and is glad of it (see fig. 6).

Apparently, after seeing Whit dead, and with Kathie as close to honesty as is possible for her, Jeff decides to pretend to go along with her back to Mexico on the plane Whit had ordered from Reno. But while Kathie is upstairs, Jeff calls the police and turns them both in, alerts them about where they’ll be driving, so there is a roadblock waiting for them. (Interestingly, he must have done this anonymously; otherwise it would have been a prominent feature in later discussions at Bridgeport, where it is still very unclear what Jeff’s motives were in being with Kathie in the car.) Kathie realizes what Jeff has done and shoots Jeff before the police open fire (see fig. 7). I suppose the polite way to say it is that Kathie shot Jeff “in the groin area,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Trapped by Oneself in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past
• 2: “A Deliberate, Intentional Fool” in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai
• 3: Sexual Agency in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street
• 4: “Why Didn’t You Shoot Again, Baby?” Concluding Remarks
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index