Excerpt, Course Explanation Statement,
English 381: Topics in Film, Video, and Moving-Image Culture: Film
Noir, Fall 2003, UWEC, Professor Bob Nowlan
Film noir, which literally translates from French as
“black film,” encompasses a large ensemble of primarily American films
first emergent in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood. In terms of content,
form, and style these films reflect and respond to difficult and
troubling aspects of (especially American) social experience (i.e., the
“underside” of “the American Dream”). Historians of film
noir often cite the following as key determinants in fashioning the
“first wave” of film noir: 1.) German expressionism, 2.) American
hardboiled detective fiction, 3.) existentialism, 4.) French
poetic realism, 5.) popularization of psychoanalysis and of sexology
(i.e., the “scientific” study of sexualities), 6.) the upheavals of the
Great Depression, World War II, McCarthyism, the Cold War, and
the threat of nuclear annihilation; 7.) the post-WWII rise of the
welfare state, consumer society, suburbia, and the “new middle class,”
as well as other concurrent, rapidly changing relations among city,
town, and country; and 8) deep class, race, ethnic, gender, sexual, and
regional divisions from the end of the 1920s onward, and especially
during the late 1940s and early 1950s, that evinced limited prospect of
resolution. As expansive as this list may seem, these constitute
only in fact some of the most commonly cited conditions of possibility,
and forces of generation, for what we, following the post-WWII French
film critics who fell in love with these American films, now identify
as the “classic cycle” of film noir (running from approximately 1944
through 1958, from the release of Murder My Sweet through that of Touch
of Evil).
Whatever its origins, noir films, from the classic
cycle onward, have always concentrated on depicting a figuratively
“darker” side of contemporary social life, and they have always done so
by drawing upon a striking array of distinct narrative,
characterological, thematic, visual, and aural styles that provide the
spectator-auditor a visceral experience of what it looks, sounds, and
feels like to live submerged in a nightmare world–a world where, to
draw upon Raymond Chandler’s apt description, “the streets were dark
with something more than night” (“The Simple Act of Murder”
1944).
The “darkness” we literally perceive in attending to
noir films, as these films’ audience, stands as the objective
correlative of a traumatic subjective state (one that is, for that
matter, simultaneously both individually and socially
subjective). Film noir is, in short, an ultimately highly
expressionistic mode of film. This means film noir does represent
reality, but it does not do so in a naturalistic way, concentrating on
verisimilitude of superficial, empirical detail. Instead, film
noir expresses, and communicates (albeit often elliptically), to us
about primarily 1.) passionately emotional and densely psychological,
2.) intensely imaginary and acutely ideological, and 3.) fantastically
symbolic and richly allegorical dimensions of the lived experience of
these films’ human subjects’ relations to objectively real conditions
of existence.
For all of their manifest bleakness, these films
show men and women grappling head-on with the darkness, maintaining an
indestructible residue of optimism, or at least hope, even if often at
first hidden behind a facade of bitter cynicism. It is important
here to remember that cynics have often been described as disillusioned
idealists; in film noir, not only is this intrinsic interconnection
between cynicism and idealism abundantly clear, but also idealism is
far from completely usurped by cynicism. In these films, cynicism
often functions as an external mask that a character assumes in seeking
to protect the internal self from the risk of living openly in as
idealistic a fashion as the character is truly otherwise inclined: the
risk of suffering considerable pain from failing to achieve one’s
highest aspirations, or, to put it more bluntly, from seeing one’s
dreams crushed.
Noir characters often battle quite vigorously, and
valiantly, with themselves, with others, and with the general
circumstances in which they find themselves. In so doing, they
strive as best possible to live lives of existential authenticity,
according to their own eccentric codes of individual honor, even while
accepting that their flawed attempts will most likely fall (far) short
of this goal. Film noir further depicts human beings as often
highly needy and vulnerable, even if frequently unable readily to admit
or respond to this “lack” in themselves–or in others. Although
filled with intensely active characters, these are most often far from
conventionally heroic figures, and they certainly rarely demonstrate
anything even approaching supernatural powers. Noir protagonists
regularly make mistakes, and they don’t always, by any means, recover
from these; at other times, no matter what they do (or don’t do), the
trajectory of their life’s well-being, of their fates and fortunes,
seems overwhelmingly beyond their control.
At other times, when noir protagonists, and
especially noir antagonists–including the femme fatale–act in cruelly
manipulative ways in pursuit of greedily selfish ends, a critical
consciousness of the oppressive social conditions under which–and of
the corrupt political forces against which–these characters struggle to
survive, subsist, and, as far as possible, prosper, helps us place
their otherwise unappealing behavior in a considerably more sympathetic
perspective. For instance, many feminists, actually find this
classic “evil woman” far from simply the misogynist projection it was
initially often described to be. By reading these films “against
the dominant grain,” and thereby activating the perspective of the
femme fatale against the framing discourses that seek to contain,
demonize, and punish her, it is possible to see the femme fatale as a
virtual anti-hero. As such, she responds in a coldly rational way
versus patriarchal sexist infantilization, trivialization, alienation,
incarceration, and degradation: she fights back, in other words,
against the historically and culturally institutionalized abuse of
women. The femme fatale takes advantage of what little means are
made available to her, making ingenious use of what she can
(especially, of course, of her sexuality), as she struggles to acquire
what otherwise is denied her on account of the fact that she is a
woman. And the femme fatale often becomes the towering center of
many of these films, even while performing an elaborate masquerade that
forestalls others (male and female) from easily grasping what she
actually seeks, how, and why (thereby all the more effectively
eliminating obstacles and preventing opposition to her quest).
She frequently serves as the preeminent magnetic force for noir
audiences as well as for the male characters she plays with–and
off. At the same time, the superficial appearance of the femme
fatale in film noir as a sinister yet tantalizing threat can tell us
much more about heterosexual male neuroses, and much more about women’s
struggle for social equality as well as men’s resistance to it, than it
does about any kind of essential female proclivity for venality,
especially given the fact that it is from the perspective of those men
who conceive themselves to be her victim[s] that we are encouraged to
perceive her as “evil.”
In sum, entering into the “spirit of the noir”
requires that we respect the considerable zest for life so many noir
characters display even as they flail about in the midst of the most
haunting and precarious of (doomed) circumstances. And finally,
it involves an openness to appreciate–perhaps even to take something of
a perverse delight in–these films’ notorious reliance upon a highly
stylized use of (razor) wit and (black) humor (it is worth noting well
that wit and humor in fact pervade film noir to a degree that might at
first seem quite surprising for films focused on such “dark” aspects of
human social experience).