SHADES OF NOIR

A R eader

Edited by

JOAN COPJEC

V ER S O

London ' New York

 CONTENTS

Introdu ction
J OAN C OP.lEC IX

Film N air o n the Ed ge of Doom

MARC V ERNET

2 T he Syn optic C ha n d ler

FREDRI C JAMESON 33

3 Stra n ge Pursuit: Corn ell Woolrich and th e Ab andoned City of the

Forties

DAVID REID AND JAYNE L. WALKER 57

4 T he Mystery o f The Blue Gardenia

J A NET B ERG STROM 97

5 Film Nair a nd Women

ELI ZAB E TH C O W IE 121

6 T he Phenomenal Nonphenomenal: Priv at e Space in Film N air

J OAN COPJE C 167

v
 CONTENTS

7 'The Thing That Thinks': The Kantian Background of the Noi r

Subject

SLAVOJ ZIlEK 199

8 Home Fires Burning : Family Noi r in Blue Velvet and Terminator 2

FRED PF EIL 227

9 Noir by N oirs: Toward a New Realism in Black Cin ema

MANTHIA DIAWARA 261

10 Democracy' s Turn : On Homeless N oir

DEAN MACCAN NELL 279

Notes on Contributors 299

vi

 INTRODUCTION

Joan Copjec

Afte r th e onl y witness to his innocen ce plunges to her death, Vincent Parry (H umphrey
Bogart) , th e esca ped p risoner o f Delme r Daves's 1947 film Dark Passage, no longer
stands any cha nce of ex on erating himself of the murder char ge s on which he was
co nvicted. His only remaining op tio n is to flee the scene and then the country, to
continue to tr y to elude th e police as he has throughout the film. Looking about
franticall y for a way o u t, he spots a door leading to the roof and quickly d ecides to tak e
it. Where to go from there? Again , only one o ptio n presents itself: the fire escape that
runs down the side of th e building. In four successive sh ots from varying angles , the
came ra remains trained o n him ; we watch as he climbs down the entire facade of the
building, step by step , landing by landing. At each shot change we half expect the
camera to cut away to the police as th ey make their way toward this scene of th e crime;
but it do es not. Parry's escape is not paralleled by a poli ce chase . The effect is somewhat
odd . Against the static and monotonous building facade, Parry, the sale movin g object
in th e frame, is more than visible , he is fully exposed . But to whom?
Not to the police, of course, sin ce the narrative point is that Parry escapes detection
by them. But if th e shots of him d escending th e fire escape had been intercut with shots
of the police, his visibilit y would have indicated th at even if he is not now visible, even if
for this moment at least he has successfully avoid ed detection, in another moment,
perhaps the next, he mi ght be ca ugh t. The parallel or alternating montage that is so

vii
 SHADES OF NOIR

often used to create sequences of cinematic suspense works by inserting pursuer and
pursued into a structure that makes our reading of each radically dependent on our
reading of the other. Suspense is produced to the extent that the structure manages to
suspend psy chology; that is: to the extent that what we know of the characters and
abilities of pursuer and pursued is superseded by the technical assumption that the
next image has the power to reverse all our expectations and render any psychological
profile of the characters irrelevant.
A similar structure of suspense supports the novels and short stories of classical
detective fiction , not through alternating images, but through the central relation
between the detective and his criminal adversary. Whether or not an arch criminal ever
enters the space of representation (usually he does not) , the supposition of his
. existence is necessary to this fiction, whose initial premiss is that the detective's
I knowledge is forcefull y challenged not by some physical conundrum, but by an act of
\ deception - that is, by another subject, or 'mastermind'. As in the alternating syntagm,
I here, too, psychology is suspended by a structure that invalidates it. Even as the
'psychological-realist', or 'character' novel was coming into its own, detective fiction
emerged to contest its conviction that narrative action was best coaxed out of psycho­
logical portraits. In the 'whodunits', such portraits are never fully drawn; the category
'deception' destroys their possibility. Once the clues that litter the scenes begin to be
taken as attempts to mislead the d et ective, they no longer betray the criminal who left
them there and we can no longer read them as details of a portrait.
Despite the common designation 'logic and dedu ction', these novels and short stories
arrive at their conclusions through paths that are only apparently deductive. When
anything ca n mean its opposite , we are no longer able to proceed from assured
principles. Thus the detective cannot and does not solve the crime by drawing from his
observations a continuous sequence of arguments, ea ch supported by the one before
and supporting the one that follows. Instead, the investigation moves forward in fits
and starts, through reversals and false solutions in whi ch the detective must show or
appear to show his hand in order to get the criminal to show his . At each step the
detective's knowledge is placed at risk, and at each step some aspect of the situation, not
previously known, actualizes itself. The world of classical detective fiction always
materializes in bits and pieces, it never appears as a fully constituted world , visible in
the simultaneity of its parts, exce p t at the end - and retroactively. This is because
detective fiction takes place in a dialecticized space , constituted by messages that
acquire meaning only when and where they are received.

viii
 INTRODUC TION

T h is di alecticized or osc illating structu re is abse nt fr om Dark Pa ssag e, and not o nly
from th e scene where Parry escapes fr om Madge's a p artm e n t. As Parry jumps to the
gr ound and rushes o u t into the stre e t to board a trolle y ca r, th e ca me ra continu es to
keep him fully in view. The a bse nce of an answering look is now marked not o n ly by the
continued refusal of a reverse sh ot , but additionall y by th e disturbing d epopulation of
th e field we are give n to see . The street a nd th e troll ey car are in explicably empty. Our
disquiet co n tin ues th roughout th e bus sequ ence that follows. Narrativel y this seq ue nc e
is set up for su spense : th e bus will not leave until two m ore tickets a re sold . We a re
th erefore led to expect a tense co u n tdown as the se lling of th e tick ets is mea sured
against th e arrival of the p olice. But this is not wh at we ge t. The sequence is cut to
disperse rather than to build suspense. A policem an does arrive , non clirnactically, a t
th e sta tio n and , as we wat ch the four other p assengers bo ard th e bu s o ne by one, we
wonder if Parry will m ake it on before h e is sp otted . As th e last o f the other passen gers
walks toward h er seat, the ca m e ra pans slig h tly forw ard to rev eal Parry, al reads seated.
Not only does hi s sudd en appearan ce here not. answ er to th e die getic look of th e police ,
it also fails to respond to the extr ad ieg e tic look o f th e sp ecta to r ; that is, Parry's
appearan ce neither m eets nor surprises our ex pe ctatio n s, it simply d isr egards th em .
To whom , then , is Parry visib le?
It can be argu ed th at he is visible to no on e ; not a r ticu lated within a di alecticiz ed
stru cture , his visibility is [orno other su bject. I f he is se en , nevertheless, it is by something
more 'rigid' than a subj ect, so m e th in g in capable of bcing d eceiv ed , th e way a subject is
deceived . But if th e di alectic of d esire - hence suspense - and th e possibilit y of d eceit
ar e both e lim ina ted from th e world of Durk Passag e, the n we h ave not onl y left the
world of d etective fiction fa r behind , we ha ve also left behind man y o f the co m mo n­
pla ces of film notr criticism. As an exa m p le offilm noi r, th e film would be described by
this cr iticism as a dark so rt of 'thriller', filled with d e ce ptions, false leads and sudden
rev ersals. Would we d eny th ese basic descriptions of the genre? Yes. What is taken for
deception is, in fact , so m e th ing mu ch more sini ster: the emergen ce of a split between
power and those whom power subjects such that th e very world of these subj ects
.. appears in comprehensible to them . Th e world no lon ger unfolds in nonsimultaneous
parts, as in detective fiction ; in film nai r it breaks up into inconsist ent and always alien
fragments. As a co n seq ue n ce of this , nothing ca n remain hidden in th e nair universe
onl y to be come visible in a future mom ent. Th e uoir hero is e m ba r rasse d by a visibility
that he carries around like a n ex cess body for whi ch he ca n find no proper pla ce .
Alread y e nc u mbere d by hi s own o verexposed being, the noir hero has no desi re to seek
his being through another. The links o f intersubje ctivity, invi sible yet essential to

Ix
 SHADES OF NOIR

detective fiction , are here dis sol ved . A different kind of struggle with a different,
un yielding ad versar y remains.

You will not find in th ese essays a point-b y-p oint consensus ab out what co nstitu tesn/»;
nair. While so m e ofthe essa ys see m to find support in th e arguments of o the r s, co n tr a ry
claims are also sometimes advanced . Each essa y takes up th e issue fr om a different
persp ectiv e . What unites all th e essays, how ever, is a strong sen se of th e importan ce of
th e ge n r e and of th e necessity of r eth eorizin g it. This agreement is prompted by two
maj or factors . Th e first is th e re-emergence of/ilm nair in recent yea rs. Once th ought to
be historicall y limit ed to th e yea rs immediatel y preceding and followin g World vVar
Two , film noir now appears, fifty years after th e first films were produ ced, to be a much
less local ph enomen on . We are obli ged to ask, then , what is th e signifi cance o f noir's
return in th e som etimes la zy, sometimes inv enti ve , occasionall y obsessive (think of
Wad e Williams's painstakingly accurate remake of Detour [1992]) r eworkings of th e
classi c film s; or of its merging with sci-fi and horror in film s such as Blade Runner
(Ridley SCOll , 19H2), Angell/earl (A la n Parker, 19H7), Terminator 2 (James Cameron ,
1990)? And what is the significance o f novels, such as Walt er Mosle y's Devil in a Btu!'
Dress ( 1990), by bla ck writers , or films by new black directors - Straight Out oflhool<lyn
(Matty Rich , 1991) , B oyz N the Hood (John Sin gleton, 1991), A Rage in Harlem (Bill Duke ,
1991), for e xa m p le - where a non-nostalgic focus on real situations dramatized in th e
present employs methods th at we know as noir? Th ese questions necessaril y send us
ba ck to th e original films o f the ge n re and reopen an inv estigation no on e ever
considered closed . The second factor urging a reth eorization offilrn noir is th e uneasy
sense that we never ad eq ua tely deli ned it in th e lirst place. This unease is not new , but
ha s bothered cr iticism of/ilm noir from the beginning. Even th e fund amental question
regarding the status of/11m nair - is it a genre o r not, does it e xist as a co h e re n t body of
films or not ? - remains, in man y cr itics' minds , unsettled .
T h is qu estion of genre - how is it that we can take a series of different texts as
ex amples of one and the sam e textu al category? - is not , of course, p eculiar to!ilml/oir.
Doubts about th e existe nce of the ca te go ry itself or about wh ether or not an individual
text belon gs to it fu el the cr itica l discourse su r ro u nd ing all genres . Within Jilm noir
criticism, however, these doubts nag more persistently th an usual, and ca n no t be
simpl y ac counted for by th e Iact th at the term/jIm uoir was not of Holl ywood 's devising
and thus does not have th e san ction of intention on its sid e. 't he persistence of
qu estions of ge n re has also and primarily to do with th e fact thatJilm n oi r is often view ed
as a political cr itiq ue of American socie ty, as a warning about the di sastrous soc ial issu e
 INTRODUCTION

of a felt mutation in th e stru ctu re s of p ower. If criticism exhibits more than a n ordinary
warin ess with respect to this cate go ry o f film , we must suppose that it fears being duped
ab out a message whose import goes well beyond cr iticism 's more narrowly defined
profess ional co nce r n s.
And yet the problems of film theorists are in some sig nifica nt way s no different from
th ose th at beleaguer political th eorists; in eac h case , in thrall to positi vist fictions,
an alysis keeps running ag ro u n d in th e course o f endless battles over sterile definitions.
In this light, th e following stat ement made by Claude Lefort and directed toward
political th eorists cont ains a lesson fr om whi ch film cr iticism ca n benefit as well :

T he sp ace ca lled socie ty ca n no t in itself be con ceived as a system of rel ations, no matt er
how com p lex we ima gin e that system to be. On the co ntra r y, it is its overall sch ema, th e
particul ar mode of its institution that makes it possible to co nce p tualize . .. the articulation
of its dimensions, and the relations es ta blished within it betw een classes, g ro u ps and
individu als, betw een p ractices, beliefs a nd representations. If we fail to grasp th is primer­
dial reference to the mod e of th e institution of th e social, to gener'ative principles or to an
overall sche ma go ve l'lling bot h th e temporal and spa tial co n figu ra tion 0 (' socie ty, we lapse
into a positivist fiction; we inevi tably ad opt the notion of a pre-social society, and posit as
elem ent s aspects that ca n onl y be grasped on th e basis or an ex pe rie nce that is alread y
social . I

Film th eory still operat es largely acc o rd in g to the str uctu ra list assumption Lefort
indicts. We conceive a film as a svstem
, of relations among " 'minimal significant units', at
various levels of a rt icu latio n. An yone familiar with th e study ofJilm notr, for e xa m p le,
can recite a list of such units or element s thought to be necessary to th e definition of the
genre; a femme fatale , a morall y co m p ro m ised detective , an urban setting, voice-over
narration , co nvolu ted plot stru cture , ch ia roscu ro lighting, skewed framing , and so 011.
Lefort's implied argum ent that any such list, along with a sp ecification of th e relations
among its individu al terms, is bound to remain a mere h eap of traits with no r eal
.co he r enc y is born e out by the continued suspicion regarding the very status of Jil m noir.
'" v e pay to o mu ch attenti on to th e est ablished terms a nd th eir relations without ever
finquirin g into th e prin ciple by which th ey are es tablishe d . In virtue of what, we negl ect
Ito ask, is this particular organization instituted ?
Sometimes, however, we are fooled into beli eving that we have ask ed thi s question,
. and are able to answer it, by making referen ce to a film's historic co n te xt. Film nair
criticism co rre late s filmi c elements with historical 'so u rces' - World War Two , a n

xl
 SHADES OF NOIR

in crea se in cr ime, mountin g paranoia re garding the working woman 's pl ace in society,
and so on - thinkin g th at it has thereby located the 'ge ne ra tive p rin cipl e' o f th e films .
',
Bu t this reference to e xterna l so u rces in no way re solves th e question of th e internal
.
. logi c of the film s; th e qu estion is merely deferred . Ra ym ond Borde and Etienne
Chaumeton, authors of th e first (19 55) book-length study of film noir, acknoweldge this
point even as they examine wh at they tak e to be th e so u rces of th e films . Aft er
dis cu ssing th e rising in cid en ce of crime durin g the period of th e produ ction off11llls
noirs, th ey comment:

The qu estion remain s: why did crime suddenl y assu me such importance in Hollywood
produ ctions durin g these last ten yea rs ? For th e ex iste nce of a phenomenon does not itself
exp lai n its artistic exp loita tio n : artists a nd the public co uld misrecognize it, int ention ally
rej ect it, or con sid er it un aestheti c. INhy were Ame rican sp ectators so sen sible to films of
vio lence a nd murder?"

U n fo rt u na te ly, Borde and Chaurneton quickl y co ver over th e very profundity of

the ir question by bemoaning th e unavailability of em p ir ica l studies to an swer it ; but,
too lat e : a qu estion has be en posed that no empirical study ca n ever answer. For
how ever exha ustively we sea rc h , we will never be abl e to find in the stru ctures of a film
or of a society th e prin cipl e in accordance with whi ch these str uc tu res be com e
intelligible. This prin cipl e ca n only be dis covered by an investigation of another order.
Beginning with th e analysis above of one scene from Dark Passage, this collectio n is
aimed at sei zing film n oir from the perspectiv e of th e old unanswered question of the
!ge n re's 'abse n t ca use' , that is, of a principle that does not appear in th e field o f its
effects. Whether by ch alle n gin g certain fund amental assumptions regarding th e
nature ofjilm noir, or by sp e culating on the workin gs of its abs ent cause , th e essa ys that
follow are co n ce r te d in th eir eff o r ts to affirm or deny this second-order principle of
f ilm non: For all the ch a r m and all th e appropriaten ess of its hard -boil ed style, the
. Fr ench film historian Georges Sadoul's d escription of/ibn noir as a 'nightmare narrated
by a drunk' will no longer suffice. We now want to know why we have become sens ible
to th ese nightmares and wh y these drunks submit to the frustration s of their
in comprehension.

rcon;s
1. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Politira! Theor; 2. Raymond Bo rd e and ( tie nn e Chaum ei on ,
(Minn eapolis: u n ive rsity of Minn esota Press, Pan orama du [d m uoir arnera u n (Pa ris:
19HH). pp . 2l7-I H. Flammarion , 19:;:;), p. 32 .

xii
 1

FILM NOIR ON THE

EDGE OF DOOM*

Marc vernet

As it has come down to us throu gh the decades , it is a n obj ect of beauty, one of the last
remaining to us in this domain , situated as it is between nco-realism and the New 'Nave,
after which rounded obj ects like these will no longer be made. It is an object of beauty
because Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall are to be found there, because it is neatly
contained in a p erfect decade (1945-55), because it is simultaneously defined by its
matter (black and wh ite) a nd by its content (the crime story), because it is strange (see its
relation to German exp re ssio n ism and to psychoan alysis), because one cannot but love
it (in contrast to its companion-objects, it is the only one that makes a place for affe ct
and that functions as both a rallying cry and a point of exclusio n ), because it assures th e
triumph of European artists even as it presents Am erican actors, because it is a severe
. critique of faceless ca p italism , because it prolongs th e r eading of detective novels whil e
feeding cornparatisrn , because there is alwa ys an unknown film to be added to th e list ,
because the stories it tells are both shocking and se n timen tal, because it is a great
example of cooperation - th e Americans made it and th en the French invented it - a nd
because a book ca n be m ad e of all these reasons , in whi ch one would finally hav e th e
feeling of having it a ll. On the whole,jilm noir is like a H arley-Davidson: you know right
away what it is, th e obj ect being only the synecdoch e of a co n tine n t, a history and a
civilization, or more precisely of their representation for non-natives.
 SHADES OF NOIR

At least it is an object of beauty as long as one restricts oneself, without lookin g more
closely, to the classics and to the presumed knowl edge of one's pred ecessors. A first,
slightly disquieting remark : speaking about film nair consists , from th e beginnin g, in
being installed in repetition , in taking up the unanalysed discourse of those prede­
cessors, with pre-established definitions ((dm nair is a cinephilic ready-made) that arc
impossible to criticize (who has seen and studied all the films listed by Silver and Ward,
Foster Hirsch or Robert Ottoson?).' Film noir is, then, an affair of heirs disinclined to
look too closely at their inheritance, who take pleasure in regularly putting ba ck into
circulation topoi like the femme fatale, the shining pavement of th e deserted sireet."
unexpected viol ence, the private det ecti ve . . . Doubtless th ere is something tru e there ,
but what that truth relates 10 remains a question: American society, th e world history of
cinema (German e xp re ssio n ism , Fr en ch poeti c realism and Italian nco-realism)," the
directors, the actors, the spectators? Complacent repetition is more or less general,'
rare being those who venture to say that(ilm noir has no clothes : Paul Schrader, .lames
Damico, Paul Kerr and oc casionally Foster Hirsch" have had courage to cry out in the
desert that the classical list of criteria defining film noir is totally het erogeneous and
without any foundation but a rhetorical one. Moreover th ey cr y out in vain, for it does
not in the least disturb the publication of learned books on(ilm non: in which on e always
finds the same arguments of which Paul Kerr has drawn up a highly amusing, bric-a­
brac list. Some ofthese arguments are eve n to be found in the founding book by Borde
and Chaumeton:" this book has not been superseded since 1955 because it cannot be so
long as the uncriticized list of heterogeneous criteria upon whi ch it was built is
retain ed ." Its su ccessors have only lengthened the list of films to be included, adding
photographs and more ex te nsive technical documentation: a look at th ese works '
general presentations shows that the argumentation has remained fundamentally the
same, without innovation . It is only in a few articles, here and th ere, that renewed
arguments can be seen to a p pea r (rol e of B-film production and post-war technique for
Paul Kerr, a distinction between two periods for Paul Schrader, a d efinition of a basic
. plot structure for James Damico). Schrader's and Damico's essays have the additional
interest of emphasizing the importan ce in film noir of the sentimental plot stru cture, of
the melodramatic weight of the spectator's appreciation of this sort of film: H lei us recall
that, by those in ch a r ge of publicity at the time of its release, Gilda and films like it were
presented as 'romantic m elodrama' ."
Oneof the most striking points about the cr itica l dis course on.fillll noir is that the
starting dates of the films are no more challenged than arc th e other criteria or
definition, even by those (Paul Kerr for example) who co n test th e latter. Certainly th ey

2
FILM NOIR ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

The Big Gamble (Fred Noble, RKO, 1931)

 SHADES OF NOIR

are stretched back a bit (to 1941 for the father, The Maltese Falcon, 10 or even 1940 if
Stranger on the Third Flam- is recalled) and forward a bit (to 1958 if Touch ofEvil is to be
included) . A few ancestors such as Scarface or Marked Woman (on account of the final
shot and of Bogart) can be found , but the charm of the genre must be respected and no
one goes any further back than these few forerunners. My purpose here is to show that
this way of breaking up time has no real validity whatsoever. 1945 marks the end of
World War Two, which is not a cinematographic event, and 1955 marks either the
appearance of the book by Borde and Chaumeton or the year that the RKO studio sold
its stock of films to television, events that are totally incommensurable with the
historical weight of the first date. To put it another way, what is completely strange in
discourse on film nair is that the more elements of definition are advanced, the more
objections and counter-examples are raised, the more precision is desired, the fuzzier
the results become; the closer the object is approached, the more diluted it becomes.
The result is that the energy deployed passes entirely into refuting or circumventing
objections and not into searching for a more solid foundation. The cause of this
situation seems to me to be a triple lack, historical, aesthetic, and theoretical : a historical
lack concerning the American production of the detective film and the appearance in
France of the notion of film nair; an aesthetic lack concerning the image and mise en scene
(film stock and lighting, but also composition of the image and stock scenes); finally, a
theoretical lack concerning the plot structure and characters of these detective fictions,
including those found in the detective novel.

THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF FILIH NOIR 'S FRENCH INVENTION

In fact, discourse on or around [ilm nair is always and necessarily a discourse of

consolidation (l could even say, of consolation) that allows us to forget what the
founders Borde and Chaumeton had none the less taken the trouble to pinpoint with a
great deal of intellectual honesty. The notion of film nair, for them, was meaningful
only for French spectators cut off from the American cinema during the war years and
discovering in Paris during the summer of 1946, under the impetus of the
Blum-Byrnes accords, 11 a few detective films that would form the core of the genre .
From 1946 to 1955, the critical work on fi:lrn nair is effectively that of consolidation
, intended to justify the first impression, this initial astonishment that leads to the
~ discovery in the post-war American cinema, coming from a nation whose military
\ power and economic well-being were so striking, of films with an appearance of

4
 FILM NOIR ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

poverty in which the optimistic and moral lesson could not always be easily di scerned by
I
, non-natives. The dates that have been agreed upon are thus ones that concern French
critical reception and not American produ ction.
What is forgotten in the wake of this is the French climate that allows film noir to be
erected as an historical object. The French have a paradoxical image of the United
States: on the one hand , it permitt ed victory in the stru ggle against Nazism and offers
the image of a people whose standard of living is sharply superior to that of th e French,
who until at least 1955 were caught in an economy of scarcity inherited from the war
and even from the pre-war period . But, on the other hand, th e United States is an
imperialist menace that threatens to impose upon Fran ce values and a culture that are
not its own: if the Americans are superior a nd even saviours in the military and
economic domains , they are judged to be inferior and dangerou s in the domain of
culture, for they threaten to repla ce red win e with whiskey, Marcel Proust with the
dime detective novel, and 'Le Temps des cerises' with jazz. In this climate, th e position
of the Communist Party is particularly interesting, at a time when it commands 25 per
cent of the vote, that is, when it is in equal measure with the Gaullists the party of the
Resistance, and when it plays a considerable cu lt ural role through intellectuals. It is
ferociously opposed to everything American , and things will obviously get progress­
ively worse after 1950, but at the same time it cannot but emphasize everything in
American production that bears witness to th e faultin ess of capitalism. Th e tone is
neither tender nor light. Thus th e film historian Georges Sadoul could write the
following in the 28 January 1954 issu e of L es L et/res [rancaises, on the controversy over
Le Ble en herbe : 12

The French branches of' the Legion of Decency a re pursuing in Paris the same go a ls as
their American patrons: to demonstrate that th e moral fibr e of French cinema is disinte­
grating, in order to replace on our scr eens the loves of Phil and Vinca with the fetishism of
bla ck kid gloves, the flagellations, th e disturbed perversions of a whore and a homosexual
that the Hollywood Code of Decency guarantees in Gilda .

Sadoul equally attacks for their Americanism the existentialists, believers in psycho­
analysis, and everything having to do with Saint-Cermain-des-Pres . 1:\ The position of
the Communist Party, in the name of a French identity that it advances all the more
strongly to the extent that it participates in the Cold War, is paradoxical: whil e wanting
II) shine the spotlight, even in American films, on the signs of the unh ealthy character

5
 SHADES OF NOIR

of capitalism, it helps to give grea te r valu e to these sa me film s, notably by indicating

that they are a cr itique o f th e Am erican system.
Film noir then co mes to occupy a bizarre position: it can be th e rallying cry of th ose
who d o not want to be ca u gh t up in the Co m m u n ist Party and th e moralism with whi ch
it was assoc iated after th e war,11 as it can be th e love- object of th ose who want to h ate
the United States but love its cine ma. By a ffir min g that film noir is a harsh critique of
American ca p italism , by explaining th e importance of European directors and
cin e ma tog ra p he rs, 15 by em p hasizing the membership of Dashiell Hammett, presented
as the fath er of the h ard-boiled novel a nd th us o f th e genre , in the American
Co m m u nist Party, film cr itics (tha t is, those cin ephiles to whom writing is necessary)
gave th emselves th e means to justify a love that was forbidden - whether it was the war
(the impossibility of seeing th e films) , the Communist Party (whether one was a
member or a n opponent of it) , or the supporters of a morality of hard ship (often the
same) , if not all three , that forbad e it. Finally, the inv ention of a new genre, at a few
years' distance from th e New Wave, is one way among others for a gen eration coming
onto the labour market , forgetful or ignorant of pre-war produ ction , to force
recognition o f its own signature. Film noir thus finds itself to be literally (but also in all
I!senses of th e term) a cr itical object : invented by French cr iticism, it allows on e to love
I the United States while cr iticizin g it, or more exactly to criticize it in order to be able to
( love it, in a relation that is not without connection with , on the one hand , the co n flicts
i inherent in the O edipal relation and, on the other (by the split that su ch an attitud e
, implies), a fetishistic econom y.
This mu ch havin g be en said, it should still not be forgotten that , if French cr iticism
finds an advantage in inventing film noir, Anglo-American cr iticism , by taking up
without any co n testa tio n its basic arguments, gives American cin ema a cu ltu ra l label
and a cr itical force validated by Europe, all the while sp aring itself th e labour o f
histori cal res earch that would h ave to be all the more fastidious in th at it would put into
question , as it would for the Europeans , th e love-object. This valorizing a nd unexam ­
in ed adoption can also be found in the way that, even in Anglo-American feminist
discourse , another French expression , 'femme fatale', In is tak en up , an expression th at
is to th e Am erican detective film what Ch anel No. 5 is to Marilyn Monroe.
I would here like to co nce n tra te on onl y two arguments : that co n nec tin g film noir
with expressionism and that linking it to th e hard-boiled nov el, whi ch, between the two
of them , have the advantage of seeming to cove r the totality of the field: e xp ressio n ism
th e im ag e and th e hard-boiled nov el the fiction .

6
 FILM NOIR ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

THE A RGU MEN T OVER EXPRESSIONISM

We will not interro gate this stra nge coupling associating Germany and th e U nite d
States at th e e n d of the war, even though we have alread y not ed th e co n tra d ictio n that
exists in putting expressionism to ge the r with the realism of th e decors or situ a tio ns that
supposedly d efine film noir. Th e argument accor d ing to whi ch expressionism was part
of the baggage brought alo ng with them by emigres holds up for no more than an
instant on ce a bit of attention is p aid to it. A good number of the directors and
cinema to gra p he rs in qu estion have o rigins that have nothing to d o with German y or
eve n Austria , and a good number of the directors and cine mato gra p he rs of German or
related origin wh o a re often invoked have nothing in com mo n with expressionism. 17
What is more, emi gres fleeing Nazism did not wait for 1939 to escape Hitl er: th ey fled
beginning in 1933 , a fa ct that once ag ain opens up the gap between th eir a r r ival and
the advent offilm noir. Finally, the historico-aesthetical a r gu me n t disappears behind a
very simple fact: from the start, Hollywood has always a tt racte d and welcomed
emigres, among th em Germans. It ha s be en less frequ entl y noted that th e notion of
expressionism itself, in th e German d omain alone , has served to prove everythin g and
its opposite, a nd that th e fashion for it is more a matter of the 1960s, followin g th e
appearance o f Lotte Eisn er's book The Haunted Screen, than it is o f the 1920s. IH
Expressionism is o fficially convoked in th e name of the strong opposition between
black and white (th e coal-like aspect o f th e image) - an opposition which is valid not
on ly in terms of light contrasts but also in terms of the relation between th e expanse of
dark areas and th e sca rcity of strongly lit areas - in th e name of th e disproportionate
shadows accompan ying the characters, a nd in the name of the oblique lines that
dominate th e composition (th e famous impossible camera angles offilm noir). Before
an y further e xa m ina tio n of th ese id eas, it must be e m p hasized that this id ea of
expressionism is often supported, in both articles and books, by photographs of the set
or even publicity photographs without an y relation to th e set , photographs whi ch ma y
very well not co rres po nd to any image in the actual film. It often h appened th at th e
publicit y departm ent or the set photographer would reorganize and relight the mise en
scene of an action or of an actor, adding a gigantic or strongly marked shadow to
in crease the dram atic effect, to visu alize in a single image the idea of menacin g
mystery. It is also true th at such photographs often constituted the only iconographical
material available to anyone not in a position to make photograph s directly fr om a
print of the film .
As far as th e film s them selves a re concerned, two fact s can no t escape notice: fir st, the

7
SHADES OF NOIR

'ex p ressionist' image is rel a tively rare in

th e period 1941-45 (it is rep resented
o n ly by a few isolated sce nes in a n ot her­
wise 'n o rm ally' lit film) a nd, second, it ca n
also be fo und, an d at leas t as frequ e ntl y,
in the films of th e p receding decades .
Wh at is mo re, it is even rarer in fi lm noir
th a n is usu all y th ou ght, for it is often
confused with the d ecor, notably re al
ex te r iors . T he latte r appear infreque ntly
in th e 1940 s before 1948 , a nd wh e n they
d o it is most freq ue n tly for daytim e
scenes, as in th e fina l car chase o f High
Sierra (Raou l Walsh, 1941 ), or fo r scenes
sho t in d ay-far- nigh t: th e op posite o f
wha t is usu ally meant by 'expressionist' as
far as lighti n g is co ncerned . In th e case of
real da ytim e decors, the 'ex p ress ion ism'
consists 1I1 th e monumental asp ect ,
cr us hi ng, isolati ng or imp r ison ing th e
human figu re. T h e monumen t ca n be a
bu ildin g, a de serted spot or even a sta ir­
way, the last o f whi ch allows sp ace a nd
light to be played o n sim u lta neo usly.
Afte r 1948 , as we will see sho r tly, what
h ad previous ly bel onged to th e plo t
st ruc ture p assed in to the represen tation ,
in th e fo r m o f a monument, of a monu ­
mental sp ace or land scape . On the who le

One year after the release in Germany of M (Lang),

Edward G. Robinson in a final trial scene pleads ,
like Peter Lorre, that his crimes were directed by an
uncontrollable force. (Two Seconds, Melvy LeRoy ,
RKO,1932)

8
 FILM NOIR ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

it is only after 1950 that night lighting a nd real urban exteriors came to be asso ciated
again.
'E xp ress ion ist' lightin g thus is at fir st used in the studio (for interiors and for fictive
exteriors) o r in exteriors but without any visible buildings (onl y th e ch a racte rs are lit in
th e night). It ca n take man y forms , a mo ng which two kinds of consiste ncy can be
found: consistency of situation a n d consistency of technique. The situ atio n is that of
the moonless night, with a few typical sce nes like interrogations, nocturnal apartment
visits and p aybacks for interiors, tailin gs and ch ases for exteriors. From a technical
point of view , here I ca n mention only the placing of light sources . 'Expressionist'
lighting is placed low on the set (ofte n on a horizontal a xis), se ts off a dark sp ace in the
upper part o f the frame (abse nce of sun or moon), is p artial (it lights only a part o f the
space and o f the human figure) a nd apparently monodirectional. Placed to the sid e of
the ca me ra, it isolates th e human figure in white ag ainst a black background. Placed
opposite it, it isolat es a silhouette against a white background. Laterally, it cr eat es a
delin eation of th e silhouette by maintainin g zones of sh adow upon it, as if o nly
Appelles's touch had been left. IV Three other traits can be d et ermined. Fir st of all , this
lighting is ch aracte rized by the ab sen ce or weakness o f fill lighting: the light seems to
come from o nly on e side, a n d it creates d ense, saturated shadows. Moreover it is often
these shadows , how ever sma ll th ey ma y be , that indicate - th at are sufficient to indicate
- th e nocturnal aspect of the scene, whi ch can in the rest of the image be lat erally lit a
giorno , so to speak, in a simple but violent fashion .2o Next, and in a see m in gly
paradoxical way, there is a constant attempt to diegeticize this light as a fun ction of the
situation (ni ght) and of th e light sources (streetlights, lamps), although the light is also
exhibited, sin ce th e spectator's a tte n tion is drawn by its violence, its apparent rarity and
the deformations it provokes. But this exh ibitio n is di egeticized in its turn , sinc e the
light ca n be what pursues and threatens the cha racte r (it is a persecutory force ).
Are these techniques , in 1955, 194 5, o r 1940, new to American cine ma? Absolutely
not. Beginning in at least 1915, th e team formed by Ce cil B. De Mille a nd Alvin Wickoff
seems to take up some of th e expe rime n ts carried out b y the team of Griffith and Bitzer
(see in particular th e last shot of th eir 1909 film A Drunkard's R eformation), and develop
them in a fairly systematic manner.F' The ca m p fire (Carmen , 1915) and fireplace (Th e
Golden Chan ce, 1915) whi ch light only a restricted circle, and from the side, are of
course to be found, but so too is the sordid street corner (th e first shot o f Kindling,
1915) . Here it is still only a matter of isol ated, often very short shots, but th e dramatic
exploitation of su ch techniques is immediately follow ed by long scenes of nocturnal
apartment visits during which a Aashlight dances on th e darkened walls (Th e

9
 SHADES OF NOIR

Golden Ch ance) , or by sudden changes of lighting created by th e turning on or off of

lamps, or (the example is better known) in the most dramatic moments of The Cheat . In
Th e Heart oj Nora Flynn (1916), a number of scenes are involved : a car driving into the
heart of th e night, with only its headlights and the part of th e road th ey illuminate
visible, a room lit and then plunged into darkness, a final confrontation in a totally
black gard en, the only light coming laterally from a window. Thus several topoi
emerge that can be found again and again: the secret, nocturnal apartment visit, the
violent confrontation, and th e car ch ase . Thus are constituted cliches that will recur
throughout the history of American cin e ma. For example, in The Big Gamble (1931),
Fred Noble shoots a 'n air' interior scene for a dramatic card game and a remarkable
chase between a train and two cars, using a real exterior at night, with light sources
pla ced on the lower side of the street and on a mobile platform accompanying the
camera during its tracking movements. In 1933, in films as littl e 'nair' as Lady/or a Day
(Frank Capra) or Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon), tracking shots ca n be found using real
streets, in the middle of th e night , with the onl y light coming from shop windows , signs,
streetlights and car headlights.F"
The first thing that must be recognized is that, first of all, th e expressionism at work
here was present in the United States and in Russia from at least 1915, if not in
Denmark from 1911 or France from 1913, and that , moreover, a certain continuit y
exists through th e 1920s and 1930s, but with the use of real night-time exteriors
suffering a massive disappearance after 1934. 23 The second thing that must be
recognized is that 'nair' lighting also owes its perpetuation to the gothic film , whose
ambiance and decor (an old house or mansion without electricity) allows effects of
darkness to be pla yed upon . Thus, before singing the (deserved) praises of Val Lewton
and Jacqu es Tourneur at th e beginning of the 1940s (see Cat People, 1942), it would be
necessary to recognize, after the role of Alvin Wyckoff in the 1910s, that of Tod
Browning in the 1920s, notably with respect to the films he made with Lon Chaney.F' as
well as the influence of Lee Gannes (notably for his work in Shanghai Express l von
Sternberg. 1932], or in Cit)1 Streets [Rouben Marnoulian , 1931 ]). We should in fact recall
that the cinematographers used injilms noirs are not callow youths seeking to impose a
new style: on the contrary, they are usually veterans who got th eir start in the 191005 and
20s . Tony Gaudio (High Si erra) began working in 1911, John F. Seitz (The Big Clod"
Double Indemnity, This Gun for I-fire) in 1916, Sol Polito (SOn)', Wrong Number) in 1918,
Musuraca (Stranger on the Third Floor, Out of the Past and Wh ere Danger Lives) in 1923 ,
Joseph LaShelie (Laura, Fallen Angel, Where the Sidewalk Ends) in 1925. John Alton (The
B ig Combo , He Walked by N ight , The People Against O'Hara, The Crooked Wa)I) , in 1928. 2 :;

10
 FILM NOIR ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

I n ord er to acco u n t Ior th e aesth etics

ofJihll1wir, Paul Kerr advances the hypo­
thesis th at production was trying to align
itself with the techni cal norms of iele­
VI SIOn 111 order to facilitate the sal e of
films to the m edium then spreading
through American households. I am
unaware of any verifi cation or attestation
of this th esis , but on e ca n add to it one
that is int ernal to th e cin e m a tog ra p h ic
institution . The years following World
War Two are not onl y the yea r s of the
d evelopment of television and of the
br eak-up of the studio system as a re sult
of the government's anti-trust suit
against Hollywood, they are also the
yea rs of rapid expansion of co lo u r film­
ing. :Z li For those films that continued to be
shot in black and white , it was necessary
to lind , with respect to the colour film,
both a di egeticjustification (types of films
whose action ' no r m ally' involves numer­
ous night scenes were shot in black and
white) and an aesthetic suppl ement that
would allow the films to hold up their end
of a comparison with co lo u r films and
differentiate th em from pre-war black

j t ,~ ~ II
and white production, in which competi­
tion with colour was nor ye t full y estab­

, " ~ . ~ ~ Ii ~.
lished for produ ction as a whole. ,' "J

What is important to us here is that the

American cinema had, ever since the
-~
r- _ . -.
~
- I
..
A typical scene since 1915: the night-time search of
an apartment. (The Big Gamble, Fred Noble, 1931)

11
 SHADES OF NOlA

1910s, a lon g a n d important tradition of

'noir' lighting, whether in go th ic or d et ec­
tive films , o r simply in o rd e r to give
gre a ter pathos La scenes se t at night. 27 In
orde r to account for this tr adition and to
cease torturing the chronolog y, it would
be sufficient to e nv isage Holl ywood
cine ma as both submitting to evolution
(th e appearan ce and d evelopment of co l­
ou r produ ction , for exa m p le) and pos­
sess in g a techni cal know-how that is not
as quickly ren ewed as on e would like to
believe. H oll ywood production, in fact,
for anyone willing to stud y a certain kind
of film in d epth , shows a great d eal of
consiste ncy, running th e gamut from
typical scen es (the night-time apartm ent
visit, th e car chase .. . ) to the overall
organization of the script. ~H . This h aving
been said , on e still should not think of th e
noir style simply as a n opposition to co l­
our, for th e renewal of the highly con­
Another typical scene, at least since 1931: the car trasted black a n d white im age could very
chase and the train, but here in real exteriors . (The
Big Gamble , Fred Noble, 1931) well be in part a result of experiments
with colour. For example, it is well known
that C one with the Wind repeatedly uses foregrounded bla ck silhouettes of unlit persons
or obj ects, set off against a colou red background, thus putting back into play an interest
in black a nd white figures within the heart of co lo u r itself.

THE LITERARY ARGUM ENT:

THE HARD-BOILED SCHOOL OF FICTION

If th e reference to expressionism as explanation of th e aesthetic qu ality of/ilm llOinloes

not hold up und er examination, the same is true for the explanation of th e narrative
and e motio nal quality of th e story by reference to th e hard-boiled school of d etective

12
 FILM NaIR ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

The femme fatale, as she will never be shown in the 1940s and 1950s: in the detective's bed.
(The Maltese Falcon , Roy del Ruth, Warner Bros, 1931)

13

 SHADES OF NOIR

fiction. Here too we find a chronological gap between the artistic source and its being
put into action: at least ten years between Dashiell Hammett's first novels and the 'first
film nair', which, as if by chance, would be Huston 's version of Hammett's The Maltese
Falcon (1941 ).29 The usual retort to recalling the existence of such a large gap is that
during the 1930s the public was too affected by the Depression to be abl e to bear seeing
the hard realities of existence recalled too strongly, and that it was necessary to wait for
the post-war economic recovery in order finally to be able to make sinis'ter films. 3o This
line of defence is no sooner adopted than it mus; be abandoned , for it does nothing to
explain why hard-boiled novels were written nor why theymet with such su ccess at the
very moment that the public was supposedly fleeing this kind of story. All the more so
in that adaptations of them are not lacking during the 1930s, beginning with Th e
Maltese Fal con, the rights to which were purchased by Warner Brothers before its serial
publication was even finished .i'! The adaptations of hard-boiled novels made during
the 1930s have thus been occulted (for reasons we will have to consid e r shortly),just as
other detective films that could easily enter into the frame of the definition ofjilm noir
have been . Why is the first version of Th e Glass K ey, directed in 1935 by Frank Tuttle,
not given the status offilm nair, when the novel is by Hammett and the action fits all th e
criteria of the film noir? In what way is the first adaptation of Chandler's Th e I IiKIt
Window, directed by Herbert 1. Leeds in 1942 under the title Time to Kill , unworthy of
being taken into account? Why could not the first version of Chandler's Farewell , i\lly
Lovely, also directed in 1942 under the title The Falcon Takes Over by Irving Reis, be part
of the set? What is more, one finds throughout the 1930s crime films whose hero is a
private detective, about which there is nothing that allows us to differentiate them from
what are ordinarily taken to be films nail'S. Thus , the argument concerning the hard­
boiled novel, as it is usually envisaged in the frame of traditional explanations ofjilm
nair, inevitably gives rise to a series of difficulties: (1) the creation of a gap of more than
ten years between the detective novels and film nair invalidates its basic argument; (2)
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are mixed up (there is a ten-year gap too
between their respective first novels); (3) the place of someone like William R. Burnett
as both a novelist and screenwriter is obscured; (4) there is a refusal 10 look at the
history of the cinema from the Depression to World War Two; (5) numerous films are
swept under the rug in order to a ttem p t to maintain an artificial purity and isolation of
film nair, going against simple common sense, whereas the examination of anterior
novels and films could be enlightening. The partiality of arguments, th e multiplication
ofjustifications and their heterogeneity clearly show that the problem is poorly posed ,
and that history strongly resists the definitions that have hitherto been imposed on it.

14
 /
FILM NOIR ON T"HE EDGE OF DOOM

g In order to d emonstrate the extent to which th e d ates of 1945 (end of World War T wo),
;t 1941 (Huston's version of Th e M altese Falcon) , or 1940 (Stranger on the Third Floor with
.e Peter Lorre, who serves as a tie with expressionism) are arbitrary, I will take only o ne
~t example : Pri vat e Detective 62.
This film , dating from 1933, was directed by Michael Curtiz,32 with William Powell
r and Margaret Lindsay in the main roles , and is an adaptation of a story by Raoul
s Whitfield, a colleagu e and fri end of Dashiell Hammett. The h ero, e mble matically, is a n
American named Free. Like Samuel Spade or Philip Marlowe, he is a private d et ective,
obliged to be in co n tact with corruption, fightin g alo ne against all for the re- establish ­
ment of right. Like them , he got his training in th e institution : a n intelligence offi cer in
Paris, he is unmasked by the Fr en ch police. Ab andoned by his bosses, he is deported to
New York wh ere he suddenly find s himself in th e middle of th e Depression. Hi s first
employers refuse to recognize him, and he is forced to seek work o n his own. H e finds a
position with a shady and spineless detective who survives by kidnapping do gs an d
returning them to their owners for ransom. Fr ee brings real , honest clients to the
agency, but his bos s finds it easier to be paid by a ga n gste r in whose service h e puts his
knowledge of th e law. It is in this framework that Free is obliged to ca r ry ou t
su rveilla n ce on a young woman who hangs out in ch ic clubs and fan cy restaurants (sh e
is a gambler) and is apparently co n n ected with gan gsters, but wh o quickly becomes an
ally in his stru ggle against co r r u p tio n . Aft er some friction and bitter-sweet
relations, they end up recognizing th eir mutu al love once they ha ve gained victory ove r
evil. The film itself is not lacking in noi r scenes, for example th e first scenes in th e
shabby rooms of th e detective age nc y or the in cid ent in which th e heroine is the victim
of an attempted assassination in a n apartmen t entirely plunged into darkness exce p t
for the windows lit from the street. What interests me in this film is the conn ection
established between the private detective and th e Depression: Fr ee is dropped by th e
national institutions that were supposed to protect him and obliged to make do for
himself. 33 Tempted by fast and easy money, h e none the less rem ains faithful to an
ideal of justice, with a rigour tempered only by love . Private Detective 62 has one o f th e
most classic of noir scr ip ts, as much in its pessimistic tendencies (th e solitary struggle of
the individual in a universe overrun by evil) as th ose that are sentimental (pure love
surviving in evil 's midst). Above all, it makes evident the fact th at this sort of scr ip t
treats the question of the relations between the individual and institutions dialecticall y.
As for the urban d ecors, they set forth a n opposition between poverty and luxury every
bit the equal of Th e Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) and its followers.
The point is not to say that the private detective is th e character wh o d efines this typ e

15
 SHADES OF NOlA

The shabby office of an obviously failed business .

This frame is strikingly similar to the beginning of Another femme fatale, but here she is defending

the Huston version of The Maltese Falcon: selting, her honour and virtue .

camera angle, position on the partner' s desk .

Five frame s from Private Detective 62

(also known as Man Killer.

Michael Curtiz, Warner Bros, 1933)

In 1933. lighting technique that will be praised ten

to twenty years later.

16
 FILM NOIR ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

of crime film : the private d etective is o nly th e practical d enomination that has been
found, because it corresponds to a supposedl y A~eri can profession , to a visu al clich e
(sexed male) , and to a cha racter's situ atio n, in or d er to designate a typ e of film, but in
reality it is mu ch more likely that a ration al history of the Am erican cine ma would for ge
a link between films o f th e 'fa lle n wom an ' genre, th ose o f the 'fo rgotte n man ' genre ,
and detective film s of the 'nair' type. In ea ch case , it is a question of the failure o f
institutions to defend the Good, o f th e unequal struggle of an innocent individual
against evil combinations, and th e ge ne ra l response that seems to resid e in th e love of a
being of the opposite se x. In all th ese cases (Ta lle n woman', 'fo rg otten man ' and 'noir') ,
what astonishes the Eu ro pea n sp ectator is th e fact that Hollywood sh ould produ ce
films with a sombre ending, o r at least apparently so , sin ce in the majority o f cases, even
if the main ch aracter fails in his e n te r p r ise , h e nevertheless keeps his pride in having
rem ained faithful to his ideal and having refused compromise. This typ e of him invit es
us to rethink th e fun ction of Holl ywood as a machine th at produ ces dreams or fairytale
spectacles, when its functi on was doubtless to work ou t in d etail th e id eological
contradictions of a simultaneousl y democratic a n d individualist society. Film noir mu st
thu s lead to a d ouble o pe n ing-u p : the ch ronology mu st be opened up by moving back
in time, a nd th e genre must be opened up by making more perm eable th e boundaries
not only with th e types of films that I hav e j ust mentioned, but also with th e west ern , in
which the sh eriff occupies a place very close to that of the h ero of the d et ecti ve film .

POPULISM Al\'D JEREMIAD

As is shown very well by Dennis Porter in The Pursuit a/ Crime,:H th e redefinition of th e

priv ate d et ectiv e by H amm ett, distancin g him from the European gentleman master­
mind, is stro ngly connected with th e cultural and moral values of Ameri can n ational­
ism an d individualism. i' " Thus th e wisecr ack is at on ce a sign of independen ce (th e
detective does not let him self be intimidated by social or professional hierarchy), a
refusal of th e rul es of propriet y (he acts with contempt for th e most norm ally e xp ect ed
politeness when it serves to cove r a lie), and a mark of exp e r ien ce (he is not goin g to get
fooled). In the middle of a n economic cr isis, Hammett invents a ch aracter who ,
through sto r ms a nd hi gh seas, bears the moral law within himself, tak es the e ne my's
weapons on ly th e better to reveal th eir corruption and destroy them , and fights against
institutions be cause th eir anonymity, expa nse, complexit y and th e weight of th eir
hierarchy render them ineffi cient and inhuman . It has often been noted that gangsterism

17
 SHADES OF NOlA

in film was the other face of capitalism, and this is particularly true in the climate of the
Depression during whi ch the rich tended to be assimilated to monopolists and do­
nothings. Thus, in Bullets or Ballots (William Keighley, 1936), Edward G. Robinson
plays the role of a policeman acting alone to bring down a gang run by bankers. It has
less often been noted that the gangster, as a character whose social ascension is 'too'
fast, is the dark image of individualism subjected to religious condemnation (,who­
soever shall exalt himself shall be abased'),36 from which the sin of pride is by no means
absent. But the gangster is also a social condemnation to the extent that he re­
establishes a class difference within society by placing a trench between poor and rich ,
between isolated individuals and those who enter into a system of organized under­
standings . Whether one is confronted in these fictions with rich bourgeois, the mafia,
unions, or nazi or communist networks (depending on the period), the fundamental
question is always that of the struggle between freedom and individual happiness on
one side and, on the other, the understandings and systems that secretly are spreading
or threatening to spread their ramifications through the whole country by forbidding
the sacrosanct operation of free enterprise and free competition.V The private
detective is a petty-bourgeois jealous of his independence, convinced of his moral
worth and concerned with protecting what is, in his eyes, the exemplary value of
American democracy. That in the process he conquers the young woman, who has all
the attributes of the upper middle class, is only th e necessary tribute to be paid to social
ascension (but here by a love that glorifies the petty bourgeoisie) and a defeat inflicted
upon the other carnp.i" From this point of view, the detective film cannot be consid­
ered to be a critique of the system; on the contrary , it functions as a necessary denial of
capitalism's tendency towards concentration, by constantly reaffirming the virtues of
the petty bourgeoisie and of free enterprise, so long as the latter keeps a human scale. 39
At least two things were brought up to date through the detective film and the
character of the private detective. The first was the repetition of the citizen's allegiance
to national principles , but through a constant pact according to whi ch national
institutions can only maintain their power through the individual, through the simple
citizen apparently lost in the masses and in the immensity of the country. The hard­
boiled detective nove! thus participates in a populist ideology. as is correctly emphas­
ized by Dennis Porter."? This populist ideology ca n , moreover, largely exp lain the
success in France of films drawn from these novels: in the fir st half of the 1950s, France
slowly takes on the rhythm of the post-war boom years, leaving behind small business­
men and small shopkeepers along with a large part of the petty bourgeoisie, so that in
1954-55 there emerges the political movement representative of this discontent of the

18
 FILM NOIR ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

small, known as Poujadism . The difference between French Poujadism and American
populism is not as great as might be thought: in both cases it is a matter of a
conservative reaction on the part of the petty bourgeoisie." The second thing (but
intimately tied to the first) that was brought up to date by film nair was the renewal of the
jeremiad, that half-political, half-religious discourse operative from the very founda­
tion of the United States, which allows the fundamental values of the nation to be
recalled by accentuating all the deviations in the nation's history that followed their not
being respected .Y Personally, I consider the American detective film to be entirely
within the province of the jeremiad, of this repeated moral denunciation in the name
of basic values among which one finds the privilege accorded to relations of proximity
and respect for ideal virtues to the detriment of material values. There is thus in film
nair something that Europe can only grasp with difficulty and that falls within the
province of 'civil religion':4 3 proof of this could be found in the unions of man and
woman that end so many detective films and whose setting is not a church but a
courtroom or police station. To take only two examples, there is the end of The Cheat
(Cecil B. De Mille, 1915) where the husband and wife, reconciled, form a couple once
again with the benediction of the judge, and leave arm-in-arm through the honour
guard formed for them by the public, and the last shot of The Big Sleep where Philip
Marlowe and Vivian Rutledge kiss to the wailing of police sirens.
If the thesis of populism and the jeremiad is accepted for the hard-boiled novel and
film noir, a great consistency in themes treated from the end of the 1920s through to the
Cold War can be noted .'!'! The overly vast systems reacted against include the justice
system and the police as well as the mafia, unions, nazi networks within the country
and, later, communists: all of them are felt to threaten free enterprise and free
competition. A film like Racket Busters (Lloyd Bacon, 1938) is symptomatic in this
respect: Bogart plays a racketeer who organizes strikes whilst George Brent plays a
small shopkeeper who wants to keep his independence.Y' The essential point here is
not whether it is a question of detective films, gangster films, or propaganda films: the
point in common must be that it is always a question of a fight to the death between an
individual and a network that threatens fundamental freedoms (among which that of
commerce is not, in this system, the least important). Thenceforth it is no longer
necessary to isolate the private detective from his immediate cousins, whose position
and function he shares. He is no different from the lawyer of the 1930s who, tempted
by the easy money held out by a gangster in need of his services, ends up turning
against his employer in the name of morality in order to bring about the triumph of the
law: the best example is doubtless The Mouthpiece (Elliot Nugent and James Flood,

19
 SHADES OF NOIR

1932), with Warren William in the main rol e (an actor who , by the internal lo gic of
events, is to be found in the second version of Th e M altese Falcon ). Nor is he different
from the journalist wh o exposes a conspiracy or an abuse of power (The Big Clock, John (
Farrow, 1948), the isolated poli ceman who fights alone against all (Th e Big Heat , Fritz
Lang, 1953), o r the victim who has to make hi s o wn wa y out of th e trap in which he has
got himself cau gh t (Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder, 1944). On a small or on a gra n d
scale, the idea is th at of th e 'combo' dominating and exerting its influ ence, it being
understood that the co m bo is undemocratic a nd (it is th e same thing) uri-American. It
can, then, be seen that paranoia is not an American malediction co n seq ue n t upon some
unspecified spell cast over th e whole country, that would then allow a magical
explanation ofjilm n oir: 4 6 on the contrary, it is a matter of a co n tr ad ictio n inherent in
the economic and p olitical system of the United States, in which the citiz en must
constantly be reassured of his rights in the fac e of economic concentrations and federal
power, the inhabitant of the small town in the fa ce of th e big cit y, the wage-earner in the
face o f the ri ch. 4 7 The advent of the private d etective in its modern American form at
the moment o f the Depression indicates th e urgency with whi ch th e se co ntr ad ictio ns
pressed at that time. In the films ofth e 1950s, traces o f these co n tr ad ictio ns can still be
found in th e form of the grot esque"l tla nd th e poor (often they a re one a nd th e same, as
in Th e Enforcer, Windust-Walsh , 1950) , who help to situate the hero at an equal di stance
from the proletarians and th ose living in misery, on the one hand, and, on the other,
from the ri ch bourgeoisie, th ese two extremes bein g presented as two symmetrical
traps into whi ch he ri sks falling. We may then und erstand th at film criticism repeats th e
gesture of the films nons th emselves, for in g r a nting them the status of a H ollywood
genre , it sees the films as pla ying th e sa me r ole in th e Holl ywood system as th e private
detective plays in Am erican soc iety .

A RET URN TO THE PARIS OF THE SUMMER OF 1946

Even if th e arguments advanced to define film nair in cinematographic terms toda y

appear to be without foundation, it nevertheless remains the case that spectators
perceived a differen ce between th e films m ade after the end of World War Two and
their predecessors. It see ms to me that there are four important differences that must
be taken into consideration: a transition tow ards a more serious tone, a shrinking of th e
frame , a change of style in th e ph ysical appearance o f the act ors and d ecor, and finall y
the weakening of censorship.

20
 FILM «o i « ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

Production bet ween th e two wars,

much like th e no vels of H amme tt or
Chandler, in volved a significant a mou nt
of pure comedy or eve n p a rod y, as ca n
still be felt in Th e Big Sleep. Husto n 's
version of T he Ma ltese Falcon is no more
faithful to th e no vel than th e oth e r two
were. It is simply in grea ter con fo r m ity
with the idea that we ha ve fo rm ed ofJilm
nou as a serious or eve n sole mn ge n re ,
because Hu ston, to as great a n exte n t as A forerunn er to The Big Sleep: The hero and the
heroine practise shootin g in the living room
possible, elimina ted all co mic elemen ts
and kept only the dramatic o r se riou s
ones, even in the love relationsh ip . T h is
tendency becam e more and more acce n­
tuated beginn ing in 1949, a date after
which the detective film began to tak e
itself seriously, to th e po int th at it
occasionall y becam e po m po us , T h e co m­
edy that was allowed in th e 1990s di sa p­
peared and surv ived onl y in the ver ba l
form of the wisecrack, whi ch is grat in g
rath er than fu nny, and in th e visua l fo r m . , . while the villain perfects his scheme. (Muss
of the gro tesq ue , wh ich is more re p ulsive 'Em Up, Charles Vidor, RKO, 1936)

than laughable. Doubtless it is this late

domination of seri ous to ne, more th an he ac tual plot str uct u re or phot ograph y of th e
films, that contrib ute d to th e term '/iI1ll noir' .'19 Everythi ng seems to h a p pen as if th e
detective plots that ha d been used sin ce the 1920s we re no lon ger good en ough a nd
that, now th at eco no mic p ressure had bee n lifted a nd th e p roperl y se n timental
framework had been removed , a n 'id ea' or ex p licitly sym bolic motif had to be added
(the plague in Panic in the Streets, the a tomic d e vice in Kiss Me Deadly), th a t su p posed ly
had someth ing profound to say a bo u t the huma n co nditio n. In fac t, thi s ca n be see n as
the vein runn in g d r y, in th a t thi s 'thou gh tfu l' d ime nsion was already p resent in the
detective films of th e p re ced ing decad es, but d iffused , e nc ryp ted in th e e nigma of the
crime and in th e opposition be tween th e indi vidu al a nd the sec re t network. Afte r 1948,
the threat either becom es metap ho r ical or is visuall y re p rese nted in real ex terior

21
 SHADES OF NOIR

d ecors by a 'g ra n d iosely inhuman' archi­

The Big Gamble (Fred Noble , RKO , 1931)
The Penguin Pool Murder (George Archainbaud ,
RKO,1932)
tecture. It is at thi s point th at the bridges
o f N aked City a nd Night an d the City (jules
Dassin, 194 8 a n d 1950) or th e gasometer
of Follow M e Qui etly (Rich ard Fleis ch er,
194 9) appear, monum ents that form a
so rt of architectural 'co m bo' th at ca tches
th e unhappy o r p ha ns in its web.
T he second difference, at least durin g
th e first half o f the 194 0s, is that th e
fr am e shrinks. A strikin g feature of film s
of the 1930s , p articularl y during th e first
half of th e d ecade, is th e importance
given to th e d ecor, to th e atmosph ere
su r r o u n d ing th e cha rac te rs (th is is coh er­
e n t with th e presence of real exteriors,
subseq ue ntly eliminated to th e advantage
of a sort of cla u stro p h obic space [huis­
clOSJ) .50 The temporary evolu tio n to­
wards a more restricted fr aming occu rs
in step with th e tendency towards a se r­
ious tone, but it is not specific to th e
d et ective him . No doubt implicated in
thi s e vo lu tio n is the double co nstra in t of
budget restrictions (tlje cine m a too is su b­
jected to a wartime economy during hos­
tilities) and e n closu r e within the studio,
whi ch would indicate as a n indirect
co nseq u e nce that the breadth of sp ace a t
th e beginnin g of the 1930s is a remnant
of the silent film in the sound era.
There is a third differen ce that is easily
noted , even if it is not e n tirely sp ecific to

Follow Me Quietly (Richard 0. Fleischer , RKO, The exhaustion of a visual motif: from night
1949) shadows to daylight pipes.

22
 FILM NO IR ON THE EDG E OF DOOM

11- the cinema : th e diffe re nce of style. I mea n by thi s tha t o ne ca n, begi nn ing in 1941-42,
es observe a di ffe re nce in th e decora tion of apa rtments, in cloth ing, bu t also in build in gs
es and cars tha t seem to be th e signa ture o f a new e p och, all the more so in tha t thi s style
~r will remain practicall y unch an ged until th e 1960s. In a rath er odd a nd yet in d isp utable
'I' , way, th is cha nge o f style ca n also be see n in the faces o f th e acto rs. T he ph ysical
a appearance of actors such as Ricardo Co r tez, William Powell, War ren Willia m , Ge or ge
Raft or Brian Donle vy su d d enly see ms to belong to a no the r era, a fa r-o ff tim e no t
connec ted to our ow n , eve n th ou gh th ey pla yed th e sa me role s in th e same sto r ies. T he
case is th e sa me for women : La u re n Bacall is no t Margaret Lindsay, Gloria Gra h a me is
not Jo an Blond el . . . In sh ort, until today o r nearl y so th e actors of the 1940s a nd 1950s
have looked natural to us, beca use th eir visua l fo r m belon gs to th e modernity to whi ch
st we still thi n k that we belon g , whereas those of the I9 30s derive fo r us fr om anoth er
:e
aesthetic tha t mak es th em look too ste reo typ ical, ove rdone a nd thu s ridicu lous.
'e
Mor eover th ere can be no d oubt th at the acto r Bogart , in the second half of h is ca ree r,
r-
did mu ch to effect th is chan ge, and we must not try to h id e fro m ou rse lves th e fact th at
s,
the defini tion of [i lm nair owes a great deal to him , to the exte nt that it was clearly
orga n ized arou nd him , aro u nd his new stardo m . It co u ld moreover be argue d th at
)-
Humph rey Bogart , Robert Montgome ry or Dick Powell su cceeded in doin g in images
'S
what Dashi ell Hamm ett tri ed to do in word s: America nize the d etective. i" Actors like
William Powell , Wa rren Willia m a nd Bas il Rath bone had too 'En glish ' a look , associat ­
e ing th em with th e mastermi nd detective. Our attach me nt to film noir thus has a great
n dea l to do with th e actors a nd actresses who succe ed ed in cry sta llizing around th eir
,I' per sons ou r plea su re in th e detec tive film . Th e personnel o f fi lm n oir appea rs to us to be
a sort of tribe, an exte nded fam ily all of whose members we know a nd in the midst of
1-
•
which we are plea sed to find oursel ves from tim e to time. Like all fa milies, it is both
i-

), encom passi ng (it has man y me m be rs) a nd exclu sive (it thinks of itself as e n dowed with
:t a particula r qual ity tha t rad ically excludes all non-rnem bersj. V For example, Bogart
.t formed a tr oika with Peter Lorre and Syd ney Greenstreet that was found toge th e r in
t var ious fo rms for several yea rs, imposin g a so rt of ca no n th at elim in at es certain acto rs
who were alre ady in place . T h us Edu a rdo Cian elli , wh o had su cceeded in making th e
~' role of a refi ned , pe rverse an d sad istic ga ng lead er (notabl y in Ma rked Wom an ) e n tire ly
) convinc ing in detecti ve film s mad e be tween 1937 a nd 1940 , was eclipsed . In The Mnsl: of
Dimurios (jean NeguJesco , 1944), h e appea rs well behind Lo rre and Gree ns tree t. Th e
genre can , then, be defin ed fo r the sp ectator by th e famili arity he h as with acto rs and
characters, by th e particul ar link th ere is be twee n a typ e o f acto r an d a type o f

23
 SHADES OF NOlA

cha rac te r, a link that will thenceforth be e no ug h to exclu de o ther actors or, in a lesser
form of exclusion, to cla ssify th em with resp ect to th e ac to r wh o has become the ce n tral
point of reference .
Finall y (fourth differen ce), it mu st not be forgotten th at Fr en ch cine p h iles were
stunned by the erotic daring of Gilda 's glove , a fa ct to whi ch Sadoul's scandalized tone
still bears witness in 1954 5 3 - as th e y were stu n ned by Phyllis Dietrichson's ankle
bracelet (Double Indemnity) and th e ch o ru s girl' s o u tfit that Lana Turner sports in the
middle of her restaurant (The Postman Always Rings T wice). World War Two and the
newsreels had delivered a decisive blow to the system of ce ns o rs hip in operation since
1933, reality having taken upon itselfto extend the list of cr imes a nd horrors that could
be looked at. Acts of violence as well as bodies gaine d access to a more direct
representation: one can only be struck by the fact th at, from 1944 on, th e female body
is redrawn and exhibited, particularly through th e quasi-obliga tory seq ue n ce of
singing in a nightclub, whether chic or not. If Borde a nd Chaumeton fr equently sang
the praises of this erotic aspect ofJilm noiT,"1 the point must be r elativized today: so far
as the female body is concerned there is in fact a return to the status quo ante, to the state
of censorship prior to 1933. Directors did not have much to do with this d evelopment
and their daring was negligible in that they were content to return to th e co des in
vigour before 1933. But the fact remains that French cinep hiles e x pe r ie nce d this as a
liberation, a feeling that doubtless had more to do with th e stat e of Fr en ch cinem a than
with an actual comparison with pre-war American produ ction .
r
c
FILM NOIR, MEMORY OF A MYTHIC STATE OF THE CINEMA

Having co m e to the end of this partial journey, on e qu estion remains to be posed . If th e f

term film nair allows us to believe we ca n co n ta in a ce rt a in form of d et ective fiction F
within the pages of a book written to describe it, we must ask ourselves wh at American a
detective films of the 1940s and 1950s are excluded from th e proposed su r veys? On e II

ca n onl y be struck by the enlargement of the notion offilm noir in th e co urse of the
years. When Borde and Chaurneton drew up their list ofJilms n oirs, th e y co u n te d only C

twenty-two, all the rest falling into sub-categories of the traditional d et ective film . \01
When Ward and Silver established an encyclopaedia offilms noirs, th eir list includ ed II
several hundred films. It would be an interesting experiment to try to mak e a n C.

encyclopaedia of detective films not included in the encyclopaedias offilms noirs. This F
would engage us in a veritable archaeology of the American d etectiv e film, a nd no f(
longer in a compilation attached to arbitrarily chosen dates. StiIl, if the context of n

24
 FILM NOIR ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

1946-55 in France ca n explain the crea tio n o f the term 'fiLm nair', it is astonishing that it
has lasted and that it has regularly been reviv ed and renewed by su cceeding ge ne ra­
tion s, until now and the present volume.
Beyond th e questions examined in th e precedin g paragraphs , what sp ecifically
cinematographic elements have we found in American detective films of the 1940s and
1950s? The re spo nse ma y reside precisely in the conjunction o f bla ck and whit e with
the stud io production system . T he d etective film of those years represents th e last
mom ent of what for ge ne ratio ns was the American cin ema : black and white films
produced by stu d ios . Film noir began to be loved when this state of affairs began to
disappear. Colour films gain ed the upper hand and left to bla ck and white onl y films
for the simpleminded or th e declaredly intellectual fringe of the public; the studios
were dismembered ; fift y yea rs of th e history o f cin ema colla pse d . Paradoxicall y, film
noir is loved for representing a past that it in fact occults, a p ast that the enthusiast
hardly knows, if at all, a bit o f the pre-war in th e post-war period. Film noir is, th en, an
eminentl y lost object : lost for never ha ving been given a satisfacto ry definition, lost for
having end ed in 1955, lost for representing the 1930s in a modern form . At the
beginning of this ch a p te r 1 claimed that film noir was the Europeanized form of
Ameri can cine ma : bla ck and white also mil itates in fa vour of this thesis , th e Europ ean
cinem a of th e 1950s having still not re ally obtained th e means to produce colour films.
It is thus not surprisin g that Italian and French cine ma at the end of th e 1950s (I am
thinking, for e xa m p le, of Fellini's Il Hidone'''·' and Godard 's A Bout de sou/ fir') borrowed
massively from the American detective cinema of th e beginnin g of th e 1950s, by a
continuity that no longer seems extraordinary.
Film noir is thus possible onl y und er se ve ral co nd itio ns: th e break caused by th e war
for the European public, p articularly in Paris , whi ch allow ed pre-war Am erican
production to be forgotten 5(; eve n as it e m p hasized th e real differences betw een pre­
and post-war visual ele men ts (style o f th e decor, objects and actors); a misunderst and­
ing of the import of th e social cr itiq ue presented by the fictions and the character of the
private detective ; both attraction to and repulsion from American cu ltu re; a Pouj adist
climat e in France ; th e formal link of bla ck and white (a su rvival in the Am erican system
whereas it continues to be th e general rule in Europe); Bogart's becoming a star ; and,
in return , on th e part o f An glo-Ameri can film criticism, over-valuation of French film
criticism at th e very moment when a reappropriation of this cinema was attempt ed.
Film noir presents a fine example of cine ma history and aesth etic refl ection that is
founded on distribution (in France at a ce r tain point in tim e) and cr itical discourse , a nd
not on produ ction (in the U nited States during several decades), in a complete

25
 SHADES OF NOlA

igno r a nce of th e larger cu ltu ral context. T h is is no t on ly becau se the h isto r y of cinema
tha t alread y exists works with very short pe r iods (neo- realism, th e Sov iet school o f th e
1920s, etc.) . but a lso becau se no o ne has su ffic ie n tly reHected o n the id eological
co ndi tio ns th a t co u ld ha ve presid ed ove r the ad ven t o f a kind of fictio n . T he res u lt is a
so rt of im agin a ry e nclosu r e in wh ich wh at a p pea re d to be e vide n t to spectato rs
becom es a ve ne rab le co nce p t for femin ists a nd historians, and in whi ch the resulting
cr itical work e nd s u p occ u ltin g the films th emselv es and their produ ction.
As an obj ect o r co rp us of films, [ilm n otr d oes not belong to th e histo ry of cine m a; it
belongs as a not io n to th e history o f fil m cr iticism, o r, if on e p refe rs, to th e history of
those who wa nt ed to lo ve th e Am erican cin e ma e ve n in its middlin g produ ction an d to
form a n im age of it. Film notr is a co llector's id ea th at, fo r th e mom ent , ca n o nly he
found in boo ks.

Tran slat ed by J. S W EN S()!':

N OT ES

* For Christian Me tz. j .un es Damico , 'Fi lm Xoir: A Mo d c xt

I . Alan SihT I' and Eliza be th Wa r d . cds .. Film
Noir (Lo ndon : Se ck el' a nd Wa rb u r g . I ~l H ()) ;
Foster I Iirsch . Film Xo ir; n il' lrark Sid e of t/II'
SrT/'I ' 1I (Sa n Diego : A. S. Ba rn es. El HI); Ro be rt
O ttoson . A R ei eren rc (;" id,. to thr Amrriran Film
Noir: 194()- / 958 (Me tuch e n, :\.1 a nd Lo nd on :
Scarecr o w Press, 1~ )H J), Fos ler 1l irsrlt 's book
is certai nl y the mos t op e n an d the one t h.u
takes the greates t cri tica l di sl:lIIu' from
traditional d efini tio ns.
~, I l itrhoxk, as is wel l kn own . const r u cted th e
aer ial a ttac k of N orth liy N orthwest as a co un te r­
ex amp le, but with ou t be ing able to avoi d th e
dese rted cha racter o f th e site .
:t On ly th e So vie t schoo l o r th e I ~ )20s is m issin g
to b r ing to get h e r a ll the classics.
4 . T he a u thor o f th ese lines, it sho u ld be
und erstood , mu st be e nc o m pass ed by the
Borgesian cat ego r y of th e 'mo re or less
general',
:-" Pa u l Schrad er . 'Notes o n Film :\oi r', Film
Co mment, vo l, S, no . I (S p r ing 19 72), pp . S- I 'l;
Pr o pos al', Film /{l'Iu/1'I' no , :\ (I'd " uary 1975 ),
p p . 41)-:,7 ; Paul Kerr. 'O u t or Wha t Pa st ~
No tes o n th e B Film No ir' , in Pau l Kerr, cd .,
nil' l l ollvioood Fih» Lrul ust r; (Lo ndo n:
Ro ut led ge a nd Keg:lII Paul , I ~ )H li), pp .
220-44 , origi na lly p u blish ed in S crccu
Educatum (A u tu m n/ W iut cr I \J7\l- 19S0 ),
pp .32- 3 .
(i, Ra ym ond Borde a nd I::tie n ne C ha u mc io n .
Punorama duiih« uoir am eri cain (Pa r is : Lex
Ed itio ns de Miu ui t, 1955 ),
7, A good examp le or th is is giH'n by Pat ri ck
Bri o n's 1./' Film No ir (Pa r is: Ed it io ns Fc rua nd
;\;at ha n , 1991 ). T he int ro d uct ion re peat s t he
classi ca l dc men ts su p posed to de fine th e
'ge n re' . T h e t hrill s :lIT produced by in cludi ng ,
a mong the eig h ty-two film s personall y c hos e n
by the a u tho r, R ebecca an d oth er H itchcock
films (which marks a double bo ld ness : I ~ l:l ')
ins tea d o f 1941 or 1')40, and H itch cock. who
was co ns id e red as a subgc n rc h im self) , / .N Il! (,
111'1' to [-J ('(1l!1'II a n d Slightly Scarlrt (seco nd
bo ldn ess: colou r"), an d eve n a Tc x Avery

26
 FILM NOIR ON
ca rtoon. T he no velt y see ms to be th e re d uced
number of films . L nfo rt u nar el y, thi s
reduction is d ue not 10 th eoreti cal o r histo r ical
p recision , but to th e constra ints imposed by
th e publ ish er.
8. On this po int, see a lso j ean -Paul Simo n 's study
of Lady ill thr Lake, ' Eno ncia tion et na rra tio n',
Commu nications, no . 38 ( 1983), p p . 135- 91.
9. Paul Schrad er, in ' Notes on Film N o ir ',
stron gl y e m p hasizes th e rom an tic or eve n
sent imental as pe ct o f jlim lI oil' .
10. This article is d eri ved from wo rk in p ro gress
on th e d et ectiv e film . workin g fro m th e
production o f Warn er Broth ers and RKO ,
which is wh y so man y o f th e ex a m p les cited in
th e following p age s were p roduced by o ne or
th e other o f th ese studios. One of th e o th er
sources of thi s wo rk was the Rockefeller
Grant I was given in 1987 to d o research at th e
Wismnsin Ce n te r for Film a nd Theat er
Research in Madi son .
I I. T hese acc o rds , wh ich reo pe ned the Fren ch
market to Am e rican cine ma. w e re shar ply
atta cked by th e co n un u n ists, particul arl y
because the ir Fren ch sign atory was a socialist,
alth o ugh th ey d ar ed nOI ove r-e m p h asize th at
he was also J ewish. I will above all d raw
atte ntio n to th e fac I that [dm uoir is a p rodu ct
of th e Blurn-B yru c s acc o rds, a n d th us placed
un d er th e sign of th e American in vasion .
12. Le Illl- I' ll hrrbe, a film by Cl aud e Autun-La ra
adapte d fr om a novel by Co le tte , recount s th e
love a ft'a i,'s o f two ad o lescent s, Phil an d
Vinca ; Phil is sexu all y ini tia ted by an o lde r
wom an. T his d eliberatel y p ro voca tive film was
th e o bject o f a local ce nso rsh ip ca m pa ign by
Catholic gro u ps ; Georges Sadoul here is
de fendin g Au tan -La ra,
1:1. The dis course o f Sadoul a nd th e Communist
Part y, as will hav e been und erstood, is
motivated by an extre me and viru le n t
puritani sm .
14. For exam p le , l.a R evu e du cinema , reborn fr om
the party's ashes , co nsec ra tes a n u mbe r o f
THE EDGE OF DOOM
importan t a rt icles to the jilm lI oi, -, no ta bly
those written by C ha rt ier a nd
Doni o l-Va lcrozc.
13. It mu st be kept in min d tha t the se m inal
a rt icle by .lean , Pie rre C ha rt ie r bo re th e
revelatory title 'T he Ame r ica ns T oo Mak e
Films No irs' (Jea n-Pierre Cha rt ie r, ' Lcs
A merica ins au ssi font d es film s no ir s', La
R ev ue de cinema, no , 2 r Novembe r 1946 ]), p p.
6~70 , ind icatin g that aft e r Worl d War Two
th e U n ite d Sta tes too k up wh ere Fra nce had
left o ff.
Ill. In Fr en ch th is is p ron ou nced 'la va mp',
17. Ward and Silver, as well as Ottoson , e n list
Lose y's M ( 193 1) in th e ranks o f [dms uuirs , but
remain supremel y unawar e of the fao tha t, in
19:\2 , Edward C . Robinson , in th e co u rse o f
his tri al a t the end of Ttoo Seconds , und er th e
direction o f Merv yn LcR o y, gives him self
ov er , by h is cries and gr ima ces , to a ('o!' y o!
the trial sce ne in th e o r igina l M.
18. On these points sec J acq ues Aum on t , l.U ei;
intrrmitutble (Pa ris: Ed ition s Scg uie J', 1\189) ,
particul a rly pp, 198- 205 a nd 2 10- 12.
19. See E. H . Co mbrich, ' Lig h ts a nd Hi gh light s',
in TI", l tcrit agr oj Aprile»: Studies i ll 1111' Ar t ol'he
R ruaissancr (O xfo rd : I'h a ido n Press, 197(;).
p p . 3-33.
20. T his typ e o f lighti ng can also be fou nd in re-a l
n octurn ul exte rio rs ill Ital ian films o f the
1950 s and 1960s.
2 1. I n Ca mi lle Morlhon 's La Ca lomnir, mad e in
Fr an ce ill 191 :\ , th e re is a sce ne in a
ph oto graphic lab o ratory with a b u lb placed
ben eath th e cha ra cter's racc as its o n ly light
so u rce . A sim ila r sce ne ca n be found in
Yevgcni Bau er's 191 5 film A/ in Death, Barry
Salt has cite d examples o f this so rt o r
ex pe ri me nta tio n in Dcumark in I!) II , On th e
lighting of De Mille's film s o f around I\11 5,
see Lea J acobs , ' Lasky l .ightiu j;', in Till ' lJe
M ille I.ega c}, Paol o Cherch i Usui and Lo ren zo
Co delli, cd s. (I.e Gior nate del Ci nema M "'0,
199 1. Edi zioni Hibliot cca d e ll' I magin c),
27
 SHADES OF
p p. 250-58 . No el Burch reports that the litt le­
known d irector J o hn G. Adolfi adop te d in th e
1914 film The Balik Burglar', Fate a visua l sty le
th a t he claims is characte r istic of the d et ective
films of th e 19 40s and 1950s; see h is book Life
to those Sha douis (Be r ke ley : U n ive rsity of
Ca lifo rn ia Press, 199 0 ), p . 135 .
22 . I n th e case of Footlight Parade, the interiors o f
the vehicles are also strongly lit so th a t th e
action goin g o n there ca n be followed , but the
exterior is without seco ndary lighting. If it
seems that the seco n d h alf of th e 1930 s is less
prodi gal in su ch scen es, from 1939 o n t he
clic he of the no cturna l apa rt ment visit
reappears in t he Won g , Sa int a nd Falcon
se rres.
23 . T his aff irmat io n is obvio us ly made un d er
rese rvat ion of a more co m p le te in vento r y of
film s, but everythi ng occurs as if, whe n it
ca m e to th e [d ms noir s of the 1940s, both
producers and cr itics saw a g rea t advantage in
shoo tin g in th e stud io , whereas the techni q ue
of shootin g in rea l e x te r io rs had ex iste d for a t
leas t twen ty-five years: to put it anothe r way ,
it is no t u nt il t he e n d o f th e 1940s th at fi lm
lIoir gives a position of ho nou r to a techn iqu e
th at was actu all y wel l known . T h is bel at ed
re t u r n to an o ld tec h n iq u e see ms to con fir m
th e hypoth esis of a themat ic ex ha ustio n
p ri vilegin g an intensifi cat ion o f for ma l
elabo ra tio n. Dou btless this is wha t made Paul
Schrader say th at be fore th e fi lm 1I0ir of the
1950s there was the fi lm gri.1 o f th e 1940s.
24 . One could also cite , still with Lo n Chaney,
Victor Sjostro m 's film II " Who Gets S la!'lml
(1924) , with nu me ro us a nd be a u tifu l
o p posi tio ns be tween a h ighl y lit zon e a n d
d e nse black, not a bl y in th e circ us rin g .
25 . T hese cine ma rograp hers a re take n more or
less by ch an ce , bu t h ow e ve r aleatory th e
ch o ice ma y be th e same co nclu sio ns will
impose them sel ves: see , for exam p le , the
cho ice mad e by Bruce Crowther in his
cha p te r 'Techniqu e : Th e Look of Noir', in hi s
boo k Film Noir: R ejl cctions in a Dark Mirror
28
NOIR
(Lo ndo n : Co lumbus Book s, 1988 ), pp. 6 1-8.
C ro wt he r is to m y know ledge th e on ly wr ite r
who pu ts th e acce nt o n t he anrerio rit y o f
ligh tin g techniqu es wit h resp ect to t he d at es
ha bi tu all y r e tain ed for fi lm noir.
30
26 . T h e ava ila ble figures are not all particula rly
clear o n the rela tion betw een productio n in
co lo u r an d production in b lack a nd wh ite . In
1954-55, more than h al f th e films prod uced
we re in colour, thou gh betw een 1955 a nd
3 1.
1960 thi s proportion d eclined slightly. It is
still th e case tha t t he Re neral tend e ncy is
marked , beginni ng fro m the e nd of Wo rl d
Wa r Two, a nd it is not in favour of black and
wh ite .
27 . H e re I a m taking up the argument o fjacq ues
A umoru in prefe rrin g the be tt er- adapted a nd
more accu ra te notion of ex p re ssivitv to the
hack ne yed term 'expressioni sm '.
32 .
28 . David Bordwell, Jan et Staiger a nd Kr istin
33 .
T hom pso n , in their tin e book Th e Classical
Ho llywood Cine ma: Film S tyl e and Mode oj
Produ ction 10 1960 (Lo nd o n: Ro u tled ge an d
Kegan Paul , 1985 ). prese nt the se d uct ive
h yp oth esis t ha t th ere was no majo r cha nge in
th e history o f lI oll ywood betwee n 191 7 a nd
196 0. I bel ieve th at thi s id ea is a lso correct fo r 34.
th e d e tecti ve film.
29 . It is no t n ecessary to recall h e r e that t he
inve ntio n ofjilm noir in Fra n ce is eq ually 35 .
bou nd up with the dis co very, d uri ng th is
same per iod, of Ame ri ca n detect ive fiction,
no ta bl y throu gh the creat ion o f Ma r cel
Du hamel's fa mo us Seri« no ire co llec tio n a t
t he p res tigio us Ca llim ard pu blish ing house .
O ne ca n moreo ve r o nly be surprised by th e 36.
p lace a cco rded to Co rn ell Woolri ch , who
wo uld o nly be t ran slat ed into Fr enc h lat e r
a nd in a not h e r co llectio n (the Seri o blerne ), 37 .
wh e reas th e titles of hi s nov e ls fo rm a
treme ndo us litany of bla ck : Th e Bride W or"
B lack, R rtule zuous in B lack, B lack Alibi, TI",
B lack Pa th ofFear, Th e Bla ck AII[;d , T he Black
Cu rtaill. This no velist is largel y u nd e r­
 F ILM NOIR ON
estimated in work on film lIoir, notab ly by A.
M. Karini in his ver y tr aditional Toward a
Definition of the Aml'riwlI Film Nair ( 19 4 1-19 49)
(New York : Arno Pr ess , 1976).
30. This argument ha s been p re sented by
Raymond Du rgnat in particu lar; his articles,
as is e m p hasized by J am es Dami co and Foster
Hirsch , did mu ch to paral yse reflection on
film nair .
31. To my know ledge, onl y William K. Everson ,
in The Detectiue Film (Ne w York : Citadel Press ,
1972), and Ja cques Segond , in 'Sur le pist e de
Dashi e ll Ha m me tt : Les trois versions du
Faucon ma ltais', P ositi] (ju ly-August
197 5), pp . 171- 2, re call that the novel was
adap ted three times by Warne r Brot hers, the
first adap ta tion be ing eve ry bit as go od as the
third , whic h moreover owes a great deal to it.
32. To ny Ga udio was the cine ma tog ra p he r.
33. Th is id ea co uld not be better illustrated than
by The W indow (Ted Tetzlaff, 1949 ), which
tells the story o f a little bo y, witn ess to a
murder, whom no on e wants to believe and
who is obliged to get out o f trouble himself: in
film nair , th e hero is a n o rphan.
34. Dennis Porter, Th e Pu rsuit of Clime: A rt am i
Id eology in Detective Fictio n (Ne w Haven : Yale
University Press, 19HI).
35. It ma y be re call ed that th e Ame rica n
Communist Party was aga inst the U nited
States's participation in th e str ug gle aga inst
fascism in Europe, defendin g th e idea that
priority shou ld be given to the rein fo rceme n t
of democracy o n the na tio nal terri wry .
36. See Jack Shadoian , Dreams and Dead Ends: TIll'
American Gangster Crillle Film (Ca m br id ge ,
MA : MIT Pr ess, 19 77).
37. The conjunctio n of the netwo rk and th e
sec r et is ver y im po r tan t in Ame r ican id eology,
th e secret referri ng to the negation of th e
fu ndamental right to know, of ea ch citizen 's
rig h t to immediate access to information. A
film like Ltuly ill the Lake justifies its plot a nd
TH E EDGE OF DOOM
its narrati ve tec hnique by claiming th at th e
spec tato r will thu s have di rect, unm edi ated
acces s to in form ati on .
3M. From the Co nt ine nta l Op to Co lu mbo , by way
o f Philip Marlowe a nd Mike Hamm er ,
indulgen ce in d escrip tion of th e sple ndo urs of
power and mon ey, or o f th e refi ne me nts o f
well-edu cat ed peopl e, functions o nly as a
preparation for th eir conde m na tion in th e
name both of humble , ordinary folk , a nd of
a n eg alita ria n mora lity. Det ective novels a nd
films thus o ffer th e reader or spec ta to r the
double pleasure no t onl y o f co n tem plating th e
sp ectacle of luxu ry - see, fo r instan ce , the
beginn ing of The Big Sia/) - but a lso o f
despisi ng the rich ; th e e nd brin gs ca tastro p he
to them and mora l tr iumph to the d et ective,
who is POO l" by cho ice - as is th e she riff of th e
wester n.
39. On th e petty bou rgeoisi e in film IlOir , see
Hirsch. p. 182 .
40 . Se e Port er, particu larl y pp . 17:\- 81 . See also
Pete r Roffm an and J im Purd y, Tlte 1I 01I)'",00d
Soci al Problem Film : Mad/l ess, Despair an d
Politics from the Depression to the Fij ties
(Bloo mingto n : Indiana Un iversity Press ,
1981 ). I would not , how e ve r, follow th ese
a u tho rs wh en, at th e be ginning of' th ei r boo k,
they o p po se 'shys te rs' and 'p opu lists', who, for
me, a re part o f the sa me sce na rio.
4 1. I d o not mean here tha t th e inv entors o f fi lm
/loi?' (Nino Fr ank , J ean-Pierre C ha rtier, Borde
a nd Chaumeton) were Po u jad ists: I simply
want to remark th e clements of resembl anc e
between American populism a nd French
Poujadism to the extent th at their soc ia l
motivat ions at the moment o f the post-war
econom ic recovery a re co m parable. Th ere
wou ld also be mu ch to say ab out th e parallel
be tween contem p t for th e crowd and
misan th ro py - th at is, a ce rt ain righ tist
anarchism of di re ctors - in Fr en ch films or
th e 19:10s (the famous poetic re alism ,
supposed to be th e Fre nc h fath er of j il m Iwir)
29
 SHADES
a nd rea ction ary ind ividualism in Am er ican
films of the sam e peri od : there a re ele me n ts
of com pa riso n, whi ch d o no t found a
sim ilarity, but which co uld lead to confusion.
42. O n this point, see Sac van Be rcovitch, Th e
America n Jeremiad (Mad ison : Un iversity o f
Wisconsin Press, 197 8).
,no See Elise Marienstras, Nous , Ie pe uple: Les
origi nes du natumulisme americain (Pa ris:
Ed itions du Seu il, 1988).
44 . In realit y, tojud ge b y a characte r like Dirty
Harry, as played with sel f-satisfactio n by Clin t
Eas twood , the period woul d have to be
stretc he d all the way to th e presen t.
45 . We may note with a m used asto nis h me nt th at
Warn er' Brothers an d RKO bega n p roducin g
films agai ns t rac ketee ring in 1935 , the yea r in
whi ch th e studios rea ched a n ag ree me nt with
ra cketee rs to p reven t stri kes. O n these po ints,
see Denise Hartsou gh , 'Crime Pays: The
Stu d io's Labor Deal s in the 1930s ', Velvet Ught
Tmp , no. 2:3 (Sprin g 1989), pp. 49-63.
46 . See, fin exa m ple, Pau l J en sen , 'T he Return o f
Dr Ca liga ri: Paranoia in I Ioll ywood ', Film
Comment, vol. 7, no. 4 (Wi nter 1971- 72 ), pp.
36-45 ; Geo rge Wead , 'Toward a Detintion of
Film no ia', Velvet Ligh t Trap , no . 13 ( 1974) , pp.
2-6 . In a mo re ser ious a nd deve loped
fas h ion , see also Dan a Pola n, Power and
Paran oia : History, N nrrut iue and the American
Ci nema, 1940-1950 (New Yo rk : Co lu m bia
Un ivers ity Press, 198 6), particularl y 'Blind
In sights and Dark Passages: T he Pr obl em o f
Placemen t', pp. 19:3- 249.
47 . T ha t Holl ywood , fro m 1935 o n, found it
necessa ry to mak e films g lor ifying th e FBI ca n
on ly co nfir m thi s poin t.
48 . I a m her e using th e te rm 'grotesq ue' in its
picto rial meaning: an ugly d istig u ra tio n of th e
face, as it is seen in Dure r's work, for
exa m ple.
49 . It still mu st be not ed that a mong th e novelist­
fathe rs, so meone like Ra ymo nd C ha nd le r' is
placed o n th e same le vel as Cornell Wool rich ,
30
OF NOIR
th e latter having a mu ch more sinister ma nn e r
than the form e r, wh ich goes to show th at the
hard-boiled sch ool is as m uc h a catch-all
notion as is expressio nism .
50 . To m Conley has p rese n ted an int er estin g
th esis whic h tries to show the influ en ce o f
ex iste ntia lism and its th eat re on fil m nair: see
his a rticle, 'Sta te of Film Noir', T heatre journal
( 1987 ), pp. 347-63. See also Rob ert G.
Po rfir io, ' No Way Out : Existe n tia l Motifs in
the Film Noir', Sight and Soun d, vol. 45, no. 4
(Au tu m n 1976) , pp . 2 12- 17.
5 1. T his Americanism , stro ng ly ma r ked in
op po sitio n to English ca no ns, can be foun d
ex te nsively used in the case o f Rob ert
Montgom e ry in Th e Earl of Chicago (Richa rd
T horpe, 1939), in whic h the actor pla ys the
ro le o f a cho ir boyis h ga ngste r, who, whe n he
7
is not chewing gu m or shovin g aside p ro tocol
an d politeness, multi plies his 'yea hs' with out P
p
e nd.
F
52. I am well aware of the fact th a t th is sort o f
argu men t ­ identifi cati o n with a n actor ­ has
noth in g decisive abou t it an d th at in th e end it
ex plai ns no thin g at a ll since logic wou ld
dic tate that I estab lish what allowe d thi s
id entificati on to occu r in the first place . T he
argumem still retains its valid ity here in th at it
d ra ws our attention to this ba sic
ph enomenon, whi ch has bee n obscured by the
at te m p ts at ration al iza tion that I evo ked at the
be ginnin g o f th e article.
53 . In the seco nd half o f the 1915 0s, Hu ston 's
version o f Th e Ma ltese Falcon was re-released
in Par is with a new tra ns lat ion o f th e subtitles,
a nd the spectators we re given a fortui tou s
start by the ref er ence, at th e beg in n in g of th e
film , to the still-wa rm slip o f o ne of the
cha rac te rs. T h is sh ows to wh at exten t th e
me ta p ho rizatio n o f the st ri ptease in th e
de tect ive's inqu iry is a good defe nce whic h ,
fo r th e spec ta tor's comfort , it is be tte r not to
to uc h. More exactly, it points o u t the e xtent to
which th e d etectiv e film inst a ls a code of
 FILM NOIR ON THE EDGE OF DOOM

censo rs hi p that th e spec ta to r has already
agreed to a nd which is part of h is pleasure.
54. Th is a rg u me nt, o f cou rse, has bee n inscri bed
in the th esis of fil m lI oi/" S victori ou s resistan ce
to the Hollywood system , film cr iticism having
see n th ese baga te lles as a n act of de fiance
th rown in th e face o f th e syste m o f censorsh ip
by certa in d irec to rs in th e nam e of a rt.
56 . In Fr an ce the br eak also allowed French
55. T he film uses Brod eri ck Crawfo rd , but in
ad d itio n its e nd ing seems to me to be very
close to th at of Losey's The P rowler (a lost
cha racte r trying to clim b up a mound of
ro cks), eve n whil e recallin g the e nd of ce rt ain
of Rossellini's films, such as II miracolo a nd
S tromboli. If post-war Italian cine ma bo rr o ws
hea vily from Ame rica n cine ma , there is no
doubt th at the Am eri can d e tective film
borrows from It alian nco-realism , particularly
in th e shoo ting o f real exte rior day time sce nes
aft er 1949 .
produ ctio n du ri ng th e wa r to be for gott en .
No r sho uld we forget that so meo ne like J ohn
Huston , th e bette r to establish his car eer , did
not hesitat e to occult this past.

PHOTOGRAPHI C CREDI TS

The Big Gamble: ph otog rapher Hal Mohr; Two S/'C(}/u!J: ph ot ograph e r Soll'oli to; Th e M ultese Falcon:
photogr apher William Rees: Pri va te Detective 62: photog raph er T on y Ga ud io; M uss 'Em V I):
pho tographers.J. Roy Hunt a nd Joseph Augu st; The Pengu in Pool Mu rder: ph ot ograph er Henry Ge rr a rd ;
Follow M e (~u ietly : p hotogra p he r Robert de Grasse.

31
 2

THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

Fredric Jameson

Inveterate readers of Chandler will know that it is no lon ger for the solution to the
mystery that they reread him, if indeed the solutions ever solved anything in the first
place. (The story of Bogart's argument with Hawks is well known; very late at night ,
after much drinking, during the filming of The Big Sl eep the two men argue about the
status of the dead body in the Bui ck in the ocean off the Lido pier: murder, suicide or
some third thing? They finally phone Chandler himself, still awake and drinking at
that hour; he admits he can't remember either.) Sometimes he aggressively fore­
grounds the more improbable plot mechanisms, daring us to throw th e book away in
disbelief: '" And at that point," I said, "you run into a real basic coincidence, the only
one I'm willing to admit in the whole pi cture. For this Mildred Haviland met a man
named Bill Chess in a Riverside be er parlor and for reasons of her own married him
and went to live with him at Little Fawn Lake," etc. (The Lady in the Lake, XXVII, p.
578).1 At other times it is presumably the speed of the plot's rotation that can be
counted on to distract us from everything that is unmotivated or gratuitous about
certain episodes: that of Amthor and the marijuana cigarettes in Farewell, My Lovely , for
example (triumphantly refashioned into a whorehouse with a lesbian madame in Dick
Richards's 1975 film version) . Finally it is for the e p isod es th emselves that one rereads:
in this, as in a few other features, Chandler participates in the logic of modernism
generally, which tends towards an autonomization of ever smaller segments (the

33
 SHADES OF NOIR

formally ind ependent ch ap te rs o f Ulysses a re only th e most dramatic e m ble m of the twe
process). But sinc e Cha n d le r's project-units remain su bgener ic, we can , as an un ex­ inte
pected bonus, co m pa re successive ve rsio ns of th e sa m e fo rm in th eir publish ed of
variants, whi ch have not, as in th e 'great m oderns', been welded together in some sin gle son
'boo k of th e world' whose repetitions would be styli stic rath er than narrative. So it is val'
th at lilli e by lilli e we begin to co llect th ese episod e types (at least in th e first four , °Pf
ca no nica l novels ; Ch andlerian s will ha ve th eir weakn ess for thi s or that feature o f th e A
lat er two, but we are here alread y beyond th e naive or natural o pe ra tio ns of the original suo
form ). Weju xtapose H arryJon es an d Geo rge Anson Phillips (inep t private detectives); the
or Laird Burnette and Ed d ie Mars or Ale x Morn y (likeable mobsters); o r Vanni er, e ffe
Marriott, o r Lavery (q u in te sse n tial gigolos) - and a new kind of stereoscopic re ading han
tion
e mer ges in which each sce n e ret ains its sh arpness whil e design ating at th e same tim e a
abst
well-ni gh Platonic (ye t soc ia l-ty po lo gica l) ultimate unit behind it that th e reading eye
lenc
d oes not so much see as intuit.
IS sr-:
So it is th at the id eal reader o f these d et ective stori es begins to dream of a syn optic
M
Cha nd le r whi ch , like the equi valent ed itio n of th e four Gos p e ls, would run the
clo si
eq u ivale n t ep isodes sid e by side for our inspection, and for the exe rc ise of those
rei g:
ultimate mental faculties that govern th e dialectic of identity and differen ce. Unfortun­
peci
a te ly for thi s illusion o f the ultimate m ythi cal ur-text and, like the atom itself, th e form
fune
of the autonomous e p iso d e is not itself ultimatel y indi visible . For wh en the would-be
cu lu
co m p ile r of such synoptic columns works his way back to th e pulp-magazine sho rt and
sto r ies th at are predi ctably th e e p isod es' first versions (and that in hindsight lend the audir
mature Chandler no vel that trul y ' mod e rn ' sense o f patch es sewn tog-ether, in which satisl
th e seams and tran sitions co nstitu te th e truest locus of ae sth etic production), he simil
discovers - as with electrons and quarks within the see m in g unity of th e ato m as suc h ­ been
that the 'o riginal' e pisod es hav e themselves already been contaminated by the autono­ later.
mization process and th ereby di ssociated or uncoupled into so man y mi cro-episod es in
th eir own right. Th e altern at e interpretation is plausible e no u g h : that Chandler
'lacked im a gination' and , redu ced to th es e few e p isod es and charact er types , found
himself o blige d to repeat th em o ver and ov er again under different guises . Those who
feel this way will probably not wish to read an y furth e r in the present pages , whose The
th esis is rath er that it was his society th at lacked imagination an d that su ch undoubted finitu
limits are those of th e narrati vit y of Chandler's so cio-histori cal raw material. neatl·
Still, th e discovery of thi s micro-episodic dimension of th e text ben eath th e larger Frenr
official an d ostensible plot mysteries and solutions of th e C h a nd le r novel su gg-ests betwe

34
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

he two new and complementary lines of inquiry. The first lies in supposing a system whose
.x­ intelligibility could be expected to displace and replace that causal explanation in terms
of the interrelationships of intrigue and action that we have already found to be
~le
somewhat less than reliable: this would presumably be a synchronic system in which the
IS
various episode or character types entertained formalizable semiotic relationships and
II',
oppositions with each other.
re
Alongside the project of disengaging that system, and in direct proportion to the
success in doing so, there then emerges a second kind of analytic interest, bearing on
al
the peculiar nature of Chandler's plot construction. Here the older logic of cause and
.);
effect (or deduction) will evidently be replaced by some new criterion for dealing out a
1',
hand of episodes, and an aesthetic whereby the rhythm of their succession or alterna­
19
tion is governed. I've suggested that at some higher level of historical or periodizing
a
abstraction, this operation probably rejoins the modernist form problem par excel­
lence, which is the invention and production of transitions: but Chandler's version of it
is specific and has its own logic.
IC
Meanwhile, both these lines of inquiry converge on the ultimate matter of narrative
e
closure, which, whatever its fate in the modern and postmodern novel, continues to
e reign supreme in the mass culture of this period, and is if anything exacerbated by the
1-
peculiar nature of the detective story. (It could be argued that even the serial - the
n fundamental exhibit in any case for the openness or indeterminacy of the new mass
e culture" - reconfirms the value of closure over and over again by its intent to thwart
and frustrate it.) Yet Chandler liked to argue that in matters of style he tricked his
audience by giving them something other (and better) than what they wanted, thereby
satisfying them in spite of themselves.'J Perhaps in the matter of closure something
similar is going on, so that the satisfaction of the detective-story puzzle has in reality
been assuaged by something else: in the event something doubly spatial, as we shall see
later.

The first source of closure is, however, the narrative content itself, whose deeper
finitude is reflected in something more temporal than its capacity to be wrapped up
neatly and tied into a well-made plot: it is a temporal closure more strongly marked in
French than in English, and there theorized (by Gide and others) under the distinction
between reat and narrative. The untranslatable generic word recit designates the

35
 SHADES OF NOIR

classic tale-telling .of events that are over and done with before the story begins or the k
narrator lifts his voice; this is signalled in French by that language's more elaborate
system of tenses and in particular by the use of the preterite, whose presence is
generally invisible in English, being indistinguishable from our generalized past tense.
But this - rather than the distinctions in social content or in gentility or violence - is the
mark of the more fundamental generic shift from English to American (hard-boiled)
1:
detective story, namely that where the classic tradition (continued in the former)
V
maintained a structural discontinuity and differentiation between open narrative (the
C
detective's quest) and the closed recu of the crime to be reconstructed, the newer
~
American form, as it began to emerge in the pulps, redoubled the closure of the crime I,
with that of the surface quest itself, which it also staged, after the fact, as a completed
(
adventure.
What we witness here, I think - what is now difficult to perceive from the hindsight t
t
of a future from which the originary medium has itself virtually disappeared - is the
J
omnipresence of a radio culture as it resonates out into other genres and media. Both
Ii
pulp or hard-boiled detective stories and film noir are indeed structurally distinguished
I:
by the fundamental fact of the voice-over, which signals in advance the closure of the
S
events to be narrated just as surely as it marks the operative presence of an essentially
f
radio aesthetic which has no equivalent in the earlier novel or silent cinema. Allusions

in the classical art story to oral narrative or traditional yarn-spinning (as in Conrad) are
I
regressive and have virtually nothing in common with this new reproducible oral
aesthetic (which found its supreme embodiment in Orson Welles). One may meanwhile r
t.
pursue its structural specificity by way of physiology and psychology (provided these
are appropriately historicized): the visual is presumably always incomplete while the
s
auditory determines a synchronous recognition that can be drawn on for the construc­
t
tion of the new forms of a radio age. The thirties aesthetic - which has stereotypically
been grasped as a kind of return to realism, a reaction against the modernist impulse, r
and a renewed politicization in the period of depression, fascism, and left-wing
movements alike - needs to be reconsidered in the light of this most modern of the
media, whose possibilities fascinated Brecht and Benjamin and not much later gener­
ated the lugubrious Adorno-Horkheimer vision of the 'culture industry'. The triumph
of Hollywood seems to have fused many of these aesthetic developments into an
undifferentiated mass, which it might be desirable to disentangle by thinking of the
'talkie', for example, as being, initially, a kind of radio film.
It is at any rate clear that the voice-over of the hard-boiled detective in general, and
of Marlowe in particular, offers a specifically radio pleasure which must be paid for by a

36
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

e kind of closure that allows th e novel's past tenses to resonate with doom and forebod­
.C
ing and marks th e d et ective's daily life with th e promise of adventure." This temporal
IS
set toward language also seems to playa significant e na blin g role in what one may call
the Flaubertian sid e o f C ha nd le r' s st ylistic produ ction , whi ch paradoxicall y marks one
e final unexpected d evel opment in the aestheti c of th e mot juste. For it is precisel y as th e
l) ultimate somersault o f Flaubert's belief in th e existe nce of one unique com bi na tio n of
") words that Chandler's most o u trageo us effects a re to be grasped. 'Abo u t as in con spicu­
e ous as a tarantula o n a slice of angel food' (Ff\!lL , I , 143): this simile con veys Moos e
T
Malloy- alread y ov erd et ermined by his gigan tic fr ame and his ou tlandish clothes - not
e
least because he is a white man in an all-black n eighbourhood and thus allows all of
d
Chandler's most ra cist ca rica tu ral instincts to begin to come into play . (Th e least
politically correct of all ou r modern writers, Chand ler faithfully gives ve nt to eve ry­
It
thing racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise soc ially resentful and reactionary in th e
e
American collecti ve unconscious, enhancing th ese unlovel y feelings - whi ch are
h
however almost exclusively mobilized for striking a nd esse n tially visual purposes, that
d
is to say, for aestheti c rath er than political on es - by a homoerotic and mal e-b onding
e
sentimentalism that is arou sed by honest cops an d ga ngsters with hearts of gold , but
y
finds its most open exp ressio n in the plot of Th e L ong Goodbye.) The practice o f the
s
outrageous simile, wh ose relations to radio might also be investigated, sh ares with
e
Flaubert's quite unmet aphoric handicraft of th e se nt e n ce a commitment to sense
tl
perception as that whi ch is ultimately to be rendered a nd set down in indelible letters:
e
those accustomed to fr equent C ha nd le r know how man y ephemeral experien ces o f th e
e
southern California landscape are in his pages e te rnally retained in passing."
e
At the other extrem e of thi s production , we find th e problem of closure po sed in
terms of the system of C ha nd ler's cha racte rs, who manage in some of th e novels to
y
project a kind of Lukacsean 'e ffe ct of totality', with out necessarily tou chin g all th e
sociological bases. But this is something we can onl y reconstruct in retrospect by testing
is
e
the completed novels for missing categories. Here are the quintessential Am erican
middle classes, for exa m p le :

The Graysons were on th e fifth floor in front, in the north win g. They were sitting tog ether
in a room whi ch seemed to be d eliberatel y twenty yea rs o u t of d at e. It had fat over-stuffed
e
furniture and brass d oorknobs, sha ped like eggs, a huge wall mirror in a f.\'ilt fram e, a
marble-topped tabl e in th e window and dark red plush sid e drapes by the wind ows. It
I sm elled of tobacco sm ok e a nd behind th at the air was tellin g me they had had lamb cho ps
a a nd broccoli for dinner. (L L, XXIII, 561)

37
 SHADES OF NaiR

But the Graysons ('he was a C.P.A. and looked it eve ry in ch') are virtuall y th e onl y
middle-class characters in all of Chandler ; and th e y are there to show that in matters of
wealth and power (their daughter has been murdered) the police cannot be counted on
to protect even these most solid and re sp ectable average citizens. As for the working
class , Bill Chess in the same novel can be thought to stand as their ' re p rese n ta tio na l
representative', but he is a cripple and an alcoholi c and a wife-beater and makes
Chandler's problem even clearer: how to co nvey the average and the everyday in the
co u rse of pursuing the ' m e m o ra ble' and th e ex ceptional, of registering what breaks the
routine, challenges the serene reprodu ction of th e social order, counts as crime and
adventure. In fact, the 'lower' classes in Chandler are either impoverished petty­
bourgeois or lumpens, and have th eir lack of mon ey stamped on them as catastrophe.
Yet the rich (with the exception of th e Kingsley figure in this novel, a business
executive) are in Chandler not altogeth er normal specimens of a conventional ruling
class either ...
But at this point I propose to combine th e now obligatory sociological survey with a
somewhat different inquiry, which touches on th e relationship between aesthetic value
and closure of the Lukacsean 'to tality-e ffect'. Wh at makes this particular inquiry
ex ceptionally verifiable, for Chandler, is th e presence , among the first four novels , of a
book not normally thought to be one of his best , whi ch however turns out, ill our
synoptic perspective, to contain some of th e all-tim e best and most memorable episodes
in Chandler. This is Th e lIigh \;\Iindow, whose astonishing parts (Elisha Morningstar's
offi ce, George Anson Phillips's apartment in Bunker Hill, the Varmier house) oddl y do
not seem to add up to the imperfect whol e. It ma y th erefore be worth trying to
determine why the novel fails to cohere, eve n in a formal situation ill which the episodic
is the law rather than the exception.
Mrs Murdock's house, for example, ma y be a good deal less dramatic than the
Stern wood estate, in opening pages that clearly att empt to reproduce the remarkable
effects of The Big Sleep'« entry into the narrative (something the Grayle house only
distantly tried to approximate in Fareuicll, My !-IJve!y) but Mrs Murdock's cantankerous
port-drinking only imperfectly approximates General Sternwood's hothouse, and in
any case a sumptuous house in Pasadena (with a fairly prosaic fortune) is not a match
for the Sternwood oil rigs and the Stern wood military ancestors (nor, perhaps, in
Chandler's unconscious , is an authoritarian female any mat ch for an authoritative
mal e) . Meanwhile, the Brasher Doubloon would seem to be a regression from the nude
photographs of Th e Big Sleep, replacing the technological image with older form s of
minted valu e and thereby threatening a slippage back into th e more romantic formulas

38
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

nly ofthe older Hammett narrative, with its falcons and curses. Yet in the synoptic view the
;01' episodes remain equivalents and suggest a conception of th e more interesting rich that
on is akin to sequestration - they are withdrawn inside their expensive dwellings like
ng injured creatures, seeking shelter and protection (a characterization that also holds for
nal Grayle himself, with his twin collections, of Fei Tsui jade and the legendary 'Velma').
,es What is crucial to retain of this micro-structure is the relative gap and distance between
.he the character and the setting or, rather, the way in which the character type is itself
.he predicated on that gap or tension . Unlike Balzac, for example, Chandler does not
nd make the dwelling immediately express the truth of the ch aracte r who dwells in it.
ty­ Dwelling is here not a semiotic or expressive category," or perhaps it might be better to
Ie.
say that it is questionable whether th ese supremely privileged Chandler characters are,
~ss
despite their immense fortunes, able to dwell, in any traditional strong sense of the verb.
ng They are within their rooms in a rather different way, whi ch has, for the other end of
the social spectrum, its equivalency in fear and vulnerability (and which is for General
1 a
Sternwood and Mrs Murdock merely motivated and rationalized away as impotent old
lIC
age and guilt, respectively).
II")'
To grasp the manner of this dwelling it is not sufficient simply to glance down the
fa
line, at those wealthy homes of gangsters and gigolos that come next (in this novel the
lIr
houses of Morny's wife and Vannier), or at the utterly rundown houses of Chandler's
.es
impoverished petty-bourgeoisie, of which Jesse Florian's house on 1644 West 54th
r's
Place is the archetype (FML, V, 156), and which is epitomized in this particular nov el by
:10
Bunker Hill and the unhappy George Anson Phillips's seedy apartment. We must turn
to
also to the other dominant spatial category of the Chandlerian cityscape: the office as
lie
such .
I am tempted to say that in Chandler the offi ce is - if not a well-nigh ontological
he
category - then at least one that subsumes a much wider variety of social activity than it
,Ie
is normally understood to do. Indeed, the very notion that work is somehow funda­
,Iy
mentally related to the space of an office is itself a sociologically revealing marker of
LIS
class. Here, to be sure, Elisha Morningstar's office and office building are among the
m
quintessential evocations:
:h
III
The inner office was just as small but had a lot more stuff in it. A green safe almost blo cked
ve
off the front half. Beyond this a heavy old mahogany table against the entrance door held

Ie
some dark books, some flabby old magazines, and a lot of dust. In the back wall a window

Df
was open a few inches, without effect on the mllsty smell. There was a hatrack with a greasy

as black felt hat on it. There were three long-legged tables with glass tops and more coins

39
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

1.ly ofthe older Hammett narrative, with its falcons and cu rses. Yet in the synoptic view the
of episodes remain equivalents and suggest a conception of the more interesting rich that
on is akin to sequestration - they are withdrawn inside their expensive dwellings like
ng injured creatures, seeking shelter and protection (a ch aracterization that also holds for
1al Grayle himself, with his twin collections, of Fei Tsui jade and the legendary 'Velma').
.es What is crucial to retain of this mi cro-structure is the rel ative gap and distan ce between
he the character and the setting or, rather, the way in which th e character type is itself
he predicated on that gap or tension . Unlike Balzac, for example, Cha nd ler does not
1CI make the dwelling immediatel y express th e truth of the ch aracte r who dw ells in it.
ly­ Dwelling is here not a semiotic or expressive catego ry ," or perhaps it might be better to
le. say that it is questionable whether these supremely privileged Chandler ch a racte rs are,
.ss despite their immense fortunes , able to dwell, in an y traditional strong sense of th e verb.
ng They are within their rooms in a rather different way, whi ch ha s, for th e other e n d of
the social spectrum, its equivalency in fear and vulnerability (and whi ch is for General
I a
Stern wood and Mrs Murdock merely moti vat ed and rationalized away as impotent old
li e
age and guilt, respectively) .
To grasp the manner of this dwelling it is not sufficient sim p ly to glan ce d own th e
line, at those wealthy homes of gangsters and gigolos that come next (in thi s novel th e
.II'
houses of Morny's wife and Vannier), or at the utterly rundown houses of Chandler's
es
impoverished petty-bourgeoisie, of which Jesse Florian's house on 1644 West 54th
''s
Place is the archetype (Fl'vIL, V, 156), and whi ch is epitomized in thi s particular novel by
10
Bunker Hill and the unhappy George Anson Phillips's seedy apartment. We mu st turn
lo
also to the other dominant spatial category of the Chandlerian cityscape : th e o ffice as
.IC
such.
I am tempted to say that in Chandler the office is - if not a well-nigh o n to logical
Ie
category - then at least one that subsumes a much wider variety of social activity th an it
Ie
is normally understood to do. Indeed, the very notion that work is somehow funda­
ly
mentally related to the space of an office is itself a sociologically revealin g marker of
.IS
class. Here, to be sure, Elisha Morningstar's office and office building a re among th e
in
quintessential evocations:
:h
n
The inner office wasjust as small but had a lot more stuff in it. A green safe alm ost blo cked
off the front half. Beyond this a heavy old mahogany table against the entran ce d oor held
some dark books, some flabby old magazines, and a lot of dust. In the ba ck wall a window
was open a few inches, without effect on the musty smell. There was a hatrack with a greasy
IS black felt hat on it. There were three long-legged tables with glass tops a nd more coins

39
 SHADES OF NOIR

under' the glass tops. There was a hea vy da r k lea th er-topped desk midway of th e room . It e
had th e usual desk stu ff on it, a nd in ad d ition a j eweller's scales under a glass dome and two tl
large nickel-framed magnifying glass es a nd a j eweller's eyepiece lyin g o n a bu ff scra tch
pad, besid e a cra cked yellow silk handerchi ef sp otted with ink . (HW , VII , 351-2)

It would be a mistake to assume that the se empirical d et ails, whi ch document age and
n eglect on the on e hand (th e dust) and a specific professionalism (the jeweller's scales,
et c.) on th e other, exe m p lify that 'rea lity-effec t' that Barthes attributed to a realism
(that, unlike his a nt i-rep re se n ta tio na l colleagu es on Tel quel, he himself read with
relish) that he can be said to have dem ystified into a realism-effect per se ." If in Balzac
the object-world was meant to give a meton ymi c signal (like a wild a n imal's den or a n
E
exoskeleton), in th e Barthesian view of Flaubert's des criptions, th ese last were simpl y
meant to e mit th e signal 'we are th e real, we are reality' - by virtue of their very
p:
(t
co ntinge ncy : it was because su ch d et ails (the ornate clock, the barometer) pla yed no
B
part in th e action a nd , unlike their Balzacian equ ivalen t, did not mean or express
an yth ing , that th ey were abl e to stand in for th e sheer massive co n tin ge nc y of reality
itself.
But in Chandler ­ how ever often asp ec ts of both th ese descriptive logi cs seems to
function - something else is also at work, which I can only ch a racte r ize as the
constr u ctio n of a vacancy, an empt y sp ace . Whatever the objects mean (the twenty­
year-old su pe ra n n ua ted furniture of th e Gra ysons, th e undusted junk of Morningstar
or Jessie Florian, but also th e elegance of the Grayle m ansion: 'A nice room with large I ,
ch este rfield s and loungin g ch airs done in p ale yellow leather arranged around a me
fireplace in front of which, on the glossy but not slippery Aoor , lay a rug as thin as silk na
and as old as Ae sop's aunt' [FML, XVIII, 214]) , they also outline a space o fa specific fa
type which can be empty or contain a presence. For example , the d escription of rh.
Mornin gstar's offi ce quoted a bove at some length is followed by th e appearance of th e an
'elderly party' himself in th e inevitable swivel chair. But what is ope ra tive in Chandler's de
description of this particular office ca n n ot be discovered empirically by a n inspection su
of an y of these enumerated details : it is, on the contrary, only ratified by Marlowe's au
second visit, whi ch discloses the offi ce's essential emptiness as well as the d emise of its Ja(
inhabitant, now just another object o n the Aoor. rei
The seco nd visit in Chandler, ind eed the return at night, under modified conditions , eVI

suggests that it is not p articularl y th e criminal who needs this reassurance , but the pH
detective and th e novelist who pass their sp ecific realities in review, and by rotating ret
them throughout a variety of situations (as Monet did with his ha ystacks) ca use th em to wil

40
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

emerge eve r more stro ngly as form al en tities . O ne thinks, for ex a mple, of the date with
the ill-fated Harry Jones in his dilapidated offi ce:

The lighted obl ong of a n un curtained window face d me , cu t by th e a ng le of a d esk . On th e

desk a hooded typewriter too k form, th en th e metal knob of a communicating door. This
1 was unlocked . I p assed int o the second of the three offi ces. Rain rattled suddenly against
the closed wind ow . U nd e r its noise I cross ed th e room . A tight fan of light spread from an
inch ope ning of the door in to the lighted offi ce . Eve rything very convenient. I walk ed like
a cat on a mantel and reach ed the hin ged side of th e door, put an eye to the crack an d saw
nothing but light again st th e angle of th e wood . (8 S, XXVI , 104)

Even more strikingly, there is the return to th e cabin at Fawn Lak e , which presents th e
psychically or psy choanalytically interesting structure o f the repetition of a repetition
(the first return is surprised by th e local sheriff, lying in wait for Marlowe in the dark) .
But th en, stu bbo rn ly:

Three hundred yards from the gate a narrow tr ack , sifted over with brown oak leav es from
last fall, cu rved a ro u nd a gra nite bould er and di sappeared . I follow ed it around and
bumped along th e stones o f the outcrop for fifty o r sixty feet , then swun g the car around a
tree and set it pointing ba ck th e way it had come . I cu t the light s and switch ed off th e motor
and sat there waiting. (LL , XI I, 5 19)

I want to use thi s p articular syn op tic eq u ivale nce to make a structural dedu ction that
may well seem an o u trageous leap: it will involve the proposition that for C ha nd le r's
narrative economy the vacant murd er cabin fun ctions less as a dwelling place, even a
former dwelling pl ace, than as a kind o f figurativ e office in its own ri ght - th e 'office' of
those in Right, of th e pseud on ymous Muriel Chess for ex ample before the novel opens
and, at the end , o f Kingsle y and fin all y Degarmo himself. The point of thi s formal
deduction is to problematize the commonsensical or 'natural' conception of dw elling as
such in C ha nd le r; o ne of its advantages is the way it allow s us retroactively to transform
our first su b-fo r m - the 'd wellin gs' of th e rich (th e hothouse of General Sternwood, th e
jade collection of old Grayle, Mrs Murdock's port-drinking room) - into sp aces of
retreat and withdrawal that a re somehow more a nalogou s to offices than to houses or
even quarters or apartments. Th ere follows , th ereby, a prodigious metaph ysical or
philosophical expansion of th e category of the o ffice per Sf in Chandler. We may, thus,
return to his other city spaces in order to test th em against this one, which is derived (it
will be remembered) from th e positing of some initial distance betw een the 'pe rso n '

41
 SHADES OF NOIR

and his or her space, in other words, from the structural calling into question of the Sl
identity, within the act of 'dwelling', between character and spatial housing or cI
envelope. sc
But at that point it be comes clear that a second and narratively very significant group tr
of Chandlerian former dwellings all at once explicitly d emand subsumption und er the
as
enlarged figurative category of the offi ce: these are th e sumptuous private houses of
re
the various gigolos, from that of Lindsay Marriott in Far ewell, My Lovely , hidden away
d<
above the coast highway (FML , VIII , 168ft".: 'It was a nice little hou se with a salt­
re
tarnished spiral of staircase going up to the front door ... ') to that - classically and
CI
repetitively 'revisited' in the above sense - in which Vannier lives and dies in Th e I I igh.
H
Window (see HW, XXIX, 437fT) and its immediate, structurall y varied repla y in the
IH
'dwelling' of Chris Lavery in Th e Lady in the Lake (LL, III , 480fT.; XV-XVI, 531f1.; and
sp
XX , 552fT.) , both of which include what we may call complementary or mirror-image
sp
'revisits' analogous to that involving th e murder in the office next door of Harry Jones
tn
by Can ina in Th e Big Sleep, That these luxuriously appointed private dw ellings are to be
considered offices can be persuasivel y argued from th e source of the livelihood of the ur
various males who use them as places in which to meet the wealthy women on whom
they prey: at which point the Geiger house in the inaugural Th e Rig Sleel) retroactively wl
comes to range itself under this category (underscoring the peculiar slippage, in
M,
Chandler's unconscious, betw een male homosexuality and high-class male 'p rostitu­ Inl

tion', whose gigolo practitioners he seems to have felt to be somehow 'effeminate' as pI'

well) .

Yet if we consider that the Geiger house - itself also like Monet's cathedrals seen I
under a variety of weathers, from driving rain via afternoon sunlight to moonlit night­ fUl
is something like a professional office in the way in which it houses Geiger's other line ho
of 'work', namely nude photography with a view towards blackmail, we begin to we
entertain a new kind of extension , whi ch leads to a furth er sub-category with a rich new all,
harvest of appropriate examples. Su ch are indeed virtually any of the institutional COL

spaces that provide for the satisfaction of the (other) 'vices' of the rich: not merely tor
Geiger's 'o the r' office, the pornographic bookstore, but also and above all th e casinos ch:
and gambling joints in which Chandler's various heiresses run up illicit IOUs and are ref
subsequently blackmailed - from the Cypress Club (in Th e Big Sl eel)) through its various dis
avatars in Farewell, lV1y Lovely (the Belvedere Club) and The H igh \Vindow (Eddie Prue's or~
Idle Valley Club, which has a virtually posthumous formal reappearance in The Long sul:
Goodbye): the subsequent wartime Lady in the Lake can only offer the London-style male mu
club of Kingsley as a stru ctural substitute. Even here , however, in this general are

42
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

subcategory of the gradual e n la rge me nt of th e private club or casino into the whole
closed enclave of the private development with its gates and private police, we witness
something like a replay (or to use the new Chandlerian category, a 'playback') of the
transformation in reverse of dwelling into office. Now all at on ce even more illicit needs
associate themselves with these offices, in particular the drug sources : from the
relativel y high-class doctors' offices (Amthor's in FML , Almore's in LL) to the Bay City
dope houses or 'p r iva te hospitals', such as Dr Sonderborg's in Farew ell, My Lovely. This
return movem ent might well lead us on into the even seedier lobbies of the various
Chandlerian hotels (a combination tryst-space and rundown dwelling, the Prescott
Hotel in San Bernadino, is extensively explored and deployed in LL , XIII, 523fT), that
now eje ct us back, at th e other end of this rather skewed class spectrum, into the lower
sph eres of the impoverished petty bourgeoisie, into the various offices or dwelling
spaces of the down-and-out. (The shift has literally been act ed out for us in the illicit
transfer of Geiger's pornographic loan library from the bookstore on Las Palmas to the
unlu cky Brody's rundown apartment on Randall Place [BS, X, 32-3].)
As has been suggested above, Th e High Window is uniquely interesting for the way in
which it yields a double-barrelled identification of both these variants, in Elisha
Morningstar's office and George Anson Phillip's virtually archetypal Bunker Hill
murder room, a dwelling that is on ce again , for a classical loser of his stamp, both
private and public all at once and does double duty as an offi ce in the literal sense (he
makes an appointment here with Marlowe) .
Leaving aside the peculiar exte nsio n of this not-so-genteel misery, filled with broken
furniture and dust, to the various offices of Chandlerian poli ce officers, crooked and
honest alike, we soon see that at the end of this particular structural sequence of forms
we have suddenly re-emerged into familiar territory, which is however hereby dramatic­
ally and unexpectedly transformed . For th e final office we necessarily confront at the
conclusion of this lengthy inv entory can only be Marlowe's own, the romantic over­
tones of which are as indistinguishable from his unique persona as the other social
character types are from th eir particular spaces. Which is also to say , as I have
repeatedly attempted to demonstrate, that they and he are both at a ce rt ain structural
distance from these urban pla ces as well. (vVe have , in other words, neither a Balzacian
organic identification , nor a Flaubertian-Sartrean radical contingency, but a kind of
substitution of an architectural language for that of individual characters : it is not so
much that these ' peop le' in Chandler are their spaces, as that these spaces in Chandler
are 'characters' or actants.i

43
 SHADES OF NOIR

As for Marlowe himself, as is well known. i' we begin with the classi cal private eye's soc
office at 615 Cahuenga Boulevard, an ostentatiously em p ty and dust-filled space pn
without a secretary in the inevitable outer office (where only bills arrive in the mail), wh
which is archetypally a place of waiting (for clients, for phone calls , for envelopes or ave
packages one mails back to oneself) in which , in equally typically Chandlerian displace­ the
ment, this particular plot function is used as a cover or a structural pretext for urban or soc
ecological perception, a monadic window from which something of the deeper truth of log
Los Angeles is able to be disclosed: eqt
I
It was gelling dark outside now . The rushing so und of the traffic had died a little and the so
air from the open window, not yet cool fr om the night, had that tired end-of-the-day smell to (
of dust, automobile exhaust, sunlight rising from hot walls and sidewalks, the remote smell for
of food in a thousand restaurants, and perhaps, drifting down from the residential hills (B,
above Hollywood - if you had a nose like a hunting dog - a touch of that peculiar tomcat
nat
smell that eu calyptus trees give off in warm weather. (HW, XII, 372)
un.
cit)
According to the economy I have described above, Marlowe's living quarters (the
om
Bristol Apartments on Bristol Avenue , then the Hobart Arms at Franklin and Ken­

no

more) will become something like extensions of his office in this respect. What it is
La}
crucial to observe is that we may d edu ce a momentous change , not merely in
itir
Chandler's narrative form itself, but in the history and the social relations from which
the particular narrative shape of his content springs, when, in The Long Goodbye, we find
that Marlowe has moved from the classic urban apartment building into a private illl l
sev.
home : 'I was living that year in a house on Yucca Avenue in the Laurel Canyon district.
the
It was a small hillside house on a dead-end street with a long flight of redwood steps to
anc
the front door and a grove of eucalyptus trees along th e way .. . ,9 It is the end of an
sys
era! and the moment at which Marlowe's marriage (to money) and relocation to La Jolla
become unexpectedly imaginable.
thi:

see

II po:

ma

The system we have initially traced here - our first , essentially synchronic one - now cal
suggests two further comments. The first has to do with closure as such. For there can wh
be no question that this particular 'map' of the social totality is a complete and closed bee
semiotic system: unified by the category of the 'o ffice ', its various positions and tel'
inversions are able in a satisfactory and satisfying manner to span the breadth of the of

44
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

social syste m from wealth to po verty an d (in th e area o f cr im e and vice) fr om public to
private. This is, to be sure, an id eologically motivated vision or scale model of th e social,
which strategicall y o mits o r represses production as suc h , alo n g with th e law-abiding,
avera ge, p eaceful middle class es themselves (althou gh it would be a mistake to imply
thereby that any nonideological , 'scientific', representationally ad equate map of th e
social could be imagined to tak e its pla ce - following Althusser's definition of ideo­
10gy, 1O all visions o f the social in this se nse will be equ ally ideological, altho ugh not
equivalent in political or eve n aesthetic valu e).
But the very closure of this system n ow presents a problem in its own right. We have
so far largely follow ed th e implications o f a classic structuralist aestheti c, which tend ed
to conflate structural systematicity and ae sth etic valu e, or at least th e aesthetic effect of
form al closure and form al satisfaction . Although it is nowh ere very explicitl y a rg ued
(Barthes comes closest in various passin g remarks), the su ggestion is that a work or a
narrative is felt to be completed when it has been able to touch all the bases in so me
underlying se miotic system; that unconscious cogniti ve acknowled gement o f systemati­
city is then transferred to the surface of the work of art, whi ch can be p ronoun ced in
one way or another a full form, a com p leted thing. 11 Indeed , all four of Chandler's first
novels (with the few specific historical modifi cations we have noted in Th e Lady in the
Lake) do su cceed in touching all the rel evant bases and are in that se nse very complete
itineraries through the social system of the Chandlerian cognitive map.
But that is precisely th e problem, sin ce we started from the (not merel y personal)
impression that Th e High Willdow was somehow , despite the rare qu ality and intensity of
several of its individual episodes, distin ctly less satisfying as a n overall narrative than
the other three. How are we to acco un t for thi s impression , given that th e sa me social
and semiotic system is in operation in this nov el as in the others a n d th at it is to this
system that we hav e been tempted to attribute their value and aesthetic e ff ect?
The obvious first ste p lies in a cr itique of th e limits of what we have don e so far: but
this must be a twofold critique, both empirical and methodological. We ma y be gin by
seeing what was omitted from the previous system , but we should not neglect th e
possibility that it is th e very way in which the semiotic co ncep t of a system is fram ed that
may be at issue here. In the first case, it is conceivable that another system might be
constructed and projected that would n ot be alt ogether coterminous with the first, and
which might allow the differen ce between Th e High Winduw and the other no vels to
become visible. In the second case, the dissatisfaction with o u r an alytic results would
tend to mov e us toward a more general cr itiq ue of semiotics as such , as a system capable
of including or processing cer tain kinds of materials of a uniform type - wh ether th ese

45
 SHADES OF NOIR

be sernes or realities. Su ch a critique would th en lead us not automatically to posit an

alt ernati ve typ e of system , but rather, more dial ecti call y, to designat e co ncep tua lities or
r eflexivitie s, negativities, absen ces, which do not register on the esse n tia lly positivistic
apparatus of the semiotic recordin g device.
I think , for e xa m p le, of som e of th e trul y wondrou s e ffects in TIll' Lad)' ill the Lak e
whi ch ca n scarcel y be co nveyed by the socio-sparial notations we ha ve devised so far,
sin ce they d erive from th e swooping sense of a radical sh ift in wo rlds . Such an eff ect is
produced , for instan ce , after Marl owe makes his way d own from Fawn Lake, where h e
ha s discovered a dead bod y, explored th e tourist village and th e cabins, had length y
e nc o u n te r s with the local sheriff, a nd finall y inte r ro ga ted the rath er seedy bellhops in
the hotel in Sa n Bernadino where the Heein~ suspect is likely to have spent the night .
Th e very next day, in Bay Cit y (Santa Moni ca) , he visits the expen sive hom e of one of
those pla ybo ys we hav e alread y m enti on ed , which stands across the street from the
eq u ally expensive hom e (or 'o ffice ') of a sh ady societ y doctor. Th e shift fr om Fawn
Lake to Bay C ity is so e xtrao rd in a ry as to mak e us imagine we have opened th e pa~es of
a different novel. We ex pe r ie nce so m e th ing like a ~ en eri c-ontol o gi cal dis continuit y, a
well-nigh ph enomenological subs! it u tion of worlds, whi ch ca n no t, for that very reason ,
be described in purel y social terms. Lavery , for instance , has visited the lak e; and th e
Kin gsleys, whose cabin Marlowe went to see, clearl y inhabit both worlds, which can
scarcel y be seen as city and country in th e old er a ~ricultural sense , but at best in terms
of an opposition between touri st industry and workpl ace. Still , what used to be call ed
nature must somehow be in play here, if only because of the d eployment of mountain
roads and th e extraordinary images of th e drown ed body, whi ch first 'waves' hesirat­
in~ly beneath the wat er and th en boils up to the su r face alon~ with acc o m p a ny ing
objects ('an a ncien t rotted plank popped sud d e n ly through th e surface , stru ck out a
full foot of its .ia~~ ed e nd, and fe ll back with a fiat slap and floated off' [U" VI, 499]) .
And the c nd in j; - th e soldiers o n ~uard on the brid ge across th e Puma Lake dam ­
bears witn ess to an unusual scmic co m bina tio n of history, nature and human produ c­
tion rare eve n in Chandler.
In this r espect, it is also worth recalling other combinations of motifs in these nov els
that one mi~ht have been tempt ed to think of as purel y aesth eti c o r formal, but that in
this cont e xt now begin to appear as the in sistence , through a purel y social-tvpologica]
fabric, of other ord ers of being or reality. Th ese are th e colour motifs, by whi ch people
and their settings (Vivian Reg an 's 'wh ite' a pa rt me n t , the 'grey' insistentl y associat ed
with Eddi e Mars) are as it were reunifi ed into metaphori cal actauts in which th e
relationships between cha racte rs and space or furniture are relatively more organic

46
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

and qu ite different from th e ten sions and syn copated inconsisten cies described a bo ve.
And they also include th e meteorological rhythms , p articularl y in Th e Big S leep, wh ere a
host o f precise and vivid indications signals th e cha nge of weather from scene to scene ,
thereby reuniting the interior cha p te rs, th e indoor expe r ie nces as it were, to the
atm ospheric unity of th e Los An geles basin as a whole.l " H ere too, th en, a different
kind of ,totalization ' can be found at work , whi ch has nothing to do with th e overall plot
itself o r with the social- character system , but which somehow ske tches in th e presence
of som e vast er, abs ent natural unit y beyond th is ep he me ral set of episodes in pun ctual
hum an tim e .
In a ny case, Los Angeles has so often been thought of as a different kind of city ­
sunbelt m eg alopolis of th e future, portending fund amental changes in the classic
urban structu re and inc orporatin g mod ern tran sport media in new str uct u ral ways I:l _
that it is worth allowing for the possibility that (q uite unlike H ammett's San Francisco,
for exa m p le) this particular deployment of th e 'urban ' includes nature in a dialecticall y
different way, whi ch ma y esca pe thc old er kinds of se m ic oppositions.
Everything I have said so far, how ever, su ggests the n ecessity of thinking th ese
form al peculiarities in Chandler according to so m e sch em e that is ca p able of Hexing
dualisms whil e remaining d eeply suspicious of th em, and that programmatically avoids
the attribution of an y a [ni ori content to terms hitherto implicitl y p redefined by suc h
traditional oppositions as subject a n d obj ect or nature and culture. This is, as is well
known , the very programm c of H cidegger's philosophical revolution , and I hope it will
not be taken as an ideological e nd o rse me n t of thi s particular philosoph y wh en I
suggest that its speculative machin ery - particularly as e vide nc ed in The Origins ojthe
Work o/A rt 1'1 - ma y well turn out to offer a theoretical solutio n to some of th e probl ems
posed by Chandler's narrativc st ructures. Th e juxtaposition of th e detective story
novelist and the Central European philosoph er-sage - rend ered eve n more in con­
gruou s by th e palpable hi gh-cultural conservatism of Heidegger him self, and his m ore
general suspicion of mod ernity and te chnology as such , let alone of formal and
aesthetic reproducibilit y - ma y bejustified, from a different angle, by the wa y in which
the philosopher's aesthetic proposition assimilat es in advance the act of po etic inau g­
uration he wishes to think to other forms of th e inau g-ural or the originative : to the
philosophical itself, for ex a m p le , which reopens th e question of Being; or to the
religious; or to th e political , in whi ch a new type of societ y and new social relations find
themselves - from Romulus to Lenin - institut ed in what ca n onl y be described as a
revolutionary act and break. 1:, Although Los Angeles lacks any radical legend ary
found ational act of thi s kind , the h istorical novelt y of its str uctu re - whi ch ha s so often

47
 SHADES OF NOIR

been transferred to Ch a n d le r, as th e writer equally often consid e red to be tha t city's war
e p ic poet - ma y e nco u rage us to co ns ider the rel evance of Heidegger's argum ent whi
which, to be sure , mobilizes the fa r more classical texts of the Greek temple and the In t
more explosive modernity of Van Go gh's oil painting. An y attempt to adapt narrative mel
as such to Heidegger's scheme would see m , however, to d o it violence at th e sa me time the
as (no matter how classical the narrative in question) it would require a good d eal of thir
analytical and int erpretive ingenuity.
For the terms o f H eidegger's aesth eti c - which seek s, as we shall see, to include and InC'

transcend space as suc h - are still e xp ressed in a spa tial metaphor that tends to nur
immobilize them , to impose on th em a kind of static condition that ma y initiall y make Mir
them seem more suited to th e visual arts and architecture (something his own mal
examples, as we have seen, do nothing to overcome). Indeed, he predicates the work of by 1
art (and, by implication only, the other inaugural acts I have enumerated) as e mer ging mel
fro m a gap or rift between World and Earth. I will of co u rse attempt to name this gap tern
or rift in other ways and with codes quite unrelated to th ese, but it is initially clear, none can
the less, that suc h language continues to figure incommensurability on th e model of the I
mountain crevice, the glacial crack or fissure , the unbridgeable chasm o r can yon In (

between plateaux that can no lon ger be reunited or e ven recombined in th e unity of a wht
single thought: th e world of Fawn Lak e as it were, versus the world of Altair Street in me:
Bay City. But this is not yet a satisfactory way of reformulating the Heideggerian 'gap', eve
sin ce in its initial version both sid es of the tension seem ed to be given to us in the terms me:
of on e, the Earth , while in our translation it is the opposite term, World, whi ch serves dea
this same fun ction . gel"
Heidegger's d eployment of this opposition at the moment he touch es on the art rad
object as such points a way out of this dilemma. It is th e materiality of th e obj ect, he tells eith
us, the sonority of the language , th e smoothness of th e marble, or the slick density of as 1
the oil paint, that marks the part of Earth in it; whil e it is the semiotic features of the din
work, the meanings and meaningfulness - what is paraphrasable in the verse, the opc
functions of the building, the obj ect imitated by the p ainting - that indicat e the part of siru
World. What seems cr ucial here - and specifically Heideggerian - is that th e opposition 1
between Earth and World be und erstood as irreducible in the last instance , no matter eve
how much each becomes implicated in the other. no matter how cr ush in g the His
preponderance of one term in their struggle. Thus, the work of art itself, exh ibited in He
that worldly pla ce that is the mu seum, and drawn into a web of social and worldly 010

relationships - those of sale and inv estment, interpretation and evaluation , pedagogy, din
tradition , sacred reference - must always som eh ow sca nd alo usly ex ceed all those sea

48
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

s worldly relationships by the ultimate and irreducible materiality of its earthly element,
which cannot become social : there is a colour that cannot be made altogether human.
In the same way, clearly, th e work's e me r ge nce as a kind of aerolith in sheer space - a
meteor from the void , takin g a place , being measurable, weighing, being accessible to
the physical senses - can never quite e n title it to full inert status as a thing among other
f things. Allegorically, indeed, this primal opposition in Heidegger's aesthetic can be
read as a refusal of fundamental philosophical dualisms while acknowledging the
inevitability of th eir existe nce and p ersistence. The meanings of World su ggest a ny
number o f idealisms in whi ch reality is thought to have been successfully assimilated to
Mind once and for all , whil e the resistance of Earth marks the resurgence of the vari ous
materialisms that try to stage their se nse of th e fragility of meanings in physical re ality
by way of meaningful words. The ontology th at wishes to escape ideologi cal imprison­
ment in eithe r id ealism or materialism ca n then only do so by foretelling the inevitable
temptations of both and using them against eac h other in a permanent tension that
can not be resolved .
I will suggest, th en, that World, from the H eideggerian perspective, be understood
in different term s as History itself, that is to sa y, as th e ensemble of acts a n d efforts
whereby human beings hav e attempted, sin ce the dawn of a human age, to bring
meanings o ut of th e limits and constraints of th eir surroundings. Earth, meanwhile, is
eve ryth in g meaningless in those surroundings and what betrays the re sistance and
inertia of shee r Matter as suc h and extends as far as what human beings hav e named as
death, contingency, accident, bad lu ck, or finitude. Wh at is distinctive about Heideg­
ger's proposal is th e insist en ce not merely th at these two 'dimensions' of reality are
radicall y in commen surable with ea ch other, and somehow un relatable in terms of
eithe r, but also that philosophy, and following it, aestheti cs, and perhaps eve n politics
as well, must now find its sp ecific vocation , not in th e attempt to paper over th e
difference or to m ystify it and theorize it awa y, so mu ch as to exacerbate a nd hold it
open as an ultimate situation o f unresolvable tension. (1 avoid the word 'contradiction ',
since it is so often wrongly felt to promise its own resolution in idealist fashion.)
This is the perspective from whi ch the work of art emerges, not to heal this rift or
eve n to assuage what is seen as an in curable wound in our very being, this gap between
History and Matt er, or World and Earth. Rather, the gre at or authentic works (for
I-Ieidegger's aestheti c, like aesthetic syste ms as suc h, ne cessaril y includes a normative
moment) a re those whose vocation consists in holdin g the two incommensurable
dimensions apart and in allowing us th ereby to glimpse th em simultaneously in all their
sca nd alo us irreconcilability: to grasp Earth or Matter in all its irreducible materiality,

49
 SHADES OF NOlA

even and particularl y th ere wh ere we have been thinking about it in terms of meanin g
and human and social eve n ts : a nd to gra sp World or History in its most fundam ental
historicities even wh ere we have been assuming it to be inert nature o r nonsocial s
landscape. Although its aestheti c relevance would have been utterl y alien a nd repu g­
nant to him, Adorno aptl y cap tu re d th e spirit of this alternation-in-tension wh en in
another context he r ecommend ed that we co ns ta n tly defamiliarize ou r philosophies of
human history by rethinking th em in terms of natural history, and d em ystify our
positivistic impressions o f n atural history by thinking them through again in historicist
and social ways.!" Rut in H eid eg ger, a t least in these privileged instances among whi ch r
the work of art is numbered , th e a lte r na tio n becomes a blinding simultaneity, both <!
dimensions now momentarily coexisting . r
The rift in Chandler, however, if we are able to posit one, can surely not tak e o n so t
benign an appearan ce as that of th e openin g of a human and social drama out onto an (.
essentially natural landscape , particularl y since that landscape has alread y be en itself r
full y humanized by th e process of urban co nstr uc tio n, and also sin ce th e socia l system f
we have di scov erd at work in Ch andl er ha s alread y tended to endow itself with spatial o
expression, so th at th e cha racte r types are a lready at least styles of architecture a nd a
gardening, and associat ed with specific neighbourhoods or eve n eco logies (as Hanh am tl
called them). Nothing is indeed quite so d epressingl y human or soc ia l as th e tourist
industry itself, so th at th e di stin ctiv e ph enomenological 'wo rld' we ha ve po sited for P
Fawn Lake cannot hav e mu ch to do with its survival as the sh ee rly natural and tI
inhuman, in contrast to th e world of human streets and occu pations and passions down a:
below. Yet Fawn Lak e is in another se nse something like the end of a traj ecto ry , a point If1
beyond which n either writ er nor character can seem to go, and whi ch marks th e e nd o f st
the road by being som eh ow beyond it. We may here want to recall th e eq ua lly tl
memorable endin g of Farcuicl], My Lovely which, also couched in the langu ag e of P
distance or space, seems to att empt to transcend it by cancelling it out : ' It was a cool day el
and very clear. You could see a long way - but not as far as Velma had gone' (FMI " XL , If

3 15). It is not because Fawn Lak e is associated with death after th e fashion of this e:
sentence that we r each th e e nd of th e road as such but, rather, the other way a ro u nd: it C
is because of Fawn Lak e's spatial peculiarity and involution that the th eme of d eath ca n
win back su ch power of evoc atio n .
Farewell, My Looel» is in man y ways Chandler's most ambitious novel, as well as his
most romantic; and th ereb y offers as promising an occasion as an y oth er for an
examination of what , in th e e n u me ratio n of the separate and sp ecific e p isodes , see ms aI
to exceed that socio-t ypoJo gical syste m we synopticall y abstracted from th e superposi­

50
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

tion of the four novels upon each other. The novel includes the spaces of the rich (the
Grayles, though less fully developed than in The Big Sleep or The High Window), the
spaces of poverty of marginalized people and things (jess Florian's house); it also
r.,
1 includes one of the memorable playboy villas - that of Marriott, whose function can be
n situated somewhere between Geiger's house and the various gigolo establishments ­
If along with the usual gambling casinos, several distinctive dens of vice (Arnthor's oddly
r modernistic dwelling and Dr Sonderborg's 'hospital'), as well as different police offices,
.t including Marlowe's own. But Chandler tried to move, not always successfully, into
new territory here; the unresolved episode of Anne Riordan introduces the possibility
1 of a partnership-romance to which Chandler will not return until after Marlowe's
marriage. Meanwhile, Marlowe is in this novel knocked out several times, by a blow to
the head and by drugs, something Dick Powell exploited memorably in his film version
(Murder, My Sweet, 1944), but which is not completely consistent with the premium
f placed on disabused lucidity by the voice-over format. This may, indeed give us our
first clue: in the attempt to draw the nonconscious, the other of conscious observation
or of a signed 'point-of-view' into the narrative, Chandler was always careful to keep at
a certain generic distance from the adventure format (in which, as with Dick Francis,
the hero is regularly beaten up, tortured, pursued, etcetera).
Such moments - which imitate death itself by allowing the conscious or named
personality to come into contact with its own end or extinction - also seem to transform
the spaces at which they occur. Sonderborg's 'hospital' is, to be sure, not so metaphoric­
ally outside the world, but Marlowe's first bout of literal unconsciousness is even more
interesting. It takes place literally at the end of a road, at the dead end of an unbuilt
street beyond which Marlowe and Marriott are supposed to rendezvous with the
thieves who have offered to sell back Mrs Crayle's Fei Tsui jade. The place, called
Purissima Canyon, is marked 'by a white fence of four-by-fours' (FML, IX, 176) at the
end of a paved street; and this white wooden barrier (like the memorable wooden fence
in Antonioni's Blow-Up, which is neither symbol nor contingent reality-effect, neither
expressive, semiotic, nor social sign, is surely one of the most fascinating things in all of
Chandler, as though it somehow spelled the very end of space itself.
But, if this is what we are looking for, any reader of Farewell, My Lovely knows that its
ultimate strong form is to be found elsewhere in that novel: in the dramatic closing
sequence on the gambling boats moored beyond the three-mile jurisdictional limit,
riding on the open sea in front of Bay City. These boats - immense floating casinos ­
are indeed virtually as far from Los Angeles as one ever gets in Chandler (save in the
last two novels, where we touch down in Kansas and Mexico respectively):

51
 SHADES OF NOIR

A faint music came o ver th e wat e r a nd music over th e water can neve r be a nyt hi ng bu t co n:
lovely. T he R oyal Crown see med to ride as stea dy as a pie r o n its fo ur hawsers. It s la nd in g dep
stage was lit u p like a thea ter marqu ee . T he n all this fade d int o rem oten ess a nd a not he r,
ther
older sm aller bo at be gan to snea k o ut of th e night to wards us . It was not much to look a t. A
witl·
converted seagoing fre ighter with scum med a nd ruste d pl ates , th e su perstru cture cut
cog:
d own to th e boat d eck level, and ab ove th at two stump y m astsj ust high en ou gh fo r a radio
doo
antenna. T he re was light o n the Mo ntecito also a nd mu sic float ed ac ross the wet da r k sea .
The spooning co uples too k th eir teeth o ut of ea ch othe r's necks a nd sta red at the sh ip an d
Bur
of ,
gig'gled . (FML , XXXV, 286)
rota
incl:
Alth ough th e social relations o n boa r d a re not m uch different fr om those we h ave left
behind (Br u ne tte here sta ndi n g in for th e stock Chandle r typ e o f th e likeable ga ngs te r in il
whii
with a heart o f go ld ), Marlowe's adven tu reso me approach and final ar r ival there have
II
all th e m ythi c qualities of th e pe rilous j ourney, th e p assage to an other realm or world ;
Sleel
while th e sea itsel f glitte rs with all that min eral fa scin ati on, th at radically nonhuman ,

nan

cold, even unn atural my stery that the ocea n o fte n h as for writers like th e essentially
dee:
urban C h a nd ler, who do not specialize in sea sto ries , o r for cultu res th at a re nonmari­
sta te
tim e . This is to say th at - especially since we d o not fantasize Los Angeles as a port city
so n
(unlike Hammett's San Fran cisco which memorably greets th e arr ival of the La Paloma ) ­
part
the liquid ele me n t d oes not exist h ere within th e n arrative world , is not a p art o f its
of tl
se m iotic system, but rath er lies be yond it an d cancels it as su ch . We need a str on ge r
whe
negativ e for this unimaginable e xte rior fa ce o f th at monad (th at we ca n ou rselve s on ly
Gei~
witness from with in, as a com plete world, as precisel y without limits) , p articul arl y since
anot
the inner syste m is itself made up of a ho st o f d if fe re n tia ted negati ons (co n traries and
co n trad icto r ies alike) abo u t whi ch wha t o ne wants to say is th at th ey too - negati ves and
positi ves alike, all swe p t up together in a jumble o f semic existe n ts - are precisely wh at w
thi s ch ill outer realm refuses and repudiates. Nor is it really worthwhile pro no u ncing w
th e term 'O th e r' (or 'Othern ess'), which so strongly reaffi rms its sec re t internal d
relatio ns with the thing-itself. T h e sea is here clea nsed even o f o the rness ; a nd it would
be temptin g to associate it with death itself, th at non pla ce a nd nonspace where Velma
goes , an d wh e re the big sleep of th e ea rlier no vel is slep t. But eve n thi s str ikes me as Ii
se n timen ta lism, a n d the att r ib ut io n o f a n inn er-worldl y con te n t to a nonspace whose g
a
fun ction it is, rather - a n ti-se m iotic yet poeti c all at th e same tim e - precisely to
tl
ap p ro p r ia te even th e word death itself a nd to lend it a sp eci fic, private, a nd h auntingly
a
Chandlerian tone .
In othe r words, d eath itself is in Chand le r so meth ing like a spa tial co nce p t, a spa tial sr

52
 THE SY NOPTIC CHANDLER

constr uctio n; as is na tu re , when a t its far thest verge - staring down into th e uncom mo n
depths of Fawn Lak e - it to uc hes on th e outer ed ge of Being itself. We fin d here
therefore the operat ion of a seco nd syste m or di mensio n in coo rd ina tion yet in tension
with th e firs t socio-se rnioric o ne . This last organ izes people a n d th eir d wellin gs into a
cognitive map of Los An geles th at Marlowe ca n be see n to ca n vass, pushing th e
doorbells of so man y social types, fr om the great mansion s to th e j u n k-filled rooms on
Bunker Hill or West 54 th Place . But th is d im ension - in H eidegge rian lan gu age , that
of World - ha s no gro u n d ing or resonance unless it circ ulates slowly against th e
rotation of th at other, deepe r anti-syste m whi ch is that of Earth itself, and which can
include space and 'n ature' on ly a t the price of transcend in g th em a nd e nvelop ing th em
in its own global negati on , cou p ling th em with th e n on sp ace of th e ou te r limit, th e
white wood en barrier at th e e nd of th e world.
In retrosp ect, thi s ultimat e d imension ca n be d et ected in var ious pla ces in The Big
Sleep as well , a nd not o n ly in th e oil d erricks tha t mark th e sea m be tween a preh isto ric
nature and the fitful traces o f heroic pol itical histo ry in th is social world whi ch , after th e
deeds of Ru sty Regan 's IR A or the Ge neral's Me xican Wa r an cestor, a p pea rs to be in a
state or cond ition of the most fee b le su rviva l, warming itself in its own decaden ce with
so man y fo r ms of vice . (T h is will, how e ve r, be th e last tim e in C h an dler's work that this
particular ele giac not e is sounded.) But we fail to come to te r ms with the pe culi ar form
of this na rrati ve, wh ich can a t first see m broken -backed an d clumsily di vid ed in half,
when th e sea rc h for Ed d ie Ma rs's wife is sud d e nly su bstitu te d for th e com p letio n o f th e
Geiger matter, unless we se e th at the ga ra ge in which th e fugitive is held is itself yet
anothe r suc h place at th e very edge of Be ing:

I drove north across the river, o n into Pasadena, thro u gh Pasad ena an d alm ost a t o nce I
was in o ra nge g ro ves. T he tum bling rai n was solid wh ite spray in th e headli gh ts. T he
windsh ield wip er co u ld hardl y kee p th e g lass clea r e no ug h to see th rou gh . But not eve n the
dren ch ed da r kness co u ld hid e the flawless lines of the oran ge trees wheeling away like
endless spo kes int o the night.
Cars passed with a teari ng hiss a nd a wave o f di rt y sp ray . T he h igh wa yje rked th ro ug h a
little to wn th at was all pa ckin g ho uses and she ds, and railway sid in gs nu zzlin g th em . T he
groves thinned out a nd drop ped away to th e south a nd the road climbed and it was cold
and to th e north th e black foo thi lls cr ou ch ed closer a nd sent a bitt er wind whippi ng dow n
their flanks. T hen faintly o ut of th e d ar k two yello w vap o r ligh ts glowe d high up in the air
and a neon sign be tween th em said 'Welcome to Realito. '
Frame houses were spaced far back from a wide main street, then a sud d e n knot of
stores, th e lights of a dru gsto re be hind fogged glass, the fly-clu ster o f ca rs in fron t o f th e

53
 SHADES OF NOIR

movie theater, a dark bank on a corne r with a clock sticking ou t over the sidewalk and a
group of people standing in th e rain looking at its windows, as if they were some kind of a
show. I went on . Empty fields closed in again.
Fate stage-managed the whol e thing. Be yond Realito , just a bo ut a mile be yond, the

highway took a curve and the rain fooled me and I went too close to the shoulder. My right

s
front tire let go with an angry hiss . Before I could stop the right rear went with it. I jammed
I:
the car to a stop, half on the pavement, half on the shoulder, got out and Hashed a spotlight
t
around. I had two Hats and on e spare . The Hat butt of a heavy galv anized tack stared at me
I:
from the front tire.
t
The edge of the pavement was littered with them. They had been swept off, but not far
enough off.
I snapped the Hash off and stood there breathing rain and looking up a side road at a

yellow light. It seemed to com e from a skylight. The skylight could belong to a garage, th e

garage co u ld be run by a man named Art Huck, and there co uld be a frame house next

door to it. I tucked my chin down in my collar and started tow ards it, then went back to

unstrap the license holder from th e steering post and put it in m y po cket. I leaned lower

under the wheel. Behind a weighted Hap, directly under my right leg as I sat in the ca r,

there was a hidden compartment. There were two guns in it. One belonged to Eddie Mars's

boy Lanny and one belonged to me . I took Lanny's. It would have had more practice than

mine . I stuck it nose down in an inside pocket and started up th e side road.

The garage was a hundred yards from the highway. It showed the highway a blank sid e

wall. I played the flash on it qui ckl y. 'A rt Huck - Auto Repairs a nd Painting.'(BS, XXV II,

IIG-III)

2
Indeed, another kind of inquiry might want to make some connections between this
spatial involution and the intermittent visions of evil in Chandler (for not the least
original feature of his modification of the detective story is that his crimes do without
3
villains; or, if you prefer, the villains are social - police co rru p tio n - rather than
antisocial in the conventional meaning of this word) . But here, in this remote garage,
we find the more sinister Canino, who poisoned Harry Jones and prepares to torture
Marlowe to death. Canino's fun ction , however, is not finall y to suppl y us with a villain
and with evil, but rather, like the space itself, to stand as the Other and the negation of
that true but human and inner-worldly murder that is the shooting of Regan (a n d
indeed the source of the other violent crimes throughout the novel). Meanwhile, as for 4

nature itself - as though the remote location of the hideaway were not enough, and in
the spirit of the meteorology of the other chapters - Chandler drowns this one

54
 THE SYNOPTIC CHANDLER

pouring rain , deep inland restoring the watery eleme n t that is the sign of the
nonhuman axis of matter in these novels.
We may now swiftly conclude, for our inquiry has virtually answered itself: Th e High
Window (for we began with its problematic features some pages back) fails to have the
signal resonance of th e other Chandlers - despite its remarkable episodic work ­
because it utterly lacks this dimension of the spatial outside or underside deployed in
them. Did Chandler feel, perhaps, that great height - the fall into the void , not waving
but 'screaming with fear' - might somehow complete the centre of his narrative with
the necessary absence ? The case itself, however, is closed and long since filed away.

NOTES

I. References to th e novels a rc from Th e
Raymond Chandler Ommhus (N ew YOI,k:
Mod ern Library, 1975) and will be made
within the text by means of the following
abbreviations: Th e Bi g Sl eep (1939) = BS;
Farewell, My [.ovel)' (1940) = FMI. ; Th e Hi gh
Window (1942) = HW ; Th e [,ad)' ill the Lake
(194 ,\) = LL. Since Chandler's nov els ha ve
been rep rinted in many different ed itio ns,
tbere foll ows , for the co n ve n ience of the
reader, th e number of the chapter in
question , in Roman numerals; and fin ally the
page refe ren ce in the Modern Library edition.
2. Sec T ania Modleski's brilliant chapter on
soaps as an emergent form of dcccntred
narrative in L oving with a Vengeanre (H amd en,
CT.: Archon, 1982), p . 90fT.
3, Quoted in m y essay 'O n Raymond Ch andl er ',
Southern R evi ew, vol. VI, no . :1 (Summer 1970) ,
pp . 624-50. The read er of this old er text may
wish silently to correct an und erstandable, yet
exasperating misprint on page 626; for 'take
for example some perfectly signifi cant event',
read 'take for e xa m ple some perfectly
insignificant event'.
4. Radio is thus impeccabl y Sartrean ; see the
well-known reflections on narrative in J.-P.
Sartre, Nausea (Ne w York : New Directions,
1964), trans. L. Alexander, p . ssn.
5. I like this one, whi ch might still 'render'
southern Ca lifo rn ia today: 'O n the highway
th e lights of th e str eaming ca rs made an
almost solid beam in both directions. The big
corn poppers were rolling north growling as
th ey went and festoon ed all over with green
and yellow overhand lights ' (FMI. , IX , 176).
6. 'Dwelling' (Wolmen) is here a gerundiv e
formation taken in the Heideggerian sense of
'Ba uen Wohn en Denken', ill Yortnve und
Aufsatze (Neske, 1985), pp , 139-56.
7. Roland Barthcs, 'L'effet de reel ',
Communications, vol, II (March 196H),
pp.84-9.
8. An indispensable aid to these sites is available
in the form of The Raymond Chandler M yster)'
Map, published by Aaron Blake Publishers
(1800 S. Robertson Blvd, Suite 130, Los
Angeles , CA 90035), 19H5.
9. The [,DUg Goodbye (Boston : Houghton Mifflin ,
1954), p. 4 .
10. The reference is to the addendum to L.
Althusser, ' Id eologica l Stat e Apparatuses', in
Lenin and Philosophy (New York : Monthly
Review Press, 1971).
I I, But see , for a more orthodox application of
the structuralist ae sthetic, my 'Spatial Systems

55
 SHADES OF NOIR
in N orth by N orthwest', in Slavoj Zize k, ed. ,
Everything You Always Wanted to Know about
La can but W ere Afraid to Ask H itchcock (Lo ndon :
Verso, 1992).
12. Th ese motifs ar e so mewha t more fully
explored in the first version of this cha p te r',
published as 'L'E claternent du recit et la
cloture caJifornienne', trans. M. Meki es, in
Litterature, no. 49 (Feb rua ry 1983 ),
pp.89-101.
13. But see Rayner Banham 's wond erful Los
Angeles: Th e Arch itectur e ofFour Ecologie s
(London : Penguin , 1971) .
14. In R. Hofstadtcr and R. Kuhns, eds.,
Philosophies of Art and BPfluty (New York:
Modern Library, 19(4), pp. 649-701.
15. Derrida's anal ysis of thi s Heid cggerian text
(in Jacqu es Derrida. 'Restitu tio ns ', Th e Truth in
Painting [Chicago : University o f Chicago
Pr ess , 1987]) id entifies the essa y's d eeper
un conscious commitment to 'rc p re se n tability'
as an ideological struct u re in which
Heidegge r's North Am erican criti c, Meyer
56
Schapiro, is also g rip ped . It may therefore be
worth restoring th e hist orical and allegorical
level at whi ch Schapiro's essay can be read as a
cru cial political move and permutation . The
essay turn ed on the suggestion that th e
foot gear d epicted in Van Gogh's painting
might not be the shoes of a peasant woman at
all, but rather th e painter's own . It th ereby
substituted an auto-referential act for a
populist or political-foundational one (as in
Heidegger himself) . Schapiro's reversal thu s
be comes supremely emblematic of th at new
post-war, high-modernist ideology with whi ch
th e members of a form erly left intelligentsia
replaced their political com mitmen ts during
th e Cold War period . The rev ersal, which now
rcdiverts our attention to the painter himself
and the act of painting, also conceals its
apostate anti-communism ben eath a perfectl y
acceptable repudiation o f the d efeated Fascist
positions.
Hi. See, on this point, my Late Marxism (London
and New York: Verso, 1990), p . 94fT.
In l'
Unite
'It is!
bour
It
set
H,
011
Pries
hell­
slabs'
abroz
fortie
disco
whid
 3

STRANGE PURSUIT CORNELL

WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED

CITY OF THE FORTIES

David Reid and Jayne L. Walker

In 1935 the popular English novelist and playwri ght J B. Pri estley, travellin g in th e
United States, was alar me d by rumours of a new te rrain in th e Ame rican way of crime.
'It is not a tropical underworld of hot blood and passion, of people too barbari c for th e
bourgeoi s virtues,' he wro te in M idnight an the Desert. Rather,

It is a chilly, grey, cellar- like , fu ng us world , of greed, of calculated violen ce and a cold
sen su alit y. The mo re a us te re writ ers of A meri can d etective sto ries, such as Dash iell
Hammett, seem to sho w us that world . . . H ow big is thi s particul ar Am erica ? Does it ex ist
onl y in a few big cities. And if th ere is not mu ch of it, wh y do we he ar so mu ch abou t it?l

Pri estley had a sha r p, propheti c eye for nair effe cts - he called th em telegrams from
hell- in newsprint, between hard covers, and on screen , where he claim ed to find 'grea t
slabs' of this new regime on di spl ay. Perhaps it helped th at he was a middlebrow from
abroad with little Am eri can cultural capital to prejudice his views. Later, in th e post-war
forties, when fi lm nair was in its classic phase and the Partisan R eview critics were busy
di scovering America, Ma ry McCarth y would dismi ss nair as a child ish m yth ology in
which only a gullible existentialist like Simone de Beauvoir cou ld believe. 'We admired

57
 SHADES OF NOIR

and liked our country; we preferred it to that imaginary country, land of th e peaux
rouges of Caldwell and Steinbeck , dumb paradise of violence and th e d et ective story ,
whi ch had excited th e se nsibilities of our visito r and of the up-to-date Fr en ch literary
world.'2 In contrast to McCarth y, who literally could not see what was in fr ont of her
eyes ('there were no good Hollywood movies' in 1947, she d eclared firml y, and no
decent players either) , Priestle y in 1935 had somehow managed to write a passable
trailer for a cycle of doom y harsh- shadowed somnabulistic films that was actually ten
years in the future.
Midnight on the Desert brin gs o ut the essential continuity between roman nair an d film
nair: the imagination of di saster in both was Depression-bred . Mike Davi s makes this
point in City of QuaTtz, wh en he obse rves of the Los Angeles nov els of th e thirties that
the 'Depression-crazed middle classes of Southern California be came, in on e mode or
another, the original protagonists of that great anti-myth known as n oir'Y Indeed, the
Depression so burdens th e sen se of the past that even the novels and stories Hammett
published before Crasli now read as if they were prophetic meditations on what came
after. But the most dramati c evid e nce of continuity lies in th e thrillers of Cornell
Woolrich, the canonical n oir nov elist most often adapted for the movi es in th e 1940s. In
Woolrich's fiction , New York - a ny big city - is not simply noir; literally, it is mad , bad,
and dangerous to know . T he Depression never lifted and threatens to become et~l ;
the city is fallen and ine scapable . Not an uplifting vision, to sa y th e least, but on e that
proved answerable to the particular anxieties of the forties. Woolrich recommended
himself to audien ces and film producers with plots that were like little infernal
machines for generating suspe nse and have now survived the texts in whi ch they
appeared. (Compared to Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, he has few
readers today.) There is a n a tt ractive historical symmetry in the fact th at his narratives
of the fallen, Depression-bound city rhyme closely with ob sessions, in the long­
forgotten sensational Ameri can fiction of exactly a century before , when the big
American city first emerged . But the real literary-historical irony of his case , one that
even the Columbia University- educated Woolrich almost certainly did not grasp, was
how conventional and in its way respectable his urban apocalypse really was.
The most familiar interpretation offilm noir presents it as a sort of dark allegory of
the post-war 1940s, starring su ch abstractions as 'the loss of wartim e unity' and post­
war economic conditions. Or, as Sylvia Harvey writes in her much-quoted a r ticle from
1980: 'T he hard facts of economic life are transmuted , in th ese movie s, into corres­
ponding moods and feelings . Thus the feelings of loss and alienation expressed by the
characters in film noir ca n be seen as the product both of post-war depression and of

58
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

th e reorganisation of th e A me r ica n econom y." Though there a re far more nuan ced
versions , for example by Dana Polan, this remains in its essent ial s th e stand ard
historical interpretation." (By [ilm uoir and roman noir, we mean the works th at are
customaril y taxoriornized a s su ch , for exa m p le in sta nd a rd works suc h as th e ency clo ­
paedic Film N otr, or Silver and Ward. The controversy ov er wh ether j ilm noir repres ents
a genre o r a movem ent [as opposed to th e more interesting matter of wh ether it exists
at all], not to m ention the terminol ogical nic en ess that would d en y th e title o f noir to an y
him with an eq u ivoca l, let alone happy endin g, threatens to become as tireso m e as th e
ancient and now ex tinct argument o ver th e possibility of bou rg eo is traged y.)"
In a 1991 essa y in th e New York R euietu oj"Uooks , Geoffre y O 'Brien d enies thatjihn noir
eve r appealed to the supposedl y end emic di sillusionments , displacem ents, a n xieties, or
nihilism or th e Truman yea rs :

Th e m ovi es' actua l e ffec ts mi ght more accuratel y be co ns ide re d not so mu ch a ' u n iverse ' or
a 'se n sib iliiv' - a nd «e rt ainlv not th e 'movem ent ' t h at on e writ er ca lls it - as a p ari icular
f'r ' ,
sh een, a slick n ew variet y or p a c~ a giI ~ g , Ltddish a t I h e time and subsequ entl y mu ch pri zed
by connoisseu rs : a ne xus o r fash ions in hair, fash ion s in lighting, fashion s in int erior
d ecoration , fa sh io ns in mot ivation , fa sh ions in r epartee .7

Thu s O 'Brien sets straight not onl y th e so rt olovcrambitious critic who straightfaccdl y
pursues th e origins offilm uoir a ll th e way hack to the theatre of Dion ysos , but also th e
standard view. Even Paul Schrad er, who vcry nic ely describedfilm noires 'a nightmarish
world of American mann erism ', also earnestl y supposed that films in this cyde
a nswe red to 't he public's desire for a more honest and harsh view of America '.H
U p to a point , no doubt, the frankness and disillusionm ent may have had its appeal ,
but there has alwa ys been so m e th ing wildl y unpersuasive about the notion that [ilms
f noirs continued to attract custo me rs in th e lat e forti es , wh en movie rec eipts were
Ip lu n ging , principall y because times were a nx io us and people want ed to massag-e th eir
.\: Ig loo m . Contnll:y lu seUIc.d m ytlH.)I( ~~ y, aUdi.en ces actu all y be gan to drift away.fr:om th e
movie palaces 111 advance o! television ; weekl y a tt e n d a nces tell from 80 million per
week in 194l) to 67 million in 1948 , when th ere were still onl y 1 million television sets in
th e country (u p 10 6,500 in 1945).!) The combination of grandiosity, self-destructiveness ,
and panic with whi ch Hollywood react ed to the a ud ie nc e' s desertion is th e subtext of
. Ni ch olas Ra y's In a L ouels Place ( 1950) , whi ch is set in th e jittery Holl ywood of 1949 .
.- ( (Boga rt , playing- a near-psychotic scr eenwrit er, says to rest aurateur-conman Mik e
Romanoff', pla ying himself: ' H o w's business ?' Romanoff: ' Like sh o w busin ess. Th ere's
no business.') For th e major studios, particularly Warner and RKO , jilm noir represented

59
 SHADES OF NOIR

simply one of many devices, including in time everything from 'adult' westerns to 3-D ,
used to captivate the restive mass audience or retain the hard core one. Sex, death and
pop nihilism could be depended upon to accomplish the latter, then as now . A vehicle
for social criticism in the hands of a director like Ray, film noir was also a set of
conventions available to a sturdy hack like Sam Wood (A Day at the Races, Kings Row), a
fanatical right-winger, indeed the man who invited the House Un-American Activities
Committee to investigate the movies. (Wood directed Iv)" a rare exa m ple of period Jilm
noir, based on a story by Marie Belloc-Lowndes, which came out in 1947 .) No doubt,
Geoffrey O'Brien's turn to slick packaging and a 'nexus of fashions' to explain why film
noir crystallized at the moment it did discloses as much about the trend-bes~ted
r atmosphere in which he is writing as it does about th e forties. But then, something like
the same could be said of the interpretations he lampoons - which find in the peculiarly
dense, complicated , tragic and sometimes ludicrous politics of 1944-50 a mere rough
draft of the cultural wars of the sixties and seventies. 10
If anything, the mythology that now surrounds World War Two and is regularly
invoked in criticism of film noir - notably , the chain-mail solidarity that supposedly
characterized the home front - confirms that nothing is more cha n gea ble than the past.
How quickly the conflict that the young Norman Mailer called a 'mirror that blinded
everyone who looked into it', was sentimentalized into 'the good war'. How swiftly
forgotten were the thousands of work stoppages, including hate strikes, racial strife
(hardly limited to Detroit and Los Angeles), John L. Lewis's duel with Roosevelt, the
' con gression al attack on the New Deal, and the bitter and morose 1~44 presidential
election (now remembered only for FDR's 'Fala' speech).ll
Paradoxically, it was precisely the success of 'wartime nationalism' and its subsequent
deflection into the forty-four-year crusade against communism and the national
security state that dissolved these memories . Such giant effects had larger causes and
more important authors than the agencies actually charged with wartime propaganda.
The principal agencies of this propaganda - the ill-fated Office of Facts and Figures
and its successor, the Office of War Information (OWl) - were faction-ridd en,
unpopular with Congress, and scarcely capable of formulating a coherent line on the
war, let alone imposing it. Much of what conservatives found objectionable in the films ,
radio scripts and pamphlets produced by the New Deal faction in the OWl amounted
to premature 'political correctness', as it is now stigmatized, such as monitoring the
comic strips for racial attitudes or signs of undue 'ind ivid ualism' (as demonstrated for
example by Terry of 'Terry and the Pirates'j.P'

60
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

In Hollywood, the Bureau of Motion Pictures vetted scripts, imposed export

restrictions on objectionable films, a n d e nco u rage d an all-co ns u m ing con centration on
the wareffort. The studios were crave n on principle, but even in wartime Paramount,
whose upper man agem ent was viole n tly against the New Deal , usuall y d eclined to
submit scripts for review . In general , re st ricti ons on camera film and bud gets for studio
ets had a much larger effect on film-making th an exhortations or overt censo rs hip ,
especially after it became clear that emphasis on th e war was leaving th e public bored
andrestless: in Jul y 1943 Variety headlin ed : 'STU DIOS S HE LVE W AR STORIES AS TH EY SHOW
40% BOX O FFI CE DECLIN E'. Thus, a n early nair e n try like Street ojChance (1942) , based on
Woolrich's The Black Curtain , would have had a novelty appeal, an appeal which may
also perhaps explain th e surprise success of a more elabo rate ad ap ta tio n, Ph antom Lady
(Robert Siodmak, I 944 ) .1 :~
From the potted histories that appear in man y stud ies of film no ir, on e might think
thatallthe worst forebodings of 1945 were actually realized. Indeed, th e strike wave of
1945-46 was the largest in Am erican history- it was estima ted to ha ve cost 107 ,47 5.000
lost days of work - and large portions of the publi c wer e horrified or ou trage d .
Immediately after the war th ere were meal sho rt ages, housing shortages, a thri ving
lack market, startling in creases in the price of living, bitter debate ove r price con tr ols,
nd a generall y sull en public temper. But th ere was no post-war depression. The GN P
dipped to $231 billion in 1947 , th e lowest since 1942 , rebounded to $2 5R billion the
next year, dropped slightly in 1948, th en grew for the next twenty-two yea rs until th e
American Century shuddered to a close in th e presidency of Richard M. Nixon (who
launched his politi cal ca ree r in 1946). Per ca p ita annu al income in 1947 was about
$1 ,750, measured in constant 1939 dollars , down from th e wartime peak 01'$1 ,900 ; but
it was depressed to this extent only because of a vastly in cr eased fertility rate (the
begin ning of the e ntirely unanticipated , by demograph ers at least. baby boom). In
1947 the distribution of income in the United States was more nearly equal (which of
course was not very ) than before or since. At no tim e did the econom y se r ious ly
threaten to contract to the dimensions of the 1930s , nor did th e sp ectre of mass
unemployment at Depression levels ever come close to materializing, despite wide­
spread fears that both of these things were virtually inevitable. I f th e co nd itio ns of 1938
(one in five out of work) , let alone o f I 9 3 ~3, had ever returned. there would h ave been
more dramatic results to reckon with than a vogue for moody genre pictures. 11
What of the Freudian argument made by Fr ank Krutnik in In a Lonely S treet, but not
only by him, that [ilm nair assisted in restoring a 'phallic order' threat ened by the
wartime mobilization of women a n d other such awful sp ectacles? 15 Perh aps the

61
 SHADES OF NaiR

Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak , 1944)

62

 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

femmes fatales in film nair, the sire ns portra yed by Jane Greer, Gloria Graham e, La na

--
T u rn e r and the rest , reall y did so me ho w re p rese n t th e Medusa fac e of Rosie th e
-
Riyeter, and J oan C ra wfo rd pl ayin g Mildred Pierce is punished for Rosie's- impud ence .
But agai n, it was not durin g or after World War Two but durin g th e Depression that
the prejudi~ aga inst working women (who were su p posed ly d epriving mal e bread­
JV
"

winners ofj obs) was most acute. Thus, No rman Cou sins , that reliable liberal-middlebrow
bellwether, ob served in 1939 : 'There are approximately 10,000 ,000 people o ut of work
in th e United Sta tes today; there are 10,000,000 or more women , married and single,
who are jobholders. Simply fir e the women, who shouldn't be workin g an yway, a n d
hire th e men . Presto ! No unemploym ent. No reli ef rolls. No depression.' The
hobgoblinizati on of working women was not a product of wartim e ; nor, cont ra ry to th e
sta nd ar d interpretation of/ilm uoir, is th ere much evid e nce that su ch prejudices were
greatly intensified by wartime (sin ce the e m p loy me nt of women in airc raft and other
manufacturin g sectors was almost universally conceded to be temporary). In
Equally to the point, though usually forgotten in th ese dis cussions, the Depression
dealt extraordinarily harsh blows to the 'phallic' cult of ag gressiveness , individualism
and self-relia nce, as Rob ert S. McElvaine maintains in his hist ory Th e Great Depression:
America 1929-1941; far harsh er, it might be add ed, than anything the war or th e
postwar yea rs ever brought. It is true th at whil e mobs of j obl ess ex-GIs never
materialized on the streets or a t factory gat es, as feared , a fair number of fictional
veterans did run satisfyingl y amok o n the film screens of the late forti es. On th e other
hand , the alienated veteran was su ch a cliche that even Ronald Reagan , who sp ent th e
war commuting betw een west Hollywood and Culver Cit y, felt obliged to represent
himself as one. As he rel ates in the ea rliest (1955) of his ghostwritten a u to biogra p hies,
'Like most ofthe soldiers wh o carn e ba ck, I expected a world suddenly reformed.' How
he conceived this illusion at distant ' Fo r t Hal Roach ' is unexplained. ' I discovered that
th e world was almost the sam e and perhaps a little worse .' T o sola ce himself, he
arranged for the twenty-four-hour rental of a sp eedboat on Lak e Arrowh ead , an
extravagan ce that su p pose d ly convinced its owner he was 'crazy'. 17
Krutnik con te nd s as follows: 'Tha t there was such a market for these dissonant a nd
schismatic representations, as is suggested by the sh eer number of noi r "tough"
thrillers in th e mid-to-late 1940s, is perhaps evid e nc e o f some kind of crisis of
confidence within the co n te m po rary re gimentation of male-dominated culture.'! " And
indeed there is no mi staking th e appeal in th e po st-war forties of mal e leads (and male
movie stars) who were deepl y confusin g figures by traditional standards. But su re ly th e
great ex emplar of this troubled new co ns tr uc tio n o f mas culinity was not the burl y,

63
 SHADES OF NOIR

lumpish Tom Neal of Detour or th e ravaged Bogart of Dead R eckoning-let alone Robert
Mitchum, insolently phallic even amid the delirium of Out oI the Past - but rather the
beautiful and ephebic Montgom ery Clift, who appeared in no films noirs at all .
No , the 'p ha llic regime' emerged from World War Two in surprisingl y good shape.

,
r Certainly, there was nothing in the cultural politics of the late forties remotel y
comparable to the great revolt against the fath ers - extending to androgynous fashions

I in clothing and body types, widespread pacifism , defiantly uncloseted homosexuality

I and bisexuality, and a vast and distinguish ed literature of disillusionment - that
) followed on the end of World vVar One in England and the United States , not to
I mention Weimar Germany. nl In literature, there was nothing at all to match Strachey's
Eminent Victorians (which actually appeared in wartime), Sherriffs}oumey'sEnd , Owen,
Sassoon, Graves; or T. S. Eliot's 'Cerontiori', e . e. cummings's The Enormous Room,
Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises , and all the rest. In the post-war forties the novel was
still close to the ce nt re of American popular culture. Although the rising yo u ng
novelists were self-consciousl y belated in th eir relation to the rebel-avatars of th e
twenties, their big war novels either accepted militarism and massification as an
irresistible fact oflife (Irwin Shaw's The Young Lions, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the
Dead) or actively championed obedience and hierarchy, as in the trick ending of
Herman Wouk's The Cain e Mruin» . But then , in the era ofjilm uoir, the most popular
and universally admired person in the country (as the Gallup Poll duly attested) and the
bestselling nonfiction author was Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied
Commander in Europe.
The reconstru ction of a long-ago public 'mood', like for that matter the
interpretation of an existing one, is a species of myth making that deals with a notably
inchoate subject; but as with any other kind of fiction, some reconstructions carry more
conviction than others. Consider this famous passage from C. Wright Mills's \tVhite
Collar:

The Second World War was und erstood by most sensitive observers as a curiously unreal
business. Men went away and fought, all over the world ; women did whatever was
expected of women during war ; people worked hard and long and bought war bonds;
everybod y believed in America and in her cause : there was no rebellion. Yet it all seemed a
purposeless kind of efficiency. Some kind of numbness seemed to prohibit awareness of
the magnitude and depth of what was happening; it was without dream and so without
nightmare, and if there was ang er and fear, and there was, still no chords of feeling and
conviction were deeply touched . People sat in the movies between produ ction shifts,
watching with aloofness and even visible indifference, as child ren were 'saturation

64
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

bombed' in th e narrow cellars of Europe . . . There were no plain targets of revolt; a nd the
cold metropolitan manner had so entered the soul of overpowered men that th ey were
made co m p letely privat e and blase , d eep d own and fOl' good,~O

It is not too much to sa y that Krurnik's phallic regime , so afflicted by th e Depression,

actu ally recuperated itself during th e war a n d its aftermath . The post-war 1940s were
': somethin g of a gold en age for real-estate sp eculators, d evelopers of tract housing, Wall
I Street lawyers (one of whom,John]. McCloy, th e architect of the J apanese internment,
be came Ameri can proconsul in German y), professional anti-communists, offshore oil­
drillers, uranium prospectors, tobacco growers, 'whiz kids', courthouse politici ans
from Missouri, a n d other props of th e patriarch y too numerous to mention , almost all
of them ap p a re n tly co m fo r table with their sociall y constru cted masculinity, and many
of them rejoicing in the j eerin g Republican slogan of ' H ad en ou gh?' T h ese were the
true inheritors of th e Am erican Century, for whom its brave dawn would always be
gold en. In Allan Gurganus's story ' Mino r H eroism', th e hom ophobic war hero fath er is
repelled when his grown-up son's lover rav es about th e music of the forties. 'Jacques
kept sa ying over and over again, " Wh at a period, what a p eriod! " For a person like
myself, who loved th e forti es, th e sillin ess of this kind of co nve rsatio n made me sick . As
if anybod y like that co u ld e ve r understand what it meant to be alive then .':!! But then, it
should n ever be forgotten that the great Am erican su ccess story of the late forties was,
,'exactly, Richard M. N ~ the ' Figh ting Quaker' from Whittier, Californ ia.
Yet even the corporate gran sign ori that Fortune ca n vassed in 1947 found something
to be anxious abou t, and that was a return to the conditions of 193 3. Rather than
struggling with a d epression , th e post-war e ra lived in fear of one, wrestling with a
shadow all the more minatory because it ob stinately remained a shadow, a phantasm,
·not a state of affairs. The Depression visibly lingered in the look of the co u ntry , large­
scale private constru ction having be en virtu ally at a standstill in most places since the
early thirties . The nightclub sym bolically concentrated e ve ry th in g that seemed phant­
,asmal about th e prosperity of th e post-war forties and naturally figure s as on e ofjilrn
. noir's standard settings.:!:! This co m p lex mood of a p p re he nsion goes farther towards
explaining the cha racte r istic air o f grim and baffled fatality intilrn noir th an any passing
downturn , as in 1947 or 1949 , that ac tually occurred. Henry Ad ams's description of
New York in 1905 applied even more exactly - uncannily so - forty years lat er. 'The
outline of the city became frantic in its e ffort to exp lain something that defied meaning .. .
Prosperity never before imagined, pow er not yet wielded by man, speed never reached
by anyth ing but a meteor, had made th e world irritable, nervous, qu erulous, unreasonable

65
 SHADES OF NOlA

and afraid .'23 It was obvious that th e new world of 194 5 would be one o f huge sca le and
bureaucratic rationality, and post-w ar film nair registers both resignation and resent­
ment at th e prospect. (Some a la r m ists on th e right terrified th emselves with th e fear of
a social-democrati c planet , and th at fear, to o , found its wa y into film nair with th e figure
of the lab our racketeer.) Yet a more than vestigial fear lingered that somehow th e worst
co n d itio ns of the Depression would return . In Augu st 1932 a jou rn alist had ask ed John
Maynard Keynes if there had ev er before been a ca la m ity like th e Depression . He
replied, 'Yes. It was called the Dark Ages, a nd it lasted four hundred year s.'

II

In a lon g perspective, the roman noir of th e late 1920s and 1930 s seems to ma rk less a
new departure th an something very like a return of the r epressed. Almost exactly a
ce n tu ry before, in the 1830s and 1840s , American writers were producing a cycle of
cr im e and adventure no vels and penn y p amphlets of e xtr ao rd in a ry violen ce , pervers­
ity and bleakness of outlook. In a crowded literary marketplace, 'American sensation­
alists quickl y earned a worldwid e r eputation for sp ecial na stiness and g r ossn ess: David
s. Reynolds writes in his authoritative mapping of thi s lost continent of dark ephemera."
There were, for exa m p le, 'Romantic', 'M oral', and of course 'Dark' adventures, and
1
I eve n darker temperan ce tracts beside whi ch even the absurdl y scabrous Jam es Ellroy
, looks to be a model of d ecorum. But th e most interestin g for our purposes were th e
lu r id and conspiracy-minded 'cit y-myst eries', of which George Lippard's Quaker City
/ 1845), 'a n illu stration of the life, m ystery and crim e of Phil adelphia ' as th e title page
(
declared , was th e most famous . Lippard 's ex poses vastl y outsold a n yth ing by Haw­
thorne, o r Melville , or by his fri end Poe - in fact, they outsold ev ery other American
novelist , ge n tee l or subversi ve , until Harriet Beecher Stowe. The amazin g popularit y
of his books inspired similarly lurid ex poses of New York C ity and Ne w Orleans, Sal em
and Worcester, Massachusetts, and Nashu a, New Hampshire. As David G . Reynolds
notes, Lippard's works were directl y mod elled on Euge ne Sue's The iYlysteries o] Pa ris
and G.M .W. Reynolds's The My steries ojLondon; but behind them we find th e example
of Balzac. 25 By 1831, according to 1talo Calvino , we find Balzac pursuin g 'his fir st
intuition of the city as language , as id eology, as th e co nd itio n ing factor of every
thought and word and gestu re, the streets that "im p r ime nt par leur ph ysiognomie
certaines idees co n tr e lesquelles nous sornrnes san defense", the city as mon strous as a
giant cr us tacea n, whose inhabitants are no more th an motor urticulations.Y"

66
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

In th e 1840s , as again a century later, Europe and the United States were coming into
closer orbits. There was a brisk traffi c in intellectuals and intellectual fashions, mostly
westward, such as Louis Agassiz, the less ons of Balzac, and Fourierism in the I8 30s and
1840s, and th e Frankfurt School, surrealism, and existentialism in the 1930s and
194 0s. Essential figures ofjilm noir, including Lang, Wilder, Siodrnak, and Preminger,
were e m ig res from Hitler's Europe. In urban history , th e two d ecades are at either end

1 of a great are, representing the period when cities were growing in Europe and North
America at th e fastest rate in history (that is, until the present Third World urban
explosion). In the US , the population quadrupled between 1820 and 1860 , and th e
proportion of city-d welle rs was in creased by about 80 per cent. By 1850 , New York was
a city of 500,000 people. Abruptly, the nation awoke from Jeffersonian reveries to
discover that the city had become a demiurge , as monstrous, in the eyes of a people
whose national mythology said they belonged on the farm , as it was irresistible .
According to Re ynolds , 'It is understandable that the dark city-mysteries genre ,
portraying the city as a modern "Sod am" populated by depraved a r istocra ts engaging
in nefarious doings in labyrinthin e d ens of iniquity, would arise in th e 1840s, for such
novels reflected the profound fears a nd fantasies of an American population faced
with rapid urbanization and industrialism . . . The city was suddenly an overwhelming
place, filled with hidden horrors and savage struggles as fascinating as they were
appalling. m
In Quaker Cit)' the 'Monks' (the Philadelphia elite) pursue their vices in a secluded
. mansion , full of cunning corridors and complete with dungeons, whose entrance is
guarded by the evil factotum and ass assin, Devil-Bug. Lippard was a rather excitable
radical democrat, and his prolix novel combines the thriller and the tract. Larzer Ziff
comments thus :

In Lippard 's handling , the co nve ntio na l castle of gothic horrors becomes a metaphor of
the city, in whi ch the wealthiest and most respectable have direct co m m u nio n with the most
vicious , who serve them in exploitation of the majorit y in I he middle. The crew of crim ina l
servants are, in effect, embodiments of th e dominating vices of th eir masters, so th at at
ce rt ain crises the monstrous underling calls the tune forjudge, minister, or merchant.f"

(Raymond Chandler's use of the same situation would be more skilful but no less
obsessive.) Like the Dark Adventure novels, the city-mysteries exploited themes of
violation, sexual humiliation, madness, mutilation and satanism with an avidity posit­
ively contemporary. Such sensational literature (and Poe, Hawthorne and Melville) also

67
 SHADES OF NOIR

drew directly on the New Age enthusiasms and popular pseudoscience of the day ­
mesmerism, spiritualism , phrenolo gy - in a way that nicely prefigures the influence of
vulgar Freudianism on the movies of the forties. 'The sensational, the erotic, and the
pseudoscientific were often linked in the antebellum imagination ' : and in the postbel­
lum imagination of 1945-50. 29
Since most of the American novels in this vein have been forgotten, the 'Mysteries of
I
I' .. ' genre in the United States represents merely an interesting precedent for film noir,
unlike Poe 's invention of 1841, the detective story . On a broader view, however, as
Calvino writes, 'The myths destined to mold both popular and cultured fiction for over
a century all pass through Balzac';:\O and within the traditions of urban melodrama
certain continuities and convergences can be traced that lead up to/ibn noir on one side
and parallel it on the other. In 'cultured' fiction one finds the 'melodramatic imagina­
tion' that Peter Brooks traces from Balzac to James to Mailer:

The world is subsumed by an underlying manicheisrn , and the narrative creates the
ex citement of its drama by putting us in touch with th e conflict of good and evil played out
through the surface of things -just as description of the surfaces of the modern metropolis
pierces through to a mythological realm where the imagination ca n find a habitat for its
play with large moral entiues. i"

This is not a bad description of what occurs in the most ambitious examples of the
roman nair, such as Woolrich, with the proviso that one speaks of large and small amoral
entities as well. In popular fiction, Balzac's obsessions with subterranean connected­
• ness, sinister supermen, and so on , carryover directly into the European city-mysteries,
,
.' achieving their first and greatest realization on film in Fritz Lang's silent Mabuse films
~ in the twenties (based on the novels by Norbert Jacques), which are among the
wellsprings of big- city jibn noir. Lang's films noirs of the forties are in a very different
vein, smaller and more severe than the grandiose Mabuse melodramas .) The relation
of film noir to the big city that is its standard setting has been interrogated less closely
than might be expected, perhaps because it seems so obvious; which in a way it is. Just as
the city-mystery registered the dreaded rise of the metropolis, film noir registered its
decline, accomplishing a demonization and an estrangement from its landscape in
advance of its actual 'abandonment' - the violent reshaping of urban life sponsored by
the Federal Housing Administration, the Housing Act of 1949, and in New York City
the force of nature known as Robert Moses . Around the winter of 1947-48, when
classic film noir was midway in its career, the United States reached its pitch of
t u r ban iza tio n . In terms of both absolute numbers and percentage of the whole

68
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

population , more Americans lived in central cities than ever before or sin ce . Some 7
per cent lived in New York Cit y alon e. But th e great dispersal was at hand. :~ 2

III

Raymond Chandler, writing in 1950 , attributed the 'authentic power' of romans non s (a
phrase he did not us e) to

th e sm ell of fear whi ch th ese stories managed to generate , Their characters lived in a world
gone wrong, a world in which, long before the ato m bomb, civilization had cr eat ed the
machinery for its own d estruction, and was learning to use it with all th e moronic delight o f
a gangster tr yin g out hi s first m achine gu n . The law was something to be manipulated for
power and profit. The street s were dark with so me th ing more th an nigh!. :!:!

Apocalypse is the most co m pe llin g parallel , at least for our apocal ypticall y minded
times, betw een th e old urban mel odramas and th e TOman noir. For as George Steiner
writes with customa ry plangen cy, 'It is precisel y from th e I830s onward', that is, from
the very moment when Balzac began elaborating his vision of the city as logic,
grammar, ideology and body of fate, 'th a t on e can obs erve the e me rge n ce of a
characteristic "co u n te rd rea m" - the vision of the city laid waste, the fanta sies of
Scythian and Vandal invasion , the Mongol steeds slaking their thirst in th e fountains of
th e Tuileries Gard ens. An odd school of painting develops: pictures of London , Paris ,
or Berlin seen as colossal ruins, famous landmarks burnt, eviscerated, or located in
romantic e m p tin ess among cha r red stumps and deacl water. Romantic fantasy antici­
pates Br echt's ven geful promise that nothing sh all remain of th e great cities exce p t th e
wind that blows through th em .' As Steiner co nscien tio usly notes, it required ex actly a
hundred years of progress before Europe realized its Iantasy.i'"
The crisis of modern capitalism in the thirties , which Keynes compared to the Dark
Ages, follow ed by the literal urban apocalypse in Europe and Asia during World War
Two, vindicated a tradition of cu ltu ra l pessimism whose great names include Henry
Adams, Burckhardt and Sp engler, and the antimodern modernists Yeats, Eliot and
Pound. The proudly cu ltivated Chandler at least must hav e realized how clos ely the
low-rent Kulturpessimismus of th e pulps during the Depression rhym ed with, if it did not
exactly e cho ,J.b ~~oomsday ch ic of Th e Waste Land and Hugh Selwy;;7 1auberle), after the
.Great War. Spengle~ Tor whom the 'world-city' like New York was invariably a late,

69
 SHADES OF NOIR

wintry phenomenon , the winding-sheet of civilizations , sold ste adily. 'These are
ominous times,' Lewis Mumford wrote in 1944, 'and Spengler is like a black crow,
hoarsely ca win g , whose propheti c wings cast a shad ow over our whole landscape.P" In
the spring of 1943, Th e Declin e oj"the W est was being read by Jack Kerouac and Allen
Ginsberg (at the insistence of William Burroughs, for whom it was a holy book), and by
a herald of a different future, Private First Class Henry Kissinger, on whose 'thought'
its imprint was permanent. Arnold Toynbee was a bestseller in 1947--48, and the
subject of a pompous Time co ve r sto ry written by Whittaker Chambers.
Variously envisaged , the fated city was the counterpart of the radiant 'Wh ite City ' of
official optimism, as it developed from the Columbian Exposition of 1893, through the
technophile science fiction of the thirties, to the atom-powered Tornorrowland pro­
jected after World War Two .31i What we are describing was not only a matter of high
culture and low. In fact, the most reliable evidence that the fated city was part of
conventional wisdom, and had a niche in dominant dis course, was its malign fascina­
tion for middlebrow or, as Dwight Macdonald used to say, Midcult writers like Stephen
Vincent Benet, the laurent of the Popular Front, and Archibald Ma cl.eish, Librarian of
Congress, head of th e OFF, Assistant Secretary of State , and multiple Pulitzer Prize
winner. Benet's 1937 story 'By the Waters of Babylon', which pictures a ruined,
apparently radioactive Manhattan a hundred years hence, was the lead sel ection in
Donald A. Wolheirn 's wartime Pocket Book oj"Science Fiction . Ma cl.eish's declamatory
radio play 'The Fall of the City ' was the f-irst and, it is safe to say, one of the very few full­
length verse dramas ever broadcast on American radio. (It was performed on CBS in
October 1935, with Orson Welles narrating.)
When Albert Camus made his first visit to New York City in 1946, it struck him
immediately that 'Everybody looks like they've stepped out of a B-f-ilm..:J7 In the years
immediately after the war, when the United States was dispatching proconsuls to
Europe a n d viceroys to Japan, visiting existentialists, oblivious to Mary McCarthy's
scorn, always expected and found its capital city, New York, to be an immense noir
spectacle, whose fall was visibly prefigured . 'A prodigious funeral pyre at midnight, as
• its millions of lighted windows amid stretches of blackened walls carry these swarming
t lights halfway up the sky,' Camus wrote, 'as if every evening a gigantic fire were
burning over Manhattan, the island with three rivers, raising immense smoldering
carcasses still pierced with dots of Aame.'3HAnd Sartre:

All the hostility , all the cruelty of the world aloe present 111 this almost prodigious
monument that m all has ever raised to himself. It is a ligh! city; its apparent lack of weight

70
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

amazes most Europeans. In this immense, malevol ent space, in this desert of ro ck th at
supports no ve get ation, they have constructed th ou sands of houses in brick, wood, or
reinforced co ncre te whi ch give the appearan ce o f be ing o n th e point of flyin g a way . . .
Already [the skyscra pe rs] a re slig h tly ne glected : to morro w, perhaps, they will be d emo­
lish ed. In an y ev e n t, to build th em in th e first place requi red a faith we no longer feel . .. I
see in th e d istan ce th e Empire State Bu ilding or the C h rys le r Building pointing vain ly
tow ard th e sky, a nd it occurs to me th at New York is ab out to acquire a history, that it
a lre ady has its ruin s.i'"

Neith er essay mention ed th e atom or h ydrogen bomb (Sa r tr e was recording a visit that
took pla ce in wartim e), and both were translat ed 1"01' a ffl ue n t American audien ces
(Sartre's was publish ed in Town and Country). Th e ad ve nt o f the bomb confirmed and
. deepened, rath er th an originating, the forebodin gs o f th e post-war forties, especiall y
. in so far as th ey were co nce n tr ated on the fat e of th e big city. In Dawn Powell's 1948
novel Th e L ocusts l Laue N o King, a hitherto sh elt ered m edievalist emerges from his
researches 'to find New York a strange and terrifyin g city, th e peace now bein g
celebrated as sin iste r a nd barbaric as the Dark Ages he h as just left'. In Th e Lady./1wll
Shangh ai (O rso n Welles, I ~H8 ) , the mad pop-eyed lawyer played by Glenn And ers
raves to Orson Welles on a bright hilltop in Aca p ulco : ' Do yo u think the world is
comin g to a n e nd ?' (We lles replies: 'It's a bright g u ilty world .') 'It's coming, yo u know.
Oh, yea h. First th e big cities and ma ybe even this . It 'sjust got to come . .. ' The nov els
and stories 01" Paul Bowles were perhaps th e most min atory in post-war fiction. 'O u r
civilization is doom ed to a short life; its component part s a re too h eterogeneous,' writes
the narrator 01" 'Pages from Cold Point' (194 9). ' I person ally am content to see
everything in theprocess of de~ The bigger th e bomb, th e quicker it will be done .
Life is visually too hid eous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it gO.'10
In The Art oI the City, Peter Conrad considers th e od d case of the architectural
visionary Hugh Ferris, who dreamed in the 1920s and 1930 s of the modern metropolis
of tomorrow, with ae rod ro mes and golf courses on th e top s 01" skyscra pe rs, but decided
after 1942 th at Ne w York sho u ld be abandoned fo r its o wn good a nd rebuilt in va u lts
under th e J erse y Palisad es." I In Elizabeth Bishop's poem of 1946 'T h e Man-Math ',
New York is a so rt of m etaph ysical underground pit ch ed atop the literal underground
of the subway.

H ere , above , crac ks in the buildings are filled with batt ered moonlight.
The wh ol e sha d o w of Man is only as big as his hal.

71
 SHADES OF NOlA

The claustral New York of Otto Preminger's 1944 film noir of Vera Caspary's novel
Laura feels somehow subaqueous, 'mo re submarine than subterranean', as Benjamin
said of Baudelaire's Paris , and on th e point of abandonment. 'It see med as if I were th e
only person left alive in New York', says Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in voice-over,
before Dana Andrews arrives to investigate Gene Tierney's supposed murd er. But
nowhere is New York more d esolat e , guilty, abandoned or men acing than in th e noir
fictions that Cornell George Hople y-Woolrich , a fail ed , closeted imitator of F. Scott
Fitzgerald, began publishing in 1934, almost at th e bottom of the Depression .

IV

Hammett is a legend, Chandler is a private m ythology - both e nj oyed sea sons of

celebr ity - and Ca in was a career; but Cornell Woolrich (b. Ne w York Cit y, 1903 ; d.
New York City, 1968) was a sort of writing ma chine, whose horribl y uneventful adult
life was spent typing in a hotel room as his mother watched . (H e dedicated The Bride
Wore Black to his Remington Portable.) In th e twenties, Woolri ch attended Columbia
University, where h e began his ca ree r as an imitator of Fitzgerald ; his first novel, ajazz­
baby ch ro n icle called Children oIthe Rit z, won a prize from College Humor of $ 10,000, an
immense sum in those days. Along with it ca me a tick et to Hollywood , where he
married the daughter of a min or film produ cer. Neither his ca reer as a film writer nor
th e marriage was a success. Woolrich spent his late nights cruising the waterfront in a
sailor suit he kept hidden beneath the bed. Th e marriage dis solved with surprisingly
little rancour, and Woolrich returned to Ne w York and the co m pa ny of his socialite
mother, Claire Aualie, with whom he toured Europe in 1931 - an odd couple, like
Sebastian and Violet in Suddenl», Last Summe r. For most of the next twenty-six years,
until her death in 1957, he lived with her in a residential hotel, the Marseilles, at
Broadway and 103rd , in Manhattan.Y
When the Depression came and the bottom dropped out of th e market forjazz-baby
novels, Woolrich turned to suspense writin g for the pulps. His success was immediate,
but there were a n xio us years. (H e once wrote a story about a ha ck writer d esp erately
trying to write a novella in a single night, from which the legend grew that Woolrich
had been reduced to that extremity hirnself.) Thereafter, as his biographer Francis
Nevins Jr sa ys, the Depression was the dominant reality in his fiction:

The New York that Woolrich lived in like a hermit in a cave and wrote about like one who
knew its every square blo ck as well as he kn ew his own name is a city of subwa ys, a uto ma ts,

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 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

movie pal aces, cheap furn ished ro om s, cold ston e stre ets, doorw ays thick with shadows ,
people sick with terror, loving, clawin g, killing, smo king to o mu ch , drinking too mu ch ,
eac h one tr yin g a nd failing to keep a t bay the ce rtai nty o f death whi ch marked Woolrich' s
work and sca r re d his life .'u

(Obviously, th e exa m p le of Woolrich's overheat ed prose is infectious.) T h e thanata­

phobe had co me a lon g wa y from th e Ritz. Toward the end o f the thirties he follo wed
H amm ett and C ha nd le r into the resp ectability of hard cove rs . T he 'blac k' novels of th e
forti es (Th e B ride Wor e Black, R endezv ous in Black, Black Curtain and th e rest) we re
resp ectfully reviewed. More important, his work was being purchased for the movi es.
H e was becoming indecentl y prolific, a t least for th e taste of Lippincott'S, whic h in 1942
publish ed Pha ntom Lad)' und er th e pseudonym William Iri sh . Deadline at Dawn and 'It
H ad To Be Murder' (th e basis for Hitchcock's R ear Window) were also published under
th e Irish pseudonym. Sales to the movies, radio a nd eventually television made him a
co m fo rtable in come, whi ch a p p a re n tly he hoarded.
In his history of cr ime films , Carlos Clarens points to th e undistinguish ed early film
versions of Hammett's Th e Maltese Fal con and Th e C lass Key and C h and ler's Farewell, My
Lov ely and Th e Hi!!;h Wi ndow, all of which lacked the distinctive atmosphere and
icon ography of the famou s f ilm noir remakes , as evid e nce th at 'na ir is more likel y to be
in th e eye of th e director th an on th e printed p ag e'.44 To th e eye unclouded by antiqu e
aut eurist prejudices, it is not so simple . In the case of Woolrich, the more faithful th e
tra ns lation from the novel or story , th e darker th e film. In large part thi s is a matter of
Wo olr ich 's pow erfully d et erminist visio n, a dime-store philosoph y dramatized with
grea te r or less co n viction in film uoir but in whi ch h e, at least, co m p letely believed : 'T he
path you follow is the path you have to follow; th ere are no digressions permitted you ,
even though you think th ere are.'?" There is, too , the unforgettably sinister and dingy
mise en scene. And then th ere are extraordinary visua l, auditory, and even synaesthe tic
effcc ts - one of Woolrich 's ch ief gifts was a surveyor's eye, as th e play with parallax in 'It
Had To Be Murd er', so brilliantly exploited by Hitchcock, con fir ms.
Nevins, Woolrich's ind efatigable booster as well as biographer, divides his suspense
fiction (he also wrote romances, adventures, period pieces and supernatural thrille rs)
into such categories as th e Bizarre Murder Method, the Noir Co p , the Clock Race, th e
Os cillation Story, the Headlong Through the Night Story, and the Annihilation Story,
wh ose names are evocative e no u gh . 1ti U n like H ammett and Cha n d ler, Woolrich did
not write detective stories as such, although he produced a fe w grim parodies, most
famou sly 'T he Dancing Det ective', in which the 'in vestigato r' is a taxi d ancer being

73
 SHADES OF NOIR

stalked by a serial murd erer. His view o f law enforcement was without illusions .
Woolrich's ghoulish variation on th e police procedural is 'Dead On Her Feet', in which
a suspect known to be innocent is driven mad when he is forced by a sadistic detective to
dance with the corpse of his lover. Woolrich 's protagonists are victims, bystanders,
naifs, the occasional psychopath, never the 'enforcers' of social order - the Sam Spades
and the Philip Marlowes - that function as th e central intelligences of classic d etective
fiction, even in their noir incarnations.
Always in Woolrich, life is ruled by chance, but its workings hid e - barel y - the
machinations of a more sinister order beyond the visible . 'The hidden id entities,
mysteries, evils of melodrama are never the result of chan ce or fate,' says Peter Brooks,
'bu t of conscious plotting: evil is concerted, volitional - which is not to say it is
motivated . Indeed , th e more it is unmotivat ed th e more it becomes a pure produ ct of
will, demonstrating that the world is inhabit ed by a Satanism as real as it is gratuitous.r' "
Woolrich's city is fall en, guilty, co m p licito us, animated by a Jansenist sense of evil
(Woolrich was a lapsed Catholic), an d ruled by a sinister clemiurgic force that thwarts
and deforms individual life. The midnight streets, furnished rooms , low bars, dance
halls, precin ct offices, rain, heat, sh adows, whiskey fum es and cigarette smoke - all the
familiar ele m e n ts of New York noir« mise en scen e - are the sometimes overstrained
vehicles for an imagination fundamentally m elodramatic and manich ean. Whi ch is not
to say th at Woolrich was (onl y) a kind of all egorist: th ese details have their own mad
verisimilitude and hypnagogic int ensity, brought out by the pell-mell, often lurid, and
occasionally ludicrous rush of his prose. Th ey are very much rooted in the experience
of the Depression, wh en the fear (o r, in other quarters, hope) arose that capitalism and
its incarnation in th e modern metropolis had entered some p ermanent crisis . In
Woolrich 's fiction th e Depression has become a sort of ete rna l unrelieved dark night of
body and soul.
For precisel y this reason , Woolrich's fiction was peculiarly answerable to wartime
and especiall y the post-war forti es, an anxious time chased by its own shadows. Not
only was his work fr equently adapted during the classic phase of film noir , it also
generated seventy-one radio plays on series like 'Molle Mystery Theater' a nd 'Su s­
pense' (a nd later nearl y as many television adaptations on 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents',
an ironic venue, and other su sp ense series ). Woolrich's fiction belongs to a lost literary
economy, in which (according to Nevins's co u n t) as man y as twelv e to thirteen hundred
writers co m pe ted to supply th e mostly mal e , down market audien ce of Bla ck Mask, Dim e
Detecti v e and other pulps with rawer sensations than those offered by films or th e
Satun/a)' E vening Post. James Joyce spoke of his ideal reader, afflicted with the id eal

74
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

insomnia: Woolrich's had no immediate job prospects a nd a hangover.

The Bla ck Curtain , the Woolrich novel so vital in establish in g th e atmospherics ofjilm
nair, be gins with its protagonist Frank T ownsend dazed , unabl e to remember the last
three years o f his life, and seized by an unnamable dread. The op enin g paragraph
typifies the renderin g of perception s fr agm ented and deranged by terror, physical
distress or, as here, amnesia, th at pervade Woolrich's fiction.

First eve ry thing was blurred. T he n he co uld feel hands fumbling a ro u nd him , lot s o f
hands. They weren't a ctua lly touchi n g him ; th e y we re tou ching thin gs th at tou ched him .
He go t th eir feel on e step rem o ved . Flin gin g away sm all, loose objects like ch u nks of
mortar or fragm ents o f bri ck, which see me d to be strewn a ll over him .4 H

It is quickl y established th at a fa lling beam ha s d estroyed Townse nd's memory. Sin ce

Woolrich could be as derivativ e as the next penny-a-lin er, Nevins is probabl y r ight to
su ggest that thi s beam began falling in Th e Maltese Falcon , in th e parable th a t Sam Spade
tell s to Brigid O'Shaugnessy. But, in an iron y that the a uste re H amm ett would ne ver
have permitted himself, it turns ou t that Townsend had already lost his memory wh en
th e beam hit him ; th e accident that erases th e last three yea rs restores him to the life
(and m arriage) he h ad unaccountably misl aid. His up-to-date wife is a mazin gly
unde rst anding ab out h is long disappearance ('Am nesia', sh e exp lains to him, with the
certainty of so meone who has read all about it in M cCall's) ; a nd so is his old bo ss, for
wh om a 'n e rvo us breakdown' is su fficie n t e xp la na tio n . 'Amnesia' = an amnesis is a neat
tri ck , even for Woolrich.
The 1942 B movie Street o] Chanc e, bas ed on Woolrich's novel and directed by Jack
Hively for Paramount, was apparently the first of many films abou t amnesia to be
prod u ced in the forties. The loss and recovery o f memory was a m atter of obvious , even
overdetermined relev ance for a society abruptly sundered fr om previous routines (th e
effect first of 1929 and then of Pearl Harbor) , then remoulded into a wartime regime
wh ose reticulations went everywhere but were sup posed to be temporary; a societ y, as
C. Wright Mills observed, that nightly witnessed, at the movies, enormities from whi ch
it remained stra ngely a loof.
Thou gh understandably a n xio us to kn ow wh ere a nd who he was during his lost tim e ,
Townsend resumes his su spended life, on ly to realize that he is being stalked by a
stranger - Agate Eyes, as he thinks o f him . When Agate Eyes follow s him to his bus
stop, he ch a nges his route; when Ag ate Eyes finds out where he works, he quits his job.
He is now literally afraid of th e dark :

75
 SHADES OF NOIR

Blue shadows, like tentatively clutching Engel's. began a slow creep toward Townsend out
from under the trees. De epening, advancing only furtively when th ey weren't wat ched
closely, pretending to be arrested when th ey were. At fir st azure, scarcely visible in th e still­
strong light of day . Then dark blue, like ink rolling sluggishly amidst the grass blades and
dyeing them from the roots up . At last, fr eed of th e vigilance of the closing red e ye of th e
sun , turning black , sh owing their true color. (p . 44)

When his house is ransacked, he flees . In the novel, the baroque escape scene is rich in
noir symbolism: he and his wife Virginia Hee down a dumbwaiter, 'in a sort of hideous
parody of entombment alive ' (pp. 75-6), to a basement that connects to the next
apartment building. There they shuffle through the darkness, terrorized by th e 'scurry
of searching footsteps scattering from room to room' in their own flat , above them (p.
77). In the film version, anticlimactically, Frank simply slips down the fire escape. The
novel is filled with bravura passages of melodramatic chiaroscuro (the 'shallow nimbus
of a gas flame', a shadow looming 'grim and ominous, like a prophet of doom') and
darkness visible:

There seemed to be a man standing there, directly opposite, facing these windows in a
surveyor's line of directness. He was in th e black silt of a shadow that filled a wall
indentation like sand blown into a niche . It might have beenjust an optical illusion , giving
the shadow's border the rounded likeness of a shoulder, then lower down a hipbone.
As he peered , trying to decide, a faint How of motion had altered the silhouette. The
rounded shadows of the shoulder, the hip, drew subtly inward, disappeared into the heart
of the shadow mass, leaving a clean-cut knife line of dark that sho uld have been there in
the first pla ce but hadn't been . (pp. 69-70)

The auditory effects are similarly, paranoically, heightened : the 'slight, soft grate of
straining leather' that a man's heavy brogues 'made each time - nothing so acute as a
squeak - the cushioned thud of their incessant fall upon the pavement. The rhythm of
the walk - pal-pal, pal-pal-pal, Im/-Im/-Iml, 1)(/1. You hear the sound at night when the
streets are still, when sorneone's coming toward you in the distance' (p. 65). 'As lifelike,
as natural as the moving pavement belt beneath them', yet fraught with signification ,
the description of Agate Eyes 's feet, Townsend 's nightmare image of pursuit, fills no
fewer than three pages of meticulously detailed prose. This kind of hyper-intensive
description, reminiscent of Robbe-Crillet's in its obsessional precision and hallucin­
atory defamiliarization, is what led Anthony Boucher to praise Woolrich as the 'great
living master of what the psalmist calls "the noonday devil" - the infinite terror of
prosaic everyday details' .4 9

76
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

Woolrich's plots routinely slip the traces of mere narrative coherence, but never
more so than in The Black Curtain, where he spends two full chapters explaining his
explanation and still leaves loos e ends dangling. What matters for our purpose is how
seamlessly his mise en scene m elded with the shadowy, low-ceilinged , expressionist
sensibility of Theodor Sparkuhl, the film's cin e ma to gr a p he r , to create one of the
earliestfilms notrs , The nair st yle may have been in the obscure director Jack Hively's eye
and is ce r ta in ly in Sparkuhl's cinematography, but it was also already ind elibly present
in Woolrich 's prose.
By co nt r ast, Woolrich's Deadline at Dawn was transmuted into one of the odder entries
in the film nair canon, through the mismating of one of Woolrich's 'Headlong through
the Night' stories with the particular talents and Popular Front sentimentalism of
screenwriter Clifford Odets and director Harold Clurman . Woolrich's novel co nt rasts
the empty desolation of New York with the main cha racte rs' nostalgia for smalltown
America, where '[fjolks say good morning to you from all the way over on the other
side of the street, even if you'd never set eyes on them before in your life, and they
never had on yoU,.'iO Even this heavy-handed thematic opposition ca n barely be
glimpsed in Odets' screenplay, in which everything, eve n the nocturnal city itself, has
been co nve n tio n alized and sentimentalized.
In Woolrich's novel , Bri cky Coleman comes to New York with dreams of becoming
an actress and ends up in a dismal job as a taxi dan cer. Obsessed with dan ce , Woolrich
wrote often and, contrary to the myth of his misogyny, with great sympathy about taxi
dancers , his favourite example of working women , always dramatizing their resilience
in the face of economic and sexual exploitation.

She got. up and she went. over to a sort of cupboard arrangement, a niche without any
closure, gaping against. t.he ba ck wall. It. held , on a shelf, a gas -ring, with a rubber tube
leading up and cupping onto ajet. that protruded from the wall overhead. She st. r uck a
match , un cocked the jet, and a little circle of sluggish blue tire jumped into being. She
placed a battered t.in coffee-pot over' this, readied for brewing from earlier in the day,
when it had not been so mu ch agony to move about. (p . 33 ))

Life in the city has been no easier for Quinn, an out-of-work electrician's helper who
grew up in the same small town as Bricky. Bricky sees New York as a personal enemy,
with a 'half-nelson' on her. When Quinn, whom she meets at the dance hall, literal­
mindedly objects that 'houses, stone and cement buildings, they haven 't got arms, they
can't reach out and hold yo u ba ck , if you want to go ', she replies thus:

77
 SHADES OF NOIR

They don 't have to have arms. Wh en there are so many of th em bunched together, th ey
g ive off so meth ing into th e air . . . [T '[ he re' s an intelligen ce o f its own hanging over thi s
pla ce, com ing up from it. It 's mean a nd bad and evil , a nd wh en you breathe too mu ch of it
for too long, it ge ts und er yo u r skin , it get s into yo u - and you' re sunk, the city's got yo u .
Then all yo u' ve got to d o is sit a nd wait, and in a littl e while it's finished th e job, it's turned
you into something yo u never wanted to be or thought you' d be . T he n it's too late . T he n
yo u ca n go anywhere - home o r an ywhere else - and yo u j us t keep on being what it mad e
you from then on. (p. 341)

This d enunciation of th e city go es on for three more lon g paragraphs, culminatin g in

Bri cky's memory of the mornin g sh e tried to leave New York by bus: 'When the su n
started to creep down from th e tops of the buildings , an d th e people started to thi cken
along th e sidewalks on 34 th Street, it kidded me by tryin g to look familiar, somethin g I
was used to, something that wouldn 't hurt me , I didn't need to be afraid of.' Lured
again, she walked out of th e terminal and heard 'the trombon es and the sax es razzing
me, way up high around th e building-tops somewhere. "We've gotcha'" (p. 342 ).
In Woolrich the metropolis is not only monstrous and monstrously alive, as in Balzac,
but actively malevolent, a d emiurge brooding over his creation like the gnostic
Demogorgon. (Not that all of his protagonists are unequal to it. In The Bride Wore Bla ck
Julie , widowed on her weddin g day by a drunken driver, plots her revenge in a
furni shed room on Twenty-first Stree t: 'She seemed to lean toward the city , visible
outside, like something imminent, about to happ en to it.'51 Woolrich 's city is a
hallu cin atory night town , th e d efinitive nair landscape ; it can 'look familiar', even
humanized in the sunlight, but is in capable of disguising its malice after d ark. In
Deadline at Dawn, chapter h eadin gs, featuring a clo ck ticking off the passage of tim e ,
insist on the passing of th e hours and the urgency of th e deadline: before dawn Bri cky
and Quinn must prove th at Quinn was innocent of the murder with whi ch he will
otherwise be charged . (In Woolrich, innocence is relativ e : out of work and d esp erate,
Quinn has just stolen a sta ck o f bills from a safe in a rich man's house where h e h ad
done so me electrical work a few months before. With Bri cky's help, he decid es to re­
enter the house and return the money. When he does, he finds the owner murdered .)
After they find the murd erer, they hope to escape to Ne w York together, that sa me
morning, and return to th e small town where they both g re w up .
Seeking clues to explain what actually happened in the interval between Quinn's two
visits, he and Bricky make separate forays into th e d arkened streets. In d efiance of the
conventional logic of mystery plots, these characters follow one clue after another, each
leading to a dead end. T hese loose threads afford brief glimpses of other narratives ­

78
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

sometimes ordinary (the man wh ose wife had just delivered a ch ild ), sometimes
desperate (the wom an wh o had just co m m itte d a murder) - a random sampling of life
on the stre ets o f th e guilly city . Dan a Polan has noted how explicit Woolrich is 'in
showing the ambival ent p ossibility o f this new sp ace of modernity for th e fr a gmenta­
tion o f narrativity . . . wh ere each narrati ve d enou ement exi sts a lo ngside the possibility
of a n equ ally sign ifica n t but opposed alternate denou ement. Modernity h ere is the
possibility of a ge n e ratio n o f endless narratives, all eq ually possible expa ns io ns o f initial
premises .' In this account, Wo olrich's text becomes availabl e for r eading as 'a kind of
meditation on novel writing'.5~ T h e id ea th at Deadline at Dawn bel ongs in the co m pa ny
of, sa y, Calvino's ljon a Winter's Night is ch arming and , on reflection, even plausible.
Bri ck y's and Quinn's se a rch throu gh a defamiliari zed, maze-like no cturnal land­
scape takes on the air of a walk through a m assiv e, monolithic se p u lch re . 'T h e re was no
one abroad , nothing that m o ved . No t eve n a ca t scentin g at a ga rbag e-can . The city was
a dead thing' (p . 355) . As alwa ys in Woolrich , h ypnago gicall y exact details , visual and
auditory, co n tr ib u te to an all-per vad ing th ernatics of abandonment.

The y ca m e out into a slu mbe ring ea r ly-mo r ning d esolation , flitt ed quickly past th e brief
bleach o f the close-at-han d stree t-ligh t, and were swallow ed up ag ain in th e darkness on
th e other side of it. T he street-li ghts, stre tch ing awa y into perspective in their impersonal ,
formalized, zig-zag pattem , only ad d ed to th e look o f void a nd loneliness. (p. 355)

But then, Woolrich's portrait of urban abandonment and desolation is not merely film
nair atmospherics avant La lettre. It is a veridical pi cture of New York still d eeply scar red
by the Depression, and a proph etic portrait of its falling, building by building, into
rUII1 .

Up a tunn el-dim sid e-street, that had on ce carried a lateral branch of the Elevated over to
Ninth Avenue . It was now shor n of it but permanently stunted in its development by the
sixty-year strait j a cket it had endured . T he slab-like sid es o f windowless warehou ses, th e
urved ba ck of a well-known skating rink that looked like a ce me n t tank, gaps tom in the
buildin g-ranks here a nd th ere b y the Depression , particularl y o n co me r-sites , a nd never
rebuilt upon, used now for parking lots . (p. 32 5)

It was not to be expected that Odets, the ge n iu s-p laywr igh t of Awake and Sing], or
Clurrnan , the cofounder of th e Group Theatre , would d eal sympathetically o r compre­
hendingly with a work from the author of I Married a Dead Man. Odets believed in
leftist politics and well-made plays, and to him Woolrich's r adicall y un conventional ,

79
 SHADES OF NOIR

logically disjun ctive plot co u ld o nly ha ve a p pea red as sim p le inco m pe te nce . T he 1946
film transforms the o u t-o f-work elect r icia n 's help e r into a sailo r on twenty-four-hou r
liberty (Bill William s), thus impartin g a plausible urgency to th e 6. 15 a. m . deadline tha t
Woolrich nev er bothered to give it, a n d considerabl y glamor izes th e taxi dancer, pla yed
by Susa n H ayward . U n til big lu g Bill Williams ap pears with h is tro ubles, he r biggest
p ro blem ha s been un welcome marriage proposals fr o m Steven Geray, a prosp erou s
immigrant with a funn y accent. In stead of fend in g for themselv es o n th e mean st reets,
Williams and H a yward are driven e ve rywhe re - fo r fr ee - by a se nten tious ca bbie, who
in th e final plot twist is revealed as th e murd erer, though one wh ose cr ime is e nt ire ly
j ust ified sin ce h e h as only killed to prevent a viciou s woman fr om hurting others.
Woolrich's 1942 n ovel Ph ant om Lad)', found more sym p a the tic tra nslators in e migre
di recto r Rob ert Siod rna k and cine ma tog ra p her Wood y Bredell. Ind eed , Phantom La d)'
th e film ( 1944) launched Siodrn ak 's sho rt, brilliant H oll ywood caree r. The multiple
perspectives a nd radical subjectivity of Woolrich 's text furnish ed a perfect veh icle for
Siod rna k's expressionist visual se ns ibility and tau t, knotted narrat ive line. And th e mise
en scene of th e film 's most grippin g visu al and a ud ito ry sequences was alread y scr ip te d,
in minute d et ail, in th e novel, as it had be en in T he Bla ck C urtain. 5 :~
In Woolrich 's novel , th e cha racte rs' - a nd th e read er's - hold on wha t passes for
objective re alit y is more tenu ou s than in th e film . H enderson is a yo u ngish sto ckbrok er
whose monstrou s wife Marcell a is murdered on e ni ght while h e is o u t on the town with
a m ysterious p ick-up in an un forgettable hat. O ne after anoth er, the witn esses who
co u ld establish his alibi rem ember him but d en y see ing the wom an , whose testim on y is
so mehow n ecessa ry to prove his inn ocence. (As is so o fte n th e case in Woolrich , th e
narrative logic is elusive.) O d d ly, H enderson himself cannot remember what th e
'p h an tom lad y' look ed like , but he is haunted by met on ymi c assoc iatio ns: 'The r us tle o f
h e r dress. The words she spoke . . . Where did th e liquor go to , th at my eyes saw in her
glass when she ra ised it? Wh en it came d own , it was empty.T' Paradoxicall y, this
memory trace o f th e e m p ty glass h elps to convin ce him of th e woman's materiality. But
th ese phantom memories a re useless in th e relentless gla re o f the p olice inv estigati on.
T e rr ified th at no o ne else can - or will - bear witness to th e wo ma n's presence ,
Henderson fears h e is losin g his gr ip on re alit y: h e feels the city tu rn in g into a ' neve r­
never land' o f 'u n real buildings a nd unreal st reets moving backward past th em , like
shad ows on glass' (pp. 39 , 38) . Finally he begs the detective to take him back to the
d etention pen , with its 'wa lls ... that yo u can fee l with you r hands' (p. 39) .
T h e harsh lighting and sta r k shadows th at cha racte r ize the film's visua l style di re ct
the viewer towa rd a stron ger a n d more d efin ite interpretati on o f these ini tial eve n ts

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 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

than anything the novel provides. For example , the sce ne s in which two major
witnesses, the bartender and the ca b driver, are interviewed by d etective Burgess,
accompanied by Henderson , both end with close-u ps o f th e witn esses ' guilty fa ces , lit as
if by a gla r in g interrogation lamp, o nly aft er Burgess a nd Henderson have turned
away. Later, in prison, the ethereal white light th at streams d own from a high win dow
to form a cone of radian ce around H enderson , trapped in sid e a cor ral-line barred
structure , and his visitor 'K ansas' (Carol Richmond, his exec u tive assista nt) str ongly
suggests, by conventional symbolic assoc ia tio ns, that he is innocent and, further, that
the two of them will fall in love or rather reali ze th at they have alway s be en.
In th e film Kan sas , unlike Ca ro l Richmond in th e novel, is shown, fr om the
beginning, to be a competent professional woman , with h er own secretary a nd her own
(undefined ) re sponsibilities in Henderson's engineering business . (In Woolrich's
no vel, Ca ro l is ha ving an affair with Henderson ; th e Produ ction Code precluded thi s
simple motivation.) Kan sas's professionalism , brio , courage and resourcefulness, co m­
bined with the tend ern ess displ ayed in the prison scene , bear more res emblance to
plucky working-women stalwa r ts of th e thirti es -like Jean Arthur in Capra film s - than
to the d evourin g femm es fat ale s that supposedly populate the landscape offilrn noir.
But Kansas also displays an uncanny ca pacity for negative ca pa bility and metamorpho­
sis, and th e form sh e assumes in th e fir st h alf of th e film is literally that of a femme
fatale .
The nov el's stalking sequence could not be more different from the co n ven tio n al
images of male pursuit in film nair. What Siodmak, closely following Woolrich, cr eates is
an intense psych odrama of stillness, silen ce and cunnin g. T h e ca mera mov es throu gh a
crowd ed bar (the bar in which Henderson met th e 'phantom lady '), ca tches the
bartender in a h arsh white light, a n d comes to re st on Kansas , dressed in a white dress
with horizontal stripes, sitt in g at th e end of the bar, gazin g fixedl y into the camera ­
and at the bartender, who has been subo r ned into swearing he n ever saw the woman
with Henderson. In the next scene, Kansas sits in th e same spot, thi s tim e wearin g a
bla ck dress, her gaze still fixed. First the bar is cr owded, then it is empty. Still she sits
there , a gorgon with a 'h arrowing stare', a 'M edusa-like co u nten a nce,' gazing implac­
ably (pp. 66, 68). Then we see her leave th e empty bar, wearing a white coat. T he
bartender, now thoroughly unnerved, calls closing tim e with his back cautiously
turned, on ly to discover she has disappeared . H e closes up and go es out into the rain,
where h e sees h er waitin g on th e ne arest street co r ne r, under a lamppost. H e walks
tow ard her, past her. Sh e foll ows him through deserted streets all the way to th e £1, her
high heels clicking in the silence , pu rsuing him as if she were one of the Furies, or, as

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 SHADES OF NOIR

Woolri ch explicitl y sa ys, 'Nemesis' (p . 78) . The pursuit, prolonged for three days in the
novel, is abridged into minutes on screen . The two of them are alone in the d eserted
station , and she is in front of him on the platform. Tension builds as he finally turns on
her and both eye the third rail , then breaks as a black woman in a flowered dress co mes
clattering in.
Foster Hirsch , in Film Nair: Th e Dark Side of the Screen , praises Siodmak for this
'quintessential moment of noir contrivance'r'" In fact, everything in this sequence,
including the intrusion of the black woman that Hirsch so admires , was already
scripted in Woolrich's novel, which builds the suspense to an even greater height, and
over a longer period of time. At the end of the film sequence , the bartender finally
confronts Kansas angrily: 'You have nothing on me.' When his shouts draw a hostile
crowd of men, he panics, bolts into the street, and is run over by a car. In the novel, the
final con fr on ta tio n occurs in 'full sunshine', and the bartender, terrified of her rather
than guilt-ridden , sa ys he has no id ea 'what she's aji er' (p . 77). After she tells the crowd
of men to let him go , '[h]e went running away from the scene full tilt .. . running away
from the slender girl who stood there looking after him , her coa t belted around her
waist to the thickness of little more than a man's hand-span. The ultimate in degrada­
tion' (p. 78). When she takes off after him again, the narrator underscores th e
un conventionality of this chase sequence : 'Strange pursuit. Incredible pursuit. Slim
young girl hurrying after a sto cky barman, in and out, out and in, through th e
swarming midday streets of New York' (p. 78) . The barman's end is the same.
Kansas's search takes her into social worlds , and roles, she has obviously never
ventured into before. With tawdry, seductive clothes, garish makeup and che win g
gum, she transforms herself into the sort of cheerfully vulgar and available demimon­
daine who would appeal to the drummer Cliff (Elisha J. Cook Jr), another suborned
witness. 'I'm a hip kitten,' she assures him. In the famousjazz cellar sequence, distorted
camera angles and rhythmic quick cu ts from Kansas to Cliffs masturbatory drum solo
and his leering companions build to an orgastic expressionist frenzy that is one of the
special glories of forties film-making. The scene is like a trapdoor opening onto a
weirdly stylized version of the actual Times Square during that odd seed-time when the
Beats were haunting the Angle Bar and buying Benzedrine-laced inhalers at the all­
night drugstores: these were the days when Alan Greenspan (currently presiding over
the Federal Reserve Board) was a jazz sideman working his way through college, and
William Burroughs (now an adornment of the National Institute and Academy of Arts
and Letters) was rolling drunks in the subway. As the drummer twitches and grimaces ,
a tight close-up frames Kansas laughing maniacally, her teeth bared. Caught up in the

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 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

dru gs and the music, she seems to hav e lost track , for a mom ent, of h er id entity a n d
pu rpose . T h e sce ne in the novel is sim ila r - a ll bebop , gin and mariju ana - but Ca rol
remains m ore o f a squ are. Still, th e en counter with C liff, which needless to say proves
fatal to him , testi fies to Woolrich 's od d , persist ent and rath er terrifying co nv ictio n that
by sh eer will on e ca n tr ansform on eself into th e co m p lete im age of another's d esir e a nd
thereb y d estroy him - or her. This is th e central co nceit o f The B ride Wor e Black a n d
Rendezvous in 13/(/ (1<, which is simpl y th e earlier novel retold with a mal e ave nge r.
Character is arbitrary a nd infinitel y mall eabl e ; dread , desire and will remain . ' Fu n n y
how we kn ow th ese things, all of us,' Kan sas thinks as she makes eye co n tact with poor
Cliff acr oss the orchestra pit , 'e ve n wh en we've nev er tri ed them before' (p. 9 1). The
co n victio n , to put it another way, th at th ere are no limi ts to self-fashionin g, because the
sel f is literall y in essential , is so me ho w evocati ve of Wo olrich 's own closeted way of life,
a n d almost su sp icio usly co nso na n t with ce r ta in present -day critical co nce r ns. But it also
has an ob vious r elevan ce to th e Hux of id entit y a nd sta tus, th e d esperat e obs ession with
keeping up appearan ces , and the proud impostures of th e Depression .
In a cha racte r istic tou ch. the act ual murderer is revealed to be H enderson's best
friend , a mood y sculpt or named Marlowe , who has been ca r ry ing on an affair with
Hen d erson's wife. In th e him , Ton e pla ys Marlowe as one of the mad -literally mad in
this cas e - a na rc h ic (jl}(~rme ll.\ (, hen that so fascinated the coll ectivist forti es. (The
arch et yp e, o f course , is Howard Roark in Th e Fountainhead, which King Vidor, the
populist of the silent Th e Bip; Parade, turn ed into the astonishing film of 1949. ) When he
is not busy murd ering possibl e witn esses o r tagging unhelpfully a lo n g with Ella Rain es
to milliners' shops , Tone is staring at his hands , or keelin g over from migraine , o r
looking peevish as Thomas Gomez, playin g In sp ector Burgess, d elivers a lecture on the
psych ology of serial murderers. Marlowe lives in a ludicrousl y mod erne penthou se
apartment-studio, white on white with his works (he ro ic busts in th e manner of Hitl er's
favourite sculptor, 1\rno Br eker) displa yed on waist-high pedestals . Afte r Kan sas
realizes his treach ery, sh e is chased by Marlow e around th e arctic vastn ess for a while
until Burgess arrives to rescu e her, a nd he pit ch es himself out th e window. Following
on th e expressionist tou rs de [orcc of the first half of th e film, th e second, in cr easingly
dominated by Ton e's overwrought p erforman ce , ha s naturally been d eemed a dis ap­
pointment by critics. But it is not unrevealin g of th e popular prejudices to whi ch
Holl ywood was pla yin g in wartim e, or unfaithful to Woolrich , in whose fictions the
treacherous friend (lover, wife , co m ra d e, whoever was capable of th e most com pre hensive
betrayal), was a sto ck pl ayer.

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 SHADES OF NOIR

In contrast to th e extreme mannerism of Phantom Lad)" the 1949 film The Windo w,
based on Woolrich 's story of 1947 'Th e Boy Who C r ied Wolf', appears fir m ly rooted in
the sociology of urban workin g-class life. (It was directed by Ted T et zlaff, who had
formerl y be en a cinema togra p he r for Alfr ed Hitch cock ; the screen write r was Mel
Dinelli, who worked with Siodmak on Th e Spiral Staircase.i In the opening sequence , th e
ca me ra pans through busy d aylit streets to rest at last on th e partl y boarded-up
windows of an abandoned ten em ent building, ironically graced by what seem to be
handsome Greek Revival details. It lingers on on e window, a gapin g black hole in th e
su n ligh t, then cu ts to the boy , T omm y Woodry , asle ep inside on a bed of straw. This
abandoned building, at once a prin cipal location and a dominant sign ifie r in the film, is
the bo y's private pla yground , where he entertains himself with solita ry cops-and­
robbers fantasies . Because th e stairs are destro yed up to the third Hoor, he enters from
above, by scampering over th e adj ace nt roofs. The ca me ra follow s him , opening ont o
an expansive view of the city fr om his Lower East Side rooftop.
As his title announces, Woolrich 's plot was banality itself. Tommy ('Buddy' in print)
is a you ng fabulist , whose parents naturally do not believe him wh en he insists that th e
Kellertons upstairs (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman in th e film) ha ve robbed and
murdered a drunken sailor. (He has seen everything from the fire esca pe onto which
he crawled on e night in order to sleep during a heatwave.) After th e sympathetic but
stern Mrs Woodry (Barbara H ale) insists that h e confess his tale-bearing to th e
Kellertons, they set out to murd er him too. Core Vidal relates that th e Wise Hack , his
guide to movi edom in the old d ays at MGM, 'trul y believed that ch ild re n in jeopardy
nlwa)'s hooked an audience', a prejudice that th e excelle n t box offi ce takings of Th e
Window, starring the appealing Bobby Dris coll as Tomm y, could onl y have confirrn ed .i'"
(The picture was made und er the thrifty re gim e of Dore Schary at RKO, before he
moved on to the by then troubled MGM.)
Unlike most other Woolrich adaptations, Th e Window, for all its routine melodrama,
is a more com pelling stud y in the notr st yle than its source, whi ch is slight and
formulai c. In Film N oir, Blak e Lu cas praises T etzlaff for using location shots ' to crea te
an American urban landscape that seems almos t infernal',57 co m p lete with falling­
apart tenements, the clatter o f the EI, heat a nd squalor - everything but a singin g
cistern. Th e city is at once unpeopled and overcrowded. The streets are empty, but th e
same day that Tommy boast s to some other boy s that he and his parents are moving to a
ranch 'out west', the building manager materializes a t their door, with desperate would­
be tenants in tow . Since a flight to the suburbs is obviously not in th eir calculations,
Tommy's parents (Arthur Kenned y pla ys th e well-meanin g, hardworking fath er) are

84
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

terrified of bein g e victed . 'W he ther or not th e symbolism was intended, The Window
occurs in th e cu sp se pa ra ting wartime an d post-war h ousing shortages from the
d epredations of 'urban renewal'; we a re at th e portals of what Marsh all Berman calls
the 'Exp resswa y World ,.58
Tomm y Woodry's home life is delimited by th e bars of the fir e escape ou tsid e his
window. T h e slatted views favoured by film noir cine ma togra p he rs (the director of
photography was William Steiner) are very much in evidence. The murder itself is seen
through the narrow band defined by a shade and a window sill. Contrasting with th ese
ominous, co ns tricted views is the bright sunlit stree t th e morning after. With gleaming
clouds of honest working-class laundry strung fr om building to building, the nei gh­
bourhood briefly looks to be clean a n d sa fe . But Tommy's journey from his street to the
local precin ct station , afte r hi s parents refuse to cr edit his story, is film ed to look like a
desperate and perilous vo yag e through th e underworld shadowed by the EI. After his
missi on fails (the cops are in credulous too), Tommy is locked in his room alo ne , and
darkn ess and claustrophobia (a nd Paul Stew art a nd Ruth Roman) close in. T er r o r
builds until , in a visuall y spectacul ar chase seq ue nce , he see ks refuge in the abandon ed
building, whi ch begins to colla pse a rou nd him. Paul Stewart , in hot pursuit, is crush ed
by a falling beam - th e falling beam aga in ! - and Tommy is left clinging perilously from
another until he leaps to the safety of a fireman's net.
In The Window , director Tet zlaff and screenwriter Dinelli, whose pacin g is e xpe rt,
pow erfully re create th e claustral atmosphere a n d a p p re he nsive mood o f wartime film
noir, a nd of Woolrich 's text, using actual New York locations as exp ressio n istically as if
they were pie ces of scenery on a sound stage . The icon ography of the city in early film
n oir was a brilliant minimalist response to the restrictions of wartime produ ction.
Hirsch d escribes these studio-bound citysca p es as 'sim p lified and semi-abstract . ..
deliberatel y lacking th e fullness and d ensity of real life', but 'p regna n t with me anin g ­
an evocative background for dramas of entrapment' r'" After the war, when ca me ra
cr ews were abl e to move outside the sound stages and venture onto the stree ts of New
York and other cities, in the approved post -war mann er, th e co ntro lled studio images
of urban desolation and abandonment were soon supplanted by th e more open
documentary style that incorporated the random bustle of pedestrians and vehicul ar
traffi c. Jules Das sin 's Th e N aked Cit» (1948), the most famou s ex ample o f pseud o­
documentary post-warfilm nou; epitomizes thi s historical moment. Tetzlaff was on e o f
th e relatively few directors in th e late 1940s (Fritz Lang was famously impervious to the
new mood) who used th ese new co nd itio ns of produ ction to intensify, rather th an
dilute , th e th ematics of th e abandoned cit y that pervaded wartime film noir.

85
 SHADES OF NOIR

Blake Lu cas writes, 'Su ch a world represents th e inverse o f the American dream of
fr eedom ; an d it is not surprising th at wh en his mother tells him not to go out of the
ap artment, T o m my replies ingenu ously th at "T he re 's no pla ce for me to go ." ,50 But in
so far as Jilm notr is, as we have been urgin g, a meditation o n th e fa te of th e city, suc h
cr iticism is eq ually ingenu ou s. Th e hidden (but n ot ve ry) subj ect o f the whole exercise
is the suburban esca pe , via the 'Expressway World', whi ch the boy's parents seem too
obtuse to grasp . Once again , the mise en scene of New York a mou n ts to a d emonization
o f the metropolis in advance of its abandonment by such sturdy stri vers as the fictional
Woodrys (Mr Wo odry seems to be some sort of technician); it is a movement that will be
voluntary for some (th e lure of sub u r bia , race-exclusive Federal Housing Adminis­
tration loans, not to mention th e a p peal of a new life 'o u t west') , involuntary for others
(,urban removal') . According to Lu cas's account in Film N oir, the filming of The Window
was complet ed in January 1948, but its release was for some reason delayed until
August 194 9, wh ereupon it be came a surprise hit. 6 1 On 7 March 1949, on a I,Sa O-ac re
former potato field on Long Island, the first Levittown was opened, and despite the
cold and lack of ad vertising, there were a thousand couples like th e Woodrys waiting in
line to bu y. 'Too o fte n we forget that the su bu r b has been built a t a terrifying cost ,' say
th e authors of American Skyline, an unpretentious 1955 history that suddenly d eflects
into o utrage :

This lies not primarily in th e loss oIthe countryside before the lengthenin g superhighway and
sp read ing development ; that is perhaps inevitable in the face of a growing population a nd
the very natural desire of the American to own h is own home . Rather, it lies in the
abandonm ent 0It//(' cit)', th e ce n te r o f our civiliza tio n. Like th e Mad H atter at the tea pa rty ,
who mov ed around the tabl e usin g o n ly th e clean tea cups and leaving th e dirty o nes behind
him, we Americans mov e o n to new land o nce we have exploited th e o ld . The ce ntra l city
has seemingly be en worked for a ll that it is worth and then aba nd o ne d for the suburban
fringe. li :!

In this paragraph , the au th o rs, Christopher Tunnard a nd Henry Hope Reed , may
have co m m u n ica te d a good deal more of the facts of th e matter than th ey realized .
By 1955, when Rear Window appeared, a new social construction and th e routin e use
of colou r film co mbined with th e particular talents of Alfred Hitch cock to cre ate a
visual th ematics so far removed fr om th e iconograph y of classi c urban jilm noir th at this
film, although closely ba sed on Woolrich 's 1942 short sto ry 'It Had to Be Murder'
(originall y and more appositel y e n titled 'Mu rder From a Fixed Point of View'), is never
in clu d ed in the ca no n ofJilm noir. The interrupted sightlines, th e complex inte rplay of

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 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

gazes th at so fascinate film theorists , a re al re ad y th ere in Wool rich , in virt ua lly th e sa me

sequence as in th e film. Woolrich's 'R ear Wind ow' (as th e story is now publish ed in
d eference to Hi tch cock' s version ) co u ld easily ha ve been ada pte d as a powerful film
nair. But while retainin g e ve ry d etail of the sus pe nse plot and visu al su btlety o f
Woolrich's thriller, Hitch cock ma de se vera l maj or cha nges that to gether created a sty le
and a mood far removed fr om film nair,
Woolrich begins thu s:

I didn't know thei r names, I'd ne ver heard the ir voices. I didn 't even kn ow the m by sig ht,
stric tly speakin g, for th eir faces were to o small to fill in with identifi abl e features at th a t
di stan ce . Yet I co u ld hav e co nstr uc ted a tim etable o f th eir co m ings and go in gs, th eir da ily
ha bit s and activities. T hey were th e rear-window dw ellers around me Y:1

Prose and donn ee are (almost) as au stere as Beckett. The unnam ed, undescribed
narrator-prot agonist is a m an , immobilized , alone in his room exce p t for occasiona l
visits by his housem an . ('T he id ea was, m y mov ements were strictly limited around this
time' (p . 2). In the film, th e man is more or less alo ne in hi s room - ex cept for th e
glamorously dressed Grace Kelly, his sweetheart, a nd T he lma Ritter, his coa rse ,
talkative , good-hearted nurse , pl aying h erself. (H oweve r f ilm noir is defined, it may
safely be asse rted that no film prominently featurin g Thelma Ritt er qualifies as nair.) In
R ear Windo w, th e protagonist's voyeurism , edgily acknowledged in th e story ('Su re, I
su p pose it was a little bit like prying, could e ve n h ave been mist ak en for th e fevered
con ce n tratio n of a Peeping T om . That wasn't my fault, that wasn 't th e id ea ' - p. 2) is
ca refu lly motivated . Jam es Stewart is a bored , re stless Life photographer laid up with a
broken leg. The co m bina tion of a virile leading man like Stewart with rom antic (Grace
Kelly) and com ic (Thelma Ritt er) elements is suffi cient to defeat an ythin g that might
have su rvived of Woolrich in th e atmosph erics of the him . Structurally, R ear Windo w is
almost id entical to The Windo w. In th e latter, a ch ild witnesses a murd er, is disbelieved by
his parents and the police, a nd is menaced by the murderers. In the form er, a man
temporarily infantilized infers that a murd er has been committed , is di sbelieved by his
lover, surrogate moth er, and th e poli ce, a nd is men aced by the murd erer. In th e co mic
resolution o f Rear \Vindow, Jeffries (p layed by Stewart) persuades lover and cra n ky
moth er figure to humour him (tho ugh Kelly demurs: 'We 're two o f th e most fri ghten­
ing ghouls I'v e ever kn own'), baits th e murderer (Raymond Burr) into a confrontation
a n d , on ce th at is over, finds himself with two broken leg s and an eve n firmer
e ngage me n t to marry Kelly. The optics in Wo olrich are retained , th e psychological
a us te r ity is lighten ed, and th e homosexual subtext, so a p pa re n t in th e story, is

87
 SHADES OF NOlA

considerabl y muted, not with out leaving a trace in th e overto nes of homosexu al ra pe
wh en th e impossibly goaded Raym ond Burr finally barges into Stewart's apartment
with murd er o n this mind.
Like th e sus pe nse plot, th e se tt ing too is a t the same tim e faithful to Woolrich in e ve r y
sch em ati c d et ail (the locations of all th e windows in th e adjace n t building precisely
dupli cat e th e d escription in th e sto ry), yet totall y different from th e claustra! a tmos­
phere of th e short story - a nd o f Jilm noir. In Woolrich 's ' Rea r Window ', se t in an
anonym ou s city, the rather dreary a pa rt me n t buildings fa ce eac h other, as Ne w York
apartments tend to do, over a co nc re te wasteland, delineat ed o nly by a back fen ce . The
film, set at a n imaginary New York address (125 West 9th Street), as Peter Conrad h as
pointed ou t creates an equally ima ginary setting.!" The a pa rtm e n t houses overlook a
beautifull y landscaped lawn, with well-tended grass and flowers. The suburbani zed
visio n o f city life tends to und ercut th e th ematics of isolation that the iconograph y of
windows rend ers so powerfull y in Woolrich's story and in Th e 11findow (both sto ry a nd
film ). Th ese e ffec ts are greatl y int ensified by Hitch cock 's p articular use of colou r,
whi ch intensifies the lushness of th e lawn and flower s, and Gra ce Kelly's beaut y. Clea rly
the distin ctive quality of Hitch cock 's film, which followed Woolrich's story so faith fully
in so man y d etails, had littl e to do with film notr - how ever it is taxonomized .
Hitch cock neglected to invite Woolrich to the New York premiere of Rear W indo w in
1955; or so , accord in g to Nevins, Woolrich told th e writer Barry Malzberg . 'H e knew
wh ere I lived . He wouldn 't e ven se n d me a ticket.'(;5

v
Apart fr om film noir and beb op , th e post-war forti es e njoy remarkably littl e purchase
on wh at passes for popular memory; little indeed co m pa re d to the hold of th e fifties,
that ca rtoo n ish construction (Ik e , Marilyn and th e Bomb; beatniks and hul a-hoops)
superimposed on a cold torpor th at passes in nation al m ythology as the Un ite d Stat es's
gold en age. The classi c ph ase of jilm 1I0i 1"- from 1944 to 1950 - coincid ed with a p eriod
in whi ch th e U n ited States had gained , and its rulers were determin ed 10 sec u re, a
'preponderan ce of power' in th e world. Despite bravad o in the Truman White House,
the publi c mood by any measure (Gallu p or even no velisti c) was fearful an d ap p re he n­
sive: fearful of a renewed Great Depression (at least up to 1947); fearful afterwards of
intern ati on al communism (th e Attorney General's list o f 'subversive organizati ons' was
drawn up in 1917). Wh at C. Wright Mills called 'th e cold metropolitan manner' and

88
CORNELL WOOLR ICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

89

 SHADES OF NOIR

W.H . Aud en 'the ag e o f a nxiety' were cognate. The temper o f th e tim es was jitte ry a nd
skitt ish . Respectabl e op in ion was pu rsu ed by a h ost of phantasms.
Just as Woolrich a nd other pulp writers of the thirties were secret sha re rs in th e lofty
tradition of cultural pessimism th at included Ad ams and Sp en gler, just as th ey
co n tin u ed Balzac's obses sed int errogation of th e su rface s of th e city, so fi lm noir - more
th an a mere 'nex us of fashions' aft er all - did registe r something di stin cti ve about th e
post-war mood. For e xa m p le , in his 1992 essa y 'T he End s of History', Perry Anderson
writes of the Germ an historian Lutz Niethammcr's id entification o f 'a n uncann y skei n '
of Eu ropea n thinkers who at mid-century had arrived at

so me th ing like a collective vision - g lim psed from man y a ng les - of a sta lled, exhau sted
world , dominated by recursi ve mechan isms o f bureaucracy a nd ubiqui tous circ uits of
co m mod ities, relie ved o n ly by th e ex travaga nces of a phantasmic im agin ary without limit ,
be cause without power. In a post-hi storical societ y, 't he rulers hav e ceased to r ule , but th e
slaves remain slaves',lit;

Surely some suc h vision of the 'end of history' troubled the sight of oth e rs in the forti es
and ea rly fifties as well (fo r exampl e, the yo u ng Mailer), and ind eed is recurrent in th e
wh ole career of film n oir. Rather than dram ati zing th e ordeal o f cha nge, as we are
usu ally told, it would be truer to th e mood of th ese films to sa y th at th e y melodramatiz e
th e ordeal, or a t least the fear, of ch a n gelessn ess. In this way the fru strations of th e left
and the fears of th e right both found their way into the mythologies of [ilm. noir . In
C ha n d le r' s novel Th e L ong Goodbye , for exampl e, the wealthy Mrs Loring (Philip
Marlowe's future bride) is co n vinced the world is well along the road to serfdom . 'We'll
have another war a nd at the e n d of that nobod y will ha ve an y mone y - ex cept th e
cr ooks and the ch ise lers. We 'll all be taxed to nothing, the rest of U S.' li7
Psychologically marooned in 1934, possessed (in the full sense o f the word) by a
melodramatic ima gination, Cornell Woolrich in his awful isolati on became a master
an atomist of Depression-era urban malaise, and a dispiritingly go od prophet. 'Amon g
th e man y images and symbo ls that Ne w York has co ntrib u te d to modern cu ltu re ,'
Marshall Berman writes, 'one o f th e most striking in recent yea rs has been an image of
urban ruin and d evastation.T" In the same way that American city-m yste r ies of th e
1840s surpassed their European cou n te r p a r ts, Woolrich was 'more nightmarish and
stylistically wild' than his fellow romanciersnoiis. In large tracts of th e city, his vision ary
dreariness ha s been realized in sobe r fact. U rba n iza tio n rea ch ed its peak in th e US
midway throu gh the late 1940s, a nd almost at once th e d ecline began. As Stanley
Aronowitz reports, 'The white working class was fated for di sp ersal: the ce n te r cities

90
 CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE ABANDONED CITY

were to be re served for the ve ry poo r and relatively afAuent .'()!) Paradoxically, to th e
e xte n t th at Woolrich's noir vision was realized , its power diminish ed. Rut th en , its
fulfilm ent was paradoxical as well. Th e fear of a ren ewed Dep ressi on lift ed , and the
city was mad e desolate in its passing.
Wh at be cam e ofjilm n air was the fifti es. In so far as it represented m erel y a con gerie
of fashions, its formal possibilities , or a t least those that were Iorrnali zabl e a nd
profitable , were so o n ex ha usted; th e stu d ios , for whom it had always represented
simply a devi ce to hold a skitt ish audience, turn ed to o th e r d evices (and eve n tua lly
return ed to o ld o nes , as lat e film nair becam e n eo- ), Snubbed by Hit ch cock in 1955 ,
Woolri ch was a whiskey-sodd en wr eck and beyond caring wh en Francois Truffaut,
ea ge r to lionize , invited him to th e premiere of 'fill' Bride W ore Black in 1968 . Wo olri ch
died a million aire , a n d one of t he live mourners a t his fun eral was a representative
from C hase Manhattan Bank , who brou ght flowers. As for th e infernal m achin es, his
plots, which profit ably live on - movie ad ap ta tio ns in It aly, Argentina, Japan,
Germ an y, and endless tel evisi on rerun s ll abeant suajata libelli.
-s

Finally, a large p art of th e appeal o ffilm uoir in the forti es, wh en Woolrich 's peculiar
visio n was so often screen ed is a lso an expl anation of why [ilm noir fad ed in th e dull
su nsh ine of th e fifti es; it is a matt er of 'A rt and Evil', as Robert Low ell phrased it in an
unfinished essay of 1955 a bo u t th e literary-moral a tm osp he re a fte r World War Two :

Old classi cs no lon ger p lea sed : but presentl y we di scovered wit h relief that su p posed ly
sound a u tho rs we re mu ch worse th an the y see med . We d iscovered th e black , n ih ilistic,
hom osexual , almo st disint egratin g Sh ak esp eare o r M easurelin' Measure, Troilus, H all/It'! a nd
Timon , We dis co vered a bla ck , gi n-d r in king T enn yson . We d isco vered a bla ck, wolfi sh ,
wire-deserting Dickens , whose g ro te sCj ue Hi eronymus Bos ch world st ru ck us as God 's
plenty, a richer cre. u io u th an an y En glish writ er's sin ce Shakespeare . Th en , a runn y thin g
happened.just as we had label ed ou r tim es th e Age or Anxiety , and had managed 10 po int
out a n ample and redeemin g sha d o w o f d arkness injust about e ve)'}' writ er who had eve r
lived - .iust a t this point we sudd enly fo u nd we were midway in a second solid , se nsible,
wealth y, optimisti c, ch ild -he a r ing era, o ne not unlike th e times of Queen Vict o ria a nd
Prin ce Alb ert. Out of th e black ea rt h of our e vil a u tho rs and e vil visio ns, we had somehow
rebuil t our o wn booming 1H70s, 'HOs, and '90s. co m p lete with their d ynasties of Republ ican
Pr esid ent s.7o

Since th en , yet another d ynasty of Republi can Pr esid ents ha s co me and gone, The
'a m p le an d redeeming shadow' o f' New York/11m n air still co m p els.

91
 SHADES
NO TES
T he autho rs gratefu lly ack now ledge the urge ncy of Mike Davis, th e resou rce fuln ess of
Roland De La Rosa at Movie Image in Berkeley, Ca lifo rnia, a nd th e fo rbea ra nce of
Ste p he n Reid .
I . .J.B. Priestle y, iVIidn igh t on the Desert (London :
Heinem an n , 1937), pp .75-6.
2 . Mary McCarth y, 'A me rica the Beau tiful : T he
Hu manist in the Bat htu b', in On the Contrary
(New Yo rk : Farrar, Straus a nd C uda h y, 1951 ),
pp.6-7. 'She [Beau voir] did not bel ieve us
when we said th ere were no good H oll ywood
movies, no go od Broadw ay plays - onl y
cu rios; sh e was merely co nfir m ed in h er
imp ression th at A me rican intellect ua ls were
" negative".' No do ubt Beau voi r, fo r he r pa rt,
was astonis hed by McCarthy's suggest ion th at
she sp e nd h er time in New York tak in g in
Rome, Open City and U s Enj an ts du paradis . See
also in the sa m e co llect ion , ' Mile G ulliver en
Ameriq ue' .
3. Mike Davis , Cit), of Q uart z: Excavating the
Future in Los Angeles (London : Verso , 1990),
p.3 7.
4. Sylvia H a rvey, ' Wo me n's Place : T he Abs en t
Fa m ily of Film Noir', ill E. A n n Ka p lan, ed .,
W omen in Film Nair (Londo n: British Film
Institu te , 1980), p. 26.
5. Pola n 's interpret atio n of j il m na ir appears in
Dan a Polan , Power and Paranoia: H istory ,
Na rrativ e an d A merican Cin ema, 194 {)-1 95 0
(New Yo rk : Co lumbia U n ive rsity Pr ess, 1986).
See especially pp. 16-1 7 an d the chapt e r
'Blind In sights and Dark Passages: T he
Pro blem o f Place m ent '.
6. Alain Silve r and Elizabet h Ward (Ca ro l Mack
and Ro be rt Porfirio , co-ed itors), Film Nair
(Lond o n : Sec ke l' an d Wa rburg, 1980) re ma in s
inv al uable. For term in ological ni cen ess (a n d
much usel'u l lea rn ing), see .Ion Tus ka, Dark
Cinema : American Film Noi r in Cultural
92
O F NaiR
Perspective (We stpo rt, CT a nd Lo ndon :
Gree nwood Pr ess, 1984 ).
7 . Geo ffrey O'Brien , 'Th e Retu rn o r Film N oi r ',
New York R eoieio of Bo oks, vol . 38 , no. 14 (15
Aug us t 199 1), p . 45 .
8 . It is Tuska who brings in Greek traged y
(p . 7fT.). For Pa ul Schrader, see his ' Notes o n
Film Nair', in David Denby , ed . A wake in the
Dark (New York : Rand om H ou se , 1977 ),
p. 290 .
9 . Fo r an atmosp heric account o f H oll ywood in
th is period , see Otto Fre id rich , Cit)' ofNets: A
Portrait oJ H ollywood in the 1940 s (New Yo rk :
Ha r p e r an d Row, 1986); th e fig u res quot ed
a p pea r o n p p . 343-4 .
10 . Frie d ric h in clud es mate r ial o n th e red -ha iting
Sam Wo od (see especially pp. 167-8 , 31 8-1 9 ),
wh o is als o th e su bj ect of a mo no gr ap h by
Tony T homas in The H ollywood l'mlessionall,
vo l. 2 (New York : A.S. Barnes/T antivy Pr ess,
19 74). O n th e peri od iza tion ofjilm noir, we
are in clined to fo llow th e sev ere view o f
Foste r Hi rsch in Film N air: The Dark S ide 01 till'
Scr een (Sa n Diego and New York: A.S. Barn es/
Tan tivy Pr ess, 198 I ) that its 'tr ue he yd a y', or
class ic phase as we ca ll it, 'was brief: fr om
Billy Wild er's Doub le I nd emn ity in 1944 ran d
Robert Siodrnak's Ph antom I.ady in th e same
yea r ] to Wild e r's Sunset Bouleva rd in 1950'
(p. 199 ). Film No ir in th e fifties becam c
tinc tu red with ca m p a nd was usua lly d estin ed
fo r d ri ve-ins an d grind hou ses.
II . Fo r thi s paragra p h, se e Rich ard I'olcnbc rg ,
War and Society: The Unit ed S tates, 1941 - 4 5
(Ph iladelp hia , Lip p incott, 1972); John M o r ton
Blum, V Wa.s For Yictor»: Politics and A mrri ca 11
 CORNELL WOOLRICH
Culture During World War Two (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Mike
Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics
ami Economy' in the History of the US Working
Cta5S (London: Verso, 1986), chapter 2;
George Lipsitz, Class and Culture in Cold War
America: 'A Rainbow at Midnight' (New York:
Praeger, 1981); and Norman D. Markowitz,
The Rise and Fall of the People'S Century Henry
A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 19<11-1948
(New York: Free Press, 1973).
12. Congress effectively gutted the domestic
operations of the OWl at the end of 1943. On
its beleaguered career, see Blum, pp. 15-52.
13. See Blum and James MacGregor-Burns, The
Crosswinds of Freedom, vol. iii of The American
Experiment (New York: Knopf, 1989) pp.
193-4, which contains the quotation from
Vm~ety. Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black,
Hollywood Goes to War (London: I.B. Taurus,
1(88) is a reasonably balanced full-length
account. Though Roosevelt knew how to use
Hollywood for his purposes, his inner circle
was mostly concerned with t.he image of the
President himself, particularly in newsreels
(Polan has interesting things t.o say about
FDR's carefully controlled representations
and his centrality to the war narrative,
pp. 66-8 and 133-6). Of course, the medium
Roosevelt made most completely his own was
radio. Though fond enough of movies, movie
stars, and even the occasional movie mogul,
his interest in the medium was sporadic,
never approaching his obsession with
newspapers and their mostly hostile
proprietors. On the whole, thejournalists,
literary men and former social workers in his
entourage were probably less interested in
Hollywood than he was. It is suggestive that
Lowell Mellett, his emissary to Hollywood,
was apparently regarded within the White
House as something of a buffoon. See
Jonat.han Daniels, White House Witness,
1942-1945 (New York: Doubleday, 1975),
p. 142: 'Obviously Mellett is impressed like a
child by t.he glamor of Hollywood.'
AND THE ABANDONED CITY
14. For a brief discussion of the significance of
the strike wave, see Davis, Prisoners, pp. 86-7.
See also the impressionistic account in Eric F.
Goldman, The Crucial Decade - and After:
America, 1945-1960 (New York: Knopf,
1960), an enlarged version of The Crucial
Decade, America, /945-1955 (1956), pp. 23-7.
Goldman's original volume was the first
general history of the period written by a
respectably tenured academic and is redolent
of the conventional wisdom of the time in
which he is writing. For a useful overview of
the relevant economic figures, see Michael
Barone, OUT Country: The SIUljJing of America
from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free
Press, 1990), pp. 147-8.
15. Frank Krutnik, In a Lonel» Street: Film Notr,
Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991).
See especially chapter 6.
Hi. Cousins is quoted in Robert S. McElvaine, The
Great Depression: America 1929-1941 (New
York: Times Books, 1984), p. 182. McElvaine
describes the widespread practices that
translated this prejudice into public policy,
such as refusing to hire married women to
teach in public schools (77 per cent of all
school districts) and firing women teachers
who did marry (50 per cent); these
restrictions provided the supposedly
misogynistic Woolrich with a plot twist in The
Bride Wore Black. See McEivaine, p. 182.
17. On the crisis of traditional male values during
the Depression, see McElvaine, pp. 340-41.
About Ronald Reagan, confused veteran, sec
Ronald Reagan (with Richard G. Hubler),
Where',I' the Rest of Me? (New York: Duell,
Sloan and Pearce, 1(55), pp. 16(i-61.
18. Krutnik, p. 91.
19. Far from witnessing a social revolution, the
post-war forties reversed long-standing
demographic trends of increased divorce and
lowered fertility, which were only restored in
the sixties, as Elaine Tyler May report.s in
'Cold War - Warm Hearth: Politics and the
Family in Postwar America', in Steve Fraser
93
 SHADES OF
and Gar y Gerst.le, cds. , Th e R ise and Fall oj the
New Deal Order, I 9}O- 1980 (Prin ceton , :\ J:
Prin ceton Un ive rsity Pr ess, I ~8 9) , pp. 53-6.
'It might have been othe rwise' : but it was not.
Though film noi r is o fte n int erpret ed as
registering alarm at va r ious uph eavals a nd
assisting in drag oonin g peopl e back into
tr aditi on al rol es tM ildred Pierce, fo r exa m p le,
is gen erall y in terpret ed along th ese lin es), it
might eq ua lly co nvinc ingly be d escribed as a
kind of proleptic nightmare vision of a mu ch
vast er politi cal, social, sex u al a nd cu ltu ra l
revolution that m ysteriously fail ed to
mat erializ e; perhaps th e tel egram s th at
Pri estl ey sp eak s of were co m ing not from hell
but from th e political un con scious.
20 . C. \"'right Mills, Wh ite Coll ar : Till: Am erican
Middle Classes ( 195 1; reprinted Ne w York :
Oxford/Galax y, 1\156), pp. :~2 H-l).
21. Allan Gurganus, ' Mino r Ilcroism : Something
About j\.!y Fath er', in Wh ite Peoplr : Storie.' and
N ovellas ( 1990 ; reprinted Ne w York :
Ballantin e/Iv y. 1992 ), pp . 15-10 .
22 . T he ni!'{htclub scen es in Gi lda (set in Buenos
Air es) ar c a classic locus . A tour of nightspots
is a regular featu re o f th e 'soldier's home'
!4'enre o f post-war fiction, as nostalgically
d escribed by Gore Vidal in 'The Art and Arts
of E. H oward Hunt ' colle cted in Gore Vidal,
1'-11 alters of Fa ct and o{ Fiction (F:s.'ays
1973-1 976) (N ew York : Random House,
I ~77), pp. 211-14 . Of co ur se , most of these
nov els ar e set in New York ('a glittering
Babylon in th ose days before the writing
a p pe are d on Ma yor Lindsay's wall', Vidal
writ es, pp. 2 11- 12), but the nightclub is also
an important settin g in a grim affair like Ross
Macd onald's BInI' City (1947 ; reprinted New
York : Warn e r, 1992) , set in a city rather like
Akron an d haunted by th e recent strike wave.
2:\ . H enry Adams, Th e Edu cation ofllem)' Adams
(Bosto n : Hou ghton j',,!iffl in, 191H), p. 499.
24 . David S. Reynold s, B eneath the American
R ena issan ce: Th e S ubversive l maginauon ill the
94
--
NOIR
Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf,
1988), p. 172. See especially chapter 6.
25. On the city-mysteries, see Reynolds, Pl'. H2--4.
Reynolds notes: 'The typical American city­
mysteries novel was more nightmarish and
stylistically wild than its foreign co u n te r pa r t,
principally because , in America, socialist
fervor had by the 1840s become fused with a
fierce evangelical emotionalism and a
republican rowdiness unknown in Europe' (p .
H2).
20. Italo Cal vino , 'The City as Protagonist in
Balzac', in Th e Uses of Literatu re: Essays (Sa n
Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich , I ~H2) ,
trans. Patrick Creagh , pp. I H4-H5.
27. Reynolds , p . H2.
28. Larzcr Ziff, Litera')' Democracy: Th e Declara tion
ofCultural hulependen ce in Ama ica ( 19HI :
reprinted i'iew York: Penguin , 19H2), p. 9G.
29. Reynolds , p. 170.
30 . Calvino, p. 18'\.
:\ 1. Pete 1- Br ooks, 'T h e Melodramatic
Imaginat ion ',I'a rtisllIl R ruieui, vo l. XXXIX , no .
2 (Sp rin g 1972), p . 199 . T he argument in thi s
essay is extended in h is Th e M elod ram atic
Imagination (New Haven : Yale Un ive rs ity
Press, 1976 ).
32. See Barone , p. 199. On di sp ersal. see Stanl ey
Aronowitz, Faile Prom ises (Ne w Yor k:
McGraw-Hill, 1973 ), p. ,\8;\.
33. Originally published in Raymond Cha nd ler,
The Simpl« Art of Murder (19 50) ; reprin ted in
the introduction to Tr oubl e 1.1 M y Busin ess (Ne w
York: Ballantine, 1972) , p. viii.
34. George Steiner, In Bluebeard :s Castle: Som e
Notes Towards the Ii edej nu tion ojCultu re (Ne w
Haven: Yale University Press, 1971) , p . I ~) .
35. Lewis Mumford, 'Spengler : Dith yr amb to
Doom' (1939--44) , collected in Interpretations
and Forecasts: 1922-1972, Studies ill Lite rature,
History, Biograph». Techn ics, and Contemporary
Societ» (New York: Harcourt Br ace
Jovanovich, Il)T~ ) , pp . 224-5 .
 CORNELL WOOLRICH
36 . On th e 'W h ite C ity', see Spe n ce r R. Wea r t,
N u clear Fear: A H istory of Im ag es (Ca m br idge ,
MA: H arva rd U niv e rsity Pr ess, 19 88 ), pp . 5-9 .
37 . Albert Ca m u s, A merican J ournals ( 1978 ; tr ans .
Lond on : Aba cus , 1990 ), trans. H ugh Le vick,
p.32 .
38 . Albert Ca m us, 'The Rains of N ew York'
(1 94 7), trans. Elle n Co nroy Ken ned y, in
Ph ilip 'Tho dy, ed ., Lyrica l and Cr itical Essays
( 1968; re pr in ted New Yo rk: Vintage , 197 0),
p . 183.
39 . .lean -Paul Sart re , ' Ma n ha tt an : T he Grea t
Am e rican De se rt ' ( 1946), co llec te d in
Alexander Klein , cd ., Till' Empire Ci ty (New
York : Rin eha rt , 1955 ), p p . 455, 4 5fl-7 .
40 . T he qu o tation regard ing Dawn Po well's no vel
The L ocusts Ha ve No King is from the o rigi na l
jacke t co py . See the int roductio n by Joh n
Gu a re to the repri nt (New Yor k: Yarro w
Pr ess, 1990 ), p . ix. G ua re asks: 'Bu t doesn 't
that so und more like D ouble Indemnitv, m o re
like a Fritz Lang W omall ill the W illdow hu rli n g
a n innocent to the film noi r wo lves o f fat e ?'
Indeed it does - but Powell was a sa tirist,
whose target in this n ovel was th e publishin g
in d us try . O n her work, see Go re Vid al, ' Dawn
Powell : T h e Am e rican 'Writ er', in AI Hom e
(Es says / 982-1 988) (New York: Random
H ouse , 198 H). Paul Bo wles's ' Pages from Cold
Point' a ppe a re d in his Th e D elicate Pre )' and
Other S tories (N ew York : Rand om H ou se ,
1950).
41 . Peter Co nrad , The Al'l of the Cit»: Fiews an d
Venion' ojNeio York (New York : Oxford
U n iversity Pr ess, I !lH4), p . 265 .
42 . T he sta n d ard sou rce o n Woolri ch 's life a nd
literary p rodu ction is Fra ncis M . N evi ns Jr's
Cor nell W oolrich: Firs t }' OIl D rea m, The" YOII
(New Yo rk: Mysterious Press, 19HH), to wh ich
we a re m uc h in d e bt ed . For a wid e-ranging
co llectio n of Woolrich 's sho rt er fiction , sec
Rear W i" dow am} Otlicr S tories, sel ected by
Maxi m J akubow sk i (New Yor k: Simo n a nd
Sh us ter, 19 88) in th e Blu e Mu n ier se ries,
AND THE ABANDONED CITY
wh ich incl u d es a terse an d ins tructive
introduction by Rich a rd Ra yne r.
43 . Nevi ns , p. 127.
44. Ca rlo s Cla re ns, Crime M ov ies: From Griffith to
Th e Godfa ther a nd B eyond, All Ill ust rat ed Hist ory
(New York : No rt o n , 1980), p p. 193-4 .
4.S . N evins , pp . 112-1 3 ,
46. lbid ., p. 117.
47. Bro o ks, p . 206.
48 . Corne ll Wool rich, The Black Curtain (New
York : Sim o n a nd Sh u ster, 1941 ), p. 3 .
49. Q uot ed in Nev ins, p . :B8.
50 . Corne ll Woolri ch ['W illiam Irish ', p sc ud .],
D eadl ine at Dawn (Ph iladelphia : Lip p in cott,
1944), p. 339.
5 1. Corne ll Wool rich, T he B rid e Wore Black ( 1940;
reprin te d N ew Yo rk : Ba lla nti ne , 1984 ), p . 76.
52 . Polan , p . 23 :t
53 . Th e brief bu t info r m ative entry for P ha ntom
1"1U1)' by Ro bert Porfirio in Silver and Wa rd ,
pp. 225-6, no tes th e n icc meld ing of
sensibiliti es a nd th e 'boost' th e film gave to
Siodr n ak 's brief passage th rou gh H oll ywood .
54 . Cornell Wool rich [W illia m Ir ish , ps eud .]
Phant om La dy ( 194 2), re print ed in Th e Best of
William Irish (Ph iladelp h ia: Lip pin cott , n .d .),
p . 39 .
55 . H irsch , p . I I.S.
56 . See 'T h e Top Te n Bcstselle rs ', in Vida l,
Mutt ers of Facl, p. 3.
57. Entry for Th e Wi lldow in Silve r an d Ward .
p. :\ 14 .
58. Marshall Berm an , A ll Th a I Is Soli d M ells 111 10
A ir : T he Experience ofModanilJ ( 19H2;
D ie rep rint ed New York : Pengui n , 19H8),
pp. 290-91 .
59 . H irsch , p . 1:,.
60 . Bla ke Luc as, 'R ea r W indow ', in Ward an d
Silver, p. 3 1:1.
6 1. Ibid .,p . 312 .
95
 SHADES OF NOIR

62 . C hr istopher Tunna rd a nd H enry Ho pe Reed , 67 . Raymon d Chandler, Th e L ong Goodbye ( 1953 ;

Am enClln Sky lin e: T he Growth and Form of Our re printed New York: Vintage, 1988 ), p . 362.
Cities and Towns (N e w York : Mentor, 1956), 68 . Berman , p . 290 .
p. 184 .
69 . Stanley Ar ono witz, Fai le Promises (New Yor k:
63. ' Rear Window' , in Cornell Woolrich , R ear McGraw-Hi li, 1973), p . 383 .
Wind ow ami Othrr St ories, p. 2.
70 . Robe rt Lo well, 'An a nd Evil', collected in
64 . Conrad , pp. 293-4 . Collected Pr ose, ed ., Robert Giroux (Ne w York :
65 . Nevins, p. 4 77 . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), pp. 129- 30.
66 . Perr y And er son . 'T he Ends of Hi sto ry',
collect ed in A Zone o/ Engagement (Lo ndon :
Verso , 1992), p p . 279-80.

96
 4

THE MYSTERY OF THE

BLUE GARDENIA

Janet Bergstrom

Pe ter Bogdanovich, co m me nt ing on The Blue Garden ia: 'This is a particularly ven omou s
p ictu re of American life.'

Frit z Lan g : 'The only thin g I ca n tell you abo u t it is th a t it was th e first pi cture afte r th e
McCanh y business, a nd I had to shoo t it in twenty da ys. Ma ybe th at's wha t made me so
veno mo us . [Lau ghs],

In th e fall of 1965, Pet er Bogd an ovich interviewed Fritz Lan g at his home in Beverl y
Hills , California. Over th e co u rse o f six days, Bogdanovich qu estioned Lang about eac h
of th e twenty-five films he had d ir ected since he cam e to Am erica under contract to
MGM in 1935, the last one co m p leted just four years be fore . These interviews were
published in 1967 as Fritz Lang in America. I Bogdanovich co u ld not have imagined that
thi s brief account, Lang's o wn, o f his history in th e Am erican film industry would be
used as th e most reliable so u rce o f information on thi s su bject for over twenty-five
yea rs . Despite Lang's fa voured sta tus with cr itics a nd scho lars , no on e has und ert ak en
the a rc haeo logy of his in vol vem ent with the Ameri can stu d io system , much less th e
more d aunting task of esta blishing his biograph y and p rofessional history across five
national co n texts (Austria, Germany, France, America and post-war West Germ any).
Not th at ch ar tin g Lang's co u rse through the studio system would be an easy task.

97
 SHADES OF NOIR

Whether a sign of strength or weakness (critics have different opinions about this),
Lang changed studios almost continuously between 1935 and 1956, from Fury to
Beyond a R easonable Doubt. His filmography shows affiliations with MGM, United
Artists, Paramount, Twentieth-Century Fox, RKO, Universal, Warner Brothers,
Republic, and Columbia . Moreover, about half of Lang's American films were inde­
pendent productions, in which the studio became involved at a relatively late date for
rel ease and distribution. Although today we have access to production files maintained
by the studios in a way that was on ce unimaginable, for these hyphenate productions
the studio records document, at be st, only half of the production history." The records
of independent productions are much more difficult to locate. Generally they have not
survived or their whereabouts are unknown. i' Such is the case of The Blue Gardenia
( 19 5~-53).
The first part of this cha p te r represents a preliminary effort to trace the production
history of this film, based on an interpretation of studio records and clippings files
available in the research libraries of Los Angeles as well as the wealth of documents that
Lang donated to the Cinematheque Francaise in the 1950s.4 The second part uses the
same sources to suggest ideas about the film itself, as distinct from the project to make it
and promote it. From the production history of The Blue Gardenia we can gain some
insight into Lang's work as a 'Hollywood professional' in the early 1950s, and we can
also see how Lang attempted to live up to his self-image as a particular kind of creative
artist, one cha r ged with the responsibility of translating socially significant ideas into
intelligent cin e ma tic expressions. Deception, betrayal and psy chological terrorism
thoroughl y permeate this McCarthy-era film, not only those scenes presented in the
nightmarish visual styl e ofJihn nou: The Blue Gardenia is a nightmare from one e nd to
the other, no matter how wholesome the 'women's world' featured in many scenes
appears to be, with its Hat lighting style, as if simulating the look of television." One
could almost say that the film is structured around a struggle to re-establish clear lines
of demarcation between social expectations for men and those for women. But, on the
other hand, the film has been seen as progressive, by E. Ann Kaplan first and others
more recently, precisely because of its crystalline representation of sex role limitations
for women . I will return to these issues later.
Lang's ca ree r in the ea rl y 1950s, as described to Bogdanovich, presents a puzzling
sequence of events. No one offered him ajob after he finished Clash byNight (1951-52) ,
and he was unable to find out the reason . Months passed without an offer or an
explanation until finall y, after a year of anxiety, he learned that he had been
blacklisted . Lang described the moral and political confusion at this time , when anti­

98
 THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE GARDENIA

fascist ac tivities during World War Two, su ch as La ng's inv olvement with the Anti- Na zi
Leagu e , could be reinterpreted as pro-communist, rega rdless of th e political alle­
gian ces of th e individu als involved. All it took was a rumour for work to di sappear.
Lang said that a ltho u g h h e had never be en a member of th e Co m m un ist Party, unlike
man y p eople he knew , h e di sco ve r ed that th ere was no way to clear his name - no co u rt
where he could be heard- because there was no sp ecific ch arge against him. Lang also
reported that his lawyer went to New York to see an officia l o f the Am erican Legion on
his beh alf, with no clear results. 'Well , finall y,' Lan g co ncluded, 'a fte r a yea r and a half,
Harry Co h n gav e me th e first job.'(; The exch a nge between Bogdanovi ch and Lang on
The BIll e Gardenia cited abo ve ('it was th e fir st pi cture aft e r the McCarthy bu siness' )
follow s this statem ent and co nstitu tes th e e nt ire e n try on that film .
Here is the puzzle: if Harry Co h n was th e solution to Lang's bla cklisting p roblem,
why was his n ext film, The Blue Gardenia, a n ind epend ent produ ction rel ea sed by
Warn er Brothers ? For it was onl y a fte r Lang finish ed Th e HIlle Gardenia that he went to
work for Harry Co h n at Co lu m bia Studios , where he directed The Big l l eat (1953) and
l l u.muu Desire (1954).
Lotte Eisner, in the Fr en ch edition of Fritz Lang, modifi es the account Lan g ga ve
Bogd anovich as follows:

Aft er J:\ months of for ced idlen ess, a produ cer by th e name o f Alex Gottlieb finall y ga ve
Lan g a cha nce , offerin g him Til t B/1/I' Cardeni a . Lan g acce p ted so that he co u ld get back to
work . In 195 3 , H arry Cohn, the head of Columbia, would give h im a one-year contract a nd
act as La n g's political gu arantor. 7

Accordin g to thi s, it was a produ cer nam ed Alex Gottlieb - th e man who did, indeed ,
hire Lang to direct The Blue Gardenia in 1 9 5~ - who gave Lang his first job after th e
'McCa rt hy busin ess'. But if Lang was alread y ba ck at wo r k, wh y would it ha ve been
ne cessary for H arry Cohn to act as his political guarantor th e followin g yea r? Or was it
possible that Cohn gave Lang a contract before Gottlieb, but on e that was to begin after
The Blu e Gardenia was completed ?
Eisn er tells us that Clash hy Night was finished on 3 Nove m be r 1951; here began
Lang's thirteen months without work. But this dat e , for whi ch sh e gives no source,
cannot be accurate. Although th ere are no files on this film in the RKO Coll ection to
establish the d a tes of 1he produ ction (e lfish hy N ight was an independ ent prod union
released by RKO), another important coll ection of documents do es provide useful
information." The Produ ction Cod e Administration docum ented th e progress of the
film in monitorin g the scr ipt and all of its revisions throughout th e course of shooting."

99
 SHADES OF NOIR

The PCA file on Clash by Night shows a continuous exc ha nge of correspondence about
recommendations and changes in th e script between the producer a nd Joseph Br een
from 11 July 1951, when the first script was submitted for approval, until 18 March
1952. This is four and a half months after the date given by Eisner for the film's
completion. The PCA reviewed th e film and granted a seal of approval number on 8
February 1952. Subsequently two more sets of letters were ex changed about 'ad d ed
scenes', the last one dated 18 March . 10 Clash b)' N ight was 'trad eshown ' at RKO Studios
on 12 May and released inJune .
As early as the following September, notices about The Blue Gardenia, featuring
producer Alex Gottlieb's name, began to appear in the trade papers. lIOn 16 October
Variety announced: 'Fr itz Lang, who has been signed to direct, ch ecked in with Gottlieb
at Motion Picture Center yeste r d ay to start work on final screenplay with [Charles]
Hoffman.' If Lang finished shooting Clash by Night in February or March 1952 and
began working on the script for The Blue Gardenia in October, his period of inactivity
was much shorter than he remembered: at most, seven or eight months. This would
not have been considered a long time between films in Hollywood, although it might
have seemed like an eternity in the midst of the career-destroying rumours and
allegations of th e McCarthy era. (The House Committee on Un-American Activities ­
HUAC - hearings on Hollywood had recommenced in 1951. 12 ) According to Colum­
bia Studios' legal department, Harry Cohn did give Lang a one-year contract, but not
until after he had finished shooting The Blue Gardenia (24 December): on 8 January
1953 Lang signed a contract with Columbia to make three pi ctures for $15,000 . I:l The
Blu e Gardenia was released on 28 March. If Lang's career was e ve r endangered because
he was suspected of being a 'fellow traveller', it was Alex Gottlieb, Blu e Gardenia
Productions incarnate, who put him back to work.!"
The man who produced the first ten Abbott and Costello co med ies for Universal
would seem to be an unlikely match for Fritz Lang. l .'> Gottlieb, who started out in
publicity, had built a reputation since the 1930s as a writer and producer of low-budget
comedies and musicals. I tl In 1952 and 1953, besides Th e Blue Gardenia , Gottlieb
produced two more Abbott a nd Costello films for Warner Brothers and a Frank
Tashlin comedy for RKO tMan» Me Again) . His screen credit as producer of Stern­
berg's Macao for RKO (1950; released 1952), a darker, more ambitious film , was only
nominal (the production was run by Howard Hughesj.!" It does not help us to
understand why Gottlieb decided to produce a film like The Blue Gardenia or why he
chose Lang as the director. Perhaps Gottlieb recognized Lang as anoth er seasoned
professional, someone who could be relied on to get the job done on time and within

100
 THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE GARDENIA

budget: here was an opportunity for a low-budget investment to payoff in a quality

produ ct. As Gottlieb stated to the press, 'We started with a good story, got Fritz Lang to
direct, looked for the best possible actors, and got them. v'"
Gottlieb moved the entire production along very quickly, keeping his name and the
film's progress in the trade journals continuously. (Gottlieb seemed to be personally
involved at e ve ry step .) He bought the rights to Ver a Caspary's story 'The Gardenia' on
3 September 1952. Three weeks lat er he had a script to send to Breen for PCA
approval; by 15 O ctober Lang was working on revisions with Hoffman, which gave him
about six weeks for pre-production.!" On 24 November Gottlieb confidently sent the
'revised final version' of the script to Breen ('Dear Joe ... ') with a note indicating th at
shooting was sch eduled to begin 'on Saturday of this week, so haste will be in order
regarding any changes your office recommends that we make' .20 On 27 November
Gottlieb concluded the di stribution deal with Warner Brothers.v' Lang began shooting
the n ext day, finishing on Christmas Eve. 22 Near the end, Gottlieb helped out by
delivering 'wild lin es' of dialogue and appearing briefl y in front of the camera as a
newspaperman; his wife, Polly Rose Gottlieb, came in to playa steno typist. 23 Although
Lang complained to Bogdanovich and Eisner that he had to shoot the film in twenty
days, he actually finished the film on e day ahead of his 21-day schedule. The trade
papers presented this as a directorial coup, no doubt thanks to Gottlieb's publicity
releases: 'Lang established a kind of re cord in bringing in The Blu e Gardenia in 20 days
. . . by diagramming scenes in advance and using a new kind of quick working dolly for
the camera.'21

In Th e Blue Gardenia, circumstantial evidence points to Los Angeles telephone operator

Norah (Anne Baxter) as the murderer of commercial artist Harry Prebble (Raymond
Burr), a notorious womanizer. In an unguarded moment following the news that her
fiance , in Korea in the army, has fallen in love with a nurse, Norah accepts a date with
Prebble and later, intoxicated , goes home with him only to realize that she has made a
mistake. To fend ofT his advances, she strikes him with a poker from the fireplace and
then blacks out. The next day she remembers nothing about the seduction or the
struggle or even about coming home. When she hears that Prebble has been murdered ,
she panics, assuming she did it (the clues point to her). Disoriented and afraid, she
begins to quarrel with her roommates Crystal and Sall y (Ann Sothern and Jefl
Donnell), accusing them of spying on her. Star newspaper reporter Casey Mayo
(Richard Conte) , also renowned 1'01' his success with women , competes with th e poli ce
for the prize story; he entices Norah to confess to him by extending to her a calculated

101
 SHADES OF NOIR

promise of symp ath y and prot e ction in 'Casey Mayo's Letter to an U n kno wn Murde r­
ess', advertised by a headline that fills the front page o f the Chronicl e. Casey's investiga­
tion draws the poli ce to her. As Norah is led off, sh e acc u ses him of betrayal. Now in
lo ve with her, Casey joins Captain Haynes (George Reeves)2:) to find a no th e r woman,
J
Rose Miller (Ruth Sto re y), who had a lso go ne to Pr ebblc's apartm ent o n th e night of th e
f murder. About to be questioned by th e poli ce , Rose slas hes her wri st , but she is still able
to co n fess from her hospital bed in Norah's presence. At the e nd , Norah emerges
smiling from the co u rth o use with her protective roommates, who n ow give Casey th eir
a p p ro val.
Kever on e to improvise on th e se t, Lang took special car e to organize this shoot for
maximal effi cien cy. The docum ents he donated to th e Cine ma the q ue Francaise giv e us
a good idea of how he accomplish ed this . Mapping ca me ra po sitions, a ngles and
co r r espo nd ing sho t numbers onto architectural drawings of the sets , sce ne by scen e,
allo wed Lang to visualize shootin g out of continuity more easily, keep track of th e d aily
production , and form a condensed picture of shot ch a n ges within a scene. Some o f
th ese diagrams sho w elaborat e ca me ra movem ents planned for th e cr ab dolly, a new
d evice for holding the camera th at allowed it to be manoeu vered easily on rubber
wheels , thu s eliminating the expen sive, tim e-consuming process o f la ying tracks a nd
allowing a new flexibility in shooting. 2 !; Lang also drew up m ast er cha rt s for each
location that sh ow ed at a glance th e order of th e shots he wanted to take, organized to
minimize th e tim e spent in settin g up the camera and lighting. Th e ch art opposite for
the most fr equ entl y used set , o f the girls' apartm ent, shows th e kind of effi cient,
logical organization behind th e detailed preparations for th e film's qui ck shootin g
sch ed u le . Th ese visual aid s referred to the ma ster document , Lang's hea vily annotat ed
co p y of th e shooting script (key to the shot numbers), on whi ch added shots and
ch a n ges in dialogue and action, even very sm all ones, were scr u p ulo usly noted ,
occasionally in th e hand of an assista n t. Vertical lin es were drawn through the shots as
th ey were film ed , with dates and sho t numbers noted . No t surprisin gly for a director so
inclined toward montage , Lang's most fr equ ent notes and sk et ch es added scree n
direction , es pecia lly the dire ction of an actor's look . Lang's script provided him with a
d etailed continuity record, th e clos est thing possibl e to a replica ofthe day's shoot th at
he could tak e home to use in planning for th e next day and that would doubtless
facilitate ed iting later. 27
Lang's script sh o ws eviden ce of typical last-m inute changes in d ialogue: word s o r
lin es crossed out or changed to a void redundan cy, improve th e pa ce , or suit th e ac to rs'
d elivery. More substa n tial revi sions can also be seen , o ne of th e most important

102
 THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE GARDENIA

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The Blue Gardenia (Frilz Lang, 1952-3)

103
 SHADES OF NOIR

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The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1952-3)

104

 THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE GARDENIA

concerning th e murder scene in Prebble's apartment. Several subjective shots from

Norah's point of view that are described in detail in the script arc not present in the
finished film: as Norah tries to regain consciousness, bits of dialogue and shadows
reveal that another woman is in th e apartment arguing with Prebble. Eisner, after
examining Lang's copy of th e script, understood these omissions as a wise decision on
his part to maintain suspense, so that the audience would not know the murderer's
identity until the end of the film. 28 One might state this another way: with no
information to the contrary, we are encouraged to believe, along with Norah and on
the basis of the same circumstantial evidence, that she is guilty. Perhaps this is meant to
increase a paranoid sort of identification with her - until we are proven \~pgmuch
later.
Other important departures from the 'Final Shooting Script' are noted in pencil on
Lang's cop y. On examination , all th e late changes involving Rose Miller, the woman
who quarrelled with Prebble after Norah blacked out, are significant. In a brief
telephon e conversation between Rose and Prebble at the beginning of the film , the
dialogue was edited in a way that did more than improve the pace: it se rved the
interests of censorship. In so doing, Rose's motive for killing Prebble dropped out of
the film. In these few moments on screen (this is the only time we see Rose or hear
about her until almost the end of the film), she is reduced to the cliche of the hysterical
woman. She murdered Prebble, one assumes , because she has been sedu ced by him
and then callously dis carded. According to the script as written, however, Rose has a
stronger reason for being desperate.
Rose calls Harry at the telephone company. He makes up an excuse about wh y he has
not called her.

ROSE I don't believe yo u , Harry. You haven't worked three nights in a row in your life !
(rushes on) I hav e to see you and talk to you. I'vejust been to the doctor and he . . .
HARR y (interrupts) All quacks . Don't beli eve any of 'em . (listens - bored, then) Rose, I'm tied
up now . Call m e later. At home .
(Rose is on the v erge oj hysteria.)

ROSE How can I? You cha nged the number and I can't get it from the operator. (pleading)

You have to help me, Harry. You promised. You told me that if an ything happened .. .

HARRY (remains calm and unmoved) Suresuresure . But you 're to o smart to believe what a

guy tells yo u - aren't you ? Ljust can't talk now. Take it easy. I'll be seeing you .

ROSE (close-up in phone booth,frantically) Harry! (She flicks the phone desperat ely, then collapses

against the phone as she reali zes he's hung uti on her .)

105
 SHADES OF NOlA

This is not inspired dialogue, but it d elivers the information: Rose is pregnant. The
syno p sis prepared by Warner Broth ers is unequivocal o n this point: 'Rose Miller, whom
[Prebble's] tryin g tojilt, is h ysterical as she tells him she is goin g to hav e a bab y. Prebbl e
co ld ly brush es her off.'29 In th e film , their conversation has be en reduced to the
following ex chan ge (the other lin es hav e been crossed o ut in Lang's co py o f th e script):

ROSE I don't believe you, Harry . You haven't worked th re e nights in a row in your life!
I've got to see yo u a nd talk to you.
HARRY Rose, I'm tied up now . Ca ll me lat er. At home.
(Ro se is II Il the verge oI hys/eria .)
ROS E How ca n I? You changed th e number and I ca n't get it from the op erat or. (j]{eading)
You've got to help me, Harry.
HARRY Ljust ca n't talk now. T a ke it easy. I'll be seein g YOll.

The camera rem ains on Harry, wh o h angs up, preo ccupied with his sket ch of another
woman .:IO
The basis for Rose's d esperation is a lso kept out of the Aashback at th e e nd of the film
when she is allowed to tell, so to speak, 'her story'. A letter from J oseph Breen was
responsible for e xcisin g a few words here th at ad ded another dimension to her
situation: 'W e would like to suggest yo u eliminate H arry's line" ... Mon ey to help you
- ", to avoid th e possible interpret ation that he is suggesting an abortion.v" We can
assume that a sim ila r concern , exp ressed in th e name of moralit y, about negative
reactions that co u ld hurt profits was behind the elimination of Rose's pregnancy. As if
dispossessed of a body, Ros e is r edu ced to a ne gat ive female stereot yp e ('a woman
scorned'). T h is sanitizing procedure weakened th e scrip t: Rose looked like a deus ex
machine to contemporary review ers .
Although Rose is older than Norah and appears less attractive be cause of her
stra ined d em eanour, the two wom en look very much alike: they are th e same height ,
they have th e sa me figure , and th e same short , blond e hairstyle.V T hey are dressed
almost id enticall y on three occasions, most notabl y the night th ey go to Prebble's
apartment, wh ere they use th e sa me weapon ag ainst him (a poker from the firepla ce)
after Prebble plays a special r ecord for each of th em : for Norah he cho oses Nat 'King'
Cole singin g th e romantic titl e so ng (they had he ard it sung by Cole in person earlier at
dinner), whil e for Rose , he puts on Wagner's 'Lie bestod ,.:n It is th e music that
e ve n tu ally differentiates them a nd leads to Rose 's di scovery. Th e two women mirror

106
 THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE GARDENIA

each other again during Rose's confession scene in the prison ward of the hospital:
both of them wear anonymous institutional uniforms (Norah a prison dress, Rose a
hospital gown) as guilt is exchanged from one to the other. According to a logic of
narrative and symbolic condensation especially evident in Lang's American films, Rose
functions as a double for Norah. Norah is not found innocent independently, not even
in the eyes of the audience. It is only because of Rose that Norah is saved from the law,
which is (as usual in Lang's American films) threatening, arbitrary, inhuman and
misdirected: in the most striking dissolve in the film, closing the scene of Rose's
confession, the insignia of the Hall ofJustice appears to descend over Norah's head like
a noose.i'" Norah never regains her memory of that night with Prebble; she accepts
Rose's story as the truth of her own past. It is Rose, not one of the male representatives
of truth or justice, who allows Norah to be innocent - at least innocent of murder.
Lang also establishes an equivalence between three of the men in the film, men who
betray trusting women: Prebble, Casey and Norah's fiance. In two of the most carefully
staged scenes in the film, Norah is joined at her modest dinner table by a fantasized
male presence as his off-screen voice reads a letter to her. The first scene is that of
Norah's birthday. Refusing to go out with her roommates, she sits down to an intimate
candlelight dinner at home wearing a new evening dress she has bought for the
occasion. Her fiance's place setting at the table is accompanied by his photograph and a
letter. Norah opens a bottle of champagne so that she can share a toast with him, at least
in spirit. These romantic touches seem extravagant in this practical apartment where
three working women use the same room as a living room, dining room and bedroom,
thanks to a folding table and convertible couches. As we read the letter with Norah (an
insert shot), we hear her fiance's voice. What she expects to be a love letter turns out to
be an impersonal note written to end their engagement: he has fallen in love with a
nurse and they are going to be married. 3 5 Surprised by this cruel turn of events, Norah
is suddenly vulnerable; her idealistic self-sacrifice has been for nothing (she has not
gone out with a man since he left). At this moment repression speaks with the voice of
coincidence: the telephone rings and Prebble invites her to dinner, thinking she is
Crystal. Like Professor Wanley in The Woman in the Window ( 1944), Norah lets herself go
and spends the rest of the film terrified of the law (policemen keep turning up in her
path) because of an indiscretion that, like a moralistic nightmare, becomes magnified
into a capital offence.
Later, Norah is on the verge of hysteria (not unlike Rose earlier). Unable to tell her
friends what happened, she tries to hide her emotions and her guilt from them. The
tiny apartment, where everything used to be shared with affectionate give and take,

107
SHADES OF NOIR

becomes a nightm arish sp id e r's web for

Norah (d espite its fiat lightin g) as sh e
tri es to asse rt a su d d e n , in explica ble ne ed
for privacy, even accu sing her room­
mates of spyin g on h e r. In th is state ,
Norah sits alone at h er dinner tabl e a
second time and read s another lette r.
This on e h as been publish ed in th e new s­
paper by Casey Ma yo and is addressed to
'an Unknown Murderess'. Cas ey's voice
e n te rs fr om off-screen , reading th e lett e r
as if it were meant for Norah alone ,
reassurin g her that h e understands h er
lonelin ess a n d fear, and that sh e G ill trust
him. T he letter is sign ed 'yours very
ea rn estly, Ca sey Ma yo'. Th e script
co nt in ues:

Voice Fades. Norah looks up and across thr

table, as when she concluded read ing letter
[nnn K orea, and relJea/ing hal f -aloud 10
hersel]: Yours very earnestl y.

T h is closing, whi ch ea rlier seemed like

the ultimate proof of her fian ce' s
insensitivity, is here taken by Norah as a
sign of just th e opposite: Casey Ma yo's
since r ity.
As th e scr ip t indicates : 'T he situation is
almos t th e same as wh ere No ra h read th e
letter fr om Korea.' So is th e mise en scene:
th e cam era fram es Norah looking up to­
ward th e ca me ra as she had a fte r she
finished the first letter. As before, sh e

The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1952-3)

108
 THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE GARDENIA

appears feminin e, se nsual, in viting, and defen cel ess . She is set up, in other words, by a
preliminary, imaginary, incomplete scene of seduction to be helped by a man , not by
her able a n d trustworthy roommates. In this, the director's presence - and perhaps hi s
collusion - is strongly felt because of the stylish enunciation leading to th e pivotal
moment of vulnerability when she looks into the ca me r a. Norah re acts to this letter as if
it can cancel the e ffec t of the first one and give her a man to whom she can entrust her
future. Little does she know th at Casey is counting on hi s ability to tak e ad va n tage of a
woman's feelings to advan ce his ca r ee r. If h e does not d enounce her to th e police, it is
only because he stands to gain by publishing hi s story (or rather, her story) before th ey
do .:\6
Where earlier Prebble took advantage of Norah's emotional state, now Casey does
the same, beginning in a n improbable scene that m akes their first en counter a
metaphor of control a nd entrapment. Casey's 'letter' su cceeds in gett in g No ra h, now
desperate, to call his number from a phon e booth and ask for his help, on the pretext
that she is a fri end of the murderess . She agrees to meet him at his offi ce. (It is the
middle of th e night in downtown Los Angeles!) Waiting for her, Casey in explicably
turns out th e lights in th e large outer newsroom and hides. As Norah enters, a
rectangle of light behind her marks the doorway at the far side of the room , making
her seem sm all, defenceless and blind as she tries to find her way . '\ 7 A neon light
outside flashes a huge shad o w of the word ' CHRONICLE' above her head , an ominous
reminder that her story is being transferred from a private to an institutional co n te x t,
the antithesis of Norah's safe a pa rtme n t with h er warm and generous woman friends.
'I'm sorry . I didn't m ean to frighten you ,' Casey say s disingenuously when he finally
steps forward , still in the dark, to take her into his office.
There are noticeable differences, then, between the supportive, uncomplicated,
domestic world of women , who are powerless. and the r epresentation of m en as
calcu latin g , insidious quislings who jockey for privil eg e and public re cognition
(appearing to be friends , they turn o u t to be enemies) . H ere we should recall Ann
Kaplan's analysis of Th e Blue Gardenia, in which she points out that the film is divided
into two different kinds of scenes : those that belong to the male world of film nair and
others that are centred on the femal e ch a racte rs and r esemble the Hollywood 'wo ma n 's
film ' of the 1930s.3 8 Within the context of Lang's work , the nair aspects of the film are
hardly unexpected; it is the quality screen time devoted to the women, espec ia lly when
they are together at home, that seems remarkable. Eric Rohmer went so far as to praise
The Blue Gardenia for its nco-realism be cause of these scenes. P"
This mixture of film nair and the 'woman's film ' are already present in the story o n

109
 SHADES OF NOIR

whi ch The Blue Gardenia was based . The writer Vera Caspary was the celebra ted author
of Laura and many other best-selling mystery nov els."? Her subj ect was the workin g
woman, her diffi culty in maintaining independence, and her intern al conflicts about
her values and self-im age as a wom an carryin g a traditional Am eri can past into a
modern urban environment. Ca spa ry, a feminist , e n ded her au tobi ography in 197 9
with these strong lines:

This has be en th e ce n tu r y or T he Woman and I kn ow myself to have been part o r th e

revolution. In ano the r generation , perhaps the next , eq ua lity will be ta ke n Ior granted .
Those who come afte r us may lind it ea sie r to assert ind ependence, but will miss the grand
ad ve ntu re of having been born a wom an in this ce nt u ry o r change. ·11

The script follow s large parts of Ca sp ary's story (she was not invol ved with the him), but
there are a numbe r of important differences.
Agnes (Norah in the film) did murder Prebble, by accid e n t, almost exactly as we are
led to believe th at Norah did, in a scen e that includ es notr lighting and a misl eading,
elliptical presentation similar to that of the film. Lik e Norah, Agn es does not realize this
until the next da y. Rose was invented for the film, as were the scen es with the d eceptive
'love letters' and th e late-night meeting in Ca se y's o ffice. Wh at th e film version ignores
entirely are th e many referen ces to family, religion , sexuality, th e social environment
of the workplace , a nd the women neighbours who share the court yard and their daily
experiences with Agnes and C r ystal. Absent, too , are all th e details addressed to
initiates of wom en's magazin es th at emphasize th e story's very sp ecific woman's p oint
of view. Thus, if th e film seems remarkable for its em p hasis on a 'woma n 's world', it is a
world devoid of th e sense of personal and soc io-eco nom ic history that defines and
largely determin es Caspary's female characters. Perhaps the most telling difference
between the story and the film is that Caspary keeps the wom an's point of view
throughout, while the film appears to switch from a female to a mal e protagonist wh en
Casey Ma yo be gins his investigation , not unlike Lang's Secret beyond the Door (19 4 7) . ·1 ~
In 'The Gardenia', Agnes is th e product of a repressive, small-town environment
dominated by her mother, her mother's fund am entalist religion a nd the Women 's
Temperance League: a moralistic com m u n ity of women enforcing conformity. Any­
thing that can lead to a loos ening of morals or to sex has been forbidden Agnes:
swea r in g, dan cin g, drinkin g. H er only knowled ge of men, in thi s sense, comes from
advice columns in women 's magazines and newspapers. Agn es has never had a date. It
is in this con te xt that the issu e of innocence is first articulated . Agnes ha s co me to
believe that innocence is a liability.

110
 THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE GARDENIA

Many of the girls who worked with [Agnes and Crystal] were married ; some, like Crystal,
had been divorced; others were knowing. Most ofthem treated innocence, or ignorance or
chastity ... it was the same thing whatever you called it ... as a disability . It was ignoran ce
that made Agnes unimportant.V'

Because of her ignorance of men, Agnes is excluded from the social world of women.
This is one of the frank insights of Caspary's story about these post-war working
women. None the less, despite their focus on men (Caspary sees this as a product of
socialization), the women are loyal to each other in a way that has nothing to do with
professional advancement.
The story is structured around a conflict between Agnes's past and her uncertain
new identity in the city where, again, it is the voices of women that dominate the
imaginary comments that echo in her mind: those of the other telephone operators at
work, her roommate and neighbours at home. Agnes is troubled and heavily self­
absorbed from the outset (this self-absorption does not begin, as in the film, after the
news of Prebble's murder); she vacillates between conflicting images of the kind of
woman she should be. This conflict constitutes Agnes. It is inseparable from her. She
seems trapped within an internalized discourse directed against herself, no matter
whether it is her mother's stern voice that she hears, condemning social interaction
with men as sin, or the voice of the 'other girls' and ready-made images from
advertising that she thinks ridicule her old-fashioned prudishness. She seems to have
no independent sense of self. Prebble's murder is an accident (a plot device) that brings
the two sides of Agnes's self-image into more brutal contact with each other and that
forces a strange, disturbing and nair cinematic resolution that is completely different
from the film.
In Th e Blue Gardenia the principal conflict turns on whether or not Norah will escape
the consequences of the accidental murder we assume she has committed. The
narrative is thus dominated by incidents that demonstrate misplaced trust and
betrayal, and by a mood of paranoia. Norah embodies conflict in the same general way
that Lang's characters almost always do; anyone, male or female, has the potential to be
subjected to a drastic reversal- a sudden transformation into one's opposite or mirror
image or double - when they least expect it and have done almost nothing to deserve it.
This was a motif dear to Lang long before the McCarthy period. (Think of Fury, made
in 1936.) When Norah finds out that Prebble is dead , she becomes consumed by
doubts, secrets and dread. She feels helpless, and makes mistakes at every turn
(unconscious slips), which seem, in her new, self-conscious state, to become symptoms,

111
 SHADES OF NOIR

signs and clues that she fears make her guilt visible to everyone around her. Overnight,
the circumstances of her daily life spiral disastrously out of control. The film can
resolve this nightmare, in one sense at least, by displacing the conflict onto Rose, who
can externalize Norah's dark side, allowing Norah, in an epilogue, to revert to the
'normal', open, friendly side of her personality. Once again she is in harmony with her
women friends, as she was in the film's opening scenes, and she can start over with a
new fiance, too. The more pervasive nightmare, although it was never perceived as
such by contemporary reviewers, persists, however, in the prison-like confines of the
social conventions governing the 'positive' scenes, scenes in the film that look like they
could be part of a women's television series.
Caspary's story pushes the noir dimension much further than the film, especially in
its unsettling conclusion. Agnes unites in a perverse but not cynical way her desire to be
important with her revived, fundamentalist religious convictions: to be known as a
murderer would make her even more important than to be known as a woman who is
experienced with men. She prepares her appearance scrupulously to match the way
she looked the night she went out with Prebble, with detailed attention to her hair and
makeup, dressing again in the taffeta suit she had bought for that occasion. Then she
proceeds to exhibit the proof of her guilt publicly by standing on a stage, flanked by the
two witnesses to her evening at the Blue Gardenia supper club: a Chinese waiter and
the blind woman who sold her the gardenia. Calm and self-assured for the first time,
she declares herself a sinner, and repents publicly before the police and the press, who
have been summoned by her to witness this revelation. Her warring identities seem to
have taken over in a way that is beyond her control in this moment that she feels is her
greatest triumph.
Caspary's analysis of the ways her protagonist's aspirations and fantasies were
channelled into limiting, conventional behaviour was not far from Lang's: story and
film share an implicit critique of American society.l" Caspary's story turns on the
negative consequences of sexual repression. Agnes fights the influence of her past even
as her mother's injunctions echo in her mind. Interestingly, her mother's fears are
exactly the same as those addressed by the Production Code Administration: the
relationship of alcohol, sex and crime. It is more strongly suggested in the story than in
the film that Prebble's murder is really a screen, or displacement, for the more
probable transgression following an evening of exotic drinks, namely sex. When Agnes
wakes up the morning after her first date:

Memory brought confusion. Nothing came into her mind whole or clean. The sense of

112
 THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE GARDENIA

difference persisted within her, irrevo cable, as if sh e had been married or given herself in
the fog 4 5

Censors in th e cities of Cincinnati and Cleveland saw the possibility of sex in the scene
in Prebble's apartment, as well as a suggestion of rape, and required cuts in the release
print before allowing the film to be shown:

Eliminate all scenes of drinking of wine by the girl 'N orah ,' and eliminate all the kissing as
she lies on cou ch and reduce the violent struggle between the girl and th e man : 16

According to this code, one might observe, illicit sex is a crime worse than murder.
In The Blue Gardenia, the double standard is flaunted: men brag about their record of
sexual success whil e women take pride in their fidelity. Rose represents a cautionary
example of what Norah could become after just on e false move. Sh e also actualizes
male fears about sexual violence directed against them , although that story is largely
elided: Rose is the image of defeat, not a femme fatal e .4 7 The Blue Gardenia, with its
condensed, indirect presentational style and its elaborate work of doubling (involving
dialogue, costumes, scenes, characters, actions, mise en scene v, demonstrat es an environ­
ment in which betrayal is well-motivated and easy, whilst clearing oneself is a matter of
last-minute chance and coincidence, a n d very difficult. 4 H The climate of paranoia
encouraged by the political denunciations of the McCarthy period coincided with fear,
especially for men, of the destabilization of traditional sex roles. From Lang's vantage
point, as if he position ed himself at a distance from this world of entrenched emotional
stakes and valuel ess prizes, both sexes - not just wom en - are prisoners within a
confining, inherently repressive and capricious system. His American films are remark­
ably consistent in their cinematic demonstration of a series of procedures that the
media and the judicial system depend on and exploit 'blindly' - without regard for
truth in a higher sense: knowledge is inferential , evidence circumstantial, belief
provisional , justice a matter of coincidence. If this is a cynical view, or a 've no mo us
picture of American life', contemporary reviewers did not see that. To most of them,
The Blue Gardenia was a routine melodrama.
Lang celebrated his sixty-second birthday on 5 December 1952 during th e shooting
of The Blue Gardenia. Among the documents he sent to Lotte Eisner for the Cinemathe­
que Francaise, he included photographs of himself with cast, crew and birthda y cake,
and a rather touching explanatory note : ' It is customary in Hollywood that the crew, if
they like you , invite you to coffee and birthday cake and celebrate with you, when your
birthday happens to be during shooting time.' The sentiment expressed h ere, while it

113
 SHADES OF NOIR

may seem uncharacteristically personal, is consistent with the way in which Lang
expressed a sense of respect for - and reciprocity with - his audience throughout his
entire career:

I was always opposed to the American line, 'An audience has the mentality of a sixteen­
year-old chambermaid.' If this would be true, I would be ashamed to work for such an
audience. I like audiences, but I don't think you should give an audience something lifty
steps ahead of them. I asked myself - why is the first work of a writer, of a screenwriter, or
of a playwright almost always a success? Because he still belongs to an audience. The more
he goes away from the audience, the more he loses contact. What I tried to do my whole lile
long was not to lose contact with the alldiellce.'El

There are essentially two views of Fritz Lang's Ame r ica n films since Cahiers du cinema
sparked controversy in the 1950s over La n g's 'second career': whilst everyone who
understands the history of the cinema can agree that his films demonstrate a masterful
conceptual and aesthetic integration of subject and mise en scene, as well as constituting
virtual essays on meta-cinema and abstraction, critics are divided into those who see
Lang as a promulgator of radical social criticism and those who see him as a pessimist or
a cynic, even if a modernist one. Ann Kaplan and those who concur with her analysis of
the place of women in The Blue Gardenia would be among the first group, arguing that
the starkness of the imbalance of power and potential for social action between women
and men in the film constitutes an implicit argument against the status quo, in favour of
women. The most powerful formulation of the opposite view was made by Jean-Louis
Comolli and Francois Gere, who ended their brilliant study of l l angmen Alsu Die (1943)
with the shocking conclusion that the him is a 'fiction about hate, but first and foremost
hatred of the spectator' .,,0 The spectator is bound to identify with the Czech partisans
on ideological grounds (they are oppressed, their cause isjust), but is bound to identify
with the Nazis in an emotional sense, despite himself/herself because of Lang's
cinematic rhetoric, which one has no choice but to internalize in the process of
following the narrative.
In neither case is it likely that the audiences for whom these films were made would
arrive at the same conclusions as these critics. Do u glas Pye, writing a decade later about
the role of the spectator in The Blue Gardenia, consid e red as a modernist film, brings the
argument back to the issue raised by Lang: contact with the audience. He quotes
George Wilson on You Only Live Once (1937) to make his point about The Blue Gardenia:

The film's power cannot be fully felt until the viewer recognizes thai the dramas of
misperception enacted on the screen have been replicated still one more time in his or her

114
 THE M YS T E R Y OF THE BLUE GA R D E N I A

theat er seal. Realizing this , we corn e to recognize that You Only Live Once has a kind 0['
complexity an d a kind 0[' in sight th at we , un su rprisin gly. a re not likel y to see ."!

Ca n Lang's statement that it was important to him to maintain co ntact wit.h his a u d ie n ce
be re conciled with hi s agreement with Ho gdano vich, with whi ch this essay began , t.hat
The Blu e Gardenia r epresent ed a 'venomous pi cture of Am erican life'? Did Lan g
misjud ge his a ud ie n ce - was he, after all , '11 ft Yste p s ah ead of th ern ' - o r was his d esi gn
more cyn ica l, that is, d id he know th at th e film would appear to be just the opposite of
what it was: that it would a p p ear to show a h ealthy society with an unscrupulous
newspaperman who reforms at th e e nd o f th e film, wh en, in fact , it was th e entire
system of institutionalized relationships th at was o u t of tim e? In my view, Lan g's sense
of politics toward the e nd of hi s career was d eepl y a mb iva le nt. A re I hese film s oriented
toward ex p osing p ro ble m s of Ame rica n in stitu tions and social co nve n tio ns with a view
toward soc ial cha n ge through ed u ca tio n? O r do th e y depict , cyni call y, a fund amentall y
static so ciety th at is ultima tel y, as J ean Do u che t put it, distilled into pure con cept or
absrractionr V The fi.lms can be re ad both ways . Yet th e stru ctural faults that Lan g
points to ag a in a nd a gain in the so cial in sti tu tion s on whi ch American so ciet.y is bas ed
are not subject to libe r al refor m . O ne must imagin e that Lang m ade films that were, in
some sense, at cr oss purposes with his own intellectual views, as if in th e hope that he
mi ght be wron g, just as he probabl y operat ed with two di ametri cally opposed estima­
tions of his audience (respect/disd ain). This is not an unfam iliar position within
cu ltu r a l politics. In m y opinion , it is this ab solutel y fundamental a mbivale nce , runnin g
throughout th e cinematic experien ce of this relatively 'light' film, that makes The Blu e
Gardenia so disturbin g .

JT O T ES

I would like to th a n k Be r na rd Eise nsch itz for his ge ne ro us assista nc e, as well as

Dominique Br u n , Catherin e Ficat a t the Cine m a th eq ue Francaise; H oward Prouty,
Sam Gill , Mich ael Fri end at th e Ma r ga re t Herrick Library of th e Academ y o f Motion
Picture Art.s and Sciences; Ne d Co m stock , Stuart Ng, Leith Adams at t.he University of
Southern California (Wa rne r Brothers Co llectio n ). An abrid ged version of t.his cha p te r
was publish ed in Paulo Ber ie u o a nd Be rn a rd Eisenschitz, ed s., Fritz L ang: la messa in
scena (Turin: Lind a u , 1993).

115
 SHADES OF
I . Pet e r Bogd anov ich, ed ., Fritz Lan g in America
(Ne w York: Praeger, 1967), qu ot ati on from
p.84 .
2. Of course, stu d io files, like othe r kin d s o f
ev idence , ca n rai se as man y qu estion s as th ey
answe r. In ' Fritz Lan g Outfoxed : T he
German Ge n ius as Co m ract Employ ee' (Film
History [vol. 4; no . 4 ,1 990]) Ni ck Sme d ley
offe rs a di sappointin g , redu ctiv e po le mi c for
th eir use in hi s effo rt to prove th a t the th ree
film s Lan g mad e fo r Tw entieth-Century Fox
were 'mere contract jobs' in whi ch '[Lang]
simpl y put onto ce llu loid ideas a n d th emes
worked up by o the rs without an y o f his own
input', Arg u ing th at ' it is not ad equ ate to
ass ess films on th e basis of visu al style alon e',
he ign ores represent ation entirel y. For a
counter- argument th at addresses o ne o f
Smedle y's o w n e xa m p les a nd is based on the
same kin d o f d ocumentati on , see Bernard
Eisenschit z's essay in Eiscnschitz, ed ., Man
Hunt de Frit z l.ang (Crisuec, Belgium : Editions
Yellow Now , 1992 ).
:t Th e \-ValLer Wanger Co llect io n at th e
U niversity of Wiscon sin represen ts a n
important exception for Lang's car eer. A
biograph y of Wanger by Matthew Bernstein,
bas ed o n thes e pape rs , is fo r th com ing from
the U nive rs ity of Ca lifo r n ia Press. See
Bernstein 's interestin g a rt icle 'Fritz Lang,
Incorpo rat ed' on Wan ger's asso ciati on with
Lang an d .loan Bennett in Diana Pr oductions
(Th e veloe: U ght T raIl, no . 22, 19HG).
4. Se veral book s hav e been publish ed th at
reprodu ce docum ents and photographs from
this coll ection. Two o f th em consist m ainly of
produ ction stills tak en by Horst von Harbou ,
Thea von Harbou 's b rother, so me times
docum enting mis sin g sce nes or sh ot s:
Metropolis: Un film de Fritz Lung (I mages d 'un
tournage) (Paris: Centre National d e la
Photographie and Cin emathequ e Fr a ncaise,
1985) ; JH. Ie Maudit: U IIf ilm de Fritz
Lang (Paris: Ed itio ns Plume a nd
Cinemath eque Francaise , 1990). Tw o oth e rs
116
NOIR
are cr itica l an al yses o f films, whi ch use and
reproduce a variety of docum ents, su ch as
letters , ske tches and pages fr om Lan g's
sh oo tin g scripts : Ge rar d Leblan c a nd Bri giu e
Devism es Lc Doubl e scenario chez Fritz I .allg
(Par is: Ar m a nd Co lin, 1991 ) a lu xury form at
book d evoted to Th e B ig Heat; an d Eisenschit z
(see no te 2).
5. Th e lightin g is cha rac te rized by Rob ert
Porfirio a nd Alain Silver as follows: 'A n
indicati on of the cha ng in g aspect o f the noir
cycle is that The Blue Gardenia as directed by
Lan g a nd as photographed by N ich olas
Musuraca was largel y com posed o f Hat ,
neutral gray images most rep rese nt ative o f
1950 s tele visio n with its overh ead lighting.
The diminished inHu ence of a p a rti cular
studio or visu al style is ev id e nc ed by
Mu suraca . whose p resence helped d efine th e
noir style a t RKO bu t wh o co ntrib utes only a
few ex p res sio nistic moments in Th e B lu e
Garden ia .' In Alain Silver and Elizab eth Ward,
eds ., Film N IJiT (Woo d stock, NY : O verl ook
Pr ess, (97 9) , p. 3H.
6. Bogdan ovich, p. H4 .
7. Lotte Eisn er, Fritz Lan g (Paris: Cahi ers d u
Cinema/Cinemathequ e Fr ancaisc , 19H4 ),
p. 368 (my translation ). This contradicts the
information found in th e English ed itio n o r
Eisner's book, whi ch ret ains the sequ en ce
found in Bogdanovich 's interview . The
English ed itiun includ es man y e rro rs th at
were su bse q ue n tly co rrected in th e French
edition : for instan ce, th at Harry Co h n
testifi ed be fore the H ous e Committee on U n­
American Activities o n behalf of Lan g , which
he did not ; Alex Gottlieb is called Ad ul f;
H UA C was sa id to have been round ed in
1947 , wh ereas that was the year t ha t th e
hearings o n Hollywood began; th e Black
Dahlia murder case is said to be re cent,
whereas it dated ba ck to 1947. In th e En glish
ed itio n, Lang was idle for eig htee n months.
co m pa red to thirteen in th e French editi on .
Eisne r's m anuscript, wr itt en in German , was
 THE MYSTERY OF
p ublis hed firs t in En glish tr an slation (ed .
David Robinson, Lo nd o n : Seeker a nd
Wa rlm rg, 1976). Eisner did not see th e fin al
vers ion o f the manu scrip t for review. Fo r
French pu blicati on , the text was revised
substa ntiall y by translator and ed itor Bernard
Eisen schitz workin g in collabora tion with
Eisne r, as d escr ibed in the book's p reface.
8. T he RKO Co llection at UC LA ge ne t'all y d oes
not contai n clip ping files or a n yth ing
perta in in g to release a nd distrib uti o n . A g l'ea t
com me nce d o n 12 J anuary 1953 a nd exp ire d
deal o f material is held by T u rne r Produ ctions
a nd is not cu rrently access ible.
9. T he pe A's role as th e ind ust ry's agen cy for
blacklisted . Alex Go ttlieb Produ ction s is th e
self-re gu lation was d esign ed to fo re stall
potentially expensive p robl ems th at a finish ed
film might e nco u n te r fro m stat e ce nso rs hip
ag ree me n t with Warner Br other s, when it
boards , reli gious o r ed uca tiona l age nc ies, o r
becom es Blue Gard eni a Produ ction s.
for eign markets b y reco m me nd ing chan ges
before shoo ting. See Lea J acob s, Th e Wages of
Sin : Censorship ami the Fallen W,mu/ll Film,
1928-1 942 (Mad iso n : U n iversity of Wiscon sin
Pr ess, 199 I). Th e PC A files arc located in the
Margaret He rrick Libra ry a t th e Academ y o r
Motion Picture Arts a nd Scie nces , he rea fte r
re ferre d to as Acad e m y.
16. Go n licb 's ca ree r cha rt s the movem e nt of
10. T hese ad d itio ns wer e p ro bably ad justme nts
based o n rea ctio ns to p review scree n ing s. T he
PC A a llowed th em with o ut a seco nd revi ew . A
se parate so u rce sho ws th a t th e prod ucer filed
20 Februa ry 1952 as th e da te o f com p letio n
with the Acad e m y o r Mo tion PictUI'C Arts and
Sciences. See th e ' Data tor Bullet in o r Screen
Achi evem en ts Award s', d a ted 20 J u ne 1952.
T he d ata sh eet subm itte d by Alex Got tlieb for
The Blue Gardenia sh ows 24 December 1952 as
th e d ate o f com p letio n ; thi s was th e last day o f
shoo tin g. (Acad em y clip ping files.)
I I. Ho//ywood R eporter, 3 Septembe r 1952.
12. The House Com mittee o n Uri-Ame rican
Activ ities hearin gs o n Holl ywood began in
1947 ; th ey recommen ced in 1951 afte r the
a p pea ls o f th e so-call ed Holl ywood T en had
be en ex ha us ted , a nd co n tin ue d th rou gh 1953.
117
THE BLUE GARDENIA
See Victo r S. Navasky , N aming N ames (Ne w
York : Pen guin , 1980 ).
I :t Th ey were to be China Ven ture (a lso know n as
Operation 16 -Z ), T he Big H eat, a nd Th e H uman
Beast (la te r cha nge d to H uman Drsirey. On 17
Ma rch the co n tract was ame nded to relieve
La ng o r Operation 16-Z , maki ng Th e /l ig H eal
th e firs t pict ure. T he third picture na med in
the a me nd ed cont ra ct, Ten Aga inst Caesar, was
ap pa re nt ly aba nd o ned . T he co nt ract
o n II J anu a ry 1954 with no op tio n to re new.
14. I fou nd no confir ma tio n th at Lan g had bee n
nam e th at ap pea rs o n co rrespo nde nce and
d ocuments relatin g to th e film unti l th e
15 . T he Abb ott and Costell o unit at Un ive rsa l
'was co m pos ed of B-pi cture personnel wh o
were use d to working at top spe ed . . .
turnin g o ut a picture eve ry three o r fou r
months'. See T ho mas Scha tz, Th e Genius ojthe
Syslem (New York : Panth eon, 1988), p p.
342-7 .
co medy a nd entertainment shows thro ugh
radi o , film, Broadwa y th eat re a nd televis io n.
T he Ru ssia n-born Go ttlieb (I 90 6-R H), a 1928
gradua le of th e U niversity of Wisco nsin ,
beca me pu blicity directo r fo r Walt e r Wan ger
Production s. Ea rly o n a wr iter fo r radi o
co me d ians AI j olson , Eddie Ca ntor, Ed gar
Be rge n , and Geo rge jesse!. he mad e an ea sy
tran sition from low-budget film to telev isio n,
produ cin g mo re than fift y televi sion sh ows,
mostl y in th e var iety and come d y formal ,
in cluding 'The Gal e Storm Sho w', 'The Ta b
Hunter Sh ow', 'The Bob H op e C h rys le r
Theat er ', 'The Donna Reed Sho w', a nd 'T he
Sm others Brothers Show ' (Variely, II October
19 88). T ho ugh Gottlieb was a succes sful
bus iness ma n, his name never becam e fa mo us
a nd th e locati on of his papers, if he kept
th em, is unknown . judgin g fro m th e press
 SHADES
clippings o n Th e Blu e Garden ia , C oulieb's
production history was well documented by
news item s in th e Holl ywood tr ad e journals.
See the Warner Br others Collectio n and
Academy clipping files.
17. In a produ ction marked by rev ol vin g
p ersonnel held in a state o f con fu sion by
H oward Hugh es (in clud in g th e un credit ed
Nicholas Ra y), Sternbe rg had more to d o with
the executive producer, Sa m uel Bischoff, than
Gottlieb. See Bernard Eisen schitz, Roman
ammcain: Les vies de Nico las R ay (Par is:
Christian Bourgeois, 1990 ), pp. 2 12- 13. See
a lso Sternberg's autobiograph y, Fun in a
Chinese Laundry' (Ne w York: Macmillan , 19( 5),
p . 283.
18. Los An geles Daily News , 30 March 1953 .
19. PCA files, 6 Oc tober 1952 , Acad emy. Ch arles
H offman was a lacklust re scr ee n wr ite r wh o
h ad worked with Gottlieb several times be fo re
o n Warner Brothers film s. We d o not hav e a
co py of th e script before Lan g sta rted to work
on it.
20 . PCA files, Academ y.
21. Variety and Holl ywood Reporter, 28 Nov ember
1952.
22 . Lang's d etailed log of th e shoot, in whi ch he
listed by number the sh ots that were
co m p lete d each da y, is in the Cine m athe q u e
Francaise colle ction.
23 . Variety, 23 Dec ember 1952; Van el)' and
Holtwood Rep orter , 24 Decembe r 1952 ; a nd Los
Angeles Times, 26 December 1952 . Gottlieb 's
many releases to the press abou t hiring actors
for min or parts a p p ea re d durin g the first
week of shooting . (Warner Br others, clipping
files.)
24. Los Angeles Tim es, 25 December 1952 ; see also
Vanety, 26 Dec ember 1952; Los Angeles
Exam iner, 28 December 1952 ; L os Angeles
Examiner, II J anuary 1953.
25 . Geo rge Ree ves was a lready kn own as C la r k
Kent in television 's 'Superman' series. A new s
118
OF NOIR
item in Vanety on 12 December drew attention
to the fact that five o f th e film 's main acto rs
were currently appearin g on television , most
notabl y, asid e fr om Reeves , Ann Sothe rn in
' Private Secretar y'. See th e Warner Br others
clip p ing files for o ther co n nec tio ns to
television .
26 . Even wh en op erating o n an extre mely tight
shoot ing schedule , Lang, as was typi cal o f
him, found tim e to reflect on th e aesthetic
an d psychological uses to whi ch a new
technological d e vice co u ld be put. ' My new
ca me ra carriage assu res the att ainment o f a
fluid film picture. The photographic
ap p aratus becomes th e co nsta n t com pa n ion of
the act or; it becomes a sha r p observer o f the
even ts, ca p tu ring th e d rama more int ensi vely
as it d raws qui ckly ne arer wh en som ething
deci sive is d on e or said. As soon as it becom es
imp o rta nt, it ca n then go imm ediately to focu s
o n some characteristic even t or signifi cant
obj ec t. The ca me ra in motion , therefore,
becomes an important a nd "livin g" p articip ant
in th e film.' Fr om an int erview with Fri edrich
Porges, ' Eine Karnera , die all es sieh t: Fritz
Lang e r fa n d d as "Opernglas" System' , Berliner
Morgenpost (27 Februa ry 1953), cited in
Frederick Ott, Th e Films of Fritz Lang
(Secau cus, Nj: C itad el Press, 1979).
For a thou ghtful co ns id era tion o f Lang's
use of this inv ention, see Raymond Bellour,
'Su r l'espace cine m arog rap h iq ue', in L'Analyse
du film (Par is: Edition s Alb atros, 1979 ).
27 . Lang was in th e habit o f working ea ch
eve n ing when he was sho oting a film , making
notes an d sket ches to prepare for th e next
da y.
28. Eisne r, Fritz Lang, Fr en ch edition, p . 37 0;
English edition, pp . 323 --4. According to th e
notations o n Lang's scr ip t, howe ve r, the
visual s for th is missing scen e were shot.
29 . 'Synopsis of "Th e Blue Gard enia' ", Warner
Brothers Collection.
 THE MYSTERY OF
30. T he sketc h a n ticipa tes Rose's do ub le: a
position ma tch sets u p th e dissol ve to wha t the
scr ipt d escri bes as 'No ra h , in a lmost th e sa me
pose as the gi rl in H ar ry's sketc h' .
3 1. PC A files, 2 Decemb er 1952, Acad e my .
32. Ruth Storey, th e wife o f Rich a rd Co n te, d yed
her hai r to play the part of Rose, accord in g to
the 1.005 Angeles Daily N eios ( I J a nu ar y 1953).
Another news ite m d rew atte n tion to th e fact
that a ll fo u r fe ma le leads had blo nde hair.
T h is is o ne of th e man y wa ys in wh ich the
wom en see m a lmos t in ter ch an geabl e. Despi te
the ir ind ividua lized person aliti es, th ey
represent a sta nda rd ized imag e o f
whol eso me, do mes tic fe mi n inity . Rose, too ,
see ms to d esire thi s imag e.
3,t T he reco rd of th e title so ng had been rele ased
comm erc ially a nd was advert ised with the
film . T here is virt uall y nothin g abou t Nat
'King ' Cole 's particip at ion in ei the r the
Warn er Broth ers Collectio n or the mat erials
La ng gave th e Cine mat he q ue Fr an c;aise .
Acco rd ing to the 1.0s Angeles Examiner ( I I
Decembe r 1952) this po p u lar singer re ceived
$ I0 ,000 I'OJ' o ne d ay's wo rk .
34 . See Fr ieda G rafe a nd En no Patalas, Fritz Lang
(Mu nich: Hanser, 1976) in whi ch th ese fra me
e n lar ge men ts were pu blish ed as pa rt of a n
eloque n t illustratio n of La ng 's me tho ds o f
visual and symboli c conden sati on.
35. The mal e voice ap pe ars to be given life by
Norah as we sha re her psychol ogical an d
visual poi nt o f view, readin g th e be ginni ng of
th e letter in an inse rt shot, liste n in g to he r
fiance . But wh en th e co n te n t o f the letter
makes it clea r th at he d oes no t share her
fantasy, the ca mera is po sitione d o p po site her,
as if in his pla ce . T he a ngu ished exp ressio n
on Nora h's face th en ma kes his voice see m
like a fo rei gn p resen ce p ressin g in on he r
from o utsid e . (T he re is no chan ge in th e
a ud io level .)
36 . First Casey com pe tes with th e police, the n he
j oins them (H ayn es an d Mayo ar e o n a fir st­
nam e basis). T he news afte r No ra h's a rrest
119
THE BLUE GARDENIA
und e rlin es Casey's co mp licity: 'Read a ll ab ou t
it, Blue Gard enia po lice tr a p. Beautiful
murd eress ca ug h t by colu m n ist.' T he front
pag e re ads : 'Casey Mayo Captures Blue
Ga rden ia', wh er e ea rlier it an nou nced th e
d u plicito us 'Casey Mayo 's Lette r to a n
U n kno wn Murderess'.
37 . T h is visu al con figu rati on, o ne of Lan g's
favourites, tr an slat es a n un equ al po wer
relati onsh ip in to th e int ernalize d lan guage of
mise en scene. Com pa red to No ra h's unwise
d ate with Preb ble , the d an ger he re look s
more obvious and more se rio us, altho ugh th e
au d ie nce ca n see th at it isj us t a teaser fo r
Casey. Cutawa y sh ot s sho w him watch ing
No rah from his hiding place with th e
u ndi sgu ised curiosity o f a voye u r.
38 . E. Ann Kaplan , 'The Place o f Women in Th e
Blue Gardeni a '. In this respect, as Kapl an
note s, her essay res em bles Pam Coo k's
an alysis of Mildred Pierce, Both were publish ed
in Wom en in Film N air, ed ited by Kapl an
(Lo ndon: Br itish Film In stit ut e, 1972 ).
39. Maurice Sch ere r [E. Rohmer], ' Un realism e
mechant', Cahiers du cinem a 36, June 1954 . On
th e other hand , see Fried a Gra fe's essay ' Fu r
Fritz La n g: e ine n Pla tz, kein Denkmal', (For'
Fritz Lang: A Place not a Mo num ent'), in
whic h she co m pa res La ng a nd Br echt o n
realism : 'What united th em , the se two
spec ia lists in d istanciatio n, mom entary
differen ces aside, was a ho rror of nat ure, o f
pseud o-nature, and it was thi s that th e y
attempted to a na lyse, each with the means
p rop er to his resp ecti ve medium . Bre cht had
th e ea sier task: in th e cin ema, it is mo re
di fficult to destro y ap peara nce th an rea lity'
(Gr afe and Patal as , p . 17, m y translati on) .
40 . Ver a Caspa ry (1904-87) , a playwri ght as well
as a novelist, ea rn ed man y scr een cred its fo r
ad apt ati on s, amo ng them Easy Li ving ( 193 7)
with Preston Stu rge s; A Letter to T hree Wives
( 1948) with J ose ph L. Manki ewicz; a nd 1 Ca n
Get It f or You Wh olesale (l 9.S1) with Ab raham
Polonsky. 'The Ga rde nia' was publ ished in a
 SHADES OF NOIR

wom en 's magazine, 'filllay '.! W oman
(Feb rua ry-Ma rc h 1952). The manu script is
included in Caspary's papers a t th e Wiscon sin
Stale Historical Society. Attach ed to it is thi s
not e: 'I d o not have screenplay o f fina l movie
("The Blu e Gardenia") which I had nothing to
do with .' In 1949 she married p rodu cer I.G.
Go ld sm ith . They formed an ind ep en d ent
produ ction company called Glori a Pictu re s.
Alth ou gh Caspary was not in volved with th e
scr ip t o r the production o f Th e Bl ue Gardenia ,
a p pa re nt ly Gloria Pictures had a finan cial
sta ke in it. Th is would explain the production
cred it see n in Lan g's filmographies: ' Blue
Ga rde n ia Pr oductions/Gloria Film s for
Warn er Bros'. Blue Garden ia Pr odu ction s is
listed as the sole cop yri ght claim an t. Glori a
Films d ocs not have a scr een cred it o n th e
film itself.
4 1. Vera Caspary, The Secrets ojGrown-ul's (N ew
York: McGraw-Hill, 1979). Also q uoted (with
min or e rro r s) in Caspary's obitua ry in th e New
York Times, 17 June 1987 .
42 . Reviewer's saw this as the scri p t's biggest
problem ; the script was ro u tine ly pointed to
as th e film's g rea tes t weakness.
4 :~ . Casp ary, 'The Gardenia', ms. p. 5 .
44 . Caspary, unlike Lan g, had been a member of
th e American Communist Party d uring th e
1930s . T o avoid answ erin g qu estions during
th e Mc'Carthy era, she mov ed to Europ e for
several years. See The Secrets of Grow n-u ps.
45. Caspary, 'The Gardenia', ms . P: 45 .
46. Warn er Brothers Collection .
4 7. Alison McKee writes ab out fem ale cha racte rs
wh ose stories are elided in 'To Spea k of Lo ve :
Female Desire a nd Lost Na rr a tive in the
Woman 's Film , 1939-1 949' (Ph D di ssertation ,
UCLA, forth coming 1993).
48 . The mu sical clue th at leads to Rose's
discovery and eve n tua lly frees No rah is
represented as a trul y ridi cul ous coincidence:
Casey and his news photo gr apher are at the
airport about to leave to witness a hydrogen
bomb explosion (!) wh en Casey happens to
hear the 'Liebestod ' agai n over the
loudspeaker. 'Wha t's that song?' he asks his
friend, remembering it fr om Prebole's record
pla yer th e morning after the murder.
'Canned musi c.' As it builds to a climax, Cas ey
realizes that No ra h ca n't be the murderer
because th e record Pr ebbl e pla yed for her,
and th at Ca sey pla yed fo r her, too , in th e
diner wh en he sta rte d Hirtin g with her in
earnest, was 'T he Blue Gardenia'.
49. The American Film I nstitute Dialogue on Film
(April 1974) , p. II (edited slightly for
punctuation) .
50. Jean-Louis Co mo lli and Francois Gere, 'D eu x
fiction s d e la hain e' , (pan one) Cahiers du
cinbna 286 (Ma rc h 1978 ), p. 47 (my
translation ). T his essay a p pea rs in En glish in
Stev e J enkins, ed ., Frit z Lang: Th e lmuge and
the Look (Lo ndo n : British Film Institute,
1980) .
51. George Wilson , Narra tion in l.igh: (Baltimore :
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986 ), p . 38 ;
cited in Douglas Pye, 'Seeing by Glimpses:
Fritz Lang's Th e Blue Gardenia', Cine/vction!
(Summ er 1988) , p . 74.
52 . jean Douchet , 'L e Pieg e considere comme l'un
des Beaux-Art s', Arts (Paris), 1-7 July 1959,
p.6.

120

FILM NOIR AND WOMEN

Elizabeth Cowie

Whether it is a genre, a cycle of films, a tendency or a movement, film noir has been
extraordinarily successful as a term. As 'the genre that never was' - since the term was
not used by the studios themselves , or by audiences at the time, ex cept perhaps in
France where the term originated - the claims for the category lie in a post hoc analysis
of similarities a nd in a set of ele me n ts that provide a 'co re' of characteristics that are
identified in certain films. The term has succeeded despite the lack of any straight­
forward unity in th e set of films it attempts to designate. Unlike terms such as the
'western', or the 'gangster' film, which are relatively uncontroversial (and were industry
categories) ,film noir has a more tenuous critical status. This t.enuousness is matched by
a tenacity of critical use, a devotion among aficionados that suggest a desire for the very
cat.egory as such, a wish that it exist in order t.o 'have' a certain set of films all together.
Film noir as a genre is in a certain sense a fantasy: it is something that is never given a
pure or complete form; the 'first' film noir, The Maltese Fal con (John Huston, 1941), is
usually d escribed as 'atypical', while it is the mu ch later Out oj the Past (Jacques
Tourneur, 1947) which is often cited as the quintessential noir film. Though only ever
realized in some incomplete form , the 'true' form is nevertheless discerned across a
series of films. The desire for film noir can be seen, too, in the tendency by film
revi ewers to discover contemporary examples - co lou r cinematography notwithstand­

121
 SHADES OF NOIR

in g - a re cent exa m p le is Denis Hop per's film The H ot Spo: ( 1990) .' Wh at is ce n tre d by
thi s fa n tasy is almost alwa ys a masculine scen ario, th at is, the fi lm nair h ero is a man
stru gglin g with o th e r men , who su ffers alien at ion and des p air, an d is lured by fatal a nd
d ecepti ve wom en .f

T H E DESIRE OF T H E CRIT IC

In a widely quot ed pass age James Damico proposes a model of/ilm nair 's plot str uc tu re
and cha racte r type:

Eith er be cau se he is fa ted to d o so by cha nce, or becau se he has been h ired 1'01' a j ob
spe cifically assoc ia ted with her, a man whose ex pe rie nce of life has le ft him san guine and
ofte n bitte r meet s a no t-inn oce nt woman of sim ilar ou tlook to wh o m he is sex ually a nd
fatally att rac ted. Throu gh this all racrio n, e ither becau se th e wom an ind uces h im to it o r
because it is the natural result of their rel ati on ship, th e man co mes to chea t, a lle m p t to
murder, o r ac tually murder a secon d man to whom th e woman is un happily or unwillingly
a ttached (ge ne rally he is her hu sband o r lover), an act whi ch often lead s to th e wo ma n 's
be tray al ofthe protag on ist , but wh ich in a ny eve n t hrin gs abo ut th e so me times me tap horic,
but usuall y literal dest ruction of th e wo man , the man to wh o m she is at tac hed . a nd
fre q ue nt ly the protagon ist himself'."

This sa me co re theme is presented by Marc Vern e t in his dis cu ssion of th e op e ni ngs o f

film s noirs, th ough it is now identified as h aving an 'ince st form ' :

T he 'tria ngle' ha s o fte n been pointed o ut as a pri ncip al form o f relation a mo ng the
cha rac ters: th e youn g he ro desires and conque rs a rich wo man wh o is quite o ften tied to a n
older man or so me othe r represe n tat ive of patria rchal a u tho rity (Double Indemnity, The I.ady
From Shanghai, Out of the Past, Th e Big Sleet), Th e Ma ltese Falcon). H owever, in most of th ese
films the woman is mad e g uilty a nd despite her prot estation s sh e is e ithe r' abando ned or
killed by the hero. In th is ma nn e r, the resolution o f the intrigu e is guaranteed by th e
an n u lme nt of the in cestuous relati ons."

Alth ough , as th e tran slator David Rodo wick notes, ill this essay Verner 'is co nce rned
less with a ge ne r ic d efinition o f film nair than with the elabo ration o f the general
cond itio ns of hermen eutic d evel opmen t an d narrative su sp ense in th e classi c Amer i­
ca n film , of wh ich th e nair is a n ex tre me exa m p le', he nevertheless ass umes th a t film nair
is a genre with a relat ively hom ogenized form: 'films noirs a re characterized by their

122
 FILM NOIR AND WOMEN

singular brutality and surfeit of violence ... the film noir insists on the transparency of
the disguise .. . when the film noir takes off . . . ' and so on.
Foster Hirsch in his book Film Noir: Th e Dork Side of the Screen claims that 'The three
major noir character types - the sleuth , the criminal, the middle-class victim and
scapegoat - all inhabit a treacherous urban terrain filled with deceiving women and the
promise of money easily and ill-gotten." These figures are clearly male, and he goes on
to say that while there are other kinds of women - meek wives or a few like Lauren
Bacall 'who achieve something like parity with the men they fall for ' - nevertheless 'the
dominant image is the one incarnated by Barbara Stanwyck in Doubl e ltulemnits: woman
as man-hating fatal temptress'. Moreover he says, 'The force and persistence of this !
image of women as amoral destroyers of male strength can be traced, in part, to the
wartime reassignment of roles, both at home and at work." Hirsch attempts here to
attach this image to a little bit of reality, but this very attempt only confirms its actual
status - as fantasy . While he appeals to a social reality which gives rise to the fantasies, I
would like to emphasize their jJs)lchical reality. The mise en scene of these fantasies is
provided by elements from the contingent social reality, just as in the dream-work.
This very clothing of contingent. social reality can then become the basis or alibi for a
disavowal thus: the image of woman as devouring is not, or not merely, my fantasy, but
really true - women have substituted for men at home and at work, and it is social
reality that produces a crisis in my masculine identity. Freud, in a discussion of fantasy
in neurosis and psychosis, says that both the neurotic and the psychotic draw upon a
'world of phantasy' which functions as the

storehouse from which the materials or the pattern for building the new reality are
derived. But whereas the new, imaginary external world of a psychosis attempts to put
itself in the place of external reality that of neurosis , on the contrary, is apt, like the play of
children, to attach itself to a piece of reality - a different piece from the one against which it
has to defend itself - and to lend that piece a special importance and a secret meaning
which we (not always quite appropriately) call a symbolic one .?

. What must be explained is the continuing fascination with this fantasy long after the
; historical period that is supposed to justify it. Accompanied now by a disavowal of the
~ 'anti-woman bias' of the films, this fascination nevertheless valorizes their themes and
visual style, which, Hirsch says 'is both varied and complex, and in level of achievement
it is consistently high. Film noir is one of the most challenging cycles in the history of
American fihns.'8

123
 SHADES OF NOIR

The pleasu re and fas cination of the fantasy of the dupli citous woman in film noir are,
no doubt, as varied - or limited - as th e different forms the fanta sy takes. In ce rt a in
films th e fascination see ms close to th e co m p u lsively repeated pattern Freud describes
in 'A Sp ecial T yp e o fO b ject-choice Mad e By Men ' (1910) ,9 that of falling in love with a
woman who is anoth er man 's 'p ro pe rty', that is, his wife or mistress , but who is sexuall y
promiscuous, givin g rise to the lover's suspicions and j ealousy. T h is jealousy is not ,
however, directed at the 'lawful' possessor of th e woman, but at all the other men sh e
associates with (seen, for e xa m p le , in Johnn y's behaviour in Gilda [Charles Vidor,
1946]). Moreover the man seeks to 'rescu e' th e woman he loves fr om moral decline, or
from poverty, or from a vicious lover o r husband. Freud co n n ects this typ e of object­
choice to the man 's oedipal desires , so that the duplicitous woman is a mother
su r roga te . This explains th e co n d itio n that the woman not be unattached, as well as th e
ove r-valua tio n of her as love-object, and the condition of her unfaithfulnes s for, after
all , she ha s betra yed the son by grantin g her sexual favours to his father, rath er than to
him. This is not a stra ig h tfo r wa rd fantasy, how ever, for the mother is both punished
for her betrayal by being cast as promiscuous and at the same tim e becomes available to
her son , for Freud says, ' the lover with whom she commits her ac t of infid elit y almost
always exh ibits th e featu res of th e boy's own ego, or more accuratel y, of his own
idealized personality, grown up and so raised to a level with his father,.lo T he injured
third party 'is non e other th an the father himself. II And , Freud says, 'in the res cu e­
phantasy [the bo y] is completely id entifying himself with his father. All hi s instin cts,
those of tendern ess , gratitude, lustfulness, d efiance and independence, find satisfac­
tion in th e single wish to be his own jilther.' 1'2 H ere, too , can be found a basis for th e
homoerotic relations often noted in [ilm nair, namel y in the id entifi cation between th e
male ch aracters, whether as rivals as in Out of the Past; or as substitutes, notably in Dead
R eckoniug (John Cromwell , 1947) in which th e hero, pl ayed by H urnphrey Bogart, falls
in love with the girlfriend of his newly murd ered best fri end and war budd y; in Gilda it
is the repression of this wish that is figured, and which then form s the basis for Johnn y's
sadistic punishment of Gilda.
Freud's essa y 'O n the Un iversal Tend e ncy to Debasement in the Sphere of Lov e'
(1912) 1:1 suggests a no th e r motive for the fant as y of the duplicitous woman, namely th at
it is her very 'promiscuity' (however veiled to accommodate the Production Code) that
secures her as a sexual obj ect. It is onl y as a whore that sh e be comes d esirable, but as
such sh e is not worthy of love - a split most visible in (Jut of the Past, but also evide n t in
Murder, My Sw eet (Edward Dmytryk , 1944) and Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944),

124
 FILM NOIR AND WOMEN

wh ere th e bad girl is counterposed to a no the r, purer woman , but who usu all y remains
un attain able.
T he sce na r io of th e duplicitous woman as femm e fat ale affords as well as th e
ple asures of p assivity which a rise from bein g in thrall 10 her promise of love , pl easures
whi ch are no doubt a lso masochi stic. Th e vio le n t retribution so often e nacte d upon th e
femme fa ta le by th e plot and/or th e mal e hero bears witness not so mu ch to patriarchal
id eology as to the man 's in verse d esire to control a nd punish th e obj ect of desire who
has unmann ed him by arou sing his passive d esire. Of co u rse, desire itself a lways
inv olves th e risk o f loss, of losing the object of d esire to wh om one ha s surrend ered a
part of on eself. Iknee Hirsch 's image of 'wo me n as amoral d estroyers of mal e stren gth '
in the film noir. But 'femme fatal e' is simpl y a ca tch p h r ase for the danger of sexual
differen ce and th e demand s and risks d esire poses for the man . The m ale hero often
knowingly submits himself to the 'spider-woman' - as Neff does in Double Indemnity ­
for it is precisel y h er dan gerou s sexualit y that he d esires, so that it is ultimately hi s own
perverse desire that is his downfall.
Frank Krutnik is another writer for whom the 'co re' film notr involves a mal e
protagonist , e xe m p lified by the male 'tough' thriller. He sees this as having three
forms:

Each o f the three mod es of th e 'to ug h' thriller tends to be struc tu red a rou nd a testing o f
th e hero's p rowess - not merel y a testing o f his ability as a detective or cr im inal, but of how
he me asures up to more ex te ns ive standards of masculine compet ence. For it is through his
accomplishm ent or a crime-related quest that th e hero co nso lid ates his mas culine identity.

Krutnik goes on to e m p hasize, however, that 'while se eking ostensibl y to d ramatise a

positive trajectory . . . th e " to u g h" thrillers tend to subj ect [it] to a series of inversions,
delays, and schisms' . As a result , th ese films offer a range of alternative or 'transgress­
ive' representations of m ale d esire a nd identity. t ·l This a rg u m e n t o pe ns up important
insi ghts , but n evertheless it too makes offilm noir a mal e preserve.
Even where there is a broader d efinition of th e film noir it is still assum ed to be a
masculine form . Richard Maltby, for example , wr ites thus :

The hero of these films, who was not always th e ce n tral protagonist , was th e investi gator,
th e man ass igned the task of making sense of the web of coincid en ce, flashback and
un explained circ u msta nce th at co m pr ised th e plot. u nce rta inly adrift in a world o f
tr eachery and shifting loyalties , th e investigator of the noir movie was himself less than
perfect, frequ ently neurotic, so me times paran oid , and often managed to re-est ablish a
stable world in the him only by imposing an arbitrary resolution on the o ther ch a rac te rs. l'

125
 SHADES OF NOIR

A QUESTION OF GENRE

These films then appear to be th e antithesis of th e 'wo ma n 's film ', for although film nair
often features strong, independ ent women with determined and determinate desires,
it has been argued that this figure is invariably destroyed, either literally, or metaphoric­
ally, and replaced by her inverse, the nurturing woman.l"
Things are not, however, so simple. The number of films that fit this model is
comparatively small (although this immediately begs the question of what is meant by
'fitting' the mod el, an issue to which I will return) . For example Laura (Otto Pr eminger,
1944), one of the original films designated by Nino Frank as afilrn nair when he coined
the terrn .!" has no such deceptive woman; on the contrary, it is the villain who is the
source of the deception . But this film does have a number of other characteristics in
common with the group of films Frank cites: it contains an investigation (h ere a
policeman investigating a murder); its narrative is convoluted (the film opens with the
assumption that Laura is dead and then reverses this assumption); it uses voice-over
(Lydecker narrates at the beginning) ; it shifts point of view (from Lydecker to the
detective, McPherson); its visual style is recognizably nair; and, finally, the motivations
of its two main male characters are psychologically perverse (Lydecker's obsession with
Laura is matched and paralleled by that of McPherson, who falls in love with a dead
woman 's portrait) .
Film noir is now identified by a range of elements, not only thematic, su ch as the role
of fate or of a duplicitous woman , but also formal : the use of flashback, for example,
and hen ce of voic e-over, th e frequent undermining or shifting of character point of
view , and the investigative narrative structure, which requires the posing of an enigma,
or several, which the film attempts to resolve. The narrative complexity of these films
stems from the doubling of the investigative structure, with stories within stories, so
that the investigation of one enigma frames another, as for example in The Hili Sleet)
and Murder, lvly Sweet.ICharacters are given psychological motivation, and this is often in
some way perverse or acknowledged as psychotic.\Fate, the arbitrary and accidental
event that brings diverse dangers and the risk of death , together with a hero falsely
accused are used as narrative motivation . \
Finally,film nair is said tobe.identified by its visual style : IH low-key lighting; the use of
chiaroscuro effects; strongly marked camera angles, either low or high; jarring and
off-balance shot composition; tight framing and close-ups that produce a claustropho­
bic sense of containment. The films are predominantly urban, the action taking place at

126
 FILM NOIR AND WOMEN

ni ght a nd film ed night-for-ni g h t o n loca tion , to p rod u ce a st ro ng contrast between th e

e nvelop ing d a rk a nd inte rmittent p ools of light.
This style was clearl y re cog n ized withi n th e ind ustry and was delibe rately u sed and
developed, es pecially by the sm all indepe nd ent produ ction co m p a n ies - fo r wh om th e
style o ffe re d spectac u la r a nd distinc t effects for littl e cost wh ile p rod uci ng a style
associat ed with 'q uAlity' - but a lso by th e major stu d ios, for proj ects not necessaril y
dete rmined by 10\'.' bud get s. "? T he se lf-conscio us u se o f th e sty le is co nfi r me d by R eign
of Terror 1949 di recte d by Ant ho ny Ma n n a nd photograph ed by J ohn Alto n, wh ich
reprodu ces th e noir style very closel y, but he re for a sto ry set in Paris d u ring th e Fr ench
Rev olu tion. Simi la rly , the use of th is visu al style m otivates the inclusion of Op h u ls's
Caught a nd The R eckless Mo ment (both 1949) in th e ca tego ry offilm noir, a ltho ugh th ey
we r e clea rly also see n as 'wo men's pictu res' Y"
The se nse of a lie n atio n a n d fata lism in m an y of the film s was re cog ni zed at th e time
within the film indust ry. Richa rd Maltby cites two art icles in wh ich J ohn H ouse m an .f !
writin g in th e 1940s, exp res sed rese rva tio ns abo u t a ne w kin d o f post-war crime film he
described as th e 'to u gh' mo vie , taking as his exam ples Th e B ig Sleep (Howa rd H awks ,
1946) a nd Th e Postman Always R ings Twice (Tay Ga rnett, 1946 ).

Wh a t is signi ficant and re p ug nant abo ut our co nt e m po ra r y 'to ugh ' films is the ir absolute
lack of mo ral ener gy, thei r listless, fa ta listic des p a ir.~~
One wonde rs wha t im pression people will get of cOllle m po rary life if Th e Postman Always
Rings Twice is run in a p ro jection room twenty yea rs hen ce. They will dedu ce , I believ e, tha t
th e U nited Sta tes of Am eri ca in th e yea r follo win g th e e nd of th e Seco nd World War was a
land of ener vated , fr ig hte ne d people with spasms of high vita lity b ut a low mo ra l se nse - a
hu ngover peo ple with con fused o bjectives gro pi ng th eir way th ro ugh a twiligh t of
in secu rity and co rru p tion .t "

All th is d oes not ad d up to a ge nre, h o weve r, a t least not a ge n re in the se nse tha t th e
term is applied to other cin e matic form s suc h as the western , or th e ga n gster film ,
whi ch have a specific iconograph y of ob jects and milieux as well as a limited se t o f
na r r ative th emes or problematics.f" Although ge nre stud ies in film has ma ny p itfalls, it
is possible to p osit sets of e le ments th a t are obligato ry or forbidden in the western or
the ga ngste r film , but th is is mu ch less easy in th e case ofjilrn noir.2 5 T he latter has no
uniqu e e le me nts, a n d wh ilst it h as so me ob ligatory ele me nts, notabl y narrat ive e le­
ments of th e sus pe nse mystery or thriller form , it do es not ha ve a n y fo rbidden
eleme nt s, ex cep t perhaps the requi remen t th a t th e p eriod o f the story be cont e mpor­
a ry. Whilst film s n oirs a re not typi cally abou t fa m ily rel a tions a nd child re n , th ese

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 SHADES OF NOIR

relations are central to Th e Pitfall as well as to Mildred Pierce and The R eckless M oment ,
whilst in Th e Prowler (Joseph Lose y, 1951) the threat to th e coupl e is th e wife 's
pregnancy and its testimony to th e co u p le' s se x ua l relations prior to her first husband 's
death .
The co nce p t of ge n re invoked in film studies is d erived from a literary and dramatic
tradition of categories whi ch, by th e time film arrived o n the sce ne of representations at
the en d of th e nineteenth century , had already been fund amentally undermin ed as
discrete form s, cha lle nge d by new forms su ch as th e no vel , and by romanti cism . The
adoption of th e term , from scie n tific studies su ch as botany at th e turn of the
nineteenth century, to refer to groups of literary works with d efinable similarities, does
not simpl y signal the imperialism of the dis course of scie n ce in the stud y of literature.
Rather, it marks the point a t whi ch the classes can no longer be assumed, hut m ust be
explain ed, described and differentiated. Y" T h is crisis of identity is not merely a matter
of lab els ; also at issue is the determining of the valu e of literary and dramatic works, a
valu e that had ea rl ie r d epended on a work 's e m bod ime n t of a genre-epic, lyri c, drama ,
or tragedy. Adherence to genre , that is, to the forms and conventions by whi ch genre
was r ecognized and hen ce constituted, ceases to be a simple cr ite r io n of value , but it is
not abandoned . As Paul Hernadi's o verview in B eyond Genre: N ew Di rections in Utnary
Classification shows, the discussion of genres proliferates.r "
The definition of genre as an adherence to a fairly fixed set o f conventions has give n
rise to a tendency to see genre works as stereotyp ed or formulai c; hence some cr itics see
the term as appropriate only to th e study o f 'p o p ula r' or mass literature , whi ch is seen
as similarly stereotyped. 'Literature' is th en marked as those works that challenge our
existing conceptions. The eliti sm implicit here is not the onl y problem with su ch an
approach. The rules of a genre may be viewed not as restrictions on cre ativity but as a
frame and a stimulus.e" Moreover, as Todorov h as persuasively argu ed, a con cept of
genre remains necessary in so far as it nam es the relation of a particular work to th e
field of literature as a whole. An y work of representation will ' m an ifes t properties that
it sh ares with all literary texts, o r with texts belonging to one of th e sub-groups of
literature (wh ich we call , precisely , genres) '. 111 oth er words , in order to be re cognizable
as different from the old, the work must a lso be re cognizable as in some wa y like it, as
similar to previous works . Todorov concludes, 'G enres are precisely those rel ay-points
by whi ch the work assumes a rel ation with the universe of literature .F" ~
A major asp e ct of genre and hence of genre stud y is therefore th e e xte n t to which
any particular work exceeds its genre, how it reworks and transforms it, rather than
how it fits certain gen eri c expectations . T he theorist constru cts an id eal type in order

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 FILM NOIR AND WOMEN

to show not only how any particular work fulfils its criteria of th e ideal, but also how it
deviates from it.
I ffilm noir is not a genre, it is nevertheless recognizable. It names a certain inflection
or tendency whi ch e me r ges in certain genres in th e early 1940s, notably in the gangster
film , the crime thriller and the det ective film . The co m m o n element of this inflection is
not so much, or not onl y, visual styl e , as melodrama . It must be admitted, however, that
m elodrama, too , is a highly imprecise genre and though, unlike film noir, the term was
used by the film industry, this was not the way in which modern criticism has applied
the term to films .:HJ In the trade p apers, from the 191Os onwards, the term 'melodrama'
referred to 'thrills and spills' films , to adventure, suspense and action and even - in the
1940s - to prison films , rather than to Joan Crawford vehicles. It appears that it was in
this sense too, that films later considered films noirs were described as 'cr im e melo­
dramas'r" The term 'melodrama' has a long critical history, and the rather specialized
use of the term by th e film trade press is both justified by and distinct from that history.
The 'thrills and spills' definition of melodrama d erives from what Ben Singer has
referred to as th e 'lo wb ro w' sensational or 'blood and thunder' melodrama that
dominated popular theatre and che a p literature around the turn of the century . Singer
describes the serial-queen melodramas such as Th e Perils 0/ Pauline as an attempt to
stav e off the emergence of the feature film, and he sees them as direct cinematic
descendants of th e 'se nsa tio na l' popular melodrarna.V By contrast, the up-and­
coming, and up-market, feature film sought to asso ciate itself with 'se rio us' .lite ra tu re
and theatre and hence eschewed the term 'melodrama'. (Suspense - as well as thrills
and spills - was nevertheless also integral to the films of a prestigious director such as
D. W . Griffith, who adapted a number of earlier classic stage melodramas, including
Orphans o] the Storm .:\:\) The melodramatic plot had been used by many nineteenth­
century writers con cerned to d epict contemporary social reality and its moral
consequences for soc ie ty, such as Dickens or Balzac. 31 As a result the devices of
melodrama - extremes of emotional experience, cha nce and coin cidence, a compres­
sion of dramatic time - are allied with a socially realist representation, giving rise to a
quite different cin ematic tradition, exemplified in films such as Borzage's Sev enth
Heaven as well as Th e Mortal Storm, King Vidor's The Crowd as well as Duel in the Sun, and
the so-called 'family melodramas' of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Nicholas Ray's R ehel
without II Cause.
The connection between film nair and melodrama has been made by a number of
writers, but usually in order to distinguish fIlm noir as a form of male melodrama, in
contrast to the woman's film and female melodrama. Maureen Turirn, for example,

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 SHADES OF NOIR

points o ut that 'nair a nd the woman's film are two sides o f the sa me coin in Holl ywood's
forties sym bolic circ u la tion'r'" Murray Smith sugg ests that th e investigation of th e
woman in film noir is mirrored in th e female gothic melodrama's investig ation of the
man. i'" Fr ank Krutnik also a r gues in terms o f parallel genres:

The 'tou gh ' thrillers tend to tr eat the drama of th eir 'd islocate d ' heroes se rio usly . . .. Just
as the dramatic representation of th e realm of women - issu es of the famil y, home,
romance , motherhood, fem ale identity and d esir e - has been approach ed . . . in terms of
the generic ca teg o ry of th e 'wo me n's picture mel odrama', o ne co uld consider the J.9 ugh '
thriller as representing a form of ' mascu lin e mel odrama' . 37

This is no doubt the case in so me film s, so that in th e ' male fi lm noir melodrama ' the man
triumphs o ver a threatening and dangerou s feminine ele me nt and thereb y re solves his
co n flict with the law. Nevertheless , I want to examine th e melodramatic in film nair in
order to overturn this rigid sexual division, not to affirm it.
In film nair, a narrative of an external e n igm a, a murder or th eft, replaces the
melodrama's plot of an external eve n t of war, poverty or social cir cumstance ; in both
cases, however, this narrative is interwoven with or supplanted by another which
focuses on the personal and subj ective rel ations between the cha rac te rs. In film noir
melodrama, these relations are cha racte rized not only, if a t all, by heterosexual desire ,
but also by perverse, sadistic, obsessive or possessive desire.i'" Additionall y, th e element
of fate , of cha nce and coin cid ence, which produces th e characteristic under-motivation
of eve n ts in melodrama, is also ce n tral to the film noir. Characters feel co m pelled by
forces and passions beyond th eir reason to act as they do - in a form of amourjou. Film
noir can therefore be view ed as a kind of d evelopment of melodrama so that whereas
earlier the obstacles to the heterosexual couple had been external forces of family and
cir cumstance , wars or illness, in the film noir the obstacles derive from the characters'
psychology or even pathology as they e nco u n te r external events. It is just such an
emphasis that links th e forties films of Nicholas Ray - usually termed films n oirs - such
as In a Lonely Place (1950) and Th e)' Live by Night (1948) with his later films, such as Bigger
Than Life and R ebel withou t a Cause , whi ch Thomas Elsaesser describes as melodramas.
The emphasis on psychological motivation, including psychoanalytic th eories of psy­
chology (the 1940s saw the adoption of so-called vul gar Fr eudianism by Hollywood),
was often associated with or presented as an increased realism. It provided spectacular
and extraordinary cha racte rs and situations, whi ch nev ertheless cou ld be set in very
ordinary and familiar contexts (for- example, in Christmas Holiday , whi ch is about a
soldier's leav e, or Lost Weekend, about an alcoholic).

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 FILM NOIR AND WOMEN

This type of hybridization or inflection of existing forms or genres is characteristic of

Hollywood film-making . For whilst genre emerged ea rl y in cinema as an important
factor in produ ct differentiation and standardization , it was marked - particularly in
'q u ality' films - by th e transformation of gen eric expecta tio ns as much as by the
fulfilment of gen eri c norms. This happened because a ltho ug h Hollywood cinema is a
form of popular e n te rt a in me n t, it is also a mass form , and th e studios were concerned
to maximize audien ces for their films; specialized genres such as the horror film were
apt to draw too n arrow an audience, while generic co n ven tio ns tended to become stale
for all but the co m m itt ed ajicionados.t"
Strongly marked genre films were primarily low-budget or B pictures.l" Whilst
many films nous were made as B films, they were also often developed as potential A
films - especially by independent companies - sin ce th e stro ng ~isual style offset low
production values, and th e 'realism' similarly justified or narratively motivated low
production valu es .
Whilst these films were 1I0t recognized b y the studios as a genre in the way in which
the gangster film was , the hybridity they offered the studios in th e forties does seem to
have been re cognized , e ve n if no single term was used to designate it. Thus what has
come to be called film nair, whilst it does not constitute a genre itself, does name a
particular set of elem ent s that were used to produce 'the different' and the new in a
film; hence the term film uoir names a set of possibilities for making existing genres
'different' . With this view of genre and of/ilm noir it is no longer possible to speak of
'the' film nair, as so many writers seek to do. This view also accords more closely with the
way in which Hollywood itself treated these films. Studios had for some years sought to
adapt the 'hard-boiled ' thriller writers; MG1\'[, for example, bought the rights to James
M. Cain's The Postman Al ways Rings Twice in 1935, but th e constraints of the Production
Code forced the studio to abandon plans to film it. Th e d etective film had been
intermittentl y su ccessful , but was primarily a B pi cture format. It was hoped that by
drawing on the hard -boiled style of fiction writing of the thirties, Hollywood might
transform the detective film. In Raoul Walsh's Th ey Driv e by Night (1940), often cited as a
precursor to film noir, e le m e n ts of the Warner gangster film format are reworked with
themes from its thirties 'woman's pictures'. The film's stars , H urnphrey Bogart and
George Raft, play family men ca u gh t up in the rackets around trucking, resolved when
Raft takes ajob managing a bigger firm. He is menaced, however, by the unwelcome
but desperate attentions of the boss's wife, played by Ida Lupino, who kills her husband
and attempts to implicate Raft. Lupino's role as the neurotic and obsessed wife could be

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 SHADES OF NOIR

seen as an element of 'melodrama ', or as prefiguring the obsessive, psychotic ch aracte rs

of film noir.
In the 1940s the elements later identified as film noir allowed Hollywood to reintro­
duce themes of sexuality within the terms of th e Production Code. In the film version
of Mildred Pi erce (Mich ael Curtiz, 1945), for example, the use of flashback narration
and the introduction of a murder as the opening e n igma motivate from the beginning
the tragedy and grief brought upon the characters, and particularly upon Mildred
herself, as punishment for the ad ultery and te chnical incest of the story . Columbia's
Gilda and Dead Reckoning both present many of the elements of film uoir, particularly
sexual perversion, suggesting that these elements were now fairly well known and
conventionalized .V A British reviewer, writing in the Tribune commented

Every pattern in an, if used too often , tends, I suppose, to ca rica tu re itself. The slope is
easy and logical from Mansfield Park to Mrs Miniver, the tough felicities of Th e Glass Key
must inevitably have degenerat ed into the sentimental-sadistic inanities of the new Bogart
thriller, Dead R eckoning.'12

WOMEN AND FILM NOIR

The film noir'« world of alienation and angst is asso ciated in critical writing with the
male protagonists, and hence it is seen as portraying a masculine problem of the forties.
For Silver and Ward , film nair is characterized by 'two key character motifs', obsession
and alienation, of which the second was the most important

The darkness that fills the mirror of the past, which lurks in a dark co rne r or obscures a
dark passage out of the oppressively dark city , is not merely the key adjective of so lllany
film noir titles but the obvious metaphor for the condition of the protagonist's mind. 1 :J

Of the films they cite , all involve male protagonists. A woman protagonist is cited only
in relation to the 'explicitly psychotic figures' in The Dark Mirror (Robert Siodrnak,
1946). The inflection that [ihn noir represented was not so exclusively masculine,
however, as writers often imply.
Whilst there are no female equivalents to Philip Marlowe, this may be due more to
the demands of verisimilitude than to those of patriarchy in Hollywood, in so far as
studios assumed that audiences would find a female detective improbable in the 1940s.

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 FILM NOIR AND WOMEN

But women do feature in the position of the in vestigator wh o 'seeks to restore order',
Frank Krutnik's first form of the thriller.I" notably in Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak ,
1944), from the novel by Cornell Woolrich. Here the male protagonist is the victim ,
falsel y convicted for the murder of his wife . He is incarcerated in prison , and it is his
secretary who takes on the role of th e inv estigator who will restore order; this situation
corresponds to Krutnik's second form , th e 'suspense thriller', whi ch is the in verse of
the 'in vestigative thriller' in that the protagonist is in a marked position of inferiority in
relation to the conspiracy and/or th e police and 'seeks to restore himself to a position of
security by eradicating the enigma'.45 The film considerably in creases the cen trality of
the woman investigator, and whilst she is helped by a sympathetic policeman, and has
to be rescued after she has un covered the real killer, thi s same device was also used for
male protagonists. In The Dark Corner (Henry Hathaway, 1946), for example, the
detective is sa ved only by th e killer's wife , when she shoots her husband d ead.
I Wouldn't B e in Your Shoes (Marvin Mirs ch, 1948), also from a novel by Woolrich,
similarly has a woman - the hero's wife - ca rry o n the investigation in order to clear her
husband , again aid ed by a d etective, but one who thi s time proves himself to be the
killer. In Woman on the Run (Norman Foster, 1950) it is again th e wife who is the
investigator, together with a reporter who , she discovers, is the real killer. In The H igh
Wall (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947) the woman psychiatrist be comes the investigator for the
male hero. These film s contain the figure . cited by Hirsch, o f the male middle-class
victim who does not effect his own rescue - and this raises the question of how to
determine 'whose story' the film centres on - an issue whi ch will be considered in more
detail in relation to Raw Deal.
Such ex amples of fem ale in vestigators are usuall y dismissed o n the gro u nd s that the
women are nev er shown to be 'as good as' equivalent male figures in some way (all of
whi ch reminds me of cases brou ght by women for equal pa y in which the exac t
equivalence of work is always disputed, ag ain to the woman's disadvantage). Not only
does this beg questions of th e -comparability of cr it<?ria - ea ch film gives rise to new
criteria for asse ssment - but it also privileges an implied ideal of narrative domin ance
that the female protagonists alway s lack , yet which is frequ ently absent where the
protagonist is male . For example , in Munier Is My Beat (Ed gar G. Ulmer, 1955) the
victim falsely convicted is a woman, her police gu ard believes her story and helps her
escape, but he in turn must be helped by his partner. Here the figure of the
victim-protagonist is played by a woman. Similarly, in The A ccused (William Dieterle,
1949), the female protagonist is th e victim of events unwittingly entered int o : Wilma
Tuttle, a psychology professor, acciden tally kills one of her students when he attempts

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 SHADES OF NOIR

to sed u ce h er a nd th e film foll ows her effort s to e vad e dis covery , in a way reminiscent
of Professor Wanley in The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1945). Lan g's later film Th e
Blue Gardenia (19 53) figure s a woman , Norah Larkin , as th e victim - accus ed o f a crime
she did not commit but believes that sh e d id. The real killer is uncovered through th e
efforts of a journalist, not directly but as a result of the murderess's a ttem p ted suicide.
The obsessed or psychotic ch a ra cte r, as alrea d y noted, is considered by many writers
to be a central figure in films notrs. This figure may be so meo ne other than the ce n tral
protagonist: for example, in Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947) the sto ry ce n tres on th e
innocent su spect, but reveals the murderer to be Robert Ryan 's j ew-hatin g psychopath.
And the ob sessed ch aracter ma y as frequ entl y be a woman as a man. Th e obsession is
usually motivated by sexual desire, most obviousl y in Possessed (Cu r tis Bernhardt, 1947 )
with joan Crawford , or So Da rk the N ight (joseph H . Lewis , 1946) , where it is a mal e
protagonist who murders. In Th e Dark Past (Rudolph Mate, 1948) , th e ob session stems
from th e criminal's unconscious guilt over his father's death , whilst in Th e Lock et (John
Brahm , 1947) th e h eroine's kleptomania is traced to a false accusation of theft in her
childhood. In Gun Crazy (Joseph H . Lewis, 1950), Bart Tare's fa scination with weapons
is more than matched by Annie Laurie Starr's 'gun-craziness'. Born to Kill (Robe rt Wise,
1947) reverses this plot, with a heroine who is uncontrollably drawn to the psy cho­
pathic man , even after she realizes that h e h as committed a murd er.
Women may also fall victim to th eir involvement with the underworld , in an
equivalent to the male cr im in al 'to u gh guy' thriller, usin g their beauty of co urse, but
also an d n ecessarily th eir intelle ctu al talents fo r d eceit, as joan C rawford does in Th e
Damned Don 't Cry ; or, as Lizab eth Scott does in T oo Late/or Tears (Byro n Haskin , 1949),
who murders two husbands in order to 'mo ve out of th e ranks of th e middle-class poor',
as she says in the film.
The duplicitous woman is, of course, ne ver cited as a central protagonist , ex cept
where the film is d esignated a 'woman's picture' (wh ich see ms to be the fate of Th e
Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Le wis Mile stone, 1946), and th e criteria by which this
figure is isolated are much less co ns iste n t th an cr itics pretend . First of all , a confusion
exists between the requirement that ch aracters be duplicitous in order for the suspense
to be created and sustain ed - which fr equ ently involves mal e ch a racte rs as well as
female characters - and the narrative fun ction of the woman's sexu al duplicit y, for
example in the use of her sexu ality to dupe th e mal e h ero. This latter is also di stin ct
from the narrative fun ction of the woman as obj ect of the male hero's desire; this d esire
may result in th e hero being drawn into cr iminal or self-de str uctive activities without
the woman herself being in any way duplicitous. This is the case in Th e Prowler , in whi ch

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 FILM NOIR AND WOMEN

the wife does not realize that her lover deliberately killed her husband; similarly, in The
Postman Always Rings Twice, it is not the woman's duplicity that is the couple's undoing. In
Nora Prent iss (Vincent Sherman, 1947) the heroine of the title is not duplicitous in the
.usual sense of this term , for though she fails to save the hero at the end, this is on his
own in sistence (his downfall arises from his own duplicity and weakness rather than
Nora's ensnarement). This Gun Jor Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942) presents a particularly
tricky variation on th e theme of duplicity. Veronica Lake plays Ellen, a government spy
who nevertheless falls in love with the hired gun, Raven (Alan Ladd), who is eventually
.killed. Robert Porfirio claims that 'stripped of her patriotic guise, Ellen is revealed as a
noir JemmeJatale who leads Raven to his destruction'Jt '' even though Ellen's motives are
blameless. Moreover, her function in the narrative affords Raven the chance to redeem
herself through his self-sacrifice for her - as does Donnelly, the male hero in The
Reckless M oment. Barbara Stanwyck as Thelma in The File on Thelma Jordan (Robert
Siodmak, 1950), is also redeemed in death, for she refuses to name her partner in the
murder, thereby protecting the district attorney she had seduced into helping her (she,
like Raven, a psychologically disturbed hired assassin, and Donnelly, a blackmailer, is
already on the wrong side of the law). Duplicity is not alwa ys and only on the side of the
woman; in Southside i-1000 (Boris lngster, 1950) it is the woman protagonist, Nora
Craig, who runs a gang of counterfeiters, who is duplicitously romanced by Nick
Starns, whom she betrays in turn.
Finally, the duplicitous woman is essential neither to the group of films designated
noirs, nor to the thirties crime fiction from which many were derived . For example, Fast
One by Paul Cain, published in 1933 after serialization in Bla ck Mask 17 , involves a
gunman gambler and his alcoholic lover, whose intelligence and ingenuity are loyally
put in his service ; both perish in the final conflagration that concludes their rearrange­
ment of th e Los Angeles underworld .
. What I am attempting to challenge here is the tendency to cha ra cte rize film noir as
alway s a masculine film form . Even th ough this mas culine bias is considered critically,
the tendency is still to see women characters as occupying a subordinate position in the
films. This obscures th e exten t to whi ch these films afforded women roles which are
active, adventurous and driven by sexual desire. Nor is this observation necessarily
discounted by the fact that these rol es were frequentl y undertaken by villainesses. As
Janey Place has pointed out, in these films 'women are deadly but sexy, ex citing, and
strong,.18 If the women die as a result, they suffer a fate no different from that of the
men: the Production Code was egalitarian on this point. Moreover, for the woman as
well asthe man the crucial relation is between de sir e and death ; of Double indemnity,

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 SHADES OF NOIR

Claire Johnston notes, 'the eroticisation of death in the final scene of the flashback
confirms a universe where access to desire is only through repression' .1 9 The fantasy of
the woman's dangerous sexuality is a feminine as well as masculine fantasy, and its
pleasures lie precisely in its forbidd enness. To argue that it is only patriarchy, or the
Production Code, that requires its punishment is to misunderstand that it is the fantasy
itself that demands the punishment, for in th e punishment the reality of the forbidden
wish is acknowledged.
Neith er [ilms nous nor the thriller novels they drew upon are a preserve of male
writers. A number of films were scripted, co-written or adapted by women or derived
from stories by women - including Desperate, Railroaded and Raw Deal, all directed by
Anthony Mann (his collaboration with women writers was extensive: 'Follow Me
Quietly', an unpublished short story by Mann and Francis Ros ewald was scripted for
the film by Lillie Hayward). In a Lonely Place is based on the novel by Dorothy B.
Hughes; Private Hell 36 was co-scripted by Ida Lupino and Collier Young; additional
dialogue in The Pret ender was by Doris Miller, and Chandler's novel The High Window,
filmed as The Brasher Doubloon, was scripted by Dorothy Hannah and adapted by
Dorothy Bennett and Leonard Praskins. Th e Reckless Moment was based closely on the
story 'The Blank Wall' by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, who was des cribed by Raymond
Chandler as 'the top suspense writer of them all'.50
There are also a number of films in which it is a man who is revealed as duplicitous,
and who may also be a murderer - for example, Laura - or who will attempt to murder
the heroine; these films are as a result centred on the female figure, for example Sleet:
My Love, or Nty Name Isjulia Ross, and The House on Telegraph Hill, Und ercurrent, Sudden
Fear, When Strange 1:1: MalTY, Shadow 0/ a Doubt or Sony, Wrong Number, and Danger
Signal. 5 1 In Th e Reckless Moment and Mildred Pierce the duplicitous man is the murder
victim. The man here is similar to the 'spider-woman' figure in that he uses his sexuality
to prey on women; he is therefore generally more like Kitty in Scarl et Street, ensnaring a
gullible Professor Wanley, than Phyllis Dietrichson (who teams up with the willing
Walter Neff in Double Indemnity) - although in Born to Kill it is just su ch dangerous
sexuality, represented by his willingness to kill, which attracts the heroine to the man.
In all these films the woman protagonist is victim to events that are beyond her control
and from which she must be rescued, though this rescue is not always effected by a
man: in The House on Telegraph. Hill and Undercurrent accidental circumstances, aid ed in
the former by another woman , bring about the heroine's release. In this the films
directly parallel other [dms noir with male victims, notably Fear in the Night.

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These films have often been considered as primarily 'woman's pictures' or 'gothic
romance', and therefore characterized by the questioning of the heroine's perceptions.
Yet, as Diane Waldman notes, these films 'represent a substantial departure from the
19th ce n tu r y Gothics, the earlier films in the cycle, and th e modern Gothics and
contemporary romances where the moody Byronic lover emerges as someone who
truly loves the heroine'. 52 For in them the man is really seeking to kill the heroine - and
herperceptions are thus proved correct. A central component of the noir inflection ,
however, namely the suspense thriller, involves just such a questioning of the protagon­
ist, since the ' suspense film , unlike the classic detective film , always involves the
production of a narrative hesitation about the truth concer ning the enigma and about
the protagonist's perception of reality.

A WOMAN'S STORY

Implicit in the arguments 1 have been advancing are questions of narrative focus,
Whose story does the film tell? On whi ch character does the narrative centre? Does it
centre on more than one character? Does it tell a man's or woman's story? Finally, what
does it mean to ask this last question ? Certainly, th ese questions are raised by the
authors of the anthology Wamen and Film Nair, and by most contemporary commen­
tators on film nair. Behind these questions there lies the whole issue of reading and
interpretation, of discerning whether and how the woman is subordinated in film noir.
Yet it is clear that while many narratives ostensibly tell the tale of a protagonist and his
or her adventures , for the spectator the film's 'story' is more than that of anyone
character; it is also a fantasy scenario. This fantasy is not produced by the spectator but
by the filmic text itself, which must 'move' the spectator to occupy his or her place
within it.
The following discussion seeks to explore the question of the woman's voice and her
story in relation to film nair by taking two films, Raw Deal and Secret beyond the Door, which
exhibit a feature singularly associated with film nair , namely, first-person narration.
Voice-ov'er narration, together with the narrative device of flashback, was co m para­
tively rare prior to the 1940s in American film, but it became common in that decade,
then fell in popularity in the fifties and again in the sixties. This popularity was not
confined to the film nair, or even to the detective film , and it precedes the film nair
slightly - being strongly established from 1940, and gaining pre-eminence with
Welles's Citizen Kane and Ford's How Green Was My Valley in 1941 ; 5 3 the first films noirs to

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us c it are L aura , Double In demnity, T he M ask ofDi mi trias a nd M u rder, i\tly Swee t, all released
in 1944. Subseq ue n tly voice-ov er is more com mo n ly used for films in othe r ge n re s. It is
ne ve rtheless featu red in man y o f th e films tha t ha ve becom e the key examp les o f jilm
n air, incl uding not o n ly th ose just listed a bove, bu t also Gilda, Th e K illers, T he Postman
A lways R ings T wice a nd Out ojth« Past.
In ji lm nai r th e u se of vo ice-over na rrati on is associated with the male he ro, o fte n a
de tecti ve or 't ou gh guy' investiga to r whose di alog u e is 'hard -boi led ' - clip pe d and
cyn ical. It fun ction s to place th e specta tor su bjectively with the chara cte r, allowing us to
ente r h is wo rld throu gh hi s wo rds . T he a u thority o f the voice-over te nds to be assumed
by con vention ; but it also con ve ntion ally includes the voicing o f h esitati ons a nd d oubts
ab ou t th e h ero's perception a nd in te rp re tat io n o f e ve n ts, incl u d in g self-d oubt (notab ly
in Gilda , a nd in Dead Reckon ing). T h e flashback voice-ov er narrati on of M ildred P ierc e, as
o f P ossessed also sta r ring j oan C raw fo rd, markedl y lacks a hard-boiled style a nd as a
result is associate d with melodra mas o r 'wo ma n's pictu res', ma ny o f whi ch also use thi s
d evi ce in this period . In Raw Deal , h owe ver, th e firs t-perso n , presen t-t ense narrati on by
a wom an d oes follow the h ard-boiled style o f th e male ji lm n air hero - th ou gh in th is
film the narra tor is not the oste ns ible protagon ist of the film .
Raw Deal was di re cted in 1948 by A n thony Ma nn , who had earli e r made R ailroaded
and Desperate, whi ch a re also usu ally recognized as f ilms no irs . Raw Deal tells the sto ry of
j oe Su llivan wh o , con victed fo r a crime he d id no t co m mi t, escapes from prison aided
by h is loyal girl fr ie n d Pat , by his ex-par tne r (who h opes he will be kille d in th e escape)
and - though un willin gly - by his lawyer's legal assista n t, A n n . Th e film features his ex­
p artner, a sad istic ga ngs te r boss played by Ra ym ond Burr; obsess ed with fire , h e
wan to nl y throws hot coffee at the gi rl fr iend who ha s an noyed him (th is sce ne was lat er
imi tat ed by Fritz Lan g in The Big H eat). T he film also fe atures , in th e h ard-boiled style ,
two sidekicks nam ed Fan tail and Sp ider; it is filmed by john Alt on in the sin gularl y noir
sty le with wh ich h e was particula rly assoc iated: marked high or low ca me ra angles,
stron g ch iarosc uro lighti ng, a nd e m p ha tic use o f sha dows (m arked ca me ra a ng les are a
featu re of Anthony Mann 's films in ge nera l and not on ly those p hotograp hed by
Alto n) .
Con sid e re d as j oe's story , R aw Deal fits Krutni k's category of the 'crim in al adv en ture
thriller', in which th e he ro 'us ua lly with the aid o f a wo ma n , becom es en gaged in eithe r
a wilful or a n acciden ta l tr an sgression o f th e law , a nd has to face th e co nseq ue nces o f
"ste p p ing ou t of lin e,,, ."·l In thi s case there are two wome n, Pat a nd A n n, b ut they d o
n ot sim pl y fall in to th e go od ve rsu s bad girl pattern. Wh ile it is clearl y Pat who is fro m
th e 'wro ng side o f th e tracks', it is An n, th e good girl , wh o a ppears re ad y to bet rayjoe , to

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beli eve him ca pab le o f cold-blooded murder. The two women a re more like Marie and
Velm a in Raoul Walsh's H igh Sier ra (194 1), thou gh Ann, afte r sh ooting but not killin g
Fantail to defend J oe , is rev ealed truly to be in love with J oe. And Pat , whil st con cealing
the information until the eleventh hour, finally reveals to Joe th at Rick is holding Ann
hostage. Both wom en are also inv olved in cr u cial narrative acti ons.
joe's story is not, hm~e v er , th e sto ry of his stru ggle for justice against Rick Coy le,
althou gh thi s, together with makin g go od his escap e fr om jail, is his initial go al. A
secondary go al, whi ch fin all y supersed es the first , em erges in the cen tral co n flict
between Joe a n d Ann, or in a sense between a former J oe, wh o as a kid had rescued
some people from a burning building, an d th e present Joe , ap pa re n tly ruthless,
hardened and cyni cal , wh om Ann believ es to be ca p able of cold-blooded murder. At
the film's end Joe will act to redeem his pa st a n d also to affirm th e truth of his childhood
bravery, to be come the 'real'joe, whom Ann alwa ys beli eved in (joe th ereb y foll owing
the nineteenth-century mel odrama tradition of th e villain turn ed hero who sacrifices
himself for th e heroine).
The film opens with a shot of prison gates and a wom an's voice-ove r in the present
tense 'T h is is the d ay, thi s is the d ay!' Th ere are no flashbacks in the film, and the
narrative structure is com pa ratively straightforward , presenting even ts in chronolo­
gical or d e r, cove r in g just a co u p le of da ys. (Complexit y is introd uced on another level
throu gh the use of p arallel montage, with cutaways on th e one h and to Rick and his
increasingly h ysterical response to Joe's continuing success a t evading th e dragnet, and
on th e oth e r hand to the police themselves . As a re sult of this complexity, a cu taway to a
posse o f police in th e woods whenJoe, Pat, and Ann are at O scar's is initially read as the
hunt for Joe ; only lat er is it revealed to be a quit e unrelated pursuit, in volving a wife­
killer. The pursuit is relevant to th e story of Joe , however, since in a humanitarian
gesture Joe gives th e man sh elter inside O scar's Tavern .)
The first-person narration by Pat, intensely personal a nd subjective, is used to
present her thoughts, rather than to narrate events. Pat's voice-over co nstitu tes a
subjective point of view on the events. In t.his sense Raw Deal becomes h er story, the
story of how Joe will be free to be with her. But thi s story, which sh e narrat es obliquely
throu gh her fears ab out wh at is happenin g, turns o u t to be about Joe's falling in love
with another woman . So it is Pat 's traged y that we participate in at. th e e nd ; as Ann
cradles the dying Joe an d receives his love, Pat looks on , losing Joe twice over, in d eath
a nd t.o Ann .
Pat 's voice- over occurs on eleve n occasio ns , but always very briefly, usu ally for the
duration of only one shot, and nev er more than three. H er voice- over is, then , bot.h

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strongly marked - through its recurrence - and relatively intermittent. It is also

frequently interrupted. Sometimes Pat's voice moves from voice-over to spoken
dialogue, asin shots 116, 1I7, 1I8:

Voice-over
'We' ve made it all right, we've gotten out of town . For some strange reason I feel worse
than before. Like a two-time loser. Maybe it's .. . ' (CUT)
, ... the let down, though there is still the roadblocks up ahead .' (CUT)
'Or maybe it's because of her, sitting next to Joe where I should be. Where I would be if
she weren't there. If she weren 't . .. ' (CUT)
Dialogue
'W hy don't we ditch her now, Joe?'

The voice-over often carries information but, as here, it is usually information also
given by the image track, which shows that they have left town . More important, it
functions to voice Pat's hopes, at the opening, and subsequently her fears, especially in
relation to Ann. Yet Pat's perceptions of the events are never questioned. The
poignancy of Pat's position is shared by the spectator not only through her voice-over
but also in one scene through a privileged sharing of information.
The three have escaped the roadblocks and have reached Oscar's Tavern where they
will change cars. Pat sprains her ankle as they walk to the house and Joe picks her up in
his arms and carries her in. The next scene contains three shots (shots 215, 216, 217).
The first shows Pat lying on a couch in medium long shot while Joe is standing looking
out of a window rear centre; Pat begins to speak in voice-over, 'Deep down I guess I
have no real beef at what I know is happening. Watching him.' The music that
accompanies Pat's voice-over begins at the end of this shot. The next shot frames her in
close-up as she looks up off-screen right. Her voice-over continues. 'Only one thing
keeps ringing inside of me. He's never really told me he loved me. Funny how that
keeps coming back now. I haven't minded it before. I'd always been more than ready to
take him at any terms.' Her voice-over continues into the next shot with the words, 'But
now ... " then she begins to speak to Joe. This third shot is as the first shot of the
sequence, and shows Joe pacing up and down right to left in mid-ground; reflected in a
mirror as he paces, he walks into the window arch then back to Pat as she talks to him;
he is not listening. Pat lights a cigarette while Joe searches for his pack; finding it empty,
he says he will go down and see if Oscar has any. Pat answers, 'Hey, I've got some right
here. No, mine's all gone too.' We can see, however, that she does have cigarettes, that

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Leaving town , Pat, Joe and Ann in shots 116,117,118 (Raw Deal, Anthony Mann, 1948)

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 SHADES OF NOIR

she is lying. Her lie gives joe an excuse to leave the room and shows us that Pat realizes
that this is what he wanted, and that she will not try to stop him. That it is Ann who is
the cause of his restlessness is confirmed for the spectator (though not for Pat) in the
next shot: joe enters Ann's room and when he sees that she is not there, he leaves to
search for her outside. Though Pat's lie is spoken in dialogue, it functions like her
voice-over to give the spectator knowledge of her internal thoughts; this focalization
through Pat is supported by the fact that her voice-over music continues until the end
of the scene.
Neither Ann nor joe is given any equivalent subjective point of view in the film;
instead their subjective views and feelings are presented through their dialogue or that
of others ; for example, joe and Pat discuss Ann's motives, whilst Pat voices what she
understands to be joe's feelings. We also come to understand the characters through
their actions and reactions as these are presented by the film, for example in the use of
shot/reverse-shot alternations, by which a character's reactions to the adjacent shot is
implied . These are seen especially at the opening of the film where Ann's talk to joe at
the prison is presented in a series of alternating close-ups of each of them. This
alternation is repeated and varied later when Pat sees Ann leave and then goes to talk to
joe herself.
Ann, of course, is a powerful alternative focus in the film. From the point of view of
the other characters, she is Pat's rival for joe's love, and she represents for joe the
respectable world he is basically part of but cannot reach from the slum where he grew
up, Corkscrew Alley; in responding to Ann's arguments and in falling in love with her,
joe narratively affirms his decency. The spectator is therefore aligned variously with
these three characters, even though only Pat is given a direct subjective point of view.
There is, then, no simple hierarchy between the characters in which the story is mainly
joe's, partly Pat's and to a lesser extent Ann's. Rather Ann's story, her concern and love
for joe are crucial to the poignancy of joe's predicament: though he is doomed , he can
see through her the decent life that remains beyond his grasp. And Ann's rivalry with
Pat is not resolved by a simple eviction of Pat; rather, the film focuses on the tragedy of
Pat's position in relation to Ann and joe. Nevertheless, at the film 's end Ann functions
primarily to resolve joe's and Pat's stories; at the end, as Ann cradles joe, he says, 'Hey,
hey, none of that. I got my breath of fresh air. You . . . ' his speech breaking off in mid­
sentence as he dies. It is Pat's voice-over that then closes the film . 'The police picked me
up and brought me here. There's my joe in her arms. A kind of . .. (CUT) happiness on
his face. In my heart I know that ... (CUT) this is right for joe. This is what he wanted.'
In an extraordinary move, the narrative emphasis shifts to joe's finally having what he

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Pat is carried into Oscar 's by Joe after hurting her ankle, and shots 215, 216, 217 follow.

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 SHADES OF NOIR

wanted , Ann , rather than focusing o n his death , and at the same tim e emphasizes Pat's
self-sacrifice, and her loss. In telling joe's sto ry, Pat also tells her own.
Along with this shift from an exclusive concern with th e male protagonist, in Raw
D eal , there is an emphasis on the interaction betw een cha racter s, and this is presented
in a way more usually associated with melodrama. J oe 's hard-boiled style is cracked by
moments of concern and sympath y; learnin g that the police hav e th e details of the car
they are using, Pat panics and Joe re sponds to her acerbically, o nly to apologize after a
short pause. His apology shifts the way in whi ch we understand J oe and his relationship
to Pat, suggesting that he does not take her help for gra n ted . Joe makes his own
sacrifice later when he sends Ann away after th eir night together, a sacrifice made
either to protect Ann or out of loyalty to Pat. But Pat is un able to talk Joe out of meeting
Rick to get the money he is owed, and so she retorts bitterly that he would not go if it
were Ann who asked him to stay. A terrible row ensues . Joe end s it by slapping Pat on
the face; she walks out. On her return she sits weeping o n the bed and admits that she
almost called the police. Joe responds to this confession with a fumbling attempt to
explain: 'About Ann ... I don't know how to ... th at 's the trouble , I don't know how to
... OK ... ' In the next shot Pat and Joe embrace and he says, 'Okay, you 've forgiven
me a thousand things before without my asking . .. (long pause) C'mon . Let's go ! Get
your things.' Pat: 'My things?' Joe: 'Sure, sure, the clothes that yo u bought for us this
afternoon . A fellow and his girl going to take a boat trip, the y usually dress for it, don 't
they?'
This scene is intercut with shots of Rick , who is now holding Ann ho stage. The
reconciliation between Joe and Pat is therefore qualified by the expectation that Joe will
have to rescue Ann. A narrative iron y now structures the events: it is Pat wh o takes the
call threatening that if Joe does not meet Rick , Ann will be killed . Pat does not report
the call to Joe. As the boat is about to set sail , Joe suddenly suggests th at he and Pat get
married. 'Have a house. Kids , ma ybe. Bring 'em up right.' Pat 's voice-over is an guished.
'Wh y didn 't he stop talking? Or the clock stop mo ving? He was sa yin g everything I had
ever wanted to hear. All my life. The lyrics were his all right. But the music, Ann's.
Ann 's! Suddenly I saw that every time he kissed me he'd be kissing Ann . Every time he
held me, spoke to me, danced with me, ate, drank , played , san g, it would be Ann ,
Ann!'5:> Finally she tells Joe about the threat to Ann .
The penultimate sequence of the film is again conventionally noir action. It is night,
there's a fog, and Rick's men are waiting to jump Joe in a dark city alley. But he
outshoots Fant.ail and Spider, then enters Rick's apartment. t.hrough a window and

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begins a final struggle to the death with him; though fatally wounded in the struggle,
Joe is nevertheless able to rescue Ann from the now-burning apartment.
In the final sequence, Joe has collapsed on the steps outside and Ann is leaning over
him, as a police car arrives with Pat; in the final shot (485, credits in 486), she says, 'This
is right for Joe. This is what he wanted,' and as she does so the camera pans right to
reveal the road sign: 'JANE STREET/CORKSCREW ALLEY' introducing a final irony and
ambiguity.
No doubt this analysis of Raw Deal begs more questions about the category of
melodrama than it can answer here. Nevertheless, I think it is clear that it is not only as
some uniquely masculine form that melodrama appears in film noir, and thus, too, that
film noir is not exclusively a form in which a particular masculine fantasy of sexual
difference is played out.

DEATHLY DESIRES

I, insofar as I can sense the pattern of my mind, write of the wish that comes true, for some
reason a terrifying concept, at least to my imagination. Of course, the wish must have
terror in it; just wanting a drink wouldn't be quite enough. I think my stories have some
quality of the opening of a forbidden box, and that it is this, rather than violence, sex, or
any of the other things usually cited by way of explanation, that gives them the drive so
often noted.
James M. Cain, preface to The Butterfly

Secret beyond the Door (1948) is the third in Fritz Lang's trilogy of films with Joan Bennett,
butthough the first two, The Wornan in the Window (1945) and Scarlet Street (1945), centre
on a male protagonist - played by Edward G. Robinson in both films - in Secret beyond
the Door the central protagonist is a woman, Joan Bennett herself, and her centrality is
emphasized by her voice-over narration. (This is the only Lang him that uses voice-over
narration in this way.) Moreover, as Stephen Jenkins points out, in this film it is the
woman who investigates the man, inverting the structure of the earlier two films, and
implying that Celia is in the narrative position previously taken by the Edward G.
Robinson characters). That position is not, however, one of dominance, for the male
character becomes a victim of his own desire, which brings him into conflict with the
law. This situation produces a relationship between the male figure and the law that is
mediated by the woman as object of desire. Similarly, Celia throws caution to the wind

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 FILM NOIR AND WOMEN

"

The knife fight. (Secret beyond the Door, Fritz Lang, 1948)

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 SHADES OF NOIR

and pu rsu es her d esire, marryin g Mark Lamph ere after a seventy-twa-h our acquain t­
a n ce . Celia, however - unlike Ch ris C ross in Scarlet Street wh o wilfull y refu ses to reali ze
what Kitt y is, but like Vern in Ra ncho Notorious and other Lan g prot agonists - is
required to discover th e meaning of the my sterious signs with whi ch sh e is presented ,
namely Mark's strange behaviour a nd, later, the locked seve n th ro om whi ch sh e
eq u ates with Mark's locked mind, or unconscious.
There is no simple inv ersion of gender in Secret beyondthe Door, but this is not because
Celia's discourse is su bver ted by th e filmi c e n u nc ia tio n or by Mark's ascendan cy in th e
film. 5 6 On th e contrary , Celia's dis course remains dominant at th e e nd of the film: sh e
arrives at th e truth of Mark's neurotic di sturban ce , she co rrectly reads the signs and
contributes to his cu re (she also literally has th e last word in th e film). But since for
Lang su ch psychological ver acity is ne ver the point, it is important 10 note th at it is
Celia's return to the house and to th e lock ed room to face h er pos sible d eath at Mark 's
hands that resolves th e problem of her d esire and th ereby makes po ssible th e 'happ y
e n d ing'. Th e film does have a mas culine proj ect: to bring Celia to th e position from
which she ca n ' u nd e rs ta nd ' Mark and hence rescu e him from his neurosis. This is
brou ght ab out, however, not bec ause Celia 'su bmits to Mark's fantasy' as Jenkins
argues, but because th e link between her d esire and danger o r death has been broken .
The film makes Celia the subject of h e r own desire and narrates th e story of its
vicissitudes; this brings her to a position wh er e, instead of fearing d eath, whi ch is
eq u ivalen t to her desire, Celia now fears the loss of d esire, o f Mark, in preference to
whi ch she would rather die.
The connection of desire with d eath is ce n tral to film nair, for it is with film nair th at
Am eri can cine ma finds for the first tim e a form in whi ch to rep resen t d esire as
something that not only rend ers th e desiring subject helpless, but also propels him or
her to destruction . It was thi s asp ect of the work of the hard-boiled school of writ ers
that may h ave provoked censorship, not the fact of illicit sexual relations alone . In
Double Ind emnity, Neff's attra ction to Ph yllis Dietrich son is inextricabl y linked to his
knowledge of h er desire to kill her husband for his life insurance money; to gratify this
desire she wants Neff to help her take out a policy without her husband 's knowled ge .
The sexu al tension between them is bound up with bringing this o ff, but is lost later as
Neff becomes more involved in duping his mentor and fath er figure, Keyes.
The connection of d esire with danger or d eath is visible in Secret beyond the Door,
though few writers consider it a film nair, unlike th e ea rl ier two films in th e Bennett
trilogy. Instead the film is associated with the 'wo ma n 's film' and the gothic. 5 7 Paul M.
Jensen obs erves in his book-lon g study of Lang's films : 'The story is akin to those

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modern Go th ic novels about a yo u n g gir l who marri es after a whirlwind co u rts hi p , and
th en notices that h er new hu sband starts actin g mysterious after th ey move into his
la r ge , gloom y mansion.t' " And indeed Lang himself claimed that Hitch cock's R ebecca­
ada p ted fr om Daphn e Du Maurier's go th ic novel- was a direct inspiration . Certainly
a n array o f gothic e le m e n ts ca n be fou nd in the film: 5 9 a fo r m er wife who di ed of an
unnamed illness ; a so n who hat es his father and wh o , he believes , has killed his m other;
a gloom y a nc estra l home ; and a sche m ing woman emplo yee lurkin g at a window .
T h e r e is also Celia's forebodin g, the dark voice in h er heart that she hears just as sh e is
ab out to be married , but does not heed, a n d the story centres o n her sense of doubt and
uncertainty about. Mark, at fir st. abo ut. wheth er he loves her or not, th en ab out. t.he
possibility t.hat. he m ay have killed his fir st. wife, and finally a bo u t his d esire to kill her.
At Mark's home in Levend er Falls, new suspicions arise a n d furth er suspense is
cr ea ted , ex p ressively reinforced by Celia's point-of-view sh ots and th e mise en scene, for
exa m p le t.he chiaroscuro light.ing th at half obscures th e long corridor th at Celia
investigate s just. before her di scovery o f Miss Robey.P"
Other ele me n ts in the film, however, co n trad ict o r disturb t.he genre ex pect.at.io ns of
t.he got.hi c. Cel ia is not ve ry yo u n g , and not. at all in experien ced - sh e is t.he d arling of
her set, she breaks a n e n ga ge me n t at th e drop of a hat, and is revealed never to have
intended to marry th e man in the first pl ace; sh e is sophisticated , self-possessed and
self-assured , as well as assertive , defending her psychoanal yst friend to her brother;
lat er, in Mexico, she spe a ks of sending a wa y her friend Edith in order to meet Mark on
her own g ro u n d . Th eir honeymoon at. a n idyllic hacienda is shown to be n ot only
romantic but also highly sexual , as is th eir eventual reunion at Lev ender Fall s when
Celia tells Mark that she is coll ecting on his rainch eck from their hon eymoon . Sh e too
has independent m eans, so wh en she becomes furi ous at. Mark for his treatment. o f her
at the train station in Levende r Falls, sh e pl ans straightaway to return to New York. She
ultimat.el y reje cts this co u rse of action because it would be a r eturn to lonelin ess, and
because she loves Mark; but. her more r ational evaluation is prefaced by a wish , a wish
for her brother Rick: 'If only Rick were alive - I co uld go home to Rick.' Sh e say s to
Mark later, however, that when she conjured Rick up , it was to 'read her the ri ot act',
th at is, to m ake her see reason, to see that she h ad committed herself to Mark a nd
should sti ck by that co m m itme n t. Here is conjoined an image of her brother as
in cestuous love-obje ct with an image of him as representative of the law to whi ch she
must submit. She does not question her own worth , but she is puzzled, a n d put out , so
th at when Mark arrives home th at evening , she questions him directly. Celia is not yet
or not sufficiently a victim of her circu m sta n ces.

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As a result, the gothic elements in Secret beyondthe Door appear marked; they function
as a device which refers not only to the conventional expectations of the gothic as a
genre, but also to the category of the gothic as such. Thus the device becomes a
symbolic referent. When Lang cited Rebecca as an influence what he pointed to was not
the similarity of plot, the death of a first wife in mysterious circumstances, the scheming
woman servant at the window, the film's ending with a burning house, but something
else:

I'll tell you what the whole idea was. You remember that wonderful scene in Rebecca where
Judith Anderson talks about Rebecca and shows Joan Fontaine the clothes and fur coats
and everything? ... Talk about stealing - I had the feeling that maybe I could do
something similar in this picture when Redgrave talks about the different rooms . Now let's
be very frank - it just didn 't co me through for me.?'

What Lang is describing is Mrs Danvers's morbid obsession with Rebecca, visualized
through her careful preservation of Rebecca's possessions, tangible signs of a lost
object. It is this obsession that is the basis for Lang's presentation of Mark's perverse
passion for collecting rooms that have been the scene of a murder. By emphasizing the
details of reconstruction, the glass from which the wife drank before being knifed, the
chair to which the mother was tied, the scarf with which Don Antonio killed - Mark!
Lang make objects stand for a murder which is itself absent. Lang, then, inverts Mrs
Danvers's obsession, for while she wished to recover the living Rebecca through the
objects, Mark seeks to recover the deaths in his .
Further, Lang has replicated Mrs Danvers's gesture, with not one but seven rooms of
revered objects. In doing so he introduces another reference, and one which is also
part of the gothic tradition, namely the reference to Bluebeard, his murdered wives,
and the one forbidden, locked room of his castle. So, too, the seventh of Mark's rooms
is forbidden to his visitors, and to his new wife .6~ It immediately becomes necessary,
then, for Celia to gain entry to the room , to discover its contents and thereby the
contents locked away in Mark's mind, or unconscious. What she finds there is a replica
of her own room, which had formerly belonged to Mark's late wife Eleanor. At first
Celia assumes that the room's secret is Mark's morbid fear that he was responsible for
'h is wife 's death , but she reassures herself that he had no hand in her death and is about
to leave when the mantle clock chimes, causing her to glance at it, and thus to notice the
candlesticks on either side of the clock. One of them is shorter than the other,just like
the candlesticks in her room now, since she herself shortened one in order to make a
wax impression of the key to the seventh room . This is a replica of her room , and it

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awaits, it is the harbinger of, her own death. Terrified, Celi a dashes out, only to
discover that Mark is in the adj acent room. She runs on, followed by Mark, who is
carrying the scarf that had been Don Antonio's murder weapon. Unlike the gothic
heroine, however, Celia is not an innocent player in this mise en scene of murderous
desire. She too is touched b y the passi on of death and by a desire to transgress the law.
She is, in fact, a veritable noir protagonist.
Secret beyond the Door opens with a dream-like image (filmed through gauze and
patently unrealistic) of a pool with a paper boat floating in it, while Celia's voice-over
says, 'I remember. Long ago I read a book that told the meaning of dreams . It said th at
if a girl dreams of a boat or ship she will reach a safe harbour but if she dreams of
daffodils she is in great danger. [The cam era pans across fro m the boat to daffodils
under the water.] But this is no time for me to think of danger. This is my wedding day.'
The scene cu ts to high and low angle shots o f a ch u rch , and Celia's voice-over
continues; she repeats Mark's words about the felicitous structure of the church, then
adds 'and love is new for me '. The scene then cuts to the first shot of Celia, in a bridal
gown, entering the church. She says, still in voice-over, 'It 's said that when you drown ,
your whole life passes before you like a fast movie,' which is a cu e for the flashback to
the events leading up to her marriage; the scene cu ts to her brother's office where he is
berating 'my gaudy young sister' for breaking another engagement. Celia refers to her
brother as her 'mother, father, and cheq ue-signer ', pointing to an overdetermined
relationship to which the film adds overtones of incestuous desire when Bob, her
brother's young assistant lawyer, breaks in upon their embrace, only to be told by th e
brother that 'it's strictly legal', before he introduces Celia as his sister.
After her brother's death , Bob proposes to Celia, who gladly accepts; but Bob urges
her first to take the trip to Mexico suggested by friends. The scene cu ts to a busy market
square in Mexico , and the ca mera pans to reveal Celia and Edith at a leather stall,
discussing the purchase of a wallet for Bob; as Edith chats about a former fiance of her
own who looked like Bob but who broke off their engagemen t, a scream is heard from a
girl off-screen. Edith urges , 'Let's get out of here. I don't want to be an innocent
bystander. Celia, come on! Come on ! What's wrong with you? ' But Celia remains
transfixed by the scene before her. Her voice-over narration begins again : 'There was
nothing wron g, but I was strangely held,' and while she admits th at sh e had seen men
fight before, she protests, 'This was different. A woman , and two men . . . fighting over
her with naked knives. Death was in that street. And I felt how proud she must be. [One
, of the men's knives strikes the table, beside her hand.] Suddenly I felt that someone was
wat ching me. [Celia looks around her to frame left and right , then left again .] There

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 FILM NOIR AND WOMEN

Celia , using a duplicate key, has entered the locked room number 7, only to find
that it is the double of her own room, that is, the room of Mark's first wife; she
assumes that Mark's secret is that he believes he is responsible for his first wife 's
death . The clock 's chime causes her to turn towards the mantelpiece, and, seeing
the candles, one shorter than the other, she realizes with horror that it is indeed
her own room. She runs out, only to find Mark has been in the adjacent room.
Mark emerges carrying the scarf which the Count used to kill his mistresses . In
the house, Miss Robey gives Celia the key to the car to drive to town , but as Celia
leaves she finds the scarf - implying that Mark has followed her - and runs wildly
out into the mist-filled garden , until she confronts a male figure . The film cuts to
Mark's voice-over and his imagined trial for Celia's murder. Discovering Celia has
returned to the house, Mark is afraid to remain alone with her and attempts to
leave, but is drawn back. Meanwhile Celia has made her preparations, and
complete with a bouquet of lilacs, returns to the room to await Mark.

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 SHADES OF NOIR

was a tinglin g a t the nape o f my n eck as though the air had turned cool. I felt eyes
tou ching me like fingers. [Ce lia look s o ff-fra me left as the cam era cu ts to a man we lat er
discover is Mark Lamphere, who is looking up off-frame righ t. The cam era cu ts back to
Celia looking fr ame-left. C ut-back to Mark, and th e voice-over resumes .] There was a
cu r re n t flowin g between us. Warm and sweet. And frightenin g too. [Cut back to Celia
looking fram e left.] Be cause he saw behind m y makeup wh at no one h ad eve r seen .
Something I didn 't know was there .'
Eventuall y, Edith and Celia leave ; later at a ca fe Edith recalls , 'When yo u fin all y
sn apped out of your tran ce you looked as though you'd seen death himself . 'That's not
how he looked,' Celia replies and sends Edith off on a pretext in order to allow Mark ,
whom we see as the cam era follows her look off-frame right, to join h er at her tabl e.
'You're not a bit like yo u,' he tells her, then compa res her to cyclo ne weath er in wheat
cou n try, remarking that behind h er smile he sees turbulence. Celi a's voice-over
resumes, saying that sh e no longer heard his voice (which cea ses on th e soundtrack
th ough we see him talking) : 'Beca use th e beatin g of my blood was loud er. As if thi s
were what I sea rc h ed for all those foolish yea rs in Ne w York. I knew before I kn ew his
name or tou ched his hand. Strange, I thought th en of daffodils.' Her voice-over ceases
and we again hear Mark's voice, now saying th at Ce lia had been living th e fight between
th e two men h erself. 'You' ve be en sta rved of feelings, an y real feelin gs. A twentieth­
cen tu r y sleeping be auty.' His referen ce here to her absorption in th e fight confirms
that Celia was indeed no innocent bystander.
Once again her voice-over resum es to summarize their n ext few days, and the n ext
sho t shows Mark and Ce lia at a wishing well, wh ere she ann ounces th at sh e is leaving
the next d a y. Mark d eclares his need for her, they kiss, a nd th en her voice-over
resumes. 'O ne door closed and an other opened wide and I walked through and never
looked behind. Because wind and space and su n and storm - everything was beyond
that door. [cu t to Celia in the church] That night I wrote to Bob.' Then, ove r images of
th e marriage, Celia's voice-o ve r re gisters her sud d e n fear: 'I'm marryin g a stranger.'
(The doors su ggest a reference to Hitchcock's Spellbou nd, but also more specifically to
th e rooms in the Bluebeard's castl e o f Bartok's ope ra .) The film is marked by a sense of
fatality, by dark passions and psych ological di sturbances in which the heroine as well as
the hero participates: all the traits , in fact , of cert ain film s noirs.
Celia's voice-over bears an extremely complex relation to the di egeti c time of the
film. Conventionally, su ch a voice- over is taken to be the cha racte r's int ernal thou ghts,
and Celia re counts her dream in the present te nse at th e film's openin g. She repeats
Mark's ea rlie r words a bou t th e ch u rc h , th en - having entered bodil y into the sce ne ­

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she relates, over a visual flashb ack, all the circumstances leading up to her forthcoming
marriage in the church; hence these scenes are shown as belonging to the past. The
return to what appears to be the present time in the film is accom p an ied by Celia's
presentiment of danger as sh e takes Mark's hand in marriage. Yet this voice-over
continues across into the diegetically discontinuous scene that follows: the first shot of
which shows a fountain in the wall of the ha cienda where Mark and Celia are spending
their honeymoon. The voice-over continues: 'Ma ybe I should have followed the dark
voice in my heart. Maybe I should have run away . It started on our honeymoon. [The
camera starts to track in to a close-up ofthe fountain.] Legend says ... 'Celia goes on to
say that iflovers drink from the fountain th ey will keep no secrets, and their two h earts
will be one, anticipating the film 's story and conclusion.
The use of the voice-over here implies that the scene - and indeed the whole film­
unfolds in the past tense , as a flashba ck. But subsequently Celia's voice-over presents
her thoughts and fears in the present time of the film and no longer recounts events as
past. Following this opening scene at the ha cienda, there is no subsequent marking of
the whole film as flashback, so that the rest of the film appears as 'histoire', unnarrated
by Celia, whose thoughts and fears we are nevertheless allowed to hear and under­
stand . The film thus resumes the cin ematic convention by which the textual system
'speaks' the story, in its ordering and disposition of its codes of narration , in particular
in its visual codes, so that we see the film as an 'objective' story and no longer as sol ely
the subjective view of Celia. There are then two Celias, one who is the author of the
flashback but who ceases to be marked as such and thus comes to be aligned with the
omniscient narrator, and Celia the character in the film. In neither case does 'Celia'
directly acknowledge her 'desire for death'; instead the film effectively proposes her
speech as a 'ma n ifest' text in contrast to which it offers a 'latent' text to be read or
deciphered through a series of repetitions, symbols and coincidences . This distinction
between latent and manifest text follows the same division Freud describes for two
aspects of the dream-work wh ereby the latent meaning of the dream is discovered
indirectly through the associated thoughts and memories of the analysand as he or she
recounts the manifest text of the dream. The film's opening images of Celia's dream
implicitly motivate our reading the film in this way.
At the same time as the filmic system narrates the conscious and unconscious
thoughts of Celia - she too is neurotic, as Humphries points out - it also displays an
'unconscious' of its own. Its conscious project is the organization of the film as a series
of signs, so that while Celia interprets the signs of Mark's neurosis, the spectator
interprets the signs of Mark's and Celia's neurosis. This organization breaks down after

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Celia's flight from the locked room; her story 'disappears' and it is Mark's story that
now becomes dominant, it is his childhood trauma that will be understood and resolved
in the seventh room . We are given not Celia's voice-over but his, through whi ch we
come to understand hi s feelings. This - together with his sharp ex change with Ca r r ie
about his having been dominated by women - serves to bring his point of view into
direct focus. Again, logically or technically there should be an ambiguity as to how we
are given this understanding, through Celia as author of the flashback as a whole, or by
the objective, omniscient narrator, th e textual system . By this time in the film, and sin ce
Celia's disappear.ance has not been explained, the narration is implicitly 'objective'. Yet
it reveals itself immediately as highly manipulative : we are led to believe she has been
murdered by Mark, but this is not the case. At the same time, since the film occludes the
scene of Celia's change of mind, we can read this elision as a sign of the textual system's
own 'unconscious', a gap that remains underrnotivated in the narrative. Its very
convenience for the plot only draws attention to its undermotivation by it.
As a result of these developments Celia has, it seems, become only a narrative
function in the service of the male hero's story. But let us reconsider this in the light of
the Bluebeard tale; in that, too, th e question is: whose story does the tale tell,
Bluebeard's or his bride's? The early versions of this tale centred on the bride's
transgression of a prohibition - whi ch is implicitly a sexual transgression , since it is a
taboo related to marriage - which brought about her punishment by death. The
development of the happy ending, in which she cunningly achieves her escape from
Bluebeard , or is rescued by someone else , presents the overcoming of the taboo . It is in
this later version of the tale , centred on the bride and her escape, that the characteris­
tics of the gothic can be discerned . In Bartok's version of the tale, his opera Bluebeard's
Castle, the wife's punishment is reinstated and Bluebeard himself comes to figure
centrally, which makes the tale the story of his tragedy, his loss ofJudith to her insistent
curiosity. Her demand for knowledge destroys her, or rather destroys her ability to be
the new love Bluebeard desires , and she becomes, royally garbed and bejewelled, a
glowing memory.P" Serge Moreux , in an explanation of the opera that he claims
Bartok himself sanctioned, comments thus:

In man 's interior world , perhaps, there are secrets locked away; each on e of us contains the
best and the worst, by our material condition . . . Onl y the shining intoxication of fresh
love ca n sometimes dissipate this dark threat: but let the new woman in a man 's life be
dis cr eet; the hidden places of the masculine self are forbidden to her a nd , above all , those
where . . . past love lives.?"

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Opening the doors, 'the woman who with her fa ith, co n fid e nc e and ad oration h ad
g r ad ua lly ligh ten ed th e darkness a nd so rrow o f th e so u l, now begins to doubt. Sh '
begins to feel the m an's secre ts as a n intolerable burd en just at the very m oment wh en
Blu eb ea rd ha s give n her e ve ry th in g th at co u ld be sha re d .'(;;") H e r punishment is not so
much d eath, as th e co nsig n me n t to m emory.
Bartok's opera ce n tres on the m an a nd tells his sid e of the sto r y. Simil arly , Lan g's
film represents th e man as something more than brutish and nefarious ; but th e sec re t
be yond th e door, th e problem of Mark 's d esire which is un covered by Celia, does not
brin g her death - ra the r it fr ees th em both . For Cel ia res cues herself not by esc ap ing
from Mark but by releasing him from the 'spe ll' - th e neurosis - of whi ch th e lock ed
room is a sign a nd a symptom . Celia g-oes throu gh th e fantasy of th e gothic romance ,
both as a narrative devi ce and as a ps ychological symptom , by resolving th e co n flict
ce n tr al to the go th ic scenario of an ambivalent d esire for the primal fa the r (or parent
co m p osite), a co n flict expressed in th e split figure of the masculine , th e sad istic and
dangerous husband or su ito r and an other, who is gentler and who protects and
rescu es. Mark is both of these and , fin ally, neith e r. Celia, too, has had to und ertak e a
j o u rney, a nd it is eq ua lly oedipal , namel y from a des ire forbidden to a desir e
permitted ; thi s journey dissipates the threat of punishment or retribution whi ch th e
desire ori ginall y provoked. But it is not onl y a problem o f a forbidd en incestuous
desire ; her brother Rick , the impl icit object of this d esire, e m bod ies both the law and
e nj oy m e n t. As Celia sa ys, 'I f onl y Rick were ali ve - I could go hom e to Rick .' Th e
fant asy th at Celia must go through is that of the enjoyment or jouissance th at Rick
signifies and which she is exclu d ed from and th erefore desires . The repeated associa­
tion o f death a nd its correlative , dan ger, with h er d esire is th e symptom of Ce lia's
fant asy. For jouissou ce ca n no t be sym bo lized ; in stead it intrudes as the ' re a l', as the
d eath dri ve . In pu rsuin g thi s jouissauc e Celia find s her own death, to whi ch sh e draws
dose a couple of times. Thus Mark represents both her he art's desire and a danger.
The repetition cha racte ristic of th e death drive is seen , too , in th e repeated pattern o f
her running away o r wishin g to do so (namel y her broken e n gage me nts and her
attempts to leave Mark).
The transformation in Celia is signifi ed fir st of all by th e ca lm with whi ch sh e greet s
Mark the morning a fte r her Hight from the locked room, in co ntra st to her hysteria o f
the ni ght before , th en later, wh en sh e returns to th e locked room, by h er d et ermination
to confront Mark's neurosis by seeking to interpret the signs o f his symptom s. Sh e thu s
e nc o u n te rs his desire from within the order of th e signifier a n d no longer finds in his
murd erous lon gings the real of her own desire. The film , however, occludes th e sce ne

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of her transformati on, whi ch ca n on ly be infe rred secondarily. Instead it is im p lied tha t
she may be de ad , fo r th e film cu ts fro m Celia ru nning headlon g into a male figu re on
th e lawn as she atte m p ts to esca pe fr om th e hou se, to Mark's voice-ove r th e next
mo rning , in whi ch he im agines his tri al for h e r m u rd er. Her appearance as Mark
wa nde rs throu gh h er room su r pr ises th e spec tator as mu ch as it d oe s Mark, but for
d ifferent reason s, a nd he r expla nati on - that she ran into Bob - is mea nt for th e
au di ence rather th an for Mark, wh o presumably knows that h e di d not kill her. T hat
she is a ble to return is th erefore impli citl y co n necte d to Bob, wh o is both he r law ye r an d
th e rejected/rep ressed stand -in for he r brother Rick, su ggesti ng a tra nsfere nce
th rough whi ch sh e fin ally accedes to the law. H er avo wed reas on for retu rni ng, th at she
loves Ma rk , tr an sparentl y veils ra the r th an moti vat es her cha nge of mind . T he
occlusion marks a repression in the film's text, of so meth in g th at ca n n ot be sp ok en or
represen ted but whi ch enables th e h eroin e to brin g ab ou t th e h a ppy co ncl usio n . It is
th ere fo re , as su ggested ea rlier, a mark of th e te xt's ow n 'u nco nscio us'.
Ce lia is ab le to read th e signs o f Mark's n eurosis, including th e key's tu rn in g in the
lock , a n d th us b rin gs a bo ut in Ma r k th e 'conv ictio n ' necessa r y to the ra peutic success .l'"
Cel ia rel eases Ma rk fro m th e tyra nny o f th e hidd en p laces o f hi s mascul in e sell', a nd
rescues him from his pa st. Fo r bot h , th e fa n tasy of th e d an gerou s sexu al ot he r wh o will
ei the r kill o r be killed is successfu lly overtu rned . T he ba d o me n of th e d affodil s is
nevertheless realized, in a n iron ic Langian gestu re; for wh ilst th e ke y is turnin g in the
lock - whi ch precipitates Mark 's murd e rous im pulse and whi ch Celia co r rectly co n­
n ects to th e sto ry of his sister Car rie lock ing him in his room - se rves 1.0 unlock Ma r k's
un conscious me mory and the reby dissipa te his d esire to kill, it also serves as the sign of
a nothe r murderou s intent, tha t o f Miss Rob ey, wh o has just set fir e to th e room s. Th e
cha ra cters a re propelled fro m their immersion in th e rea l, in th e d eath drive, to the
reality o f a n im pendin g incendiary d eath th at pa rod ies the im age o f th e 'b u rn in g
d esire' o f th e two lo vers. Fro m th is e merges th e fa ntasy th rou gh wh ich th e terro r of th e
wish th a t might co me true is ove r tu rned , an d thus thro ugh which '[auissance is
d omesti cated'i '" T h is is o f cou rse the fa nt asy of the heterosexu al cou ple as a co m­
plemen ta r y un ion o f re cip roca l d esire . Cel ia resolves Mar k's un consciou s co n flict,
whilst Ma rk res cu es Celi a from the burnin g ho use . A p ostscript sho ws th e cou p le o nce
mo re at the romantic hacienda o f th eir h on eym oon ; Mark , with his head o n Celia's lap ,
is saying th at h e still h as a lon g way to go . He r re p ly, tha t th e y bo th d o , is th e o n ly
ele me n t tha t refers back to the film' s beginning a nd th e dis tu rbance in h e r own d esire.
T he rein scription o f th e fa n tas y of th e rom an tic cou p le with whic h th e film closes is
th erefore und e rmined by th e refe re nce 1.0 Cel ia's story wh ich o pe ned th e film , but

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whi ch was left behind in the shift o f em p hasis to Mark's sto r y. As Bellour noted,
'Beca use Lang play s a highly perverse game, it is through the lacunae, th e lack he
establishes, that he seems intelligible. And it is this which requires decipherment at all
levels .'68

A WOMAN'S INTEREST IN FILM NOIR

Interviewed in 1990 about her latest film, Blue St eel, Kath erine Bigelow had this to say:

I find B-m ovie s inspirin g be cause th ey d elve into a darkness and talk ab out the demons
that exist in all of us. T hey take a lot o f cha nce s. When I was mo vin g away fro m the a rt
world a nd into the world of film , I stumbled o n to noir film s and couldn 't get en ough o f
them . I was fa scinated by them, riveted to them . I found Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy
extraordinary, lurid , ve ry brave, with cha racte rs who were willin g to transgress, who were
so far beyond the ed ge th at they were almost in a sort of Z world of vicarious thrills. Detour's
another pi cture that I th ink is a flawless ma sterpiece. I'm a huge fan of(ilm noir, but I'm less
interested in updating it .th an in reinventing it, o r perhaps just using it as a point of
departure.

She cited her earlier film Th e Lo veless as a 'sor t of biker-nair', and said of Blue Steel:

I wanted to d o a 'wo ma n 's acti on film' , putting a wom an at the centre o f a movie
predominantly occupied by men.
Wh en women go to see Lethal Weapon , m an y o f th em will iden tify with Mel Gibson . I was
interested in creatin g a person at the cen tre of a n action film who represents an Everym an
that both wom en and men could identify with. At our initial scree n ing s at the Berlin Film
Festival , some men at th e press conference co m me nted that the y found th emselves for the
first time in their lives identifying with a woman . I found this very interesting becau se
finall ythe notion of self-p rese rva tio n.is uni ver sal. I wanted to cre ate a very strong, capable
person who just happens to be a wom an, usin g the co ntext of the police ge nre.69

Blue St eel seems fundam entally nair in style, achieving through the use of colou r a
lighting style that is the equivalent of film noir's chiaroscuro world of black and white.
Instead of a world of shadows, we see th e passagewa ys of the police statio n , veiled in
bars of light, as dust refle cts sunlight in streams across faces. Megan is a rookie cop who
kills an armed robber on her first patrol. The robber's gun is never found, but

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subsequentl y a series of murders are com milled using bullets engraved with Megan's
name. Her wish to be on th e sid e of the law , to partake of its powers, turns into a
nightmare wh en the man she ha s been dating proves to be the murd erer. He is
obsessed with her precisely as th e woman with the gun/phallus, whi ch he d esires as an
absolute and pure violence, as the pow er ol"death rather than life. He has id entified
with her - th ey are two halves of o ne person, he says - in a grotesque inv ersion of the
romantic language of ideal union betw een lovers. Th e film presents a story not merely
of self-preservation on Megan's part , but of her confrontation with her own id entifica­
tion with th e law - revealed most graphicall y in th e image of her donning a Smith and
Wesson at th e beginning of th e film - and thus of her co n fro n tatio n with th e distorted
reHection of herself embodied by Eugene. He com es to represent her own d esire for
violence, whi ch is psychologically motivated - though sch ematically - with reference to
her wife-beating father.
If both m en a nd women identify with Megan, it is not because she represents some
notion of Everyman from whi ch th e question of sexual differen ce is abse n t, but
bec ause th e problem of sexualit y posed by the film is not filled up in th e co n ven tio na l
codes of gende r. .I'he conjoining of d esire and destru ction familiar in th e I 94()s film uoir
is present. here , too, and is equ ally a matter for wom en as for men .

[\,"OTES

I would like to thank colleagues and students at th e University of Kent , Ca n te rbu ry,
who worked on the shot breakdown of Ra w Deal on whi ch this chapter has drawn . I
would also like to thank Lea J acobs for her helpful co m me n ts and Steven Neale, who
read an earl ie r draft of the article .

1. Alain Sil ve r an d Elizabeth W<lrd include a
' FilmogTa p hy o f Film N oir in th e Eightie s'. pp.
:n5­ 9 in Film No ir: All En cyclopedic R elereu c«
Guide (Lo n d o n : Blo omsbu ry . 19 HO).
2. Black W idow (Bo b Rafelson . 19 H7) ha s a
woman inv esti g ate the duplicitou s wom an ,
whil e.JlIgg l'd E dg r (Richard Marqu and , l ~lH5)
fully inv erts the classic structure : th e d esirable
man is dupli citous.
3 . .lam es Da mi co , 'Film Noir: A Mod es : Proposal',
Film R radrr, n o. :{ ( I97H) p. :) 4 .
4 . Marc Vcrnct, 'The Filmic Tran sa cti on: On the
Open in gs of Films Noirs', Vl'lv l'll.ighl '!"ral), no .
20 (S u m m e r 1 9 H :~ ) , 1'. H.
5. Fost er H ir sch , Film No ir: "1111' Dark Sidr o/Ilu
Screen (N ew York : A . S. Barne s, 1~ lH I ), p. 1:\.
T he fou r th a nd less important figure fo r
Hirs ch is th e psychotic o r ob sess ed ch a r act e r ;
t h is is, however, frequ entl y a wom an.
G. Hirsch , pp. 20-21.
7. Sigmund Freud , The Loss o f Reality in
N eurosis a n d Psych osis' in TheStandard

160
 FtLM NOtR
Edition ofth« Co mp lete Psycholog ical Work of
Sigm und Fr eud (hence fort h re ferred to as S El,
vo l. XIX (Lo ndon : H ogarth Pr ess, 19(1 ),
p.1 87 .
8 . Hi rsch , pp . 20 a nd 2 1.
9. Freud , SE, vol. XI. Freud also cites th is as the
basis for the obse ssio n of his fem ale pa tie nt in
'The Psych ogen esis of a Ca se o f
Hom osexual ity in a Wom an', .'lE vol. XV II I.
As Mandy Me rck has pointed o u t, 'this
allu sion fleet in gl y reo pe ns th e qu estion o f
earl y mother love onl y bri efl y mentioned thus
far in the hom osexual case stu d y', but it is
ne vertheless not pursued by Freud (Mand y
Merck, 'T he T ra in o f T ho ugh t in Freud's
"Cas e o f Homosexuality in a Wo man",' in
Par veen Ad a ms a nd Elizabeth Co wie, ed s.,
Th e WOIIUIII ill Qu estioll (l.o ndo n: Verso , 1991).
p.3 32.
10. Ihid., p. 171.
II. Ibid ., p. 169.
12. Ibid ., p . 173,
13. Freud , su, vol. XI. These two essa ys, to gether
with 'The Taboo o f Vir ginity', wer e published
tog etherin 19 18 unde r the collective title
'Co n tribu tio ns to the Psychology o f Love'.
14 . Frank Krutnik , III a 1.!!IIely Stre et : Film Noi r,
Genre, M asculin ity (Lo ndo n a nd Ne w York :
Routledge, 199]), pp. 86 a nd 89. T he three
forms he descri bes arc : ( I) the iu uestigatiu«
thriller , where th e hero, o fte n a profession al
detective, seeks to resto re order - a nd to
validate his own identity - by ex pos ing a nd
countermanding a criminal co ns pira cy; (2) the
male suspens e-thriller , whi ch is th e inverse o f
the ab ove, in that the her o is in a marked
position of inferiorit y, in regard both to th e
criminal co nsp ira to rs and to the police, and
seeks to restore himself to a position of
securit y by eradicating th e e n ig ma ; a nd (:~) the
criminal adu enture thriller , whe r e th e hero,
us uall y with th e aid of a woman , bec o mes
en ga ged in either a wilful or a n accid e n ta l
16f
AND WOMEN
l
• tr ansgression of th e law, and has to face th e
co nseq ue nces o f step ping o u t o f line (p. 86) .
15. Richard Maltb y, 'Film Noir : T he Po litics of
th e Ma ladjusted T e xt',joumal ojA mericau
S tudies, vol. 18, no. I ( 198 4), p, :;3 .
16. J an ey Place , ' Wo me n in Film No ir ', in E. An n
Kaplan , ed ., Wlm lell an d Film N oir (Lond on:
British Film Institute, 197R), p. :) 0 , a nd Mar y
An n Doane, 'Gilda: Epist em ology as
Striptease', Cam ~m Obscur« , no. II, p . 15. Th is
a rt icle is reprinted in her co llect ion e n titled
Femm e Fatales (Lo ndo n and Ne w Yo rk :
Routledge , 199 1) in which sh e argu es : 'Since
fcminisrns a rc forced to sea rch o u t sym bo ls
fr om a lexicon th at d oes not yet exist, their
acceptance o f the femme fatal e as a sign of
strength in an unwritten history mu st also and
simultaneou sly invol ve an und er standi n g and
assessment o f all th e e piste mo log-ica l hag;gag-e
sh e car ries along with her' (p , :l ).
17. The other films were Murda , M y S weet (U K
title Farewell, My I.ove!y ), D ou ble Indemn ity and
Th e W oman ill the W iw/ow (Fri tz Lang, 1945),
Nino Frank , in E cran jrancais , no. (il (28
August 1946).
1H. Th ese featu res arc a ll listed in a lmost a ll
bo oks on f ilm noir; see for exa m pie tbe
int roduction to Silve r and Ward , p . 3.
Discussions of the origins a nd ant eced e nt s o f
thi s style usn all y invok e Germ an
expressionism , the influx of emigres from t hc
German film industry, and Welle s's Ci tize n
Kan e. David Bordwell ha s cha lle ng-ed man y o f
th ese assumptions in The Cla ssical Hollywood
Cinema Film Style an d M ode ojProdu rtion to
1960 (London and Ne w York : Rontled ge and
Keg an Paul . 19R5), pp . 74- 7. He points to
reali stic motivation as the alibi fo r th ese
stylistic d evices, and notes th at lo w-key
ligh tin g was alre ad y a staple o f ge n res such as
th e horror film .
19. T h is view is a rg ued b)' Frank Kruuuk, who
su ggests th a t the style o f German
expressionism was associated with qu ality a nd
with a r t. He cites Phil Kar son , a directo r
 SHADES OF NOIR
working for Mon ogram in th e I 94()s, who
com men ted , 'No matter what I did in the
smaller stud ios, they th ought it was fantast ic,
because nobody could make p ictures as fast as
I could at th at time, and get so me qu alit y int o
it by giving it a little screwier ca me ra an g le or
so meth ing' (Phil Karson , interview ed in T odd
McCarthy a nd Ch arles Flynn , ed s., Kings of the
B's: Working within the H ollywood System [N ew
York : E. P. Dutton, 1975), p . 335, and qu ot ed
by Krutnik, pp. 21-2).
20. Rich ard Winnington, wr itin g in Th e Chroni cle,
a British daily newspaper, of 10 December
1949, claimed th at , 'b u t for th e grace o f Max
Opul's [sic] [there] would hav e gone the dread
"wo ma n' s filrn '".
21. John Houseman was a writer and director for
the stage and scr een, as well as an ac to r. He
set up the Mercury Theater with Orson
Welles in 1937 and developed th e o rigina l
story for Citizen Kane. He lat er work ed as a
producer. He was, as Richard Maltby points
out, a liberal.
22. John Houseman , 'T od ay's Hero: A Review', in
Hollywood Quarterly, vol. 2, no. 2 (1947),
p.1 63.
23 . John Hou seman , in Vogue, 15 January 1947,
quoted in Lester Ash eim, 'The Film and the
Zeitgeist', Hollywo od Quarterl)·, vol. 2, no. 4
(1947), p . 416 .
24 . Steven Ne ale provides a revi ew of re ce n t
dis cussions of film genre in 'Q uestio ns o f
Genre', Screen, vol. 3 I, no. I (Spring 1990),
pp.45-66.
25 . Marc Vern et dis cusses the obligatory and the
forbidden in his essay, 'Genre' in Film R eader ,
no. 3 (197 8) .
26. The use of the term in En glish to refer to th e
classificati on of literary works seems more
rec ent, however. The Oxford E nglish Dictionary
gives 1818 as its first use, but with reference
to kinds of cha rac te r. Thackeray uses it in
1840 to refer to a 'story in th is genre'. The
phrase 'genre painting' is used fr om 1873
162
to refer to works in wh ich 'scenes and subj ects
of ord inary life are d epicted' and the term
'ge n re' seem s to have subseq uently acq uire d a
pej orativ e se nse in thi s co n nec tio n . T he te rm
'species' is used by th e OED in its ent ry for
'e pic', whi ch it d efines as a 'species o f po eti cal
compositi on', and it cites und er th e uses of th e
term Milton 's reference (1644), to the
tea ching of 'wh at the Laws are of a tru e Ep ic
Poem'.
27 . Paul Hernadi, B eyond Genr e: New Directions in
Lit erary Classification (Ithaca a nd London :
Cornell University Pr ess, 1972).
28 . H ernadi cites Pierre Kohl er's views that
artistic cr eation may be regarded as a p rocess
of 'o rd e r in g' 'that starts with selectio n a nd
lead s to constr uc tio n . The id ea o f ge nre
stim ula tes and gu id es the artist in both
cr eative phases' (He rnad i, p. 2 I) . See Pierre
Kohler, 'Co n tr ib u tio n a un c philosophie des
genres', Helic on, I (1938), pp . 23,}-44 ; 2
(1940) , pp. 135-47.
29. Tsv etan Todo rov, Th e Fant astic: A Stru ctural
Approach. to a Lit erary Genre (Clev eland : Case
Western Reserve, 1973), pp . 6-7 and 8 .
30. Modern critical a tte nt io n to the catego ry of
melodrama can be traced in part at least to
Thomas Elsaesser's landm ark essay 'Tales of
Sound a nd Fury: Observati ons o n th e Family
Melodrama', which first appeared in th e
Br itish film journal M onogram , no. 4 (1972)
and has been widely reprinted, includ in g in
C h ristine Gledhill , ed. , Hom e is Wh ere the H eart
Is (London: British Film Institute, 1987).
Elsaes ser's essay also re cognizes fi lms noin as
melodramas (Gledhill, p. 56 ) in so far as th ey
involve 'psycho log ised, th ernatised
representations of th e hero's inner dil emmas'
(p. 55).
3 1. Steven Neale has pointed ou t th at th e most
common term for th e film s late r called films
n oirs was 'melodrama' or 'melle r' - Varieti s
slang term. He notes that these terms cross
over int o the so-called gothic mel odramas
such as Gaslight, and that the gothic films and
 FILM NOIR
thrillers with a contempo rary se tt ing are all
d escribed in th e sa me way. This mat eri al was
p res ented in a paper ' Me lo T alk : O n th e
Mea ning a nd Use o f the Te rm "Melodrama"
in th e Am eri can T ra de Pr ess', at th e Screen
Film Stud ies Co nfere nce , G lasgow, 1991.
Raymond Du rgn at, in 'Ways o f Melod ram a ',
S ight and S ol1nd, vol. 2 1, no. 1(1 9 5 1),
maintain s th at th e notion of melodram a
cent res on th rillin g action , while takin g
acco u n t of 'emo tio nal mel odrama '.
32 . Ben Singe r, 'Fe ma le Powe r in the Se r ial­
Q ue en Melodram a : The Etio logy o f an
Ano maly ', Ca mera Obscu ra no. 22 (1990), p . 9 1.
33. Mad e in 1922 , it was ada p ted from the pla y
The Two Orphan s , written by Adolp he d'E n ne ry
a nd Eugen e Ca rmo n, first per forme d in
1874.
34 . Peter Brook s's study Th e M elodramatic
I magi nation : Bal zac, H enry [ames , M elodrama
and the M ode ofExcess (New Haven : Yale
Un iversi ty Press, 1976) also suggests a wide r
applicati on o f th e term , a ltho ug h his
emphasis o n the 'melodramati c imagin ation'
gives pri ority to textual an alysis rathe r than to
ge neric conve nt io ns.
Pat rice Pet ro's stud y joy/i'ss Streets: W omen
and M elodram atic R epresentation in W eimar
Genn an y (Princet on , Princeton Un ivers ity
Press, 1989) ar gu es th a t 'm elodrama was an
important re presen tatio nal mode in Weim ar
German y' (p . 26 ). Hei d e Schlupmann ,
howev er, a rg ues fo r a distinction betw een
soc ial drama a nd melodrama in he r a rt icle
'M elo drama and Soc ial Dr ama in th e Ea rly
German Cinema ', Came ra Obscura, no. 22
(1990).
35 . Maureen Turim , 'F lashbacks and th e Psyche
in Melodram a a nd Film No ir' , in Flashb acks in
Film (N ew York: Routledge, 1989), p. IH2.
36. Murray Smith , 'Film N oir a nd th e Female
Gothi c and D eception', W idt, A ngle, vol. 10, no.
1 (198 8) , p. 64 .
37 . Krutnik , p . 164 .
163
AND WOMEN
38 . Ob session was a central element in man y
melodram as as well, for exam ple in T he
S eventh Veil (Co m pton Benn ett , 1945 ), J ames
Mason is a crip pled music teach er and sadistic
gua rd ian of th e he roin e, a brilliant pianist. H e
refuses to recognize his love for his ward ,
wh ich she reciprocates , while his pathological
jea lousy be gins to d estroy her.
39. T he exa m ple o f the western is int er estin g
here. Audien ce resea rch pri o r to 1950
ind icat es th at, whils t westerns we re regul arly
p roduced in lar ge n umbers by th e studios, th e
ge nre was popular o n ly with ado lescen t bo ys
and secto rs of America 's rural population ,
and th at it was actively d isliked more tha n it
was liked by the viewin g population as a
wh ole (Garth S. J owett, 'G ivin g Them Wh at
T hey Want: Movie Audience Research Before
I 95()', in Bruce A. Au sten , Current R esearch. in
Fil m: Audien ce, Econom ics and Law , vol. I
[Norwood , N I : Ablex Publishing, 1985]). At
the sa me tim e, from J ohn Ford's S tagecoach
o n , the A western as directed by Ford, Hawks ,
Walsh and later Anton y Mann was extremely
successful at the bo x o ffice. T hese films not
o n ly drew u pon the west ern formula , th ey
also ex te nded th e genre , usin g it in a way that
would co rne to be see n as re cogn izabl y
Fo i'dian, Hawksian, e tcete ra.
40. T he term B picture can be understo od in two
d iffer ent ways. As a n exhibiti on cat ego ry - in
the US and the U K betw een the ea rly to mid
1930s and th e 195 0s - it made up th e second
half o f a d ouble bill a nd was so ld on th e basis
o f a flat rental fee, in co n trast to the first-h alf,
0 1' A, picture, whi ch was sold o n the basis o f a
pe rce ntag e of th e gr oss return on re ce ipt s. A
B picture thu s had a very reli abl e re tu rn, bu t
could never become a blockbuster for the
producers, howe ver popular it was. A sligh tly
mo re complex picture em erges , however,
whe n we consi d er th e term B picture as a
produ ction category. Pr odu ction catego r ies
were spec ials, or o ne-o ff pictures. A proje cts
were assigned big budgets, whilst B pr ojects
had smalle r budgets. A studio's B projects
 SHADES OF NOIR
were not nec essaril y rel eased o n a flat rental
basis, that is, th e y might becom e A pictures o n
exhibitio n. Mo reover, a film might sta rt out as
a n A picture and be released as a E,
d epending on p re- rel ease audien ce re po rt s,
cha nges in studio cont rol, et cet er a. Fo r
exa m ple, Tw entieth Ce n tu ry Fox init iall y
assigned Laura a bud get in its lowest bracket ,
but then raised its budget in th e preview
stages and resho t so me scenes.
In ad d itio n, re lease s in New Yo rk , Los
Angeles a nd o the r big cities were o fte n
handled differentl y from th e rest o f the
United States. La rge cities had cine mas that
spec ialized in ce rtai n types of films in a way
not possible in sm aller locations; as a result B
horror films, westerns , etceter a, could appea r
as feature films. If success fu l, th e film might
be rea ssigned by th e distributor for e xhibition
in the rest o f the co u n try. In the 1940s, B
p roduction was not a ghetto o f poor talent
and limited expectations; rath er it was a
tr aining ground wh ereby new you ng directors
might prove th em selves on chea pe r
p rodu ctions. Lea J acobs has exa mine d the
stru ctu res of di st ribution/advertisin g and
exh ibition of low budget A pictures and B
pictures in th e 1930s in 'The B Film and th e
Problem of Cult u ral Distinction ', Scree n , vol,
3,l, no. I (1992). My th anks to Ben Brewster
for inform ation o n the nature o f B picture
production, di stribution and e xh ibitio n .
41 . Gle n n Ford, wh o co-starred in Gilda, has
confirmed in int ervi ews that th e psycho-sexual
ove rt o nes of Gilda were int ention al.
42 . Tribune , 21 March 194 7.
43. Silver and Ward , p . 4.
44. Krutnik, p. 1\6 ; see my note 14.
4:>. Ibid.
in th e American fiction film , Invisible
4li. Silve r and Ward , p. 291.
St orytellers (U niversit y o f Ca lifo rn ia Press,
47 . Pau l Cain , Fast O ne (re p ri nt ed Harpenden :
No Exit Pre ss, 1989).
41\. Place, p. 54.
4 9 . W omen in Film Noir, Claire John ston, 'Do uble
164
Indemn ity', in E. Ann Ka plan , ed. , (Lo ndo n :
British Film Institute, 197 8), p. 110.
50. Quoted on the cover of the Ace Giant Double
Novel ed itio n , 1947 of Elisabeth Sanxay
Holding' s 'The Blank Wall', which first
a p pea re d in th e Ladies' H ome j ournal (mo tto :
' Ne ve r Underes tima te a Wom an '). Also
publish ed in th is editio n was another sto ry
'The Girl Who Had to Die', abo u t a beauti ful
woman wh o believes her boyfriend wants to
kill her - he does not, bu t other s, whom sh e is
blackmailin g, do . Th e sto ry is told in the fir st
person by th e bo yfri end , who thus
investigates the wom a n.
5 1. These films have also been associa ted with
films not included as films notrs, such as
Reb ecca, Sus picion , Th e T wo M r5 Carrolls,
Gaslight , Dragollwyck,ja1lC Ey re, and with Secret
heyond the Door, Experim ent Perilous , and A
Woman 's Vengwllce, d escribed vari ousl y as
femal e goth ic or gothic romance. Mary Ann
Doane also describes th ese as 'paranoid
woman films' (T he Desire to Desire: The W uman 's
Film oj the 19405 [Bloomington : Indiana
Univ e rsity Press , 191\7], p . 123). Th o mas
Elsae sser cites them as Freudian feminin e
melodram as . The Spiral S taircase is not
menti on ed, perhaps becau se the murder er is
discov ered and despatch ed by his eld erl y a nd
ailing ste p mo the r, who had previousl y
suspected he r own so n.
52. Diane Waldman, 'At Last I Can Tell It to
Som eone ! Feminine Point-of-view and
Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of
the I940s', CinC1lU1 [ournal, vol. 23 , no. 2
(1983), p . 34 .
.S3. Informati on here was d ra wn from Sar a
Kozloff's valuable inv estigation of voice-over
Berkele y a nd Los An geles: (988).
54. Krurnik , p . 86; see m y note 14.
55. Nev ertheless, the music we hear continues to
be Pat 's voice-over mu sic.
 FILM NOIR AND
:'iG. For t h e op posin g view sec St ev e J e nkin s, Fritz
Lu ng : Th e I mage a nd ,II" l .oo]: (Lo ud o n : British
Film l nsti tu tc , 19 HI) , p. 104. Re yn old
Hum phries, Fritz Lan g: Genre and
Rep resentation ill H is A merican Films (Ba ltimo re :
J ohn s H opk in s U u ivc rs ity Pre ss, I ~ ) H H ) a lso
sees I he film as r easserting a pballocentric
o rd er : 'T h e s p lit s u b ject po sition manifested
by C e lia th rough th e vo ice-o ff wa s there all
a lo n g to s ho w th at a woman ca llnot occ u p y
suc h a ll act ive role ' (p . 152) . I sh all presem a
diffe ren t vie w o f Cel ia 's ro le a nd fu n cu ou in
the fo llowi ng di scu ssio n ,
:,7, It is p la ce d in this ca te g o r y hy Dia n e
\Valdll1an ; se e n ot e :,2,
:>H, Paul M . J ensen , nil' Cm rm« 0( Fritz l .llIIg
(London: Zwe m me r , 1 9()~J) , p . 1(;:"
59 . Dian e Wa ld m a n describes th e fClll al e got h ic
thus : 'a you n g and inex pe r ienced wo m a n
meet s a h and som e o lder m an to wh o m she is
a lte r na te ly a tt ract e d a nd repell ed . A ft er a
whirl wind co u rts h ip (se ve n ty- two h ou rs in
Lan g 's Secret beyond til" Door, two wee ks is
m ore typi cal ), sh e m a r ries him . A fter
r e t urn in g to th e a n cc stra l m a nxiou o f on e of
th e p ai r . th e hero ine ex pe rie nces a series o f
bizarre and unca nny in cidents , open to
a m big uo us in ter pre tatio n, re vol vin g around
the qu estion of wh eth er o r n ot th e Go th i«
male really lo ve s he r. She be g in s to s u spect
that h e m a y be a mu rd erer' (p p . ;\ 1-2) .
(iO, Re yn old H umph ri e s sees th e se stylistic effects
a s in keepi n g with {ilm noir co n ve nt io n s w h ich ,
he su g gest s, ' La ng e x p lo its here a ga in st a
sim p listic r eadin g' (p . 147) .
t,l. Cit ed in J en kin s, p . lti:>.
(;2 . Blu c bc.nd is t hc villa in o r a wid es pread
Eu ropea n fo lk tal e in wh ich h e m a rries , o ne
a ft e r the oth er, th r ee (o r sev en ) be au tifu l
siste rs, H e hand s hi s lat est yo u n g wife th e
keys to th e ca st le a n d d eparts, sa ying th at sh e
ma y unlo c k a ny doo r e xce p t o ne . S h e
165
WOMEN
d isob e ys, o pens th e for bid de n doo r, a n d
be holds so me sig n of Blu r-bea r d 's blo ody
mi sd ee d s. H e r tra n sg ressio n is betrayed b y
an ot h er sig n an d sh e is p u t to d ea th . O n ly the
yo u n ges t a nd las t wi fe sav es h erself or is
r escue d by a m an sh e th e n m a r ri es (I ho ugh
thi s h app y e n d ing is t hou g h t to be a
com para t ively rece n t a d d itio n) .
(,:'>. III Ba rt ok 's o p e ra , J udi th h a s ab a udoned h er
bet roth ed and h er fa m ily to go wit h
Blu eh ca rd to hi s castle . Sh e sings, 'Da rl in g
Blu cbcard ! If yo u re ject m e
A nd d ri ve m e o u t, I'll ne ver le a ve you .
I'll p eri sh 011 yo u r icy th r esh old .' A I thi s,
Bl u ebc a rd em brace » h er. Blucl x-ard s how s
h er hi s cas tle , b UI fo rbid s her to o pe n t h c
d oors o f se ven o f th e ro o m s, b ut Judith
in sist s, a n d Blu cb c ard ac q uiesces . Th e sto r y IS
wh olly m etaph oric , Cy o rg y Kro o arg u e s:
' Blu e b ea rd's ca stle is th e sym bo l o f th e male
so ul. Ea ch of the se ven d o o rs represen ts on e
p art icula r as pen of t h e life of m a n as we ll as
ind ivid u al charact er tr a its.' Cy org y Kro o, A
Guid« to Bartok (Bu da pest : Corvi nu Press ,
I ~ ) 7 1 ) , p. 63.
ti-l. Se rge Moreu x, B ela Bart ol: (Lo n d o n: H a rvill
Press, 195:».
(;:>. Kro o, p . 65 .
li(i. S ig mll n d Fr eud . ' Be yo lld t he Ple a su r e
Prin ciple', SF , vo l . XVIII , p. 19.
t,7 . ' Fa n ta sy co nc ea ls t he b n tha t th e Other, th e
symbol ic o r der, is st ructured aro und so m e
traumat ic im p ossibili t y, aro u nd so m e t h illg
whi ch cannot be sym bolise d - i.c. I he real of
[oui ssance: throu gh lu u tasv jOllis.lllllr:e is
d omesti ca ted ' (Sla voj Zizek , The Su blim e Obja t
of ItI"olo!',)' [London : Ve l'SO , 19 H91), p . I:n .
liH. Ra ymond Bcll o ur, 'O n Fri tz LJIl g' in J enkin s,
p. 3ti.
69, Pam Co ok, 'Bl u e Ste el ', At outhl)' Film lt uiletin,
vo l. 5 7 ( Nove m be r 1990 ), p . :\ 12.
 6

THE PHE NOMENAL

NONPHENOM ENA L : PRIVAT E

SPACE IN FILM N O I R

J oan Copjec

THE ACT Ui\RIAL ORI G I NS OF DETECT IV E FICTIO N

Barton Keyes is a fir st-rate detective, so we learn from Walt er Neff, wh ose voice-ov er
narration ad d ressed to Ke yes is d ense with praise for him and with recoll ections of his
remarkable tal ent fo r detectj on . O ft hese recollections, one stands ou t pa rti cularly, and
not o n ly because th e case o n wh ich it bears is th e ve ry o ne in whi ch Ne ff is himself
guiltily entangled. This scen e of Keye s's ma gisterial display of reason is clearly invested
with all th e e mo tio ns of fea r a n d rel ief that ste m fr om Neff's in volvement in th e
insurance sca m und er in vestigation , but it is also invested with th e emotions of
ad miration a nd pride that cha racte r ize Ne ff's in vol vement with Ke yes. Drama tizin g,
th en , the fu ll ambivalence o f Neff's rel ation to th e mentor whom h e will not cho ose to
foll ow, th e sce ne is nevertheless un ambi valent with res p ec t to its evalua tio n of thi s
me n tor's logic.
Keyes's su perior, th e man with th e biggest 'office' at th e Pacific All-Risk In surance
company, is Mr No rt on. An extre me ly foolish ma n, he h as just pompousl y and
t precipitously a n nou nce d to Keyes, Neff a nd the ne wly-wid owed Mrs Dietrich son his
ill-founded con clusion : Mr s Diet r ichson is n ot entitled to collec t an y insu rance money
from her husband's d eath since it was obv io us ly a su icide a nd a clea r attempt to d efraud

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 SHADES OF NOIR

his compan y. It is precisely by exposing the fooli shn ess and ill-found edness of this
conclusion th at Keyes's performan ce d eri ves its pow er. Delivered with great rh etorical
Rail' and pun ctuated by the fr eneti c gestu res of a man imp atient with , eve n co nte m p­
tuous of, his op po ne n t, Keyes's cou n te ra r gu ment begins with what is meant to be an
outright di smi ssal of his oppon ent's reasoning. The d evastating charge ? You are
ignorant of sta tistics:

You 've never read an actuari al tabl e in yo u r life , hav e you? Wh y there are ten volumes o n
sui cid e alo ne . Su icide : by race, by colo r, by occupati on , by sex , by seaso n 01' th e yea r, by
time of d ay. Sui cide, how com m itte d : by poison , by fir ea rms , by drownin g, by leaps.
Suicide by poison, subdivid ed by types of poison, such as co rrosives, irritants, syste m ic
gases, narcoti cs, alkaloids, proteins , and so forth. Sui cid e by leaps, subdivided by leaps
from hi gh pla ces, under the wh eels o f trains, under th e wh eel s of trucks, under th e feet of
horses , under stea m boa ts. Bu t, Mr Norton , of all the cases o n record, there's not o ne sing le
case of su icide by so meo ne jumping o ff the back e nd of a mo ving train.

Appearin g in wh at is argu abl y th e climactic scene of Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder,

1944) , thi s sp eech by Keyes is presented as decisive . But all the rh etorical fo rce and
narrative co nsequ e nce of this a r gu me nt should not prevent us from obse rvin g that
there is, nevertheless, som ethin g unsatisfying a bou t it. How is it th at a n appeal to
statistics ca n come to be tak en as a devastating argum ent? 'What pow er ca n possibly
issue from a recourse to math ematical probability? Every investigation begins when we
cease to be abl e to take something for granted . Min e begins here with thi s sce n e and
with thi s qu estion : what , in th e final anal ysis, do numbers ha ve to do with detection ?
It would seem at first th at we co u ld begin an swering these qu esti ons by linking
detective fiction to the adv ent o f rationalism. Marj ori e Nicolson, for exa m p le , makes
this link in her description of the detective, who , she says

ignores . . . clues in ord er to d evote himself to thou ght. Having like his gr eat pred ecessor
[namel y, Descartes] thought a way all the universe, nothing remains but th e cu lp rit. By the
strength of logi c alone, he ha s re con structed th e universe, and in his proper pla ce has set
th e villain of the pie ce . I

While sh e is referring specifically to the French tradition of detectives as opposed to the

English , whose prime ex emplar, Sherlock Holm es, 'laboriously and ca refu lly accumu­
late[s] all possible clues, pas sin g over nothing as too insignificant, fillin g his little boxes
and e n velopes with eve ry th ing that com es his way', it has often been argued th at

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 THE PHENOMENAL NON PHENOMENAL

even Holmes, who always looks a littl e out of place at th e sce ne of th e crime , is not
primarily a man of experience . If he sees things that othe rs mi ss, this is be cause his
in vestigati on tak es off from rational catego r ies th at th ey do not seem to poss ess. Fr om
C. Auguste Dupin to Ironside, then , the tradition of d etectives is that of the armcha ir
rationalist, kn own less for his perceptiven ess than for his sce p ticism ; th e d et ecti ve is
one who withdraws from the world of th e senses , of whi ch he remains infinitel y
su spi cious, in order to be come more a tte n tive to th e clear and distin ct prescriptions o f a
priori ideas.
Keyes is a d et ective in this mode: suspicious of everything and eve r yo ne, including
the o ne woman he eve r got close to, unwilling even to state what d a y of the week it is
until he consu lts his cale nd a r and th en ch ecks to see if the cale ndar is this year's; he
trusts onl y the feelin g he ge ts in the pit of his sto mach th at tells him wh en so me th ing is
wrong. This feeling - his 'little man ', he calls it - th at n ever errs, h ow are we to
understand it if not as a remnant o f the Cartesian tradition, a so mewha t hypoch ondria­
cal version of the cogito? If Keyes 's re citation of a list of statistics from an actuarial table
leaves us so mewha t unsati sfied , we mi ght attribute this to nothing more than the fact
that the rationalist, as.Q~ppared to th e man o f experience , is always less exciting, more
colo urless. Detecti ves, in so far as th e y are rationalist s, a re never far fr om insurance
men , claims adjustors. This seems to have been the insight of James M. Cain, wh o
equ at ed d etection with insurance in Th e Postman A lways Rings Twice as well as in Double
Indemnity.
But thi s insight overruns the work of Cain , for th e connection between d etection and
insurance ca n be established historicall y. The origins of detective fiction coincide, it
turns out, with what Ian H ackin g has termed 'th e avalan che of numbers'. According to
Hacking, there was an exponential in cr ease in th e printing of numbers between 1830
and 1848 2 (the precise moment a t whi ch th e detective sto r y e me rge s) as a pas sion for
coun ting- both things and people - in cited the Western nations. This new nurnberlust
was an immediate response to th e various d emocratic revolutions whi ch dem and ed
that people be counted. The increased interest in numbers had a double-edged effect.
The first was corrosive : statistics had a mordant effect on the image of th e monarchical
body that had held the old , premodern nations together." The second was constitutive :
statistics served to individu alize th e mass of the citizens, to create more and more kind s
of people. As Keyes' s speec h illu strates, after the avalanche of numbers, there were no
longer simply people who a tte m p ted su icide and others wh o did not. Instead there
were those who attempted sui cid e by poison, subdivid ed by typ es of poison and

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 SHADES OF NOIR

subdivided again by r ace, by colou r, by occupation , and so o n - a nd a ll sorts of others

who did not.
Entire bureaucra cies gre w up around these numbers to co u n t, cross-re fer e nce, and
analyse them. But it was not me re ly numbers that were bein g manipulated by these
bureaucracies; it was p eople , th eir happiness and well-b ein g , that were primarily at
issue. The interest in numbers was part of the modern n ati on sta te 's co n ce r n for th e
welfare of its populati on , with whose well-being the sta te's own was now intimately
linked. What statistics ca lcu la ted was the ' felicity'" of citize ns a nd what they aimed at
was indemnification aga ins t eve ry so rt of infelicit y, eve ry accid ent and misfortun e.
Statistics structured th e modern nations as large insurance co m pa nies that strov e,
through the law of la r ge numbers, to profit from th e proliferation of ca tego r ies of
people, the very div ersit y of its citize ns, by collecti vizin g a nd ca lcu la ting risk. ')
Murder is one of th e risk s that increased at an alarming rate as modern cities grew
ever more populous. It would seem that one could never prot ect oneself from th e
randomness of a violen ce su ch as this; Quetelet once ob served that 'nothing would
seem more to esca pe fore kn owled ge than murd er', but as a sta tistician he demon­
stratedthat th ere was more stability in the area of 'mor al d eviancy' than in procreation
or mortality ." 'The terrifyin g ex ac tn ess with which cr ime s re p rod uce themselves', was a
matter of enormous fas cin ation to populations who were m ad e aware for the first time
of the statistical regul ariti es of cr ime. The frequen cy di stribution of kinds of murder,
murderers , and instruments used were all charted to reveal amazing uniformities
when correlated with variables su ch as sex , class, nation alit y, a nd so on . Sta tistics, th en
created a mathematical expecta tio n within whi ch we co u ld co m e to believe in th e
calculability of risk . Before statistics this sort of exp ectat ion was strictl y impossible , a nd
so, I would argue , was d et ectiv e fiction. For it was sta tistics that formed the basi s of
classical detective fiction 's narrative contract with its reader ; the nineteenth century's
fictional belief in th e solvability of crime was specifically a mathematical expectation.
The thesis that mod ern bureaucracies and detectiv e fiction spring from the same
source lends itself to a Fou cauldian interpretation . It co uld be a r gu ed that statistics and
the bureaucracies th at are sustained by them are, like d et e ctive fiction, techniques of
surveillance, m e ch anism s of a dis ciplinary form of p ower. Each of these techniqu es
isolates minute , differentiating and therefore in criminating d et ails which give access to
the most intimate sec rets of the individuals th e y inv estigate. It is, in fa ct, th e very
passion for co u n ting, recording and tabulatin g that d eposits man y of the du es used by
detectives to track th eir suspects. Laundry lists, insurance records , teleph one bills,
parking tickets, th e cr im inal and the criminal ac t always turn up as figures in some

170
 THE PHENOMENAL NONPHENOMENAL

bureaucracy's accounting. When Walter Neff attempts to avoid detection , he estab­

lishes his alibi by making a long-distance call that he knows will be re corded and thus
help to place him at home at the hour of the crime. Keyes begins to unravel the case
when he notes that Mr Dietrichson did not put in a claim for his broken leg, though he
was insured against su ch an accident. In detective fi ction , to be is not to be perceived, it is to be
recorded. This is one of the fundamental differen ces between the realist novel (with its
emphasis on the intersubjective network of perceptions) and detective fiction.
In The Novel and the Police , D. A. Miller emphasizes not the differences between the
detective and the realist novel so much as their 'radical entanglement'." Taking the
detective novel as a special case of the novel in general , Miller see s them as the bad cop
and the good cop of modern surveillance. Because the detective novel is set in a
bounded space and deals with a limited and, by convention, closed set of characters, it
passes off its deployment of investigative techniques as extraordinary, that is, as special
and temporary. The ordinary novel, or the novel as such, thus appears as a space
vacated by detectives, a space that no longer requires or is exempted from the
intervention of any special policing power. Detective novels , then, fill an ideological
function by lulling us into the belief that everyday life - the one we ordinarily live and
the one we read about in realist novels - is free of surveillance. This blinds us to the fact
that our ordinary life is structured by the very diffusion or dispersal of the same
techniques found in detective novels. In the more subtle, discreet form of the realist
novel the detective function is permitted to go undetected.
But what is meant here by the 'detective function '? What actions does it perform? It
scrutinizes, it invades, but above all, it constitutes the very people into which it comes
into contact. It 'makes up people'." The function of the nineteenth-century novel,
detective and otherwise, is the invention of character, not simply as a literary category
but character as such. Here we may stop to note a certain similarity between the
rationalist project and that of new historicism. Both believe that categories of being
subsume being itself. As the Cartesian 'I think' is supposed to subsume the 'I am', so the
categories of people invented in the nineteenth century are supposed to subsume the
actual people who came to be numbered in them . It is this new historicist conviction
that Hacking wants to reinforce through his reference to Frege's work on numeration:
'as Frege taught us, you can't just print numbers. You must print numbers of objects
falling under some category or other.'" Hacking's point is that statistics did not simply
c<tint varieties of people, it accounted for them, that is to say, it created them. Beneath
the categories actual people came into being.

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 SHADES OF NOIR

Making a sim ila r point (for exa m ple, ' It is not j us t that, strictly p ri vate subjects , we
rea d abo u t vio lated , obj ectified subj ects , bu t th a t, in th e ve ry ac t o f r ead in g about them ,
we co n tr ib ute la r gel y to co nstitu ting them as suc h ' !"), Miller refin es thi s argumen t by
rende rin g a n acco unt of th e sub tlety of th is co ns titu tive panoptic po we r. For this pow er
to function p roperly, it m ust m a ke itsel f in visible, it m u st co nceal its ow n operatio n .
The function o f d et ectio n , then , is not o n ly to co nstr u ct va riou s categories of the se lf, of
character, bu t to co ns truct cha ra cte r as quirky, as resistant to ca te go r iza tio n , to
construct th e sel f, fina lly, as p ri vat e. In this way, the knowled ge in wh ich he is he ld is
concealed from th e subj ec t. Secr ecy is here conceived of as a ne cessa r y r use of mo de rn
power, simply that; for there ca n in fact be no secret that keeps itsel f from powe r, no
self that is not alw ays a lready kn own . Keyes's argument is a corolla r y of th is p r incip le :
Mr Dietrichs on ca nnot h ave att e m pted suicide by jumping off th e ba ck e nd o f a train
sin ce th e r e ex ists n o suc h statistical cate go ry . If there is no secr e t self, no hid d en or
private d oma in th at is n ot always already public, then th ere is no d ece p tion , no
ignom in y oth e r th an that wh ich attaches itself to the law . H ow th en is cr ime possible?
How is it possible to tra nsgress te r ri to ries th a t have no privat e bou n daries , to stea l
so meth ing whi ch belon gs to no o ne?

T HE LO CK ED-RO OM PAR ADO X AN D T HE G RO U P

In his famous in te rvi ew with Francoi s Tru ffaut , Alfred Hi tch cock d escri bed a sce ne he
planned to in clu d e in North liy Northwest, but never ac tually sho t:

I wanted to h ave a lo ng di alo gu e sce ne bet ween Cary Gran t an d one of the factory wor kers
[at a Ford a uto mobile p lant] as they walk along the assembl y lin e. T h ey mi g ht , for instance,
be talkin g abou t on e o f th e fo remen . Behind them a car is being assembled , piece by piece.
Finally , th e car th ey've seen bei ng put together from a simple nut a nd bo lt is co m p lete , with
gas an d oil , and all ready to drive o il th e line. The two men look at eac h ot her and say, 'Isn' t
it wonderful! ' T hen th ey o pe n th e door to the car and our d rops a co rpse. II

What we h ave h er e is o ne of th e d efinin g elemen ts of classical detective fictio n : the

locked-room p aradox. T he q uestio n is: where h as th e bod y come from? On ce th e
co m p lete p r ocess of th e ca r' s produ ction has be en witnessed, 'once th e m easures of the
real a re made tig h t, o nce a pe r im et er, a volu me, is defi n ed o nc e a nd fo r all, th ere is
nothin g to lead o ne to sus pect th at whe n a ll is said a nd do ne';'? so me object will have

172
 THE PHENOMENAL NON PHENOMENAL

completely escaped a tte nt io n on ly later to be extracted from thi s space . So , if no hand

on the assembl y lin e has placed the corpse in th e ca r, how is it possible for an other hand
to pull it o u t? T he Fou cauldian solu tion would be to co nsider thi s parad ox a d eception
of panoptic power, to treat th e co r pse as a fiction ne cessary to th e dis cr eet functioning
of the law . One merel y subscribes to the illusion of d epth create d by this fiction when
one beli eves th at something can escape power's meticulous inspection .
Lacan d evot es his 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter'" to a completel y different
treatment of the locked-room paradox. He argues that those who co nside r con ceal­
ment to be simply a matter of d epth , those who think that that which lies hidden must
lie undern eath so me th ing else , subscribe to 'too immutable a notion of the re al', 1:1 since
wh at is co n cea led m ay just as easil y lie o n th e surface. Lacan , then , like Fou cault,
beli eves there is nothing but surface , but maintains , nevertheless, that th e co r pse, th e
pri vate 'sel f , the purloined letter are not sim p ly fictions; th ey are real.
To understand thi s po sition , let us return to our original obs ervation th at det ecti ve
fiction arises in tandem with a passion for co u n ting . We have so far left unchallen ged
the lesson Hacking d erives from Fr ege , that co u nting regi sters more than numbers, it
registers obj ects - in this case people - fall ing under categories. If Lacan argues, on the
contrary, that there are real objects that a re not reducible to an y catego ry , thi s is
be cause h e seems to draw a different, a more basic lesson from Frege: in o rd e r for
countin g to be possible in the first place, th e set o f numbers must register one cate gory
under which no obj ects fall. The category is that of the 'not-identical-to-itself ; the
number o f obj ects subsumed by it is zero. Our argum ent will be that it is precisely this
principle that es ta blish es the link between d etective fiction and statistics. The grou p of
suspects that forms around th e murd ered co r pse and the paradox of the locked room
are two different phenomena that e me rg e simultaneously in detective fiction to
confirm this h ypoth esis.
The implications of Fr ege's th eory of numeration for Lacanian psychoanal ysis have
already been clearly spelled out by Jacques-Alain Miller in his influential article 'Su tu re
(Elements of the Logic o f th e Signifi er)'. But sinc e this article h as be en so o fte n
misinterpreted, it will be necessary to repeat its main points here. Miller begins by
noting th at Frege initiated his th eory by rigorously excluding fr om conside ratio n the
subj ect who counts; more precisely, Frege began by exclu d in g th e empirical subj ect,
'd efin ed by attributes whose other sid e is political , disposing . . . of a fa culty of memory
" cessary to close th e set without the loss of an y of th e interchan geable elements' . I i
From this exclus io n two interrelated conseq u ences foll ow:

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 SHADES OF NOIR

1. N umbers can no longer be considered the neutral tool of a subject who wants to
designate empirical things.
2. The question of how the no-longer-closed set of numbers, a pure and infinite series
of numbers , can come to subsume objects is raised. How does the series close itself,
in other words ?

From the first point to the second it is clear that a distinction between things and objects
is being made : objects are defined as logical entities as opposed to things, which are
empirical; but what is it that allows the abolition of the thing, the suppression of all its
attributes, to give rise to a logical object - to something which can be substituted for
another without loss of truth?
Do not let the reference to the suppression of attributes ('whose other side is
political') fool you; this question is not at all apolitical. It is, on the contrary, one of the
most fundamental questions of political modernism. How, after destroying the body of
the king, which formerly defined the boundary of the nation and thus closed the set of
subjects belonging to it, how then does one constitute a modern nation? What is it that
allows the nation to collect a vast array of people, discount all their positive differences,
and count them as citizens, as members of the same set, in logical terms as identical?
This question poses itself within detective fiction which, classically, begins with an
amorphous and diverse collection of characters and ends with a fully constituted
group. What we want to know is: what happens to produce this entity, the group? What
is the operation that renders these diverse entities ... countable?
As Miller tells us, this reduction to a purely logical object, that is, to a countable
entity, requires us to conceive the concept that subsumes objects as a redoubled
concept, as a concept of identity-to-a-concept. Thus, members of a modern nation do
not fall under the concept 'citizens of X', but under the concept 'identical to the
concept: citizens of X' . While the simple concept 'citizens of X' seeks to gather the
individuals it subsumes by ' p icking out' the common attribute that qualifies them for
inclusion in the set, the redoubled concept gathers by reducing individuals to their
identity to themselves. The circularity of this definition should alert us to the fact that
we have entered the dimension of the performative. The attribute that distinguishes
the objects of a numbered set does not pre-exist, but subsists in the very act of
numeration. And since this attribute is simply tautological, their retroactive belonging
to the nation confers on its citizens no other substantial identity or representational
value.
So far this theory of numeration may not seem incompatible with the one Hacking

174
 THE PHENOMENAL NON PHENOMENAL

presents. In both cases an object's existence is made to depend on its falling under a
concept. The difference stems, as I have said, from the introduction of the concept
'not-identical-to-the-concept'. With this addition, first, the performative operation of
subsumption which appears to close the set is made visible as an effect of this closure
and, second, numbers or signifiers can no longer be thought to subsume the entire
universe of objects. For the performative does not, in fact, resolve the problem we cited
above, namely with the expulsion of the empirical subject, the set of numbers remains
open. To any number appearing at the end of the series it is always possible to add one
more. If we can detect a performative dimension in numeration, this must mean that
some limit has been applied to the series of numbers. And since no exterior limit is
conceivable (this is, after all, the point of the exile of the empirical subject), only one
possibility remains: the limit has to be conceived as interior to the series. This is what the
concept 'not-identical-to-itself is: the interior limit of the series oj numbers . That which is
unthinkable within the logical functioning of numbers has to be conceived as unthink­
able for the set of numbers to be closed, or as Miller says, sutured. The fact that this
suturing concept does not subsume any objects should clarify any ambiguity that may
persist. What is thought is not the unthinkable, but the impossibility of thinking it. The
suturing concept is empty of content. I n marking the limit of the series of numbers this
concept at the same time severs the numbers from empirical reality and solders them to
each other; in a phrase, it establishes the autonomy of the numerical field. Henceforth,
the value of the numbered objects will not be determined empirically but differentially,
through their relation to other numbered objects.
As we have stated, Frege's theory reveals the logic not only of the foundation and
operation of the series of numbers but also of the modern state, which was, from the
moment of its emergence in the nineteenth century, conceived in actuarial terms. The
statistical accounting of citizens resulted in their normalization by assigning to each
citizen a value that was merely the translation of its relation to the others. The modern
social bond is, then, differential rather than affective; it is based not on some oceanic
feeling of charity or resemblance, but on a system of formal differences.
The group forming around the corpse in detective fiction is of this modern sort; it is
logically 'sustained through nothing but itself. The best proof of this, the most telling
sign that the social world of the detective is in this sense a sutured space, is the fiction 's
foregrounding display of the performative: in classical detective fiction it is the
narrative of the investigation that produces the narrative of the crime. On this basis we
will want to claim that the relations of the suspects to each other are not emotional,

175
 SHADES OF NOIR

familial , or econo mic; th ey are not 'the mole cular a ffin ities whi ch stru cture bourgeois
societ y, the o nes that re veal th emsel ves to be the last sociological ce me n t betw een
individual persons in a situ ati on in whi ch class divisions no longer exist an d d espotic
methods are not ye t binding'.15
But if th e relati ons a mong th e suspects a re, as we a re a rgu ing, diffe rential , what th en
is their relation to th e corpse? It is here that detective fiction appears to o ffer a more
sophisticat ed explanation of these differential relations than that offered by hist­
ori cists. For by produ cin g a corpse at th e very ce n tre of the group , detectiv e fiction
acknowledges th at th e differential rel ations that sustain the gro u p d epend on an
internal limit to the se r ies o f suspects. Representing this limit, the cor pse be comes, in
Helmut Heissenbuttel's words, 'the trace of the unnarrated': that without which the
narrated world and the groups of suspects would cease to e xist. 16
Suture, in bri ef, supplies th e logi c of a paradoxical fun ction whereb y a supplemen­
tary element is added to th e se r ies of sign ifie rs in order to mark th e lad! of a signifier that
could close the set. The endless slid e of signifiers (hen ce deferral o f sense) is brought to
a halt and allow ed to fun ction 'as if' it were a closed set throu gh th e inclusi on of an
element that acknowledges th e impossibility of closure. The very d esignation of the
limit is co nstitutive of the gro u p, th e realit y th e signifiers come to represent, th ough the
group , or th e reality, ca n no longer be thought to be e n tirely representable. At the risk
of repetition, I would like to underline th e point that mu st not be mis sed in all this
argum entation : the modern phenom enon of statistics, of count ing people, would be impossible
(that is, one cou ld nev er convert a disparate anay of persons within the empirical field into
categories ofpersons) without the addition ola nonempirical object (Lac an calls this th e object a)
whi ch closes theJield. Within detectiveJiction the strongest evidence of the obligatoryladdition ofthis
object bjl statistics is the paradox of the locked room.
We may now return to the asse m bly line scene that Hit chcock planned for North by
Northwest to obs erve this paradox at work. Although the corpse that tumbles out of the
car - whose assembly we witn ess, piece by piece, whose elements are joined before our
very eyes - a p pea rs to be the very surplus element that haunts eve ry symbolic str uc tu re
and thus allows the articulation of its parts, this co rpse does not function in the same
way as the one that organizes the gro u p of suspe cts. For the locked-room paradox is
only comprehensible if we view th e surplus element not as the cor pse itself, but as that
which allow s the corpse to be pulled out of an apparently sealed space. T h e logi c that
says that an element is added to the structure in order to mark what is lacking in it
should not lead us to imagine this element as an isola tabl e ex cess hidd en beneath th e

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structure. The ex cess eleme n t is instead located on the same su r face as the structure,
th at is, it is manifest in th e latter's very fun ctioning. It is und er th e species of d efault
th at th e exc ess marker of lack appears, in th e internal limitation that prevents the
signifi er from coinciding with itself. It is in th e fact that a sign ifie r is unable to signify
itself, but must always call o n another in an infinite a p pea l to o ne signifi er more, that
lan guage's intern al limit is located.
This means wh at ? That if on e person, to take a classical example, says 'X went to the
well', and an other reports that 'X went to the place where ruffians gath er', we ca n not
treat th e two statements as substitutabl e on the ground s that th ey have the same
referent, for this co ns titu tes th e purest form of the realist imbecilit y. What thi s error
imagines is that th e referent contains all its possible d escriptions. But if th e logi c of the
signifier follows Frege's elu cidation of it, th en it is th e fa ct that the two statements are
treated as substitutable that allows us to say th e y hav e th e same referent, and not the
other way around . What happens th en to th e referent? Simply this: it is no longer able
to contain all its possible descriptions. For if there is no metalanguage , no external limit
to the set of signifiers, if every signifier must appeal to another for in terpretation , th en
it is no longer possible to complete th e description of a ny sp ace , to im agine a sp ace th at
would co n tain all its possibl e descriptions .
It is for thi s reason that th e locked room is always breached in detectiv e fiction. Not
be cause e ve ry private space has alwa ys alread y been intruded upon by th e public forces
of the symbolic, but because in the symbolic the real always intrudes. The room can not
be locked because its d etails ca n never be co m p letely e n u me rated; their list is nev er
countable. The d etective, therefore, is not , as is commonly believ ed , on the side o f
metalanguage, of the reparation of th e signifier's default. He is, instead, on th e side of
th e failure of metalanguage , he represents the alwa ys open po ssibility of o ne sign ifier
more. Out of eve r y lock ed room he is always able to extract a letter, a co rp se, a clue that
was literally undetectable before h e arrived on th e scene. It is th e sign ifyin g description
of the scene and not the 'scene itself, the referent, that is submitted to the work of
detection. And not in order to penetrat e th e language of th e description to dis cern the
scene beneath , but to d emonstrat e that th e su r face of lan guage nev er cove rs a depth:
th e clu e is always found in th e mo st conspi cuous pla ce.
We mi ght eve n argu e that th e detective distinguishes himself from th e police by
virtue of his passion for ignorance , not for e li m inating it. For while the poli ce sea rch
for the telling clu e, the index , in th e belief that at this point reality 'im p resses' itself on
the symbolic, 'brushes up again st' and thereb y di sambiguates it, th e detective
 SHADES OF NOlA

approaches the index as the point where the real makes itself felt in the symbolic, that is
as the point at which the symbolic visibly fails to disambiguate itself. Dashiell Hammett's
'Bodies Piled Up' contains an excellent illustration of this point; here the modus operandi
of detection is explicitly described thus:

From any crime to its author there is a trail. It may be . . . obscure; but since matter cannot
move without disturbing other matter along its path, there always is - there must be - a
trail of some sort. And finding such trails is what a detective is paid to dO. 17

While this description sounds as though it belongs more readily to the genre of the
police procedural, the clue upon which the solution pivots belies this assumption. As
long as it is believed that it was these bodies piled up in room 906 that were the
murderer's targets, the investigation remains stalled. In order to solve the crime,
someone must first realize that the murderer mistook room 906 for the room of his
intended victim, who was actually registered in room 609. How does the investigation
arrive at this realization? By noting that the murderer would, when he glanced at the
hotel register, be looking at it upside-down. But 609 read upside-down....still reads 609 .
Yes, the reasoning goes, but the murderer in his furtive haste would have forgotten this
and would have automatically made an adjustment for the error which, in fact, did not
exist.
The detective, like the police, believes that the criminal leaves traces in endless
incriminating details; what he denies - and what is denied by the example above - is the
possibility of deducing the criminal from his traces. The detective does not refute the
belief that the criminal author reveals himself completely and exclusively in his
criminal works; he simply, but critically, denies that the evidence itself can account for
the way it gives evidence. There is a gap, a distance between the evidence and that
which the evidence establishes , which means that there is something which is not visible
in the evidence: the principle by which the trail attaches itself to the criminal. The
registration of the room number 906 does provide a clue essential to the solution of the
crime, but however exhaustively we examine this piece of evidence, we will never arrive
at the principle of how it leads us to the criminal perpetrator.
Here interpretation must intervene - interpretation which, Lacan says, is desire. All
of a sudden it becomes possible to understand what he means. To say that the detective
manifests his desire in interpreting the clues is not to say that in the absence of complete
knowledge a historical or personal bias directs the interpretation. Desire is not an
impurity that threatens the 'objectivity' of the detective, but the quasi-transcendental
principle that guarantees it. In other words , desire does not impose a bias but supposes

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 THE PHENOMENAL NONPHENOMENAL

a ga p : th e detective reads th e evidence by positing a n em p ty be yo nd , a re sidue th at is

irredu cible to the evidence whil e being, a t the sam e time, com p letely d emonstrated in
it. Interpretation me ans that e vidence tells us everything but how to read it. Beyond th e
evidence , in other words, th ere is no other reality, nothing - ex cept th e p rincipl e that
guides our re ading of it. One of th e primary imperatives o f d etective fiction ma y be
stated in the followin g way: d esire must be taken literall y. This imperative is a positive
and more com p le te restatement of th e well-known stricture against the introduction in
detective fiction of so me n ew reality - a trapd oor or a su spect who is not already kn own
to the reader - for the purpose of solvin g th e crime. This stricture do es not mean
sim p ly that th e culprit must be one from th e known gallery of suspects, it also mean s
that he is himself not to be reintroduced as another reality, a substantial entity be yond
th e trail of evid e nce h e leaves. The culprit is cons u bsta n tial if n ot with the e vide nce per
se, then with a readin g of it; he is no more nor less than this. The desirin g d etective,
then , co ncludes by taking the cu lp r it'S d esire literall y, seeing th e way it manifests itself
in the clues. In this way does th e d etective make buffoons of th e police, who bust­
themselves with th e senseless task of ignoring d esire and taking th e evidence literally,
co nfla ting sign ifie rs and signifieds.
The gap that n ecessitates interpretation, that prevents th e signifier from signifying
itself, is caused , as I ha ve argued , by the abse nce of o ne signifier, a final signifier that
would establish an end to th e chain . It is because this final signifier (or number) is
mis sing that d etective fiction a nd statistics a re, as we have been a r guing, possible. On
the othe r hand , th e ab sence of this signifier makes th e sexual rel ation impossibl e. This
signifier, if it existed , would be th e signifier for woman. As anyone with eve n a passing
acquaintan ce with the ge n re knows, the absence o f this signifier is e vide nt in d etective
fiction not only in the nontotalizable space that produ ces the paradox of the locked
room, but also in th e unfailing exclusio n o f the sexual relation . The detective is
stru cturally forbidden any inv olvement with a woman.
In the middle of writin g thi s, I take a break to watch Columbo on televi sion . H e is
bad gering, patronizing on e of the ch aracte rs, which me ans, according to th e formula,
that thi s ch aracter is the gu ilty suspect. Columbo asks this man, who is running for
Congress, for a n autograph for his wife . As everyone knows, the wife of thi s most
uxoriou s of detectives is simply th e condition of the impossibility of his involvement in
any sexual relation; sh e never a p pe a rs , must never appear, in th e diegetic space. The
co ng ressma n ag rees to th e autograph . Taking a piece of paper from his drawer and
beginning to write on it, he asks Columbo, 'What is you r wife's name?' - 'Mrs Colu mbo',

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 SHADES OF NOIR

is the only, and from th e matter-of-fa ct look on the d etective's fa ce , th e onl y possible
reply.

DETOUR THROU GH THE DRIVE

Whilst thi s elision of th e sig nifie r for woman eLlI1 be sho wn to define the fictional sp ace
o f classical d etective fiction , th e ver y presen ce of Ph yllis Dietri chs on, Doubl e Indemnity's
femm e fatale , reminds us that th e film co ns tr uc ts a different sort of fictional world .
Although it is incon ceivable for Keyes , as a classical detective, to hav e an y involvem en t
with a woman, it is equally inconceivable for Neff, as a nair hero, to escape such
involvement. One of the most theoreticall y co m pellin g aspects o f Double lndemnits is its
inscription not onl y of thi s difference, but of the very topologi cal incompatibilit y of
classical d etecti ve fiction and film noir. In one scen e Neff re ceives a call from Ph yllis
while Keyes is in his offi ce. Sin ce Keyes se e ms disinclined to leav e , Neff must co nd uct
th e entire conversation in his mentor's presence. T h e un comfortable~ss of this
situation, combined with the sh ot/ reve rse-shot cu tting betw een Phyllis on on e end of
th e line and Neff (together with Keyes) on the othe r, se r ves to underline thi s
in compatibility. In a no th e r scene, as Neff awaits a visit from Ph yllis, Keyes drops by his
apartment unexpectedly. While Neff attempts to ush er Keyes out, Ph yllis a r r ives a nd
ha s to wait behind the door until Keyes walks down the cor r idor toward the eleva tor
before sh e ca n slip, unse en , into Neffs apa r tme n t. Throughout th e film, Ph yllis and
Keyes have a 'revolving door' relationship; th ey do not and can not occup y th e same spac e.
But this relationship is trivialized, its real stakes obscured if one int erprets its eithe r/or
dimension in strictl y narrati ve terms. The choice that Neff faces is not on e between two
people, a mentor and a lover, but betwe en the world of classical d ete ction and f ilm noir.
One of th e mo st common d escriptions of the historical shift between these two
worlds makes identificati on the pivotal term; that is, it is argued that the detectiv e
, comes to id entify more and more closel y with his criminal adversary until, at the end o f
the film noir cycle he has become the cr im ina l himself, as here in Double Indemn ity, where
Neff is both inv estigator and murderer. The mom ent Neff sto ps 'watch ing th e
'customers to make sure that they don 't crook th e house' and gets to thinking how he
could crook th e house himself 'and do it sma rt ', he enters th e noir world . But if th e
reversal were that sim p le , th e ch oices that symmetrical , if film nair d epend ed merely on
the h ero's reje ction of a lofty go al for a ba se one, one would be forced to wonder why
the hero alway s ends up not ge tt in g th e money and not getting th e woman.

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Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

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 SHADES OF NOIR

I would like, th en, to offer a different explanation o f Neffs cho ice to try to 'croo k the
h ouse'. This explanation is derived from th e fort/da game that Freud des cribes in
B eyond the Pleasure Principle. I propose that we co nside r this littl e ga me of bide-and-seek
as the elementary cell of d et ective fiction - in both its in carnations. A few pages after his
o riginal a nalysis of it, Freud adds that his gra nd son later d eveloped a variant of the
ga me. In this later version the ch ild himself fun ctioned as th e cotton reel ; hiding
beneath th e mirror for a time, he would suddenly jump up to observe th e emergen ce of
his mirror reflection. Now there is, it would see m , a fundamental distin ction to be made
between the two versions of the game. For when th e ch ild throws th e cotto n reel , he
throws that part o f himself that is lost with his ent ry into language. The child thu s
situ ates himself in the field of language; h e chooses sense rather th an the being that
se nse continuall y fails to sec u re . He thus becomes a subject of d esire, lacking-in-being.
But wh en the child takes up the position of the cotton reel , he situates himself in th e
field of being; he ch ooses being, [onissancc, rather th an sense.
This distinction ca uses us to not e a differen ce in th e two forms of repetition that th e
games instantiate. In the first game it is failure, or d esire, th at propels the repetition.
Something escapes, or to use one of Lacan's phrases, som ething 'd oes not stop not
writing itself, in the field of representation str uctu re d by th e ga me, and so th e game is
repeated endlessly with th e hope , but without the possibilit y, of capturing th at whi ch
escapes it. In th e second ga me repetition is driven not by desire but by satisfaction :
so me satisfaction is repeated , 'does not stop writing itself' in th e gam e.
I am proposing that th e inversion that d efines th e sh ift from classi cal detection to(ilm
noir is to be und erstood not in terms of identification but in terms of th e choice between
sense and being, or - in the dial ect of ps ychoanal ysis - between d esire and drive. 1k
Lacan h as argu ed that this shift d escribes a general historical transition whos e process
we are still witn essing: th e old mod ern order of desire, ruled over by a n oedipal fath er,
ha s begun to be replaced by a new ord er of th e drive , in which we no longer hav e
recourse to the protections ag ain st [ouissance that the oedipal fath er on ce offered .
These protections hav e been erod ed by our society's fetishization of being, that is of
, [ouissance. Whi ch is to sa y: we hav e ceased being a society th at attempts to preserve th e
individu al right to [ouissance, to become a society th at commands jo ui ssance as a 'civic'
duty . 'Civic' is, strictly sp eaking, an inappropriate adj ective in this co n text , since th ese
ob scene importunings of contemporary societ y e n ta il th e destru ction of th e civ itas
itself, o f increasingly larger portions of our public space. We no longer attem p t to
safeguard the e m p ty 'private' sp ace that co u ntin g produ ced as a residue, but to dw ell
within this space exclusively. Th e a m bitio n ofjilm notr seems to hav e been monitory: it

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sou ght to warn us that this fetishization of private jouissance would hav e mortal
consequences for society, would result in a 'r ise of ra cism ', 19 in ever smalle r factions of
people proclaiming th eir duty-bound devotion to their own special brand of enjoy­
ment, unless we attempted to reintroduce some notion of co m m u n ity, of sutured
totality to whi ch we could partially, performatively belong. Thus, of all th e admonitory
ploys in the arsenal ofjilm no ir surely the most characteristic was its insistence that from
the moment the choice of private enjoyment over community is made , one's pri vacy
ceases to be something one savours when sheltered from prying eyes (so that, as is the
case with Keyes, no one ca n be sure that he even has a private life) and becomes instead
something one visibly endures - like an unending, dis comfiting rain . In [dm noir
privacy establishes itself as the rule, not as a clandestine exce p tion . This changes the
very character of privacy and , indeed , of 'society' in general - which begins with the
introdu ction of this new mode of being to shatter into incommensurable fragments.

THE VOICE AND THE VOICE-OVER

I f there is one feature ofjilm noir that seems to stand in the way of the acceptance of our
thesis, it is th e voice-over narration , which definitively links the hero to speech and
hence, we would suppose, to community, to sense. Sp eech, as we know -language - is
the death of the thing, it contributes to th e drying up ofjouissance. And nothing has
seemed more obvious in the criticism ofjilm nair than this association of death with
speech, for th e voice-over is regularly attached to a d ead narrator, whether literally as
in Sunset Boulevard and Laura, metaphorically as in Detour, or virtuall y as in Double
Indemnity.
But before we can contest this reading of the voice-over in jilm nair, we must first
confront a certain theorization of the voice in cinema . In an excellent article entitled
'The Silences of th e Voices', Pascal Bonitzer makes a distinction, which will form the
basis of a great deal of subsequent theorizing, between th e dis embodied voice of the
, documentary voice-over - a voice that remains off-screen throughout the film and thus
never be comes an chored to a bod y imaged on screen - and the voice-over that at some
point be comes attached to a visible body. Neff's voice, and that of other noir narrators ,
belongs to the latter cat egory and , in fact, Bonitzer us es the example of a late film noir,
Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich , 1955)" to great advantage in furthering his argument.
Throughout most of the film Dr Soberin, th e arch criminal, is absent from the screen,
we hear only his off-screen voice and see onl y his blue suede shoes. At th e end of the

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film , how ever, h e a ppea rs bo d ily in th e sp ace for th e first time an d , almost immediately,
is shot and falls d ead to th e bottom o f the frame . That is to say, at th e moment th e voice
is an chored to a bod y, it relinquishes its apparent omnipot ence and is instead 'submit­
ted to the d estin y of the body'; cor porealized , it is rendered 'decrepit and mortal' r' "
The voice, we could sa y, di es in th e bod y. In opposition to thi s, th e noncorporealiz ed
voice of th e classical docum entary issues from a sp ace other than that on the scr een, an
unrepresented, und etermined sp ace; thu s transcending the visible, dete rmined field,
the voice maintains its absolute power over th e image , its kn owl edge remains
unimpugned.
This di stinction betw een th e dis embodied voice, whi ch conveys kn owledge and
pow er, and the e mbo d ied voice , whi ch conveys the limitation o f both, is underwritten
by a simple opposition between th e universal and th e particular, th e latter being
co nceived as that which ruin s the possibility of th e former. The embodied voice,
particularity, and lack of knowledge line up on one side ag ains t the disembodied voice ,
universality, and knowledge on th e other. Within this fram ework of nestled opposi­
tions, another notion is introdu ced toward the e nd of the a rticle, that of th e ' bod y oft he
voice'. Bonitzer effortlessly sweeps this notion beneath the 'pa rt icu la r ' flank of his
oppositions, using it to argue that a n y voice at all , any commentary, threatens the
assumption of universality upon whi ch documentary realism d epends. For th ough the
voice ma y nev er be come visibly anchored in a place, place may be audibly anchored in
the voice, thus betraying it through accents that ind icate its regional, class, se xual, or
so me other rootedness. By 'the bod y of the voice' Bonitzer means an y accent that
particularizes the voice, spoiling its ideal ato n )" hen ce th e omniscience and authority
that a re assumed to define th e neutral , unaccented vo ice-over. Once th e bod y of the
voic e becomes audible, it betrays 'a subject fallen to the rank of an obj ect a nd
unmasked . . .. [The bod y of this voice is] its death to meaning. ... T he voice .. .
"la bors". It is perceived as an accent .. . and this accent neutralizes meaning.Y'
.But th e films of Margu erite Duras, whi ch Bonitzer mention s in his article, man ag e to
, perturb his argument more th an th e y bear it out. Consider India Song. In this film the
images are almost co m p letely silent. The voices all issue from o ff screen (as in a
documentary) , though th ey are all heavil y 'acce n ted '. We ca n speak properl y here of
the 'laboring' of the voices, th eir grain. Distinctly female, exce p t for o ne at the e nd , they
seem to suffer throughout th e film . One cou ld say that they are th e very embodiment
of everything the documentary voice is not supposed to be: they are 'burning' voices,
seemingly 'ephemeral, fragile , troubled '. But while th ey appear to co m me n t on th e

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images on th e screen, there is in what they say a co nsta nt ambiguity of referen ce, since
they may also be commenting on their own situ atio n. 'T he heat !' 'Ca n' t bear it. No, ca n't
bear it!' We begin to be unsure whether it is the heat that suffuses th e diegetic space or
the off-screen space that these voices find insupportable. Sometimes they dispense
altogether with any pretence of co m me n tin g on what we see on screen and speak to
each other of their own situation .
What are we to make of the fact that these voices are situated permanentl y off
screen? that they are so painfully, burningly 'grainy'? The standard argument would
probably try to convince us that they were 'desiring' rather than omniscient voices; that
they express a yearning and loss rather than power; that th ey reduce their bearers to a
merely mortal, corporeal existence. Yet this description clearly misses its mark, for
these off-screen voices ca n n ot be co nstr ued as mortal. They are , as Duras d efines them ,
intemporal voices; they cannot be situated in - nor submitted to the ravages of - time or
place. This is not to deny that the voices are associated with death, but to note that this
death brings no expiry; rath er, in them, death persists. The voices bear the burden of a
living death, a kind of inexhaustible suffering.
Though film nair does not, like Duras, acoustically mark the break between image
and voice, it does, I would argue, similarly tear the voice from the image in a way that
remains unexplained- is effaced even - by the commonplace observation that the noir
hero's voice-over narration simply div erges from the truth of th e image. Seeing in film
nair the evidence of a post-war waning of mas culin e self-certainty and power, this
observation reads the grain or labouring of the voice-over as well as its periodic
diegeticization as proof of th e falt ering of the hero's knowl edge, his inability to control
or comprehend th e image, which then often seems to belie what he says. It is th e
pertinence for film noir of this d efinition of the voice-image relation that must be
challenged, together with the pop-ps ychological diagnosis of post-war male malaise
that has lent it credibility . I will continue to argue instead that th e asp ect of this period
that most con cerns the development of film noir is the perceptible ascendancy of drive
over desire. To this shift a whole range of 'so cial' poli cies encouraging suburban
, expansion and ethnic and racial segregation (mandated most notably, but not e xclus­
ively, by the Federal Housing Administration, which was found ed in 1934 and gained
momentum only after the World War Two) clearly bear witness .
There is no need, however, to limit our observation to th ese poli cies , for a number of
other phenomena will just as readily attest to this shift, including the vogue for
existentialism, whi ch also reached its peak after the war. From the moment the first
hard-boiled novels were translated into French in th e Serie noire, the existentialists

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 SHADES OF NOIR

recognized in this new type of detective novel something of their own philosophy.
What they must have recognized in the novels was their commitment to the priority of
being - or, in existentialist parlance, the in-itself - over sense. Existentialism is, in this
regard, a philosophy of drive, unthinkable before drive's historical overturning of
desire. The problematic of duty or responsibility so crucial to existentialism is equally
central to film noir, from Sam Spade's moral code (his ultimate refusal, for example of
Brigid O'Shaunessy : ' I won't because all of me wants to') to the extravagant, delirious
form it takes in Mike Hammer's contempt for death itself, his mad vengeance against
injustice. The particular treachery of these ethical vocations (and it is the articulation of
this treachery that so fascinates us in both the philosophy and the films) stems from the
extreme difficulty of fathoming the Other, society itself, from the perspective of the
drive.
How does this diagnosis of the post-war period bear on our understanding of the
voice in [dm noir? It supports our perception that however contiguous it is with the
diegetic space, t.he space of the voice-over is nevertheless radically heterogeneous to it.
It is to this fact - and not to the limited knowledge of the bearer of the voice - that we
ascribe the apparent incompatibilities between image and voice . What is most question­
able about standard interpretations of film noir is their insistence on subsuming the
function of the voice under the category of commentary, since what seems to me
distinctive about this voice-over narration is the way it refuses to spend itself as
commentary. Certainly this narration performs the same function that every speech
does : it vehicles a message addressed to another. In Double Indemnity, for example, the
voice-over is explicitly addressed to Keynes. But the film also deliberately severs this
speech from its addressee in order to return us repeatedly to the image of a solitary
Neff, seated in an empty office at. night, speaking into a dictaphone. In t.hese scenes the
destiny of the voice-over seems not to be exhausted by its function as message. An
excess of pleasure, a private enjoyment, seems to adhere in the act. of speaking as such
as Neff contents himself, beyond the content of the message, with the act it.self. This is
t.o say that the voice-over narration serves less to describe or attempt to describe the
world that the narrator inhabits than to present that world at. the point where he is
abstracted from it. Neff clings not to the community with which speech puts him in
touch, but to the enjoyment. that separates him from that community.
We can begin to grasp what is at stake here by returning to our discussion of the
'body of the voice'. Though Bonitzer offers this notion as the equivalent of Roland
Barthes's 'grain of the voice', the two notions are, in fact, quite different. The body of
which Barthes speaks 'has no civil identity, no "personality''' .22 In no way, then, can it

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 THE PHENOMENAL NONPHENOMENAL

be co nsid e re d th e 'a ccent o f an e ra, a class, a re gim e',23 in no way can it be imagined to
be tra y a n yth ing like th e car icatu red typ es appropriately indicated by Bonitzer in
quot ati on marks: 'the paran oid an tico m m u n ist', 'the jovial Stalini st,.24 T h e grain is not
the index of a p articularity with an y co n te nt, soc ial or otherwise , it is th e in dex of a
part icular absolute. This means that it marks th e voice as belo nging to this sp eaker,
uniquely, even th ough th e grain must not be consid ere d 'p e rso nal: it ex presses
nothing' o f th e speake r.i"
The grain of the vo ice h as no co n te n t; it appears only as the 'friction' (Ba r thes's
word ) one hears when one perceives th e materiality o f languag e , its re sistance to
mean in g. Th e grain works in th e voice as index in the same way as the index works in
d etecti ve fiction : to regi st er a resistance to or failure of me anin g. It is this fri ction th at
prompts inte rpretation . Don 't read my words; read my desire! T h is is wha t the grain o f th e
voice urges. T ha t is, don't take me literally (th at is, universally), but re alize th at th ese
words are th e unique bearers o f m y desire. Fu nc tioni n g as limit, th e grain of the voice
d oes spe ll th e colla ps e of th e uni ve rsal , o f th e universalit y o f se nse; so me excess of
being over se nse su ggests itself an d begins to und ermine kn owledge. But it is th e
knowled ge o f th e listener th at is in qu esti on here, not th at of th e enun ciato r. The
e n u nc iato r becomes all at on ce n ot unknowin g (as in Bonitzer's account), bu t unknown,
voluptuously a n X. T he phenomenon just d escribed , and full y exhib ite d in Barth es's
essa y, is that o f tran sference. Confronted with th e limits o f ou r kn owled ge , we fictively
ad d to th e field o f th e Other, to the voice , an X, the mark of our nonknowledge . This
simple addition is en ou gh to e ro ticize th e voice, to trans form o u r rel ation to it to o ne o f
d esire , o f interpretation . As Barthes a tte m p ts to eluc idate th e differen ce be tween two
singers, Pan zera and Fischer-Dieska u, we come at fir st to see his distinction as
co m p lete ly arbitrary , subjective. He isola tes in th e voices no posit ive feature th at would
help us to un derstand his p reference for Pan zera , in whose voice he h ears 'the tongue,
th e glott is, th e teeth , th e mu cous membran es, th e nose'. O ne can not be train ed to h ear
vocal 'featu res ' su ch as thi s; we learn no thing th at might be called 'music ap p reciatio n'
from Barthes's essay . And yet th ere is clearly a differen ce betw een th e two voices ; it
amounts ba sically to thi s: th e ad d ition o f a n X to Pan zera's voice whi ch turns Ba rthes 's
relation to it into one of d esire. One must be ca refu l, how ever, not to dismi ss thi s
relation as simply su bjective : because the X is the ca use o f desire a nd not the o th e r wa y
around, we can no t claim that Barthes im po ses something o f h imself onto the voice . H e
simply 'se ts up a new scheme o f evalu ation wh ich .. . certain ly . . . is ind ividual'Y'' T h us
d o relati ons of d esir e preserve particul a rit y, difference , by su p posing, via th e gra in of
the voice , a private beyond, a being that d oes not su rre nder itse lf in sp eec h .

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 SHADES OF NOIR

Wh en d esire gives way to drive, thi s private be yond no longer remains hidden . Wh at
is involved in the drive , Lacan tells us, is a 'making onese lf heard' or 'm aking on eself
seen,;27 that is to sa y, th e intimate co re o f ou r bein g, no lon ger she lte re d by sense ,
ceases to be supposed a n d su d den ly becomes exposed . It thrusts itself forward ,
pushing throu gh th e surface of speech to take up a positi on alongsid e it. T his d oes not
mean th at th e merely su p posed, h ence e m p ty, d omain of private being e me rges
unveiled, its con te nts finally visible for anyone to see. In sh ift in g its topological
position , bein g does not lose its essential nature as resi stance to sense: what is made
audible - or visible - is th e void as such , contentless and nonsensi cal. T h e 'ma kin g
oneself heard ' o r 'ma kin g oneself seen ' of the dri ve must not be co n fused with a desire
to he ar/be heard or a desire to see/be seen , sin ce th e very reciprocity that is implied by
desire is denied in th e drive . The intimat e kernel of our being is su sceptible neither in
its hidden nor in its exp ose d form to 'objective' knowl edge; in exposing itself it does not
seek to co m m u nica te itself. Or, we mi ght put it this way: surfacing within the
phenomenal field , private being,jouissance, nevertheless does not take on a phenom e­
nal form. PhenomenaVnonphenomenal- this (mo re accurately, perhaps, than inside!
outside) names th e divi sion troubl ed by drive . It does not communicate itself by
exposing itself.
In film notr th e grain of the voice su r faces alongside th e diegetic reality. Issuing fr om
the point of death, it marks not some id eal p oint where the subj ec t would finally be
absorbed into his narrative , used up ; it mat erializes rather that which ca n never be
incorporated into the n arrative. Death becomes in film nair the p ositivization of the
narrator's abs ence from the very di egetic reality hi s speech describes.

LOCKED ROOM!LOKELY ROOM

In Double Indemnity, Neff' s a bse nce from the narrative - that is, from the social space - is
imaged as I have said in the repeated scene of a con fessi on th at we a re refusing to take
,
purely as su ch . The clu e that allow s Keyes to begin to unravel th e Dietrichson case
should not be lost on us; Keyes realizes th at th e fact that Mr Dietrichson did not put in a
claim wh en he broke his leg is clea r proof that the man who bo arded the train on
crutches must hav e been someon e else . The one detail that trips Neff up, his 'blind
spot', is the one th at ultimately di stinguishes him as a noir hero : he cannot think of
claiming the protection of th e law . For Neff, and his like, the benevolent-impotent
Other no longer e xists and Neff ca n , then , no longer seek from it what it is able to

188
 THE PHENOMENAL NONPHENOMENAL

provide: p rotection fro m j ouissance. Neff is thu s a man who e nj oys too mu ch : too mu ch
to surrender his words to anoth er, wh en they hold for him su ch exqu isite pleasure. Th e
difference between the crime film and Jilm nair a mou nts to this qu estion of e nj oymen t:
in the crime film, d espite th eir transgressions of the law , the criminals are still ruled by
th e impotent Other whom th e y, und erstandabl y, try to cheat; in Jibn notr th e reign of
the Other h as been superseded, its law is not so much transgressed as disbanded. Th e
emergen ce o f the e n u n cia tio n on a level with th e narrative statement constitutes our
proof of this.
But th ere ex ists further evidence. Sin ce it is th e cloaking of the enunciative instance,
its marked retreat fr om th e phenomenal field , that defin es the very space o f classical
d etection , we would expect th e su rfac in g of th e e n u nciatio n to produ ce with in f ilm noir
a wholly different sort of sp ace. This is exactly what happens; th e infinite , inexhaust­
ible space of the older model- exe m p la r ily realized in th e paradox of the locked room
- gives way in film noir to its inverse ; th e lonel y room , su ch as th e o ne in whi ch Ne ff
utters his co n fession . For Neff sits in on e of those vacant office buildings, those plain
and , for th e moment, uninhabited spaces that constitute th e characteristic architecture
offilm noir. Office buildings lat e at night, in the ea rly hours of the morning; ab andoned
warehouses; hotel s m ysteriously untrafficked ; ee r ily empty corridors: th ese are th e
sp aces that supplant the locked room . One is struck first of all by th e curious
d epopulation of th ese spaces, and then by their sp a re ness. In The Big l I eat (Fritz Lan g ,
1953), Debbie Marsh, lookin g around the woefully und erdecorated hotel room in
whi ch Dave Bannion temporarily resides , delivers an accurate appraisal of this typically
noir interior. 'Oh , earl y nothing !' sh e quips. Rut it would be wrong to sto p at th e
ob servation that th ese lonely r ooms are simpl y e m p ty of people and decoration. More
fundamentally, wh at film nai r presents to us are spaces that have been e m p tied of
d esire. Or: th e emptiness of th e room indicates less that there is nothing in th em than
th at nothing more ca n be got out of th em . Th ey are no longer interpretable, in th e
strict sense : that is, th ey will never yield anything new a nd cannot, therefore, hid e
anything.
Primaril y, it is th e hero himself who su ffe rs th e loss of a hidin g place. Think, for
example, of Al Rob erts in Det our (Edgar Ulmer, 1945), who at the e nd of the film walk s
resi gnedly, without wonderin g how he has been found, toward the police car that stops
to pick him up ; or Vincent Parry in Durk Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947 ), who is
re cognized wherever he goes , no matter how lat e at night or that he has be en totally
transformed by plastic surgery. Or, think of a n earlier moment in Detour when
Rob erts's private voice-over co n te m p latio n of the events leadin g up to his cu rren t

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 SHADES OF NOIR

despe rate situ a tio n IS cu t sh ort b y this venomousl y d eli vered qu estion from th e
hitchhiker h e has r ecentl y picked up : ' Wh e re did yo u put the body? ' All ora sud de n the
voic e- over no lon ger co n tains his privacy, the sea m se pa rating it a nd him from this
cru el passen ger m elts as the hiss of her viciousn ess m arks th e edges of their beings
co m ing into co ntact. It is almost as if she has re ad his thou ght s and ye t she does not
really respond directly to his words o n the soundtrack . Here we find ourselves in that
paranoid uni verse whi ch film notr is so often tak en to be. But whil e thi s paranoia is
usually assumed to indicate an e ro sio n of privac y that permits the Other to penetrate,
to r ead on e 's inn ermost thou ghts,film noir helps us to see that the opposite is tru e . It is
on th e public level th at the e ro sio n has taken place . No social distance separates
individuals, no so cial 'clo th ing' prot ects their inn ermost bein g. But since there is no
distance to trav erse, no layers of disguise to pen etrat e , th e e xpo su re of being is not
preceded b y an y ignoran ce or cu r ios ity . N oir heroes may never successfull y hid e out in
their urban space s, but neither are th e y seriousl y pursu ed . No r doe s their bein g
be come readabl e, in th e proper sense , th at is, no discursive knowled ge is gained by its
expo sure . It is not Rob erts's words , his thoughts , that a re rev ealed to Vera , but rather
that which his thinking ordinarily preserves : his being.
In Double Indemnity Ne ffs d ecision to tr y to 'c ro o k th e house ' issu es in a situation that
is not compreh ensible in stri ctly narrative terms . H enceforth Neff and Phyllis will
refrain from meeting in pri vate and will be forced to rend ezv ous onl y in public pl aces .
Jerry's Market be com es their meeting pl ace. This narrativized d escription of what
takes pla ce does not quite mak e sense . Wouldn 't there be more rath er than less risk in
their public encounters ? Wouldn't the hatching of th e plan require private co nsu l­
tation? What this description fails to grasp , however, is that within th e term s of the noir
universe j erry's Market is a private space. It is e m p ty exce p t for a few shoppers who
take no interest in their ex iste nce, and Nell and Phyllis a re in little danger of dis covery
here , though th e y arc eq ua lly in capable of co ncea ling th emsel ves. Ph yllis's dark glasses
are as humorousl y in effectual , and unn ecessary, as Vincent Parry's pl astic surgery.
Thi s s.eems, in fa ct , to be the point of both the glasses and th e su r gica l band ages . Every
, disguise turns out to be futile within a space defin ed by the drive, wh ere what is at stake
is making one's pri vate bein g seen .
But how does jilm noi r exhibit th e workings of drive, the exposure of being, wh en, as
I ha ve noted , this being has no ph enom enal form , wh en it is and remains essentiall y
contentless? How is th e intrusion of the non ph enomenal private realm into the public,
that is, ph enom enal world made apparent in film n oir? As Neff's cre p usc u la r office ,
Jerry's Market, and th e many abandon ed sit es in th ese films d emonstrate, this is

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 THE PHENOMENAL NON PHENOMENAL

acco m p lishe d by ad d ing to public sp aces

the very e m p tiness I ha ve a lrea dy d es­
cr ibed . Th e intrusion of th e private - th e
o bj ect a, th e grain of th e voice - into
phen omenal reality, its addit ion, is regis­
tered in th e depletion of this re a lity. Lost ,
thereby, is the sense of solid ity that ordi­
narily a tt ache s to the soc ial field , as well
as th e illusion of depth that underwrites
this solidity. This illu sion is sim p ly th e
perception - unnegatable by a ny counter­
perception - that we have never go t to Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder , 1944)
the bottom o f our reality. It is/ilm noir's
suspension o f this illusion th at rend ers it
in capable of con cealin g a n yth in g , least of
a ll its heroes . This is th e logic that leads
me to a r gue that J erry's Market is a pri­
vate sp ace, that film noir co ntin ua lly
exposes th e landscape of privacy. In such
a land scape , wh ere pri vat e bein g e xh ibits
itself as complete , as ind ependent o f th e
d esire of oth ers , the hero's e nco u n te rs
with other p eople will be jarring, at least
(the series of women whom Marlowe
Dark Passage (Delmer Daves, 1947)
meets in The Big Sleet)), threatening
at most. This is wh y th e palpable claustrophobia of noir sp aces is not a t all in consist ent
with th eir visible e m p tine ss.
Jerry's Market is the res u lt, then , of Ne ff s cho ice of pri vate being ,jouissmu:e, rather
than the signifying network that structures social r eality . What he gets is being, but
, d eprived of the' in accessibilit y that ga ve it its value: in sho rt, he ge ts nothing. It would
be an e r ro r, how ever, to think that the co nseq ue nces of this choice stir in the hero a
kind of 'disappointment ', for it is precisel y this nothing that satisfies. And th erein lies
the problem , the potential fat ality of this choice. Despite some attempts by Hollywood­
for ex ample , the re vised ending of Double Indemnity, whi ch eliminates Neff's ultimate
isolation in the gas chamber and su bstitutes instead the reciprocity o f th e cigarette
lighting ritu al betw een Neff and Keyes - to disguise th e unabated ness of this satisfa ction,

191
 SHADES OF NOIR

there is still evidence that the heroes in these films often cling to the satisfactions of this
nothing to the bitter end .

LETHAL./OUiSSANCE AND THE FEMME FATALE

This is not to say that th ere are no d efences against the drive , no m eans of cu r bing its
satisfactions. Drive is, of co u rse , not instin ct, and just as in the symbolic realm som e real
is manifest (in the failures of th e signifier), so in the realm of the real som e symbolic
makes itself felt (in the very repetitions of the drive's circuits). That is: the drive is not
indifferent to symbolic intervention, which is available in [dm. noir on two different
levels. The first level is that of the filmi c syst em. Here we encounter the deep-focus
photography and the chiaroscuro, 'e xp re ssio n ist', lighting that pervade this cycle of
films . The fun ction of these devices onl y be comes clear wh en we consider th em in
relation to the empty, private spaces that compose the primary territory of f ilm lloir. "2H
Through the use of wide-angle lenses and low-k ey lighting these spaces are repre­
sented as d eep and deceptive, as spaces in whi ch all sorts of unknown entities may hide .
One must distinguish between the genuine illusion of d epth - which is a matter of
desire, of not knowing so m e th in g and wanting, therefore, to know more - and th e
ersatz representation of d epth - which is sim p ly a mailer of a te chni cal skill in
rendering, of verisimilitude - if on e wants to avoid being misled by th e shadows and
d epth of field that so famously cha racte r ize the noir image. The visua l techniques of
film noir are pla ced in th e service of creating an artificial replication of depth in the image
in order to make up for, to co m p e nsate for, the absence of depth in the narrative sj)(u :es;
that is, these techniques are placed in th e service of a defence against the drive . The
makeshift domain of illusion that th ey create e rects a facad e of nonknowled ge and thus
of depth, as a substitute for and protection against their dangerous, and potentially
lethal lack in the notr universe itself. These techniqu es of deception install a kind of
ersatzs ymboli c as bulwark a gainst its diegetic colla pse. It is onl y be cause this distinction
,
between the te chnical replication or representation of depth and the illusion of depth
that d epends on th e signifier's failure has not been tak en into account in the anal ysis of
these films that the notr universe has be en perceived as essentially deceptive , though it
is, in fact , a world in which nothing ca n lie hidden, everything must come to light. This
is really the dark truth offilm n oir.
On the narrative level till: defence against the drive takes anoth er, but no less genre­
d efining form: that of the femme fatale . Th e femme fatal e is in everyone's estim atio n

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 THE PHENOMENAL NON PHENOMENAL

one of th e most fas cinating elements o f the n oir world . As such she ha s provoked a
great d eal of cr itica l a tte nt io n, esp eciall y from feminists wh o have wanted to see in thi s
powerful femal e figure som e proof that Hollywood's te n d e ncy toward a 'minorization '
o f wom en was not absolu te. These wom en had a kind of strength, a kind of privileg e
and command over the di egetic sp ace that most of their cin ematic siste rs did not. And
yet th e y see med always to be presented fr om th e point of view of th e mal e protagon ists.
Ch r istine Gledhill was abl e to see in their stren gth a so rt of rebellion against th e point
of view that co u ld onl y barely contain th em:

Thus , though the heroines o f him noir, by virtu e o f mal e control of th e voice- over, flash­
back structure , are rarel y acco rd ed the full su bjectivity and full y exp resse d point o f vie w of
psy ch ologically realist fiction . . . their perjormance of th e roles acco rded them ... fore­
grounds th e fact of th eir im age as a n a rt ifice and suggests ano the r place behind the im age
where the woman mi ght be. 29

T he qu asi-B rechtian interpretation of th e women's tenuous habitati on of th eir rol es is

qu estion able, but an impo rt ant perception underlies this interpret ation : the femme
fat ale d oes h ave an initiall y d ependent a n d visibly a r tificial exi stence within this
ni ghtm arish world.
Consider th e sce ne of Neff's second visit to the Dietrichson home, arran ged by
Ph yllis so that h er husband can h ear Neff's sale s pitch. Her husband is not in , of co u rse,
nor is th e maid , thou gh Ph yllis plays it - unconvincingl y - as if sh e had forgotten th at it
is Netti e's day o ff. Sh e has not fo rgotten a t all ; her d eceit is tran sparent to us a nd to
Neff. If the femme fat ale is th e embodiment of d eceit, it is always a d eceit of this ord e r :
tran sp arent, p ainted o n; a d eceit that does not disguise itself. Th eoreti call y, nothing
precludes thi s visible deceit from hidin g another, but in th e world of film noir this
seco nd -o rd e r d eception never takes hold. T he femme fat ale remains a two­
dimensional figure with no hidden sid es; th e deception is only up-front. In othe r words,
although she , too, seems to fun ction , for th e hero this time , as a sort of p roto­
illu sionisti c element ill film noir's nonillusionist field , she usually fails to become a
, proper barrier: to protect him in the wa y real illusi on do es. Rather th an scree n ing
jou issance, sh e hoards it.
For th e femme fat ale also functions in a nothe r strategy of defen ce. Having cho se n
[ouissance, the noir he ro risks its sh atte rin g , annihilatin g effec ts, which threat en his very
status as sub jec t. In order to indemnib himself against these d angers , he cre ates in the
femme fatale a double to whi ch he su r re nde rs th e jouissance he ca n no t himself sus tain.
That is, h e tri es to tak e some distance fr om himself, to initi ate some alt erity in his

193
 SHADES OF NOIR

relation to himself: to split himself, we could say, not as the d esiring su bject between
sense and being, but between kn owledge and jouissance. Givin g up h is right to
enjoyment, the hero co n tracts with the femme fatale that sh e will henceforth command
it from him, as levy.
In Double Indemnity we a re not left sim p ly to surmise the existe n ce of this con tract , we
actually witness its drawing up in the scene in whi ch Mr Dietrich son is tri cked into
signing a document oth e r than the on e he thinks he is signing. T h e document he in fa ct
signs is the contract that binds Neff to th e will o f Ph yllis. Initially e n te re d int o throu gh
an act of the h ero's own voliti on and in o rd er to forestall his ruin (th at is, to impose
restrictions on the drive's satisfactio ns), th is document nevertheless fails to secure th e
hoped-for stability and instead leads Neff to his abs olute d estruction.
The problem stems from th e greediness of the femme fatale. In Double Indemnity as
well as in Detour, Gilda , Kiss M e Deadly, Th e Maltese Falcon (to nam e only those films th at
come immediately to mind), explicit reference is mad e to the femme fatale's greed, her
constant demand for more and more satisfaction. T he more th e hero devotes himsel f
to procuring it for her, the more sh e deli ghts in hoarding it. T he contract thu s binds
the hero to a lethal relation , one that go es from bad to worse. Neffs turning-down o f
his promotion is only th e first step toward his e ven tual abdication of life itself. It is this
progressive instability - which is enabled , but not necessitated by th e contract - that
accounts not only for the regularity of the final, mutually destructive en counter
between hero and femme fat ale, but for the escala tion of violence in the/ifm n air cycle
as a whole. The social co n tract between the n air h ero and th e femme fatale - social
bec ause it attempts to erect some co m m u n ity with in th e privat e sp ace of jouissaf/{:e ­
turns out, in these cases , to be an ineffectual an d ultimately d eadly stand-in for th e
social bond that classical detective fiction had ea rl ier described .
Slavoj Zizek , following up remarks mad e by Lacan in his 'Seminar on "The Purloined
Letter" " has noted that one of the differences between classical d e tec tio n a nd th e hard­
boiled/nair variety is that in th e former the d etective accepts mon e y for his services ,
while in the latter he does not.:\O It is AI Roberts (in Detour ), how ever, who supplies the
, mo st rev ealing reason for the nair protagonist's inabilit y to deal with symb olic cu rren cy.
Reluctant to accept a ten-dollar tip for his piano-playing, he spits out his definition of
money : 'a pie ce of paper crawling with germs'. Wh at happens, I have tri ed to argue, is
thi s: the neutral, dead syste m of sym bo lic community a nd e xch a n ge that had sup­
ported the classical world ha s given way in film nair to a world that cra wls with private
enjoyment and thus rots th e old networks of communication. So meth in g similar
happens to numbers. Where formerl y the cou nt ing of pe ople, statistics, had estab­

194
 THE PHENOMENAL NON PHENOMENAL

lished a n etw ork of relatio ns th at protected - and protected us fr om - private

e njoy men t, film nair allows us to witness th e sp oiling of this network th at takes place
when privacy comes to th e surface . Seen fr om Keyes' s perspective, statistics e nable th e
discovery of new fa cts; fr om Neff's perspective th ey threaten annihilation sin ce, to him ,
th ey represent the e xiste nce o f other people . And in the nair world, thi s is th e greatest
horror.

NOTES

I. Marj ori e Nicol son, 'T he Pr ofess or and t he
Det ective' ( 1929) in Till' A rt of the M )'.Iter)' ,';tOl)
(New York : Sim on and Sch uster, 1946),
p .1 26.
2 . Ian Hackin g, ' Bio p ower an d th e Avalan che of
Printed N u m be rs' , Hu maniti es in Society , vol. 5 ,
nos . 3/4 (S umm e r/Fall 191"\2), p. 21"\ 1.
everyth in g from the tim e of d eath to th e
obj ects found in th e po ckets o f th e co r pse .
T h e variou s ways o f killing on eself are
ab ru p tly cha racte r ized a nd become sym bo ls of
nation al ch aracter . The Fre nch fav or carbon
monoxide a nd drownin g ; the En glish h an g or
sh oot themselves .'

3. Ha cking's work d ocs not ackn o wledge thi s
effect of sta tistics; it is Claude Lefort's
rem arks o n numbers in Democracy lind Political
Th eory (Minneapolis: U n ive rsity o f Minn esota
Pr ess, 1988 , pp . 18-1 9) whi ch di rected m y
a tte nt io n to thi s important e ff ect.
4. Ian H acking , 'H ow Sh ould We Do th e History
of Sta tistics?', I & C. no. 8 (Sprin g 191"\2) , p. 25.
5. For a co nc ise stat ement of this th esis, see
Francois Ewald , ' Norms, Discipline an d the
Law' , Representations , 30 (Sp r ing 1990 ),
pp. 131"\-61.
9 . Ha cking, 'Biopowe r', p. 29 2.
10. Miller,p.162.
II. Francoi s Truffault, Hitchcock (Ne w York:
Simo n a nd Schuste r, 1983 ), p. 25 7.
12. J acqu es La can, B ook 1/: TI", Ego in Freud's
T heory a nd in the Techn iqu e of Psvchoanalssis,
/ 954- 55, ed . jacques-Al ain Miller (New York
a nd London : W. W . Nort o n , 1988 ). pp. 32-3.
13. J acqu es Lacan, 'Seminar on "The Purloined
Letter" ', Yal e Fren ch Studies, no . 4 8 ( J 972) ,
p .54.

(i. Ian H ackin g , 'N ine te e n th -Ce n tury Cracks in
the Co nce pt of Determinism', jou rnal 4 thI'
History of Id eas, Jul y 1 9 8 :~ , p . 4 69 .
7. D. A. Miller, Ti ll' N ovel lind the P olice (Be r keley :
U nive rsity o f Ca lifo rnia Press, 1981"\).
8 . The phrase is H ackin g's; see his 'Making U p
People', in Recon stru cting Indi vidualism
(Stanford : Sta n ford U niversity Pr ess, 1986 ),
pp. 222-36 . Esp eciall y interestin g for this
discu ssion o f Double lrulemuity is th e followin g
pas sage: ' Eve ry fact ab out th e sui cide becom es
fascinatin g. Th e statisticians co m po se forms to
be com p lete d by do ctors and poli ce , re cording
14. J acqu es-Alain Miller, 'Suture (Elem e n ts of the
Logic o f th e Signifier)', Sc ree n , vol. I H, no . 4
(Winter 1877-78) , p. 27 .
15. H elmut Heissenbu uel , 'The Rules o f th e
Ga me o f th e Crime No vel', in Glenn Most e
and William W. Stow e , eds ., The Poetics oj
M urder (San Diego : Ha rcourt, Brace, and
Jo vano vich , 1983 ), p . 88.
16. It is interesting to co m pa re Roman .Jakobson 's
d escription o f th e differential relation . As
j akobson d emonstrates, the relation between
/pal an d /mal is not to be understood as a
sim p le o p po sition, bu t as two sets oj o/JjJos;tiou.l:

195
 SHADES
between Ipal, which is itself an opposition,
pure self-opposition or diacriticalitv, and the
opposition between Ipal and Ima!. In other
words, Ipal appears twice in these sets of
oppositions, as the only element of the first
opposition and as one of the elements of the
second; although the second appearance
retroactively effaces the first. Joel Fineman, in
'The Structure of Allegorical Desire' iUctohrr,
no. 12, Spring 1(80), p. :,9, summarizes
Jakobson's argument thus: '. . IpaJ loses its
original status as mark of pure diacriricalitv
when it is promoted to the level of the
significant signifier within the system as a
whole. This new significant Ip:J is utterly
unrelated to the first simply diacritical Ip,J
that it replaces ... And it is precisely this
occultation of the original Ip:J, now
structurally unspeakable because revalued as
something else entirely, that allows the system
to function as a structure in the first place.'
In other words, the articulation of Ipal and
Im:J can only take place by rendering visible a
certain empty place, a certain structural
impossibility, which is not purely excluded
from the system. A diagram oljakobson's
description would look likr- this:
The shaded area represents the empty place,
the -st ruct ural excess produced hv the
articulation of the two signifiers; in short, the
, logic of suture is discernible in Jakobson as
well as in Frege.
17. Dashiell Hammell, 'Bodies Piled Up', collected
in William Nolan, cd., Blacl: Mns]: lio)'s: Maslen
in the I lard-boiled Schoo! ojDctectiue Fillion
(New York: William Morrow, 19H:,), p. H4.
I H. {acqucs-Alaiu Miller's unpublished 19H7-HH
seminar 'Ce qui fait insigne' provides the most
196
OF NOIR
complete analysis to date of Lacan's
distinction between desire and drive.
19. Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge /0 the
Psvchoanalvttc Establishrneni, cd . joan Copjc«
(New York and London: W. W. Norton,
1990), p. 74. The filmed interview is more
explicit on this point than is the published
text.
20. Pascal Bonitzer, 'The Silences of the Voice', in
Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, A/J/)(lrallls, Id('()log)'
(New York: Columbia University Press , 19H6),
1'.323.
21. Bonitzer, PI" 329, '12H.
22. Roland Bart hcs , 'The Grain of the Voice', in
l magelMusiclTcxt, trans. Stephen Heath (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1(77), p. I H2.
23. Bonitzer, p. 32H.
24. Ibid., p. 329.
25. Bart hcs, p. IH2.
26. Ibid., p. 1HH.
27. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts
ojPs),cllOAnalssis, Seminar XI, cd . .Jacques-Alain
Miller (London: Hogarth Press and the
Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1(77), p. 19~),
2H, The introduction of the notion of two
different levels in 111m noir'< dehning
characteristics - one primary and the other
secondary, a reaction against the first - also
helps to clarify some of the confusion that
surrounds the theory of/11m notr, The earlier
presence of IlOiT-like lighting techniques docs
not invalidate the belief in the spccili«,
discrete phenomenon of/lim IlOir, since their
earlier use was descriptive and not
'restorative', as they are in [ilm notr; that is,
chiaroscuro lig'hting functions differently in
film noir than it did previously. Additionally,
the absence of chiaroscuro lighting' and deep
focus cannot automatically disqualify a him
from inclusion in the [ilm noir catalogue, since
this list of films must obviously include those
that demonstrate lillie or no detence against
the drive as well as those that build an
elaborate defence.
 THE PHENOMENAL NON PHENOMENAL

29. Ch ristine Gledhill , 'K lute: A Co nte m po ra ry 30 . Slavoj Zizek , Looking A wry (Ca mbrid ge, MA:
Film Noir', in E. Ann Kaplan , ed. , Women in October Books/MIT Press, 1991), pp. 60- 6 1.
Film Noir (London , Bri tish Film Institute,
1978), p. 17.

197
 7

'THE THING THAT THINKS': THE

KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE

NOIR SUBJECT

Slauoj Zizek

One of the ways to take note o f th e historical gap th at separates the eigh ties from the
fiftie s is to co m pa re classical film s noirs to the new wave of n oir films produced in the
eigh ties. What I have in mind here a re not prima ril y direct or indirect remakes (the two
DOA s, Against All Odds as a remake of Out of the Past, B ody H eat as a remake o f Double
Indemnity, N o Wa )' Out as a remake of Th e Big Clock et cetera, up to Basi c In stinct as a
distant remake of Vertigo l ) but rather those films which atte m p t to resuscitate the noir
universe by com bin ing it with a nothe r genre, as iffilm noir were today a vampire-like
entity which , in ord e r to be kept alive, n eeded an influx of fresh blood from other
sources . Two cases a re e xe m p la ry here: Alan Parker's Angel H eart (1987), which
combines film noir with the occult-supernatural, a nd Ridl ey Scott's Blade Runner (19 82) ,
whi ch combines it with science fiction.
Film theory has for a lon g time been haunted by the question : is film nair an
independent genre or is it a kind o f an a morphotic distortion affecting different
ge n res? From th e very beginning, film nair was not limited to hard-boiled detective
stor ies: reverberations ofjilm noir motifs are ea sily discernible in comedies (Arsen ic and
Old Lace) , in westerns (Pursued), in politi cal (All the King's Men ) and social dramas

199
 SHADES OF NOIR

(Weekend 's End), e tce te ra . Do we have

here a se condary impact o f som ethin g
that o rigin ally co n stitu te s a ge n re of its
own (the noir cr im e universe), or is th e
crime film o nly o ne of the possible field s
of application o f the nair logic , th at is, is
'nair' a predicate that e n te rtain s towards
th e cr ime universe th e same relationship
as towards com edy or western, a kind o f
logi cal operator introdu cing th e same
Angel Heart (Alan Parker, 1987)
anamorphotic distortion in e ve ry ge n re it
is applied to , so that the fact th at it found its strongest ap p licatio n in th e cr ime film is
ultimately a historical contingen cy? To rai se th es e qu estions is in no way to indulge in
hair-splitting sophistry: m y th esis is that th e 'proper', d et ectivefilm noir as it were arri v es
at its truth - in Hegelese : realizes its notion only by way o f its fusion with a no ther genre,
sp ecificall y science fiction or th e occult.
Wha t do, th en, A ngel lJe art a n d Blade Runner h ave in common ? Both films deal with
m emor y and subve rt ed p erson al identity: th e h ero , th e hard-boiled inv estigator, is sent
on a qu est (in pursuit of a former pop singer suddenl y and mysteriously proclaimed
d ead, in the o ne case, and of a group of repli cants at large in the Los An geles 01'2012 , in
th e oth er) whose final outcome is that he himself was from the ver y beginning
impli cat ed in the obj ect o f his quest. In Angel H UITt, the hero ascertains that the d ead
singer is non e other th an himself (in an occult ritual performed long ago , he
exc ha nged hearts an d so u ls with an ex- soldier who he n ow thinks h e is). In Blade
Runner, he is told that he is himself a repli cant. The outcom e ofthe quest is th erefore in
both cases th e radi cal und ermining of self-identity m asterminded by a mysterious, all­
powerful agency, in the first case th e Devil himself (' Lo u is Cipher'), in the second case
th e T yr ell co r po ra tio n . which succeeds in fabri catin g replicants who remain unaware
of their repli cant st atus , who misperceive th emselves as humans. The world d epicted in
, both films is the world in whi ch corporat e capital h as su cceed ed in p enetrating a nd
d ominating th e very fantasy kernel of our bein g : non e of our features are really 'o u rs' ;
even our m emori es and fantasies are artificiall y planted. It is as if Fr edric J ameson's
thesis - that postmodernism is th e epoch in which ca p ita l fin all y colonizes the last­
resort holdouts against its all-inclu sive logic - were here brou ght to its h yperbolic
co nclusio n. The fu sion o f capital and knowledge brings ab out a new type o f prol et ar­
ian , th e absolu te proletarian, as it were , bereft of the last po ckets of private resistance:

200
 KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

verythin g , Up to th e m ost intimate

mem ories , is planted, so th at wh at
remains is literally th e void o f pu re sub­
stancele ss su bjectivity tsuhstan ziose S ubj ck:
tiuitdt - Marx's definition of th e prol e­
tarian). Ironically, o ne might say th at
Blade Runner is a film abo u t th e e rne r ­
getlCe o f class-c onsciousness.
This truth is co n cea led, h owever, in
one case metaphoricall y, in th e other
m eton ymi cally. In Angel Heart , corporate
ca p ita l is substituted by th e m etaphorical
figure o f th e Devil, whereas in Blade Run ­
ner, a metonym ical impediment p revents
th e film from ca r ry ing out its inh erent
logic. That is to say, th e director's cu t of
Blade Runn er differs in two cr uc ial res­
pects from the initiall y rel eased version :
th ere is no voi ce-ov er and a t th e end
Deckard (Ha r r iso n Ford ) di scovers that
he too is a replicant." Yet e ven in th e
rel eas ed version , a whole series of fea- Blade Runner (Ridley Scott , 1982)
tures point tow ards th e latte r fa ct : th e
accentu ated visual p arallelism between De ckard and Leon Kowalski , a rcpli cant
qu estion ed in th e Tyrell building at the beginnin g of the film; a fte r Deckard proves to
Rachael (Sean Young) that sh e is a repli cant by quot ing her most intim ate ch ild hood
re collections , not shared with a n yo ne else , the camera provid es a brief su rvey o f his
person al m yth (old ch ild hood pi ctures on th e piano, his dream re collection of a
unicorn) , with a dear implication thaI th e y a lso a re fabri cated , not 'tr ue' memories or
dreams, so that when Rachael mo ckingl y asks him if he also underwent the repli cant
test , th e qu estion resounds with ominous und ertones ; the patronizing-cynical attit ud c
of the poli ceman who serves as th e co n ta ct with th e poli ce chi ef clearl y indi cat es hi s
awareness that Deck ard is a replicant (we can safel y surmise that in th e original version ,
h e vicio usly.informs Deckard of it). Th e paradox here is that the subver sive message
hin ges o n the m etaphorical narrative closu re (when , at the beginnin g of th e film ,
De ckard replays the tape of Kowalski's interrogation, he is unaware that a t th e e nd he

201
 SHADES OF NOIR

will himself occupy the same place), whereas in the released version the evasion of the
narrative closure functions as a conformist compromise which cuts off the film 's
subversive edge.
How, then, are we to diagnose the position of the hero at the end of his quest, after
recollection deprives him of his very self-identity? It is here that the gap that separates
classical film noir from the noir of the eighties can be perceived in its purest form.
Today, even the mass media are aware of the extent to which our perception of reality,
including the reality of our personal self-experience, hinges on symbolic fictions.
Suffice it to quote from a recent issue of Time magazine: 'Stories are precious,
indispensable. Everyone must have his history, her narrative. You do not know who
you are until you possess the imaginative version of yourself. You almost do not exist
without it.' Classical films noirs remain within these confines: while they abound with
cases of amnesia - the hero 'does not know who he is', what he did during his bla ckout­
this amnesia is here a deficiency measured against a standard of integration into the
field of intersubjectivity, of symbolic community. Successful recollection means that, by
way of organizing my life experience into a consistent narrative, I exorcize the dark
demons of the past. In the universe of Blade Runner 01' Angel Heart, on the contrary,
recollection designates something incomparably more radical: the total loss of my
symbolic identity: I am forced to assume that I am not what I thought myself to be, but
somebody or something else entirely.
One of the critical commonplaces about classical film nair concerns its philosophical
background in French existentialism . In order to grasp the implications of this shift at
work in the film noir of the eighties, however, one has to reach further back to the
Cartesian-Kantian problematic of the subject qua pure, substanceless, 'I think'.

II

Descartes was the first to introduce a crack in the ontologically consistent universe: the
, contraction of absolute certainty to the punctuality of the 'I think' opens up, for a brief
moment, the hypothesis of an evil genius (le malin genie) who, behind my back,
dominates me and pulls the strings of what 1 experience as reality. He is the prototype
of the scientist-maker who creates an artificial man, from Dr Frankenstein to Tyrell in
Blade Runner. But with his reduction of the cogito to res coguans, Descartes as it were
patched up the wound opened up in reality; it remained for Kant to articulate fully the
inherent paradoxes of self-consciousness. What Kant's 'transcendental turn' renders

202
 KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

manifest is the impossibility of locating the subject within the 'great chain of being' in
which ever y ele me n t has its own place. The subject is in the most radical sense out of
joint - it constitutively lacks a place, whi ch is why Lacan designates it by the mathem $,
the barred S.
In Descartes, this out-of-jointness is still concealed, since his philosophy remains
within th e confines of wh at Foucault, in his The Order oJ Things , baptized as the 'classical
episterne', the epistemological field regulated by the problematic of representations
(ideas in th e subject) , their casu al enchainment, th eir clarity and evidence, the connec­
tion between representation and represented co n ten t, etcetera. After reaching the
point of absolute certainty in his cogito ergo su m, Descartes does not yet conceive it as
correlative to the whole of reality, as the point external to reality, ex empted from it,
which as such delineates its horizon (in the sense of Wittgenstein's well-known
metaphor, in his Tractatus, of the eye whi ch cannot ever be part of th e seen reality), that
is, as th e autonomous agent that spontaneously constitutes the objective world opposed
to it. The Cartesian cogito is a representation which, following the inherent notional
enchainment, leads us to other, superior representations. The subject first ascertains
that, doubt being an index of imperfection, the cogito is a representation belonging to
an inherently deficient being. As such, it entails the representation of a perfect being;
and since it is obvious that a deficient, inferior being cannot be the cause of a superior
being, this perfect being (God) has to exist. The veracious nature of God furthermore
assures th e reliability of our representations of external reality, etcetera. In Descartes's
final vision of the universe, the coguo is therefore one among the representations in an
intricate totality, part of reality and yet not (or, in Hegelese, only 'in itself) correlative to
reality in its entirety.
According to Kant , Descartes falls prey to the 'subreption of the hypostasized
consciousness'; he wrongly concludes that , in the empty 'I think' that accompanies
every representation of an object, we get hold of a positive phenomenal entity, res
cogttans (a 'small piece of th e world ', as Husserl would have put it) which thinks and is
transparent to itself in its capacity of thinking, that is, that self-consciousness renders
, self-present and self-transparent the 'thing' in me that thinks. What is lost thereby is the
(topological) discord between the form' I think' and the substance that thinks. Kant
here logically precedes Descartes: he brings to the light of day a kind of 'vanishing
mediator', a moment that has to disappear if the Cartesian res cogitans is to emerge. This
Kantian distinction between th e analytical proposition on the identity of the logical
subject of thought, contained in 'I think', and the synthetical proposition on the
identity of a person qua thinking thing-substance , is revived by Lacan in the guise of

203
 SHADES OF NOIR

the distin ction between the subject o f the enun ciation and the subject o f the statement.
The Lacanian subject is also an empty, nonsubstantial, logical variable (not a fun ction) ,
whereas 'pe rso n' co ns ists of the fantasmati c 's tu ff that fills out its void.
The act of 'I think' is transphenomenal , it is not an object of inner experience or
intuition , yet for all that it is not a noumenal Thing-in-itself, but rath er the void o f its
lack . It is not sufficient to say ab out the I of pure apperception that 'of it, apart from
them [th e thoughts which are its predicates,] we ca n not have an y concep t whatsoever'
(A 346 3 ) ; one ha s to ad d that this lack o] intuited content is constitut ive of the 1 - the
inaccessibility to the 1 or its own 'kernel of being' makes it an 1.1 T h is gap that separates the
empirical I's self-experience from the I of transcendental apperception coincides with
the distinction between existen ce qua experiential reality and exi stence qua logical
construction (that is, existence in th e mathematical sen se - 'the re exists an X which ... ').
The status of Kant 's I of transcendental a pp e rcep tio n is that o f a necessm)' a nd
simultaneously imp ossible logical constru ction (impossibl e in the precise sense that its
notion ca n ne ver be filled out with intuited ex pe r ie ntial reality); in shor t, it ha s the
status o f the La canian real - Descartes's e r ro r was precisely to co n fuse experiential
reality a nd logical construction qua real-impossible. "
Wh en , consequently , Kant remarks that, 'in the synthetic original unity of appercep­
tion , I am co nscio us o f m yself, not as I appear to m yself, nor as I am in m yself but only
that I am ' (B 157) , one mu st grasp the fundam ental paradox inherent in this
formulation. I encounter being devoid o f all determinations-of-thought at th e very
mom ent when, by way of the utmost abstraction, I confine myself to the empty form of
thought that accompanies all my representations. In other words, the empty form of
thought co incid es with being, whi ch lacks an y formal d et ermination-of-thou ght. Here,
however, where Kant seems closest to Descartes, the distance th at se p ara tes them is
infinite. In Kant, thi s coinciden ce of thou ght and bein g in the act of sel f-co nscio usness
in no way implies an access to m yself qua thinking substance:

Through this I or he 01' it (th e thing) that thinks, nothing further is represented tha n a
,
tran scendental subj ect of the th oughts = X. It is known o nly through th e thoughts which
are its predicates, and of it, ap art from th em , we cannot have any con cept whatsoever. (A
34 6)

In short: there is no answer possible to the question 'How is th e Thing-that-thinks

structured?' The paradox of self-co nsciousness is that it is possible only against the
background of its own impossibilit y. I am conscious o f m yself only in so far as I am out

204
 KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

of reach to myself qua the real kernel of my being ('lor he or it (the thing) that thinks').
I cannot acquire co nscio usness of myself in my capacity as the Thing-that-thinks. 'We
can see, now , how the very notion of self-consciousness implies the subject's self­
decentrernent, far more radical than th e opposition between subj ect and object. This is
what Kant's theory of m etaph ysics is ultimatel y about : metaph ysics endeavours to he al
the wound of the ' p rim o rd ial repression ' (th e inaccessibility of the Thing-that-thinks)
by allocating to th e subject a place in the 'great chain of being' . What metaph ysics fails
to take notice of is the price to be paid for this 'cu re' : th e loss of the very capacity it
wanted to account for, namely , human freedom. Kant himself commits an error when,
in his Critique oj' Practical R eason , he conceives freedom (the postulate of practical
reason) as a noumenal Thing. What is thereby obfuscated is his fundamental insight
according to which I retain m y ca pacity as a spontaneous-autonomous agent precisel y
and only in so far as I am not accessible to myself as a Thing.
On closer inspection, in what do the inconsistencies which e m e rge when the I of pure
apperception is id entifi ed with the noumenal self (the "Th in g-th a t-th in ks' ) consist? As
Henry Allison put it in his perspicacious resume of Strawson's critique of Kant," in the
case of this identification , the phenom enal I (the empirical subject) has to be con ceived
simultaneously as something that (in th e guise of an object of experience) appears to the
noumenal subject (that is, ever ything that appears as part of the co nstitu ted reality
appears to the transcendental subject, which is here conceived as identical to the
noumenal subject) and as the appearan ce oj'the noum enal subject (that is, the empirical
subj ect is, as is the case wit h every intuited reality, a phenomenal appearance of some
nourn enal entity, in this case of the noumenal subject). This doubling, however, is a
nonsensical, self-cancelling short circuit : if the noumenal subject appears to usel], the
distance that separates appearance from noumena collapses. In other words, the
agen cy thai perceives something as an appearance cannot itself be an appearance - in
whi ch case, we would lind ourselves in the nonsensical vicious circle described by
Alphonse Allais wh ere two appearances mutually r ecognize th emselves as appear­
ances . (Raoul and Margu erite make an appointment at a masked ball . In a secret
corn er, they both take oil their masks and utt er a cry of surprise - Raoul because his
partner is not Marguerite, after all ; Marguerit e because her partner does not turn out
to be Raoul .) The on I, way out of this impasse is to maintain the distinction between the
101 pure apperception .u id the Thing-that-thinks: what I experien ce , what is given to
! ll " phl '1I01l11'lI;l1h ill 111\' int uitiou. the content of my person (the object of empirical

!l " , 11, ll, ,~ v) is. 01 (OlllSe , ; IS wii h ( '\'IT\ phenomenon, the appearing of a Thing (ill this
'1 ' Il' I "hi ll\' -il, ;'i -!i l illks l. hut tlu-. rhi/l .~ ra n nut hI' th« I o(jJll1'l' app erception, the
 SHADES OF NOIR

transcendental su bject to whi ch th e Thing-th at-thinks appears in th e g UIse o f th e

em p ir ica l I.
With thi s cru cial point Il1 mind , we ca n give a precise acco u nt o f th e difference
betw een the in accessibil ity of th e noumenal sel f and th at of any o the r obj ect of
perception . Wh en Kant says abo u t th e transcendental subj ect that it 'is known onl y
throu gh th e th oughts whi ch a re its predi cates, and of it , apart fr om them , we ca n no t
have a n y co nce p t wh atsoever' (A 346), d oes not th e same hold also for the table in front
o f me , for exa m p le? Th is tabl e is also known onl y through the thoughts which a re its
predicates, but apart fr om them , we ca n no t h ave any co nce p t of it whatsoev er.
However, because of the above-described self-referential doublin g of the ap pea r ing in
the case of the I , 'I think' mu st remain empty also on the phen omenal lev el - the I's
apperception is by d efinition d evoid of any intuitional co n te n t, it is an e m p ty represen­
tation whi ch truncates, ca rves a hole into th e field o f repres entations . To pu t it in a
co nc ise way: Kant is compelled to d efine the I of transcend ental apperception as
neith er phenomenal nor noumenal be cause o f th e paradox of asuo-ai'[ectum: if I were
give n to m yself ph enomenall y, as a n obj ect of expe r ie nce , I would simultaneously have
to be given to myself noumen ally.
Another wa y to arri ve a t th e same re sult is via the duality of dis cursive and intuitive
intellect: on account of hi s finitud e, the subj ect disposes only of discursive intellect. He
is affected by T h in gs-in- th e ms el ves, and he makes use of the dis cursive intell ect (the
network of formal transcend ental ca tego r ies) to stru cture the multitude of formless
affects into obj ective reality; this structuring is his own 'sp o nt a ne o us', a u to no m o us act.
If th e subject were to possess intuitive intell ect , th e ab yss th at se p a r ate s intellect from
intuition would be filled out a nd the subject would gain access to things as they are in
themselves . However, 'while I can coherently, if vacuously, claim tha t if I had an
intuitive instead of a discursive intellect, I could know other things (obj ects) as they are in
themselves I cannot similarly claim that I could know mys elf as object in m y capacit y as
a spontaneou s, thinking su bjec t'. " Wh y not? If I were to possess an intuiti on of my self
qua Thin g-that-thinks, that is, if I were to have access to my nournenal self, I would
,
theTeby lose the very fe atu re whi ch mak es me an I oUmre apperception.- I would cease to be the
sp o nt a neous transcend ental agent that co ns titu tes reality. "

III
Lacan 's reformulation of Des cartes's cogito , 'I am not where I think', is to be con ceiv ed
against the ba ckground of this ga p between th e void of pure apperception and the

206
 KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

noumenal self qua Thing-that-thinks. How, precisely, are we to understand this ' I am
not wh ere I think'? Let us recall a symptomatic act described in Freud 's The Psychopath­
ology oj EVe1)lday Life:

During a sessio n a young married woman mentioned by way of asso ciation that she had
been cutting her nails the d a y before and 'had cut into the flesh whil e sh e was trying to
remove the soft cuticle at the bottom of the nail'. This is of so little interest that we ask
ourselves in surprise why it was recall ed and mentioned at all, and we begin to suspect that
what we are dealing with is a symptomatic act. And in fact it turned out that the hnger
whi ch was the victim of her small act o f clumsiness was the ring-finger, the one on which a
wedding ring is worn. What is more , it was her wedding anniversary; and in the light of this
the injury to th e soft cu ticle takes on a very definite meaning, which can easily be guessed.
At the same tim e, too , she related a dream which allud ed to her husband's clumsiness and
her anaesthesia as a wife. But why was it th e ring-hnger on her leji hand whi ch she injured,
whereas a wedding ring is worn [in her country) on the right hand ? Her husband is a
lawyer, a 'doctor of law' ['Dohtor del' R echte', literally 'doctor of right(s)'], and as a girl her
affections belonged in secret to a physician Uokingly ca lled 'Doktor del' Linke' ['doctor of the
left'). A 'left-handed marriage', too, has a definite meaning."

A trifling slip, a tiny cut on the ring-finger, ca n well condense an entire chain of
articulated reasoning which con cerns the subject'S most intimate fate: it bears witness to
the knowledge that her marriage is a failure, to the regret at not choosing her true love,
the 'doctor of the left'. This tiny bloodstain is the place where her unconscious thought
dwells , and what she is unable to do is to recognize herself in it, to say 'I am there', at th e
place where this thought is articulated. If she is to retain the consistency of her self­
identity, the stain has to remain a blot that means nothing to her. Or, as Lacan would
have put it, there is no 1 without the stain: 'I am ' only in so far as I am not where I think ,
that is to say, only in so far as the picture I am looking at contains a stain that co nde nses
the decentred thought - only in so far as this stain remains a stain, that is, in so far as I
do not recognize myself in it, in so far as I am not there , in it. It is for that reason that
I
Lacan returns again and again to the notion of anamorphosis: I perceive 'normal'
reality only in so far as the point at which 'it thinks' fails to become visible and remains
simply a formless stain.
The theoretical temptation to be avoided h ere, of course, is that of identifying too
hastily this stain with the object a: a is not th e stain itself but rather the gaze in th e
precise sense of the point of view from which the stain can be perceived in its 'true
meaning', the point from which , instead of the anamorphotic distortion, it would be

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 SHADES OF NOIR

po ssible to dis cern its true con to u rs. For that reason , the a nalyst occupies the place o f
the object a: h e is supposed to know - to know what ? The true meaning of the stain,
precisely . Consequentl y, Lacan is quite justified in claiming that in paranoia object a
'becomes visible': in the person of th e persecutor, the object qua ga ze assumes the
palpable, e m p ir ical existe nc e of an agency which 'se es into me' , is able to read m y
thoughts.
In this se nse, a stands for the point of self-co nscious ness: if I were abl e to occupy this
point, it would be possible for me to abolish th e stain , to say that 'I am where I think'. It
is here that th e subversive potential of the La canian cr itiq ue of self- consciousness qua
self-transparency be comes visible: self-consciousness as such is literally decentreil ; the slip ­
th e stain - bears witn ess to the existence of a certain d ecentred, external place in whi ch I
do arrive at self-consciousness (F reud 's patient articulates the truth about herself, her
failed marriage, at a place that remains exte rn al to her sen se of se lf-identity). Therein
consists the scandal of ps ychoanal ysis, unbearable for philosoph y: wh at is at stake in
the Lacanian cr itique of self-consciousness is not th e commonplace accordin g to whi ch
the subject is never full y transparent to itself, ca n never arrive at full awareness of what
is going on in its psyche (that is, full self-consciousness is not possible sin ce there is
always something that eludes th e grasp of m y co nscious ego) , but th e lar more
p aradoxical th esis that this decentred hard kernel that eludes my grasp is ultimately
self-consciousness itself. As to its sta tus, self-consciousness is an exter nal obj ect out of
my reach. 10
We can see , now, wh y self-consciousness is the very opposite of th e subject's self­
transparency: 1 am aware of my self only in so far as there is, outside of me, a pla ce in
which the truth about me is articulated . What is not possible is for th ese two places to
coincide : the stain is not an unreHect ed remaind er, something one co uld abolish via
self-reflection , via a deeper insight into one's psychic life, sin ce it is th e very produ ct of
my self-awareness, its obj ective co rrelative . This is what Lacan has in mind when he
writes down sym p to m as 'sinthorne': symptom qua ciphered message waits to be
dissolved by way of its interpretation, whereas sinthome is a stain correlative to the very
, (non) being of the subject. In order to exe m p lify this distinction , suffi ce it to recall the
two versions of Cap e Fear , J. Lee Thompson's o riginal from the ea rly 1960s a nd Martin
Scorsese's remake of 1991. Even those reviews that were repelled by Scorsese's
patronizingl y sel f-co nscio us attitude towards the o r igina l noted that Scorsese accom­
plished a crucial shift. In the original version, the ex- convict (Robert Mitchum) is
simpl y a figure of evil invading from outside th e idylli c all-American family a nd
derailing its daily routine, wh ereas in Scorsese's remake, th e ex- convict (played by

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 KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

Robert d e Niro) materiali zes , gives bod y to traumas a nd antagorustrc tensions that
alread y glow in the very heart of th e famil y: th e wife's sex ual dis satisfacti on , the
daughter's awaken ed femininity and se nse of ind ependence . . . In short, Scorsese's
version h as bu ilt into it an int erpretation homologou s to that reading of Hitchcock's
Birds that co nce ives of the birds' ferocious attacks as th e materialization o f th e maternal
superego, o f the disturbance that dw ells in family life . Althou gh such a reading ma y
appear 'deepe r' than the alleged ly 'su pe rficial' redu ction of the force of evil to an
external threat, what ge ts lost is precisel y th e remainder o f an outside . This ou tsid e
cannot be reduced to a secondary e ffec t of inherent intersubjective tension s, since its
exclusion is constitutive: a n object which always adds itself to the intersubjective
network, as a kind o f ' fellow-travelle r' o f every intersubjective com m u n ity. Are not the
birds in Hitchcock's films, notwithstanding th eir intersubjectiv e sta tus , at th eir most
radical.just su ch an overblown stain on a finger ? When , upon crossing the bay for the
first time, Melanie (T ip p i H edren) is attack ed by a gull which strikes her head, she fe els
her he ad with her glov ed hand, looks at h er fing ers and perceives on th e tip o f her
forefinger a small red bloodstain . All th e birds that later attack th e town co u ld be said to
arise out of this tiny stain, just as in North by Northwest th e plane that attacks Ca ry Grant
on the e m p ty co rn field is first perceiv ed as a tiny, barely visible sp ot on th e horizon.
This original d oubl ing of sel f-co nscio us n ess provid es th e found ati on of 'int ersubj ect­
ivity': if, as the Hegelian commonplace go es , self-consciousness is sel f-co nscio usnes s
only throu gh the mediation of a no the r sel f-consciousn ess , th en m y self-awareness ­
precisely in so far as thi s self-awaren ess is not th e same as self-transparency - ca uses the
e me rge nce of a decentred 'it thinks '. What is lost in the translation of th e split between
'1 am' and 'it thinks ' into the standard motif of intersubj ectivity is th e radical asymmetry
of the two terms - the 'oth e r ' is originall y an object, an op aqu e stain that hinders my self­
transparency, that is, that whi ch gives body to what has to be excluded if I am to
emerge . In other word s, th e ultimate paradox of th e dialectics of self-consciousness is
that it inv erts the standard doxa according to whi ch 'consciousness' relates to a
heterogeneous, exte r na l object , wh erea s self-consciousness abolishe s this d ecentring.
, The object is str icto sensu the correlate o! selFcon w:iouslIess, there is no object prior to self­
consciousness, sinc e th e obj ect originally em erges as that opaqu e kernel that has to be
excluded if I am to ga in awareness of m yself. Or, to put it in Lacanian terms , the
original intersubjective cor rela te of the subject - of the barred $- is not an othe r $, but
S, the o paq ue, full Other pos sessing what th e subject constitutively lacks (being,
knowledge) . In this precise sense th e Other - th e other human being - originally is th e
impenetrable, subst antial Thing.
 SHADES OF NOIR

There is a radical co nclus io n to be drawn from th is: intersubjectivity senso strictu

becomes possible, thinkable, onl y with Kant, with th e notion of subject qua $, the empty
form of apperception that needs S as the co rrela tive o f its non-being . What we have
prior to the Kantian subject is not intersubjecti vity proper, but a community of
individu als who sha re a co m mo n universal-substantial ground and participate in it. It
is only with Kant, with his notion of th e subject as $, as the e m p ty form of self­
apperception, as an entity that constitutively 'does not kn ow what it is', that the Other
Subject is needed to order for me to d efine m y own identity. Wh at th e Other thinks I
am is in scribed into the ver y he art of my o wn most intimate self-identity. Th e
ambiguity that stick s to th e Lacanian notion of th e big Other - another su bj ect in its
impenetrable opacity, yet at the same time the very sym bolic structure, th e neutral field
in which I encounter other subjects - is th erefore far from being the result of a simple
confusion: it gives expression to a d eep str uc tu ral necessity. Precis ely in so far as I a m $,
I cannot conceive of myself as participating in so me co m mo n substan ce, that is to sa y,
this substance n ecessarily opposes itself to me in the guise of the Other Subject.

IV

The irredu cible gap between the I of apperception a nd th e noum enal Thing-that­
thinks opens up th e po ssibility of a 'p a ra noiac' attitude according to which noumenally
- qua Thing-that-thinks - I am an artefact, a plaything in the h ands of an unknown
Maker. This accounts for a cru cial co m p o ne n t of the film noir renewal of the eigh ties: a
new type of father which cha racte r izes 'post-industrial', corporate lat e capitalism , a
father epitomized by T yrell in Blade Runnel", a lone figure of un cann y, eth ereal, fr ail
materiality, devoid of a sexual partner. This fath er clearly materializes the Cartesian
evil genius : he is a father who exerts domination ove r me not at th e level o f my
symbolic identit.y, but at th e level of what I a m qua T h in g-tha t-th in ks. II In other words ,
he is a father who is not an ymore Sf, a master-signifier whose Name guarantees my
symbolic identity, m y place in the texture of symbolic tradition, but S\!, Knowledge
which created me as it.s artefact - the moment father changes his status from S 1 to S2,
from empty master-signifier to Knowledge, I, the son, become a monster. I\! The
hysterical questions monsters address to their Makers, from Dr Frankenstein's cr ea­
ture to the Rutger Hauer cha racte r in Blade Runner, ultimately vary one an d th e same
motif: 'Why did you screw me up? Why did you create me the way you did, in complete,

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 KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

crippled?' Or, to quote the lines from Milton 's Paradise Lost that served as the motto to
the first edition of Frankenstein:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man ? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me ?l:l

This paradox of the 'subject who knows he is a replicant' renders clear what the 'non­
substantial status of the subj ect' amounts to: with regard to every substantial, positive
content of my being, I 'am' nothing but a replicant, that is, the difference that makes
me 'human' and not a replicant is to be discerned nowhere in 'reality'. Therein consists
the implicit philosophical lesson of Blade Runner attested to by numerous allusions to
the Cartesian cogito (as wh en the replicant characte r pla yed by Darryl Hannah
ironically points out '1 think, therefore I am') : where is the cogito, the place of my self­
consciousness, when everything that I actually am is an artefact: not only my body, my
eyes, but even my most intimate memories and fantasies? It is here that we again
encounter the Lacanian distin ction between the subject of enunciation and the subject
of the enunciated: everything that 1 positively am, every enunciated content 1 can point
at and say 'that's me', is not T - I am only the void that remains, the empty distance
towards every co n te n t.
Blade Runner thus gives a double twist to the commonsense distinction between
human and android. Man is a replicant who does not know it. Yet if this were all, the
film would involve a simplistic reductionist notion that our self-experience qua free
'human' agents is an illusion founded upon our ignorance of the causal nexus that
regulates our lives. For that reason, on e should supplement the former statement: it is
only when, at the level of the enunciated content, I assume my replicant status, that, at
the level of enunciation , 1 be come a truly human subject. '1 am a replicant' is the
statement of the subject in its purest - the same as in Althusser's theory of ideology
where the statement 'I am in ideology' is the only way for me to truly avoid the vicious
circle of ideology (or the Spinozian version of it: the awareness that nothing can ever
escape the grasp of necessity is all that allows us to be truly free) . In short, the implicit
thesis of Blad e Runner is that replicants are pure subjects precisely in so far as they
experience the fact that every positive, substantial content, inclusive of the most
intimate fantasies, is not 'their own' but already implanted. In this precise sense, the
subject is by definition nostalgic, a subject of loss. Let us recall how, in Blade Runner,
Rachael silently starts to cry when Deckard proves to her that she is a replicant. The
silent grief over the loss of her 'humanity', the infinite longing to be or to become

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 SHADES OF NOIR

human aga in althou gh she kn ow s th is will never happen ; or (the reverse o f this) th e
eternall y gn awin g d oubt abo u t wh eth er [am trul y human orjust an android - these are
the very undecided, int ermediate sta te s that mak e me hurnan. l'
What is o f crucial importance here is that we d o not confuse this radical 'd ecentring'
that ch a racte r izes th e r eplicants a m i the decentring of the subj ect of the sig n ifie r with
regard to th e big Other, the sym bo lic order. It is, of course, possible to read Blad e
Runner as a film about th e process of sub jectiviza tio n of the replicants: notwithstanding
the fa ct that their most intim at e memories a re implanted , not 'tr ue ', replicants
subjectivi ze themselv es by way of co m bin in g th ese memori es into an individual myth, a
narrative that allows th em to constru ct their pla ce in the sym bolic universe. Further­
more, are not our, 'human', memories also 'implanted ' in th e se nse that we all borrow
the elem ents of our individual myths from th e treasury of th e big Other? Are we not ,
prior to o u r speakin g , spoken by th e discourse o f the Other? As to th e truth of our
memori es, does not, acc o rd ing to Lacan , truth hav e the stru cture of a fiction : even if its
ingredients are inv ent ed or implanted , not 'reall y ours', what is 'o u rs' is th e unique wa y
we subjectivize th em , the way we integrate th em into our symbolic universe. In thi s
perspective , the les son of [Hade Runner is th at manipulation is ultimately doomed to
fail; eve n if Tyrell artifi cially impl ants eve ry e le me n t of our m emory, what he is not able
to foresee is the wa y replicants will organize th ese elemen ts into a m ythical narrative
which will then give rise to the h ysterical qu estion . 1:-) What Lacan has in mind with wgito
how ever, is the exact o pposite of this : the 'subj ect' qua $ emerges not via subj ectivizatio n­
narrativization (that is, the construction of th e 'individual myth' from th e decentrecl
pi eces o r tradition ), but ul the li I'J )' uunn ent when the indiaidualloses its support in th e network 0/
tradition - the subj ect coincides with the void that remains aft er th e framework o f
-ymboli c memory is suspended.
Th e e m e r ge nce o r the coguo thus undermin es the subj ect'S ernbedd edness in th e
symbolic tradition by opening up a n irredu cibl e gap betw een the horizon of meaning ,
o {' narrative tradition , and an impossible kn owl edge th e po ssession of whi ch would
enabl e me to gain access to th e T h in g I am in th e Real , be yond all na rrativization , that
is, symbolization/historization. A full recoll ection ('total recall ') would therefore
s
amount to filling out the void th at co n stitu tes me qua subj ect of self- consciousness , it
would a mo u n t to id entifying-recognizing m yself as 'h e/it , the thing , th at thinks'. In
Lacanian terms, 'to ta l recall' would amount to 'knowledge in the Rear.
Repli cants know th eir life sp an is limited to fo u r years: this certainty whi ch saps th e
openn ess of their 'be in g-to wa rd s-d ea th ' be ars witness to th e fact that th ey have arriv ed
at th e impossible point of know in g how th ey a re structured qua 'thin g-machin e th at

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 KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

thinks' . For that reason , replicants are ultimatel y th e impossible fantasy-formation of

us, human mortals: the fantasy of a being conscious of itself qua Thing, of a being that
does not have to pay for its access to self-consciousness with $, with the loss of its
substantial support. A crack in this fantasy can therefore enable us to approach the
question of 'art ificial intelligence': do computers think?
What is crucial in the debates on artificial intelligence is that an inversion has tak en
place whi ch is the fat e of eve ry suc cessful metaphor: one first tries to simulate human
thought with the computer, bringing th e model as close as possible to the human
'original', until at a certain point matters reverse and the question emerges: what ilthis
'model' is alr eady a model of the 'original' itself; what if human intelligence itself operates
like a computer, is 'programmed', etcetera? (Th erein co nsists also the intriguing
implication of computer-generated virtual reality: what if our 'tr ue' reality itself has to
be virtualized , con ceived as an artefactP) The computer raises in pure form the
question of semblance, of a dis course that would not be that of a semblance: it is clear
that the co m p u ter in some sense only 'simulates' thought; yet how does the total
simulation of thought differ from 'real' thought? No wonder, then , that the spectre of
'artificial intelligence' appears as an entity that is simultaneously prohibited and
considered impossible . One asserts that it is not possible for a machine to think, at the
same time as one prohibits research in this direction on the grounds that it is
dangerous, ethically dubious , et cetera.
And th e reason the computer 'does not think' holds precisely to this logi c of the
reversal of the metaphor where, instead of the computer as th e model for the human
brain, we conceive the brain itself as a 'computer made of flesh and blood', where,
instead of defining a robot as an artificial mall , we conceive man himself as a 'natural
robot'. This reversal could be further exemplified by an example from the domain of
sexuality. One usually conceives of masturbation as an 'imaginary sexual act', that is, an
act where the bodily contact with a partner is only imagined. Is it not possible to reverse
the terms and to conceive the 'proper' sexual act, the act with an 'actual' partner, as a
kind of 'm asturbation with a real (instead of onl y imagined) partner'? The whole point
of Lacan's insistence on the 'impossibility of the sexual relation' is that this, precisely, is
what the 'actual' sexual act is: man's partner is never woman in the real kernel of her
being, but woman qua a, reduced to the fantasy object (let usjust recall his definition of
the phallic enj o yme n t as essentially masturbatory)!
It is against this background that we can provide a definition - one of the possible
definitions - of the Lacanian real: real designates th e very remainder that resists this

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 SHADES OF NO IR

re ve rsal (of the comp u te r as mod el of th e huma n brain into the brain itse lfas flesh- a nd ­
blood compu ter ; o f masturbat ion as imaginary sexua l act into th e actual sexual act as
masturbati on with a real pa rtn e r ). T he real is th a t X o n accou n t of wh ich this squarin g
of th e circle is ul tim at ely d oo med to fail . This reversal re lies on a kind of realizati on o f
th e metaph o r: what a t first a ppears as a me re met a phor, a p ale imit at ion , o f tru e reali ty
(the co m p uter as a metapho r for the bra in , e tcetera), beco mes the origina l paradi gm
imitated by flesh -and-blood rea lity (brains fo llow in an always impe r fect way the
functionin g of the computer, etce te ra). What we exper ie nce as 'reality' is constituted by
suc h a reversal : as Lacan pu ts it, 're ality' is always fra med by a fa n tasy, that is, for
so meth ing real to be ex pe r ienced as part of 'reality', it must fit the preordain ed
coo rdi na tes of o u r fantasy space (a sex ual act th e coo rd inates of o ur im agined fan tasy
scr ip ts, a brai n th e fun ctionin g of a co m p uter, e tcetera) . In thi s way, we ca n p ropose a
second d efiniti o n of the real : a surp lus, a hard ke rn el , that resists me ta p ho rization .
Let us recall how, apropos of Al ien 3, some reviewers quoted a se ries o f features (the
action takes place in a clos ed ma le com m u nity whe re even Ripl ey has to shave her h ead
in orde r to become part o f it; hum an s are utterl y de fe n cele ss against th e threat of th e
'a lie n', e tce te ra) as an a rg u men t fo r conce iving th e 'alie n ' as a met aph or for A IDS .
Wh at on e has to ad d, fr om the Lacanian persp ective , is tha t all th e talk abo u t th e 'a lien',
the monste r, as a metaphor for A I DS fa lls sh o rt of the cr uc ial fac t tha t A IDS itself owes
its tremend ou s impact not to its raw reality as a n illness, to its immediate physical
impact, however horrifyin g it may be, but to th e extraordin a ry libidinal e nergy
in vested in it (A I DS is perceived as irresistible , it str ikes all o f a sudden , as if fro m
no where, it seems to fit p e r fectly th e role of a punishment fro m God for our
promiscu ou s way o f life) - ill sho rt, A IDS occ upies a ce rta in preo rd ain ed place in our
id eological fa n tasy space, a nd th e monstrou s 'a lie n' ultimatel y j ust mat erializes, gives
bod y to, th is fantasy dimension which from th e very beginning was at work in th e A IDS
phenomen on.

v
My poin t is thus a very elementa ry one: tru e , the co m p u ter-ge ne rated 'vir tu al reali ty' is
a semblan ce , it does foreclose th e real; bu t wh at we experien ce as the 'true , hard ,
exte r nal reality' is based upon exactly th e same excl us ion . The ult imat e lesson of virtual
reality is the virt ua liza tio n of o ur 'tr ue' rea lity: by th e mi rage of virt ua l real ity, 'true'
re alit y itself is posited as a se m bla nce o f itsel f, as a pu re sym bo lic ed ifice. T he fac t tha t 'a

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 KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

computer doesn 't think' means that th e price for our access to 'reality' is that something
must remain unthought .
To make this point clear, let us turn to Fritz Lang's noir western Rancho Notorious
(1950), which begins wh ere a Hollywood story usually ends: with the passionate kiss of
a couple awaiting their marriage : immediately thereupon, brutal bandits rape and kill
th e bride, and th e desperate bridegroom (played by Arthur Kennedy) commits himself
to an in exorable revenge . His only clue as to the identity of the bandits is th e word
'ch u ck-a-luck', a meaningless signifying fragment. After a long search, he unearths its
secret: 'Chuck-a-luck' d esignates a mysterious place whose very name it is d angerous to
pronounce in public, a ranch in a hidd en valley beyond a narrow mountain pass, where
Marlene Dietrich, an aged saloon singer, former femme fat ale, reigns, offering refuge
to robbers for a percentage of their booty. Wherein consists the irresistible charm of
this film? U nd o ubte d ly in the fa ct that, beneath the usual western plot, it stages another
mythical narrative, the one articulated in its pure form in a series of adventure novels
and films whose action is usually set in Africa (King Solomon' s Min es, She, Tarzan) : they
narrate th e story of an expedition into the very heart of the dark continent where white
man has never set foot (the voyagers are lured into this risky trip by some incompre­
hensible or ambiguous signifying fragment: a message in a bottle, a fragment of
burned paper or the confused babbling of some madman hinting that be yond a certain
frontier, wonderful and/or horrible things are taking place). On the way, the expedi­
tion is confronted by div erse dangers, it is threatened by combative aborigines who at
th e same time strive desperately to make the foreigners understand that they should
not trespass across a certain frontier (river, mountain pass, abyss), since beyond it there
is a damned pla ce from which nobod y has yet returned . After a series of ad ve n tu r es,
the expedition goes beyond this frontier and finds itself in the Other Place, in the space
of pure fantasy: a mighty black kingdom (King Solomon's Mines) , the realm ofa beautiful
and mysterious queen (Sh e), the domain where man lives in full harmony with nature
and speaks with animals (Tarzan). Another mythical landscape of this kind was of
course Tibet: the Tibetan theocracy served as a model for the most famous image of
the idyllic world of wisdom and balance, Shangri-la (in Lost !lorizon) , which can be
reached only through a narrow mountain passage ; nobody is allowed to return from it,
and the one person who does escape pays for his su ccess by madness, so that nobody
believes him when he prattles on about the p eaceful country ruled by wise monks .!"
The m ysterious 'Chuck-a-luck' from Rancho Notorious is the same forbidden place : it is
by no means accid ental that all the cru cial confrontations in the film take place at the
narrow mountain pass that marks the fronti er separating everyday reality from the

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 S HADES O F NO lA

valley whe re 's he' re igns - in o ther words , at th e very place of passage between reality
an d th e fa n tasy 's 'o the r place'.17
What is cr ucia l he re is th e strict form al homology between all these sto ries: in a ll
cases , the stru cture is th at of a Mobius str ip - if we p rogress fa r e no ug h o n th e side o f
r eali ty, we sudd enl y find ourselves o n its reverse, in the dom ai n o f pure fant asy.!" Let
us p ursue this lin e o f associa tions: d o we no t e nco u n te r th e sa me inversio n in th e
d evelo pm en t o f a grea t numbe r of a rti sts, from Sha kes pe a re to Mozart , wh e re th e
grad ua l d escent int o d esp air all of a sud de n , whe n it reac hes its nadir, cha nges int o a
kin d o f hea venl y b liss? Afte r a se ries o f tra ged ies wh ich m a rk the lo west poin t o f hi s
d esp air (Hamlet, K in g Lear, et ce tera), th e tone of Sha kespea re's p lays une xpectedly
cha nges, we e nte r th e realm o f a fairy tal e ha rm ony where life is govern ed by a
ben evolent Fat e wh ich brin gs a ll co n flicts to a h appy conclusio n (T he Winter's Ta le,
Cymbeline, e tcetera) . Afte r Don Gi ova nni, thi s ultim a te monument to th e impossibility of
th e se xua l relation ship , to th e a ntagon ism of the re latio n be tween sexes, Mozart
co m po sed Th e lvla g ic Flute, a hymn to the harmon ious couple of man a nd woman (note
th e p aradox of how th e criticism jnw edes th e pane gyricl).
T he horrifyin g , leth al and at th e sa me tim e fascin ating bord erl in e that we approach
wh e n th e reversal into bliss is im m ine n t is wha t Laca n , a p ro pos of So p ho cles' Antigone ,
a ttem pts to indica te by me an s o f th e G ree k wo rd ate. I!1 T here is a fund am e nt al
am bigu ity to this term : ate simul ta neously d en ot es a h orrifyin g limit that can ne ve r be
r each ed, the tou ch of which m ea n s d eath, and the spac e beyond it. Th e crucial point h ere
is the primacy o f th e limit o ver the spa ce: we do n o t hav e two sp heres (that of reality
an d th at o f pu r e fa n tasy) that are d ivid ed by a certa in limit: wh at we have isj us t rea lity
and its limit, th e abyss , th e void a round whi ch it is str uc tured . T he fantasy space is
th erefore strictl y sec o n d a ry, it 'gives bod y', it ma te rializes a ce rtain limi t or, more
p re cisely, it cha nges the imp ossible into th e [nohibiied, The limit marks a ce r ta in
fun d amental impossibility (it ca n no t be trespassed acr oss, if we co me too close to it, we
di e), wh ile its be yond is prohibited (whoever e nters it ca n no t r etu rn, etce te ra) . We have
there by a lready produ ced th e formula of th e m ysterious reversal o f h orror in to bliss:
by m eans o f it, the impossible limit ch a n ges in to the [orbulden place. In other wo rds, th e
logic of this r eve rsal is that of the transmut a tio n of the real into the sym bol ic: th e
im p ossible-real cha nges into a n object of symbolic prohibition. The parad o x (a nd
perhaps th e very function o f th e prohibition as su ch ) consists of co u rse in th e fac t that ,
as soo n as it is co nce ived as prohibited , th e impossibl e- r eal cha nges in to so me th ing
possible, th at is, into so me th ing that ca nnot be reach ed not becau se o f its inherent
impossibility bu t sim p ly becau se access to it is hindered by the e xte rnal barrier of a

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 KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

prohibition . Therein lies, aft er all, the logic of the most fundamental of all prohibi­
tions , that of incest : incest is inherently impossible (even if a man 'really' sleeps with his
mother, 'th is is not that' , the incestuous object is by definition lacking), and th e symbolic
prohibition is nothing but an attempt to resolve this deadlock by a transmutation of
impossibility into prohibition - there is One which is the prohibited object of incest
(mother), and its prohibition renders all other objects accessible.I? The trespassing
across the frontier in th e above-mention ed series of adventure films follows the same
logic: the forbidd en space beyond ate is again constituted by the transmutation of
impossibility into prohibition .
By means of th e rev ersal of the (impossible) limit into (prohibited) space , of Don
Giovanni into The Magic Flut e, we thus elude the real quo impossible: once we enter the
domain of fantasy, the trauma of inherent impossibility is replaced by a fairy beatitude.
Mozart's Magic Flut e, its image of the amorous couple forming a harmonious whole,
exemplifies perfectly the Lacanian thesis that fantasy is ultimately always the fantasy of
a successful sexual relationship: after th e couple of Tamino and Pamina su ccessfully
undergoes the ordeal of fire and water, that is trespasses the limit, the two of them
enter symbolic bliss. The logic of this symbolic bliss enables us to articulate one of the
fundamental mechanisms of ideological legitimization : we legitimize the existing order
by presenting it as the realization of a dream - nut ojour dream, but ofthe Other's, the Dead
Ancestor's dream, the dream of previous generations. That was , for example, the
referen ce th at determined the relationship tow ards the Soviet Union in the 1920s and
1930s: in spite of the poverty and wrongs, numerous Western visitors were fascinated
by this very drab Soviet reality - why? Bec ause it a p pea red to them as a kind of palpable
materialization of the dream of millions of past and present workers from all around
the world. Any doubts about the Soviet reality thus entailed instant culpabilization:
'True, we in the Soviet Union make numerous mistakes, but when you criticize our
efforts with ironic disdain, you are making fun of and betraying the dreams of millions
who suffered and risked their lives for what we are realizing now!2l The situation here
is not unlike that of Zhuang Zi, who dreamt of being a butterAy, and after his
awakening posed a question to himself: how did he know that he was not now a
butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zi?221n the same way, post-revolutionary ideology
attempts to make us understand that what we now live is a dream of our ancestors come
true; the worker in the Soviet Union of th e 1930s, for example, is a pre-revolutionary
fighter dreaming of being a worker in the socialist paradise : if we complain too mu ch ,
we might disturb his dream. This detour through the dead Other is necessary for the
ideological legitimization of th e present to take effect.

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 SHADES OF NOIR

A furth er formal homology mi ght set us on the right track con ce rn ing th e logic o f
this reversal: do we not encounter th e same matrix in Fr eud 's most famous dream , th at
of Irma's injection?23 Do n ot th e three stages of thi s dream correspond to th e
imaginary dual relationship, its 'aggrav atio n ' into a n unbearable antagonism whi ch
announces the encounter with th e real , and the final 'a p pease me n t' via the ad vent of
the sym bolic order? In the first phase of the dream , Freud is ' playing with his pati ent} 'l
his di alogue with Irma is 'to tally stuck within the imaginary co nd itions whi ch limit it,;2:,
this dual , specular relationship cu lmin ates in a look into her open mouth:

There's a horrendous d iscovery here, that of the flesh o ne never sees, the found ati on of
things, the other side of th e head , o f the face, the secr et or y gland s par excellence, th e flesh
fr om whi ch everything exudes, a t th e very heart of th e m ystery, th e flesh in as mu ch as it is
su ffe ring, is formless , in as mu ch as its form in itself is som ething which provokes a nx iety.
Spectre of anxiety, identification o f anxiet y, the final revelati on o f yO Il a re this - You are this,
which is so far from )'ou , this which is the ultimate [ormlessnessi"

Suddenly, this horror changes miraculously into 'a sort of ataraxia' defined by Lacan
precisely as 'the coming into o pe ration of the symbolic function>27 exemplified by the
production of the formula o f trimethylamin, the subj ect floats freely in symbolic bliss­
as soon as the dreamer (Freud) renounces its narcissistic perspective. Jacqu es-Alain
Miller was quite right to su btitle this chapter o f Lacan 's Seminar II sim p ly 'The
Imaginary, the Real and th e Syrnbolic'r' " The trap to be a void ed here is of cou rse to
oppose this symbolic bliss to 'h a rd reality': the fund amental thesis of Lacanian
psy choanalysis is on the co n tra ry that what we call 'rea lity' co nstitu tes itself against the
background of such a 'blis s', that is, of such an exclusion of some traumatic real. This is
precisely what Lacan has in mind when he says th at fantasy is the ultimate su p po rt of
reality: 'reality' stabilizes itself when some fantasy fram e of a 'symbolic bliss' forecloses
the view into the abyss of th e real. Far from being a kind of dreamlike cobweb that
prevents us from 'seeing re alit y as it effectively is', fantasy is constitutive of wh at we call
reality: the most common bodil y 'reality' is constituted via a detour through th e cobweb
of fantasy. In other words , the price we pa y for our access to 'reality' is that so me th ing ­
the real of the trauma - mu st be 'repressed'.
What strikes the eye here is the parallel between th e dream of Irma's injection and
another famous Freudian dream, that of the dead so n who appears to his fath er and
addresses him with the reproach, 'Father, can't you see that I'm burnin g ?' In his
interpretation of the dream of Irma's injection, Lacan draws our attention to the

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 KANTIAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

appropriate remark by Erik Erikson that after the look into Irma's throat, after this
encounter with the real , Freud should have awakened -like the dreamer of the dream of
the burning child who awakens when he encounters this horrifying apparition : when
confronted with the real in all its unbearable horror, the dreamer awakens, that is,
escapes into 'reality'. One has to draw a radical conclusion from this parallel between
the two dreams: what we call 'reality' is constituted exactly upon the model of the
'symbolic bliss' that enables Freud to co n tin u e to sleep after the horrifying look into
Irma's throat. The anonymous dreamer who awakens into 'reality' in order to avoid the
traumatic real of the burning child's reproach proceeds in the same way as Freud who,
after the look into Irrna's throat, 'cha n ges the register', that is, escapes into the fantasy
that veils the real.

VI

How does this situate film noirr The art of Rene Magritte enables us to formulate a
precise answer to this question. Upon hearing the name 'Magritte', the first thing one
thinks of is his notorious Cui n'est pas une pipe: a drawing of a pipe with an inscription
below it, 'This is not a pipe.' Taking as a starting point the paradoxes implied by this
painting, Michel Foucault wrote a perspicacious little book with the same title. 29 Yet
perhaps another of his paintings ca n serve even more appropriately to establish the
elementary matrix that generates the uncanny effects that pertain to his work: La
Lunette d'appro che (1963), the painting of a half-open window where, through the
windowpane, we see external reality (a blue sky with some dispersed white clouds),
while in the narrow opening that gives direct access to the reality beyond the pane we
see nothing but a dense black mass. The frame of the windowpane is, of course, the
fantasy frame that constitutes reality, whereas the narrow opening between the panes
opens onto the 'impossible' real, the Thing-in-itself.
This painting renders the elementary matrix of the Magrittean paradoxes by way of
staging the Kantian split between (symbolized, categorized, transcendentally consti­
tuted) reality and the void of the Thing-in-itself, of the real, which gapes in the midst of
reality and confers upon it a fantasmatic character. The first variation that can be
generated from this matrix is the strange, inconsistent element that is 'extraneous' to
the depicted reality, which is, uncannily, placed in it, but does not 'fit ' : the gigantic rock
that floats in the air close to a cloud, its heavy counterpart, its double, in La Bataille de
['Argonne (1959); the unnaturally large bloom that fills out the entire room in Tornbeau

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 SHADES OF NOIR

des lutt eurs ( 1960). T h is stran ge, 'o u t o f joint' e le me n t is precisel y th e fa n tasy obj ect
fillin g out th e bla ckn ess of th e re al tha t we percei ved in th e crack o f th e o pen window in
La Lun ette d'a!J/Jro chl'. T he effe ct of uncanniness is e ve n stronger when th e 'same' ob jec t
is redoubled , as in Les Deux iH)'s ! l~ res ( 1966) , a lat e r var ia tion of th e fa mo us Cea n'est pas
nn e pipe. The pipe a nd th e inscripti on un d erneath it 'Cec i n'est pas une p ip e' a re both
d epi cted as drawings on a bla ckboa rd ; yet o n th e left of th e bla ck board, th e ap p arition
of a no ther gig a n tic a n d m assive pipe float s freel y in a no nsp ecified sp ace . The title o f
thi s p aintin g co u ld also have been 'A pipe is a pipe', for wh at is it if not a per fect
illu strati on o f th e H egelian th esis that tautology is th e ultim at e co n trad iction : th e
coin ciden ce between th e pipe located in a clearly d e fin ed symbolic reality , a nd its
un cann y, sha d o wy doubl e. Th e inscription und er the pipe on the blackboard bears
witness to th e fact th at th e sp lit bet ween the two pipes, th e pipe whi ch for ms p art o f
re ali ty and th e pipe as real , tha t is, as a fan tasy apparition , results fro m th e intervention
of th e sym bo lic o rde r. It is th e e mergen ce o f th e sym bo lic order that splits reality in to
itsel f and the enigmatic su r p lus o f th e re al, m aking each th e derealization of its
counterpart. The l .acan ian point n ot to be missed is th at su ch a split ca n occu r onl y
within an econo my o f d esire: it d esignates the ga p between th e inaccessi ble obj ect-cause
of d esire - th e pipe floatin g freel y in th e a ir - and the 'empirical' pipe which , a lth o u gh
we ca n smo ke it , is ne ver it. T he massive presence of th e free- floa ting pipe, o f co u rse,
turns th e d epicted pipe into a 'm er e p ainting', ye t, simultaneously, the fr ee-floatin g
pipe is opposed to th e dom estica ted symbolic realit y of th e pipe o n th e blackboa rd a nd
as such acq u ires a phan tomlike , su rrea l presence . Th is is precisel y eq uiva lent to th e
emergen ce of th e ' rea l' Laura in Otto Pr emin ger's Laura (19 44): th e police d etective
(Dan a And rews) falls asleep sta r ing at th e portrait of th e alleged ly d ead Lau ra. Up on
awakenin g , he finds th e 'r eal' Laura by the sid e of th e portrait, aliv e and well. Th is
presence o f the ' rea l' Laura a ccentuates th e fa ct that th e portrait is a m ere 'imitation' ;
on the other hand , the ' rea l' Lau ra e m erges as a no n-sym bo lized fan tas m atic surp lus, a
gh ostlike a p p ar ition. Ben eath th e portrait , on e ca n easil y imagin e th e inscription 'This
is no t Lau ra,.:10
T h is, th en, is the 'noir' that d efines th e noir universe: that crack in the half-open
wind ow th at shakes our se nse of re alit y a n d is as suc h co r r ela tive to th e subj ec t qua void ,
ga p in reality. Eventually, eve ry thi n g th at ha s been sa id is given a co ndensed e xp res­
sion in Fr ank Cap r a's It's II \Voudl'ljul Ute (1946), a film whose unmistakable runr
und ertones beli e the common redu ction of Cap ra's uni verse to a New Deal populist
humanism. Wh en , out o f utte r despa ir, th e hero (james Stewart) is on the brink o f

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 KANT IAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

co m m u ting sui cid e, th e a nge l Cla re nce stops him and submits him to a Kripkean
m ental experiment with possible universes: h e se n d s him ba ck to his small Massachu­
setts town , but renders him unrecognizabl e , d eprivin g him of all asp ects of his identity,
including his pa st history, so that he can witness how things would hav e turned o u t had
he never e xiste d . In this way, th e hero regains his optimism , since th e cat astrophic
co nseq ue nc es of his ab sence are mad e e vid e n t to him : his brother has drowned lon g
ago (th e hero was not th ere to save him), the good-hearted old pharmacist is rotting in
j ail (the hero was not th ere to war n him again st inad vert entl y mi xin g in poison wh en
preparin g a prescription ), his wife is a lone, d espairing old m aid, and , above a ll, his
father's small loan soci et y, providing cre d its to working-class families a nd thus se r ving
as the last shield of th e popula r community against th e ruthless local ca p italist who
wants to co n trol the enti re town , has gon e bankrupt (th e hero was not th ere to ta ke his
father's business o ve r, so , instead of a town wh ere solidarity p revails and every poor
family has a mod est home of th eir own, the h ero find s himself in a bursting, violent
American small town, full of rud e drunkards and noisy nightclubs, totall y co n tro lled by
th e local magnate). What immediately strikes th e eye here is th e fact that the America
encountered by the h ero when he witn esses the way things would turn out in his
ab sence is the actual Am erica, th at is, its features are th ose of th e co nte m po ra ry grim
so cial reality (th e dissolution of its communal so lid a r ity, the bo astful vulgarity of its
ni ghtlife, e tce te ra ). The relationship of dream and re ality is thus reversed: what the
hero, in th e mental experiment he is subj ected to , exper ie nces as a nightmarish dream
is actual life; in o th e r words, we encounter the real in the filmic dream, and it is
precisely in order to esc ape this traumatic real that th e hero takes refuge within the
(di egetic) realit y str uctu re d by th e ideological fantas y of th e id yllic community still abl e
to resist the ruthless pressure of big capital. This is what Lacan m eans wh en he says that
the traum atic r eal is en countered in dreams; thi s is th e way id eology str uctu res our
experie nce of realit y.
What we are primarily interested in, however, is th e Cartesian dim ension of this
m ental experiment. That is to sa y, when Stewart is sent ba ck to his town as a stra nge r,
h e is bereft of his entire symbolic identity, reduced to a pure cogu o, as th e a ngel
Clarence points out. He has no family, no personal history, even th e small wound on his
lip s has dis appeared: the onl y remaining kernel of ce rt a in ty, th e kernel of th e real that
remains 'the same' in th e two different symbolic universes, is his cogito, th e pure form of
self-consciousness devoid of any co n te n t. Cogito d esignates this ve ry point at whi ch the I
loses its support in the sy mbolic network o f tradition and thu s, in a sense whi ch is far
from metaphorical. ce ases to exist. This pure cogito co r respo nd s to the fant asy gaz e : ill

22 1
 SHADES OF NOIR

it, I find myself reduced to a nonexistent gaze, that is, after losing all my effective
predicates, I am nothing but a gaze paradoxically entitled to observe the world in which
I do not exist (like, say, the fantasy of parental coitus where I am reduced to a gaze that
observes my own conception, prior to my actual existence, or the fantasy of witnessing
my own funeral). In this precise sense one can say that fantasy, in its most basic
dimension, implies the choice of thought at the expense of being: in it I find myself
reduced to the evanescent point of a thought contemplating the course of events
during my absence, my non-being. In short, I find myself reduced to a noir subject.

Usually, the opposition offilm noir to the classicallogic-and-deduction detective fiction

is conceived along the axis of being versus thought (or, as it is usually put; action versus
contemplation): the logic-and-deduction narrative centres on the mental exercise of
the detective who maintains his disengaged distance, who is present just to give body to
the 'grey matter', thus whose being is not involved in the affair, whereas in film noir the
detective is himself caught up in events, to the point of putting his very life at stake.
What our analysis ultimately indicates, however, is the exact opposite: classical detec­
tive fiction is based on the choice of being at the expense of thought, whereas the shift
to film noir involves the choice of thought. That is to say, the underlying libidinal matrix
of the shift from logic-and-ded uction narrative into noir narrative is that of the shift of
desire into driue." 'Desire and Its Interpretation', the title of Lacan's seminar of
1958-59, is to be taken as tautological: what this seminar aims to demonstrate is that
desire is its interpretation, that interpretation of a desire is always already the desire of
interpretation - desire is that very force that compels us to progress infinitely from one
signifier to another in the hope of attaining the ultimate signifier that would fix the
meaning of the preceding chain. In opposition to desire, drive is not 'progressive' but
rather 'regressive', bound to circulate endlessly around some fixed point of attraction,
immobilized by its power of fascination. In short, the opposition of desire and drive
corresponds to that of symptom and fantasy: symptoms are ciphered messages to be
interpreted, fantasies are to be gazed at, they resist interpretation. In this precise sense
symptom is based on the choice of being, it presents the case of 'I am, therefore it
thinks', that is, it is the decentred place at which my 'repressed', unconscious thought is
articulated, the thought that I have renounced by way of choosing being; fantasy, on
the contrary, presents a case of 'I think, therefore it is': in it, I am reduced to a pure
thought intuiting the being of jouissance in its imbecility.
Classical logic-and-deduction narrative stages desire in its purest: the effort to
interpret symptomatic 'clues' and thus to reconstruct the 'primal scene' of the crime.

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 KANT IAN BACKGROUND OF THE NOIR SUBJECT

In clear co n trast to this, the nair narrative reduces the hero to a passive obs erver
tr ansfixed by the succession of fantasy scenes, to a ga ze powerlessly ga ping at them:
even when the hero seems 'active' , one ca n not avoid the impression that he simulta­
neously occupies the positi on of a disengaged ob server, witnessing with in credulity the
strange , almo st submarine , successio n of events in which he remains trapped.

NOTES

I . Basic Ins tin ct also , in a very sp ecific wa y, bears
witness to a fund am ental change in th e logic
a nd fun ction of the narrative frame. A d ecade
or two ago, the e ffect of the sudden shift in
the last shot (th e tracking from th e love­
making cou ple on th e bed to a close-up of the
ice-pick under th e bed) would hav e been
shatt e ring, it would have ca used a vertigin ous
turnabout compellin g us to reinterpret th e
entire previous con te n t. Tod ay , however, it
loses its d ramatic impact a nd basically leaves
us indifferent. In short, th e 'Hitchcock ian
obj ect', a 'litt le piece o f th e real' condensin g a n
int ense inte rsubjecti ve rel ationship, is toda y
no longer possibl e .
2. The ver sion rel eased in 1992 as th e 'director's
cu t' is a com p ro m ise, not yet the true original:
whilst it does eliminate th e voice-ov er and the
imbecilic happy e nd ing , it still abstains from
discl osin g Deckard's o wn replicant sta tus.
3. All quotations fr om Kant's Critique of P Ine
Reason are fr om Norman Kemp Smith's
translation (London : Macmillan , 1992 ).
4. Whi ch is wh y the expression 'se lf-in -itse lf'
used by so me int erpreters of Kant (Find lay,
for exam ple) is inherentl y nonsen sical : in so
far as we con ceive se lf as a n intelligible
thin g, it loses the very feature that defin es it,
namely its tr anscendental 'spo n ta neity' and
a u to no my , which bel ong to it o n ly within th e
horizon o f finitude, th at is, of the split
between intelligible and intuitive. (This is
ultimately confirmed by Kant himself who
always insisted on lea ving open the possibility
that free human activi ty is actua lly regulated
by some inaccessible intelligibl e nature­
God's Providence, for exam ple - which makes
use o f us for the real ization o f its
unfathomable pla n.)
5. T he sam e paradox could also be formul ated
by way of the a mbiguo us ontological status of
possibility wh ich, in its very capa city as 'mere
possibility' as o p pos ed to actuality, possesses
a n actuality of its own : the Kantian
transcendental apperception de sign ates a
pure possibilit y of self-co nsciousness whi ch,
qua possibility, produces actual e ffects, th at is,
d etermines th e actual status of the subject.
Once thi s pos sibilit y is actu alized , we a re no
longer dealing with the self-consciou sness of
the pure I, but with th e empirical
conscio usne ss o f th e self (flta ph enomenon,
part o f re ality . An other way to formulate this
differen ce is via th e gap th at se pa rates 'I'
from 'me ': the Kantian tran scendental
apperception designates th e I of ' I think ',
whereas Descartes surre ptitiously
substantivizes the J e p ense' (I think) into 'moi
qui p ense' (me who thinks) .
6. Henry E. Allison, Kant 's Transcendental Idealism
(Cambridge: Ca mb rid ge Universit y Press,
1983 ), p. 289.
7. Ibid ., pp. 289-90.
8. T owards the e nd of Part One of Critique of
Practical Reason, the sam e logic re-emerges at
th e ethical level : if I were to hav e a d irect
insight into God 's nature, thi s would abro gate
the very notion o f ethical activity.

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 SHADES
9. Sigmund Freud, Th e I's)"dlOjJatho!o,!!;y of
monster whi ch ge nera tes its offspring with out
Evel)'day Life, Pelican Fr eud Library, vol. ;,
th e m ediation o f th e phallus: it was Marx
(H arrn ondsworth: Pen guin, 1976), p . 24H.
who, in an en ig ma tic metaph or in Capital , vol .
10. It is ag ains t this ba ckground that comput er­
ph obi a ca n be prop crlv situa ted : th e fear of a
' mac h ine that thinks' hears witness to th e
fo reboding that th ought as such is ex te r na l to
th e self-identity of m y being.
II. One of the early stori es of' Philip Dick , the
author of Do Androids DrNlIII of Electric Shaj)
on which Blade Ru nn er is based , is 'T he
Father-thing'. Charles Walton , a ten -yea r-old
bo y, re alizes that hi s fath er Ted was killed a nd
repl aced by an alien , malignant form o f life.
This thing, which is 'in father more th an
fath er ', an evil embodiment of th e supe rego,
Gill be dis cerned in those rare mom ent s when
th e ex p re ssio n o f C ha rle s's fath e r' s face
sudd enl y changes, losin g the features of an
ordinary, weary middl e-class Ame rican a n d
irradi ating a kind of indifTerent, impe rsonal
evil.
12. In thi s re speel, th e co nse q ue nce s ofth e
Orlando , Florid a , co u rt rulin g in Se p te m be r
199 2 , in favour of co m p lia nce with th e wishes
of the ten-year-old boy who warner! to remain
with his foster par en ts instead of retu rning to
his hiological moth er, a rc more radi cal than
ma y appear, sin ce they co nce rn th e ve ry
relati onship o f S , a nd S2: when a ch ild ca n
win a divorce ag ainst his mother, as th e
newspapers put it, he G ill ultimately choose
wh o his mother (o r his father) is with regard
to th eir respecti ve p ositive properti es (th e
qu alit y of ca re, etce te ra ). In this way,
motherhood as well as fatherhood ult imatel y
cea se to be symbol ic fu nctio ns ind ep end ent of
positive features : th e very logic of 'W ha teve r
you do, you remain m y mother/fath er and 1
sha ll love you ... " o f qllll master-signifier
which designates a sy m bo lic mandat e , not a
simple cluster of p roperties, is undermined.
1~1. T he correlate to this reduction of th e father
to non-phallic Kn owledge, of course, is the
fa nta sy notion of mother 'I'!" sel l- reproducin g
OF NOIR
II I, determin ed ca p ita l as a self-reproducing
mother-thin g .
14. Was not th e sa me ges tu re accomplish ed by
Kierkegaard a p ropos o f belief? We finite
m ortals ar c co nde m n ed to 'be lieve tha t we
believe'; we ca n never be certain that we
actua lly believ e . T h is position o f e te rn al
doubt, this awa re nes s that o u r be lief is forever
co nd e m ne d to remain a ha zardous wager, is
th e onl y way for us to be tru e C h ris tian
believers: th ose who go beyond the thresh old
of uncertainty a nd preposterously assume
that they reall y d o believe are not believers at
a ll but arrogant sin n ers. If, acco rd in g to
LI GIIl , th e qu esti on that a n ima tes th e
co m p u lsive (obsess iona l) neu rot ic is 'Am I
dead or aliv e ?', an d if the religio us ve rsio n o f
it is 'Am I really a believer or d o I just beli eve
I believe?', here , as we can sec , th e question is
transf o rm ed into 'A m I a (d ea d) replicant o r a
(living) human bein g ?'
15 . Fo r such a readin g , sec Kaja Silverman, ' Back
to the Future ', Camera Obscu ra, 27 (1991), pp ,
109-32.
I (i , This utopian world is, of co u rse , stru ctured as
a co unter p o int to the aggressive , patriarchal ,
Western civiliza tio n: the re alm o f matriar ch y
(Site), of black rule (K in g Sol omon's Min es), o f
harmonious contact with nature (Tarzan), of
balanced wisd om (I .ost I-Im1Wll ), The mess ag e
of these novels is, h owe ver, m ore ambiguous
than it ma y see m . For th e heroes who enter
this id yllic world , life in th e d omain of
saturated d esi re soon be comes unbearable
and they striv e to return to our cor ru p ted
civiliza tio n; the universe of pure fantasy is a
universe with out su r p lus-e n joym e n t, th at is, a
pe rfectl y bal an ced universe where the obj ect ­
cau se of d esir e ca n no t he brought to effect .
17. This is th e reas on why this pass is always
shown in a way that poi nts out its artifi cial
 NOIR
cha rac ter (o ne perceives immedia tel y that it is
a studio set, with its entire back ground -­
includin g th e ' ra ncho notoriou s' in th e valley
2 1. Here we e ncou nte r th e fun ctio n o f th e
belo w -- painted on a gigan tic clo th) ; the sa me
procedure was used by Hit chcock in his
,Wamie, am on g o the rs. And d o we not
e ncou n te r th e sam e matrix o f a pure fan tasy
space beyond th e fro n tie r in Co p po la's
ApocalYPsi' Now? What this film stage s is also a
kind o f 'vo yage beyond the e nd of th e world ':
the 'end of th e world' is clearl y represented by
the burning bridge on the frontier of Vie tn am
a nd Kampu ch ea, th is place o f gen er al
co n fusio n and d isso lu tio n wh er e the
distin ction be tween re ality and d elusi on is
blurred. How e ver , o nce we tres pa ss ac ross thi s
fro ntier a nd penetrate its be yond , th e
ferociou s violen ce sud de nly gives way to an
unna tural calm; we en ter th e pu re fantas y
space , th e kin gdom of Ku rtz, th e o bsce ne
fath er, th e reve rse o f th e ' normal' sym bo lic
Fathe r wh o consti tutes reali ty.
I R. This space is simil a r to that o f th e
' tra nsce nd ent a l S chein ' in Ka nt. Although the
Idea o f Reason do es not bel on g to th e field o f
reali ty, of pos sible expe r ie nce, it fun ctions as
th e symbo lic closure that tot alizes, fills o u t, its
field - if we progress in real ity to its u tter
29. Mich el Foucault, Th is Is N ot {{ Pi/,e (Be rk eley
limit, we sud denly find o u rsel ves 'o n the ot he r
a nd Los Angel es: U niversity o f Ca lifo rn ia
sid e ', in Id ea s to whi ch no realit y co rre spo nds .
19. See J acqu es Lacan , l .e Seminaire, livre Vll:
L 'ethique de la psydulIllllyse (Paris: Ed itio ns d u
Se uil, 1986), chap te r XX .
20. Beside th e real impossib ility a nd the symbolic
prohibition th ere is a third, imagina ry, versi on
the economy of whi ch is ps ychotic: in cest is
neces sary and unavoidable since eve ry
libidinal object is in cestu ou s. An exe m plary
case o f it is th e Ca tha ric he re sa y tha t prohibits
every sexual rel ation , clai ming tha t int e rcourse
with lI ny libidinal obj ect, not o nly with o ne's
parents, is ince stuous. As to these th ree
mod alities o f in cest (its impossibilit y,
prohibiti on , necessit y), see Pe ter Widmer,
225
BY NOIR
'jenseits d es ln zestverbot s', Hiss 2, 4 a nd 6,
Zu rich 1986-87.
's ubject su p posed to beli eve' : th e ex isting
o rde r is legitimized via the fact tha t any d oub t
abo u t it would bet ra y th e nal ve bel ief o f th e
Othe r (of th e foreign worke r who bel ieves in
the USSR a nd wh o , by mea ns o f this bel ief,
confers meaning a nd co nsiste ncy up on his
life) . As to th e noti on of th e 'subject su ppos ed
to believe', see Sla voj Zizek , T he Su blime Obj ect
of Ideology (Lo nd on: Verso , 1989), pp . 185-6 .
22. Fo r a no the r reading- o f this paradox sec
l izek, pp. 4.'>-7.
23. See Sil{fll lllld Frcud , TIll' Int erpretation of
Dreams (I Iarm ondsworth: Pengu in 1977) ,
chap te r II .
24. Ja cqu es Lacan , Th e Semhlllr o/ JaCl[llesl .acau,
Hook 1/: The E[{o ill Freud's Th em)' and ill the
Techinqu e of Psychoa nalvsi s (Ca mbridge :
Ca mb r idge Un iversity Pres s 19Ril), p. 159.
2 .~. Ibid ., p. 154.
26 . Ibid ., pp. 154- 5.
27. Ibid ., p. 168 .
2H. Ibid ., p. 161.
Pres s, 1982).
30. A somewhat homolog-ous e ffe ct o f th e re al
occ urs at the beginning o f Sergio Leone's
O nce Upon. a T im e in the !Vi's l ( 1984): a phon c
rings end lessly; wh en, finall y, a hand pick s up
th e rec eiver , th e ph on e co nt in ues to rin g - the
first sound bel ong-s to 'r ealit y', wh erea s th e
ringin g th at continues eve n a fte r the rec eive r
is picked up co mes o ut o f th e non -sp ecified
void o f th e real. Wh at we ha ve in this scene,
of co urse, is a kind o f re flecti ve red oubling o r
the ext ern al stimulus (sound , o rga nic need,
et cet era) whi ch trig g-ers the activi ty o f
dreami ng : o ne invents a d re a m in tegratin g
this element in o rder to prolon g sleep , yet th e
co nte nt e nco u nte re d in th e dream is so
 SHADES OF
trauma tic th a t, fina lly, o ne esca pes int o rea lity
and awa ke ns , T he ringi ng of the ph o ne while
we are aslee p is suc h a stimu lus par excellence;
its du ration eve n afte r th e source in reality
ceases to emi t it exe mplifies wha t Lacan calls
th e imll t~nce of the re al.
226
NOIR
31. T he point was made by J oan Cop jec, in a
pa pe r delive red at th e City Unive rsity of New
Yor k; a lo nge r versio n of tha t pape r is
prese nted in this volume (chapter 6).
 8

HO ME FIRES BURNING: FAMILY

NOIR IN BLUE VELVET AND

TERMINATOR 2

Fred Pfeil

When we think abou t film n oir in the present, it is well to remember the cate go rical
in stability that h as h aunted it fr om th e mom en t French cr itics coined the term in the
lat e 1940s as a retrosp ective tag for a n u m be r of previously withheld American films
which now , upon th eir foreign release, all looked and felt strikin gly simil ar. Eve r sin ce,
critics a nd th eorists ha ve been arguin g about wh at film noir is, whi ch film s the term
includes, and what social or psychi c processes it e n ga ges . Does film noir constitute a
genre ; or a style th at ca n be d epl oyed acr oss gen eric boundaries; or a historicall y
specific movement within H oll ywood cine ma? Th ese intrinsic qu estions and debates
ha ve th eir own momentum and e n e r gy, but deri ve extra ch ar ge fr om an associated set
of extrinsic questi ons regarding f ilm noir's relationships to other, non cinematic soci al
transformations , es pecially shifts in gender id entities and rel ati onships in th e USA
after World War Two. Did the spider-women of so many film s noirs, despite their
destructiveness, constitute a challenge to th e restoration and extension of a patri archal­
capitalist gender eco no my unde r wh ose terms men co ntro lled and ran th e publi c
sphere whil e women , d esexualized a nd maternalized , were relegated to hearth a nd
home? Does th e aggressive sex uality, power and plot controlling/generating/deran ging
force, of, say, a Barbara Sta nwyck in Double Indemnity, Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Glori a
Grahame in The Big Heat , together with film noir's characteristically d eviant visuality - its

227
 SHADES OF NOIR

cramped asymmetrical framin gs, its e xpress ion istica lly harsh lighting contrasts a nd
lurid shadows, the whole twist ed a nd uncertain spa tia lity of it matching th e mal e
protagonist's lack of control over th e breakneck d eviousness of its plot - constitute a
real and potentially effective subversion o f th e d ominant order, as Christine Gledhill
suggests?l Or is it simpl y, as neoformalist film historian Da vid Bordwell asserts , that
'these films blend causal unity with a new realistic a nd ge ner ic motivati on , and th e
result no more subverts the classical film' - o r, we m a y presume , an ything else - ' tha n
cr im e fiction undercuts th e o rt ho d ox nov el ' P''
The debate sm o u ld e rs on unresolv ed , a nd p erhaps irresolvabl y, depending as it does
o n some broader knowledge or agreeme n t as to wh at indeed co nstitu tes subversive or
progressive work within a pre- o r non-revolutionary cu ltu r al moment and soci al
formation . More directl y, th e qu estion is: how ca n any ca p ita l-in ten sive work, su ch as
film , produced for a mass audien ce be progressive , and what are the signs that it is?
How (a nd how well) would su ch work work? Wh at (and how much) would it do? More
crudely still, how far can a work go and still be produced and distributed within a system
whos e various structures are overdetermin ed by cap italism a nd patriarchy (not to mention
racism and homophobia)? What is the most, and th e best, we can demand or expect?
Such m essy questions press themselves on us today so in sist ently that a whole new
interdisciplinary proto-discipline, 'cultural studies ', has been co nstitu ted just to deal
with them. Their urgency for us is, after all, in evitably co n seq ue n t upon the dimming
of the revolutionary horizon, and the loss or co n fu sio n o f revolutionary faith, not only
within the socialist left but throughout all th e other feminist a nd 'm in o r ity' movements
in the seventies and eighties. In the USA th e revolution , to the ex te n t that there was
one, ca me from the right - recall 'ne w ri ght ' g u r u Paul We yri ch 's proud proclamation
in th e wake of the first Reagan election in th e ea rly 19ROs, 'We a re rad icals seeking to
overthrow the power structure' - against th e liberal-corporatist sta te and the so ciopoli­
tical good sense that flowed from and supported it , both o f whi ch have been di smantled
and rearticulated in quite different ways. Given thi s co m bina tio n, then , of disinteg­
ration below and regressive hegemoni c reintegration fr om o n high , th e whole notion
of what Gramsci ca lled a 'wa r of mo vem ent', of d eep struc tu ra l and institutional
cha nge , has come 1.0 seem to man y on ce-in surrectionary sp ir its to be in conceivably
crac kp o t or even worse , a gri sly ruse of th e very pow e r (,\ la Fou cault ) it pretends to
oppose ; so that a permanent 'wa r of po sition ', th e e ver p arti al and provixio nal
detouru rmrut of otherwise intractable insritution al arrangem ents a nd practices . \",
COilles lite ral" the only game in 10\1'11.
 HOME FIRES BURNING: FAMILY NOIR

I describe this situation here n ot to deplore or criticize it, nor to attempt to resolve
the questions of cultural politics that flow from it; it is, for better and for worse, th e set
of circumstances we in the developed West , and the USA in particular, now inhabit. So
it will serve both as the context from which we must think about the meaning and
direction of some of the newest mutations in the noir sensib ility, and , dialectically, as the
subject of that sensibility's reflections back upon us . But before turning to consider
those mutations, it ma y be worthwhile to rehearse briefly those aspects of film noir
con ced ed to be its constitutive features, even by critics who otherwise disagree over
where it belongs and what it means. These aspects typically involve a combination of
iconographic, stylistic, narrative and th ematic features: iconographicall y they stretch
from the dark city streets and lurid jazzy bars to the privatized, alienated space of th e
car and the modern urban apartment, and down to th e close-up level of the cigarette,
drink, swanky dress, trenchcoat and slouch hat; stylistically, from the use of voice-over
and Hashback to expressionistic lighting and d ecentred and unstabl e compositions,
often in deep space; narratively, they include a n ew e m p h asis on deviant psychological
motivation, the deviousn ess and frustrating confusion of the mal e protagonist's project
or quest, and the outright hostility, suspicion and sexual attraction between the often
confused and weary male protagonist and the duplicitous, powerful femm e fatal e (with
a good asexual wife-mother figure optionally dead or waiting in the wings) ; and
thematically, they consist above all in the 'absu r d' existential choice of moral behaviour
according to one's own individual ethical code, in a hopel essly dark universe in which
more consensual authorities are ineffectual, irrelevant, or corrupt.
In Bakhtinian criticism, the conce p t of the chronotope provides us with a useful tool
for synthesizing and mediating all such features into a common image of a given
narrative form, its quintessential phenomenal ' feel'. Vivian Sobchak's, 'Lo u n ge Time:
Post-war Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir' usefully reconstructs film nair's
chronotope:

The diacritical co n trast that structures him nair . . . is between the impersonal, dis contin­
uous rented space of cockta il lounge , nightclub, hotel , and roadsid e cafe , on the on e hand ,
and the familiar, unfragmented secure space of domesticity on the other. The noir
chronotope has no ro om for children or for ritu als of family continuity: 'no weddings , no
births , no natural deaths , no famil y intimacy and connection ca n be eventful here.' Even
leisure is more suffered than enjoyed in the 'lo u nge-lime' of the shadowed sp ace of film
nair. The characters generated by this ch ro no to pe are tran sient, without roots or occupa­
tion , in a world wh ere murder is more natural than d eath . The ch ro no to pe of him noir .. ,
perversely celebrates the repressed hysteria of a postwar cultural moment when domestic

229
 SHADES OF NOIR

and economic coherence were fractured , sp atializing and con cretizing a 'free d o m ' at once
attractive, frightening, and ultimatel y illusory.3

If such a 'cultural moment' sounds mu ch like our own seventies and eighties just
past, we would none the less do well to resist the urge to invoke th e similarit y as
straightforward explanation for the 'return' of film noir during those same years, in
such films as Bod,y H eat (1981) and the remakes of Farewell, My Lo v ely (1975) and The
Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) . Instead, it is the very notion of 'return' itself that
needs to be explored.'! For whateverfilm n air was in the forties and fifties, it will not be
again three decades or more later by dint of straightforward imitation, and not only for
the general reason that no such slavish reconstruction could ever escape the fetishizing
and ossifying effects of its intention simply to repeat , but because the meanings an d
effects of the original films noirs even today must still be experienced and understood in
their relation to a whole system of film production , distribution and co nsu m p tio n - th e
Hollywood studio system, in effect - whi ch was in its last hour even then and is now
gone. As Thomas Schatz has recently reminded us ," it was that system that most full y
standardized and customized the look, feel and plotlines of film genres (from MGM
classi cs and costume dramas to Warner's gangster pics and Un iversal's speciality in
horror), some of th em genres from which noir had something to steal (for example, th e
deep shadows and expressionistic framings of the horror film), but each and all of I hem
together a system of te chniques, conventions and, not least, audience expectations (for
example, the romanti c happy ending and/or the satisfying restoration of law and
order) that films noirs first defined themselves by violating.
Bordwell's contention, quoted above, that these transgressions quickly fall into place
as simply a new set of techniques, co n ve n tio ns and routinized audience satisfactions, is
still debatable. But the view that the meanings of/ilm noir must be worked through in
relation to contemporaneous generic productions and the 'classical Hollywood style' in
general, I should think, is not. So when the studio system breaks up into the present
'package-unit' system in which individual produ cers assemble production groups and
materials on a film-by-film basis, employing what is left of th e studios primarily as a
distribution arm, and generic production atomizes too as the specialized constellations
of talents and resources once fixed in position to produce it are dispersed, we may
expect that the working parts of the nair machine of effects and responses will also
break apart into so many free agents, capable of being drafted into any number of new,
provisional combinatory teams, all according to the same recombinant aesthetic
economy which, for example, a decade ago brought us th e television series Hill Street

230
 HOME FIRES BURNING: FAMILY NOIR

Blues ou t of a directive to its original writers to kn ock out a co m bina tion o f a sitco m
Barney M iller and th e action-adventure se r ies Stan k)' and Hutch.6
In this newer Holl ywood , quintess ential site of th e intersection bet ween th e Hexible
specializa tio n of post-Fordist production a nd the fr ee-floating id eol ogemes-turn ed­
syntax of p ostmodernism , the transgressive e ne r gies a nd subversive formal practices
that first animated and defined film noir ma y ind eed be most alive and well where they
hav e migrated from th e now -conventionalized site of th eir first a p pea ra n ce toward s
some new and eve n perverse com b inatio n with other formal and thematic ele me n ts in
similar drift from other former film genres. Such, at any rate, is the hypothesis of thi s
cha p te r, wh ose specific claim is th at f ilm noir in particular, homeless now as a ge n re,
none the less cu r ren tly finds itself most alive wh ere its form er elements and energies
form part of a new ch ro noto pe whose ch ief difference from that non- or even anti­
domestic one outlined by Sobchak for 'classic' film noir lies in the exte n t to whi ch the
newer one includes, and indeed is centred on , h ome and famil y, e ven as it d ecent res
and problernatizes both . Throu gh a look at two suc cessful recent film s, Blue Velvet and
Terminator 2 , I mean to show how home and family a re being d est abiliz ed , noir-ized in
both. Th e large differences betw een these two films , in terms of aesthe tic stra tegies and
audiences, only make th e similarities o f results of eac h film's processin g of noir
elements that mu ch more striking a nd significan t. Striking in wh at wa y? How signifi ­
can t and for whom? Connected to wh at othe r transformations a nd prax es , under way
or to come? Those questions will be raised again on the other side of th e following
readings, forcing us again to hedge and an swer them as best we can in th e a bse nce of
any clear or sha red utopian goal.

BI. UE VEL\!ET AND THE STRANGELY FArvlILIAR

It is too easy to tick off the noirelem ents in David Lynch's art film hit Blue Velvet (198 6).
, The investigative male protagonist jeffrey (Kyle Mcl .a chan), caught between danger­
ous, dark-haired Dorothy Valens (Isabella Rossellini) and bland , blonde, Sand y (Lau ra
Dern); the far- reaching nature of the evil Jeffrey uncovers and th e entanglements of
the police th emselves in its web; the homoerotic dimension of th e relationship between
Jeffrey and the film 's a rc h-villain Fr ank (De n n is Hopper): an y college so p ho mo re with
an introductory film course can pick ou t these features, just as an yone with a n
introductory ps ychology course can pick up on th e oedipal motifs hiding in plain sight ,

231
 SHADES O F NOI R

beginning with th e co llapse of .Jeffre y'S

fa ther a nd end ing with h is restorati o n.
Michael Moon , in on e of th e be st co mmen ­
taries o n th e film , n icel y su m ma riles th e
familiar sto ry of wh at happ ens in between:

. . . a young man m ust ne gotiate what is

preprescru ed as bein g the treache rou s
path between an older, ostensibly exo tic,
sex ua llv 'perve rse' woma n and a yo unge r,
racially 'whiter', sexual 'normal' on e, and
he must at the sa me time and as part of the
sam e process negoti ate an eve n mo re peri­
lous series of int eraction s with the older
wom an 's violent a nd murde rou s cr iminal
lover and the you nger woman's protective:
police-d etective father. T his het e ro se xual
plot resolves itself in classic oed ipa l fas­
hion : the young man ,J ell n' y, d estro ys the
demonic criminal ' rath er' and rival, Fra n k;
rescues th e older wo man , Do ro th y, fr om
Fran k's sadi stic clu tches ; and the n relin­
qu ishes her to her fall' an d marries the:
pe r ky young dau ght er of the good cop.' Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)

Suc h a bl a tant e voca tio n , or perh a ps more accu ra tely, acti ng-ou t, o f t he sta nda rd
im a g e re pe rto ires o f g en eric / dill n air a n d p sych oanalyti c Ir u ism will, it is wo rt h nOlin g ,
n ot be o bv io u s to eve ry o ne - onl y to th ose who , t h an ks to co llege or so me o t h er
eq u iva le n t ed u ca tio n a l circu itry , h a ve th e cu lt u ra l ca p ita l to r ecogni ze the co des a t
work. Assumi ng suc h a n a u d ie nce , th ou gh, th e p o in t is to co nsi der suc h p a int -b y­
numbe r mat erial n ot as finish ed p r oduct , but as sta rti n g" p oint and se co nd -o rder r aw
m aterial for the film 's su bs eq ue n t el abo rati on s. I f it wou ld he a mi st ak e to ac ce p t su c h
ge neric mat erial a t fac e va lue , in oth er wo rds, it would bej u st as wro ng to writ e it off
a n d lo ok for w ha t el se is ' rea lly' going on inst ead .
Our firstjoh, th en , is ra th er to con sider obotousne ss in Blue \!dvct as a feature in its own
rig h t - o ne wit h its o wn m u ltip le , co m p le x e ffe cts . But to tak e this su bject up in turn is
to noti ce imm ediat el y in j u st h ow m an y wa ys Lyn ch 'sh oves it in our fac es' as well as how

232
 HOME FIRES BURNING: FAMILY NOIR

many things 'it' in that last phrase comes to be, so often and so many that a certain kind
of 'ominous-obvious' may fairly be said to constitute both the film's thematic subject
and its formal method alike. An exhaustive reading of Blue Velvet along these lines
could in fact begin with the film's very first image, the rippling blue velvet against which
its opening titles appear, shot in su ch extreme, quasi-magnified close-up that, as
Barbara Creed points out, its smooth, soft surface appears mottled and rough as bark.s
But I would rather concentrate instead on the images that follow those credits, a sort of
music video to the Bobby Vinton oldie of the film's title, falling in between (in both a
chronological and a stylistic sense) the credits and the storyline that picks up at its end.
Here is a list of the shots that compose the film's dreamy opening montage:

1. Tilt down from perfectly blue sky to red roses in medium close-up against white
fence. DISSOLVE to
2. Long shot: fire truck passing by slowly on tree-shaded small-town street, with
fireman on it waving in slow motion . DISSOLVE to
3. Yellow tulips against white fence, close-up as at the end of shot 1. DISSOLVE to
4. Long shot, small-town residential street: traffic guard beckoning for schoolchil­
dren to cross, again in slow motion. DISSOLVE to
5. Long shot: white Cape Cod house and yard . CUT to
6. Medium shot: middle-aged man with hose, watering yard. C UT to
7. Long shot, interior: middle-aged woman inside, sitting with cup of coffee on
couch, watching television, which displays black-and-white shot of man crossing
screen, gun in hand, and from which issues sinister 171m noirish music. C U T to
8. Close-up of hand holding gun on television scree n . CUT to
9. Man with hose, as in shot 6, but now off-centre at screen left.

Actually, the sequence at this point has already begun to speed up somewhat , moving
from shots of approximately five secon ds apiece (shots 1-4) to an average of three
(5-8). From shot 9 on, moreover, the sequence will quicken and warp still further, as an
increasingly rapid montage of increasingly close-up shots of kinked hose/sputtering
tap/vexed man , joined with a soundtrack in which the diegctic sound of water fizzing
under pressure is combined with a gradually rising and apparently nondiegetic buzz or
roar, towards the man's collapse, the hose's anarchic rearing upward, a slow-motion
shot of a dog drinking from the hose beside the fallen man, the sound of the dog
barking, a baby crying, a rushing wind combined with a mechanical rustling noise, as
we go down through the lawn in a process shot pretending to be an unbroken zoom-in

233
 SHADES OF NOIR

to a horde o f swarmin g, warrin g bla ck in sects whose organic-mech anical noi se-plus­
wind now swells up to an overwhelming roar.
Wh at is o ne to make of such a n openin g ? Given ou r previous training in how to read
a film 's spatio-ternporally o r ie ntin g shots a nd narrative cu es, it seems to me that in p art
we struggle to do th e usu al with thi s seq ue nce : to read it narrativel y, pla ce ourselves in
it , 'follow' it out. And , of co u r se , our efforts and presumptions in this r egard are not
e n tire ly in vain. Okay, we say, it's a sm all town , and here 's a particular famil y in side it, a
dad and mom , a nd look, som ething's happening to the dad so things a re off-balance
now, not right, gee what happens next? But we say this onl y in part a nd ag ains t a kind
of semic co u n te r-logic or inertial drag in stigated by th e very sa me shots - at least or
esp ec ially sho ts 1-4 and the slow-motion and extreme close-ups that close ofT the
seq ue nce (o the r such shot co mb ina tions will serve as the disjunctive ligatures between
o ne section of the film's narrative and th e next) - in the d egree to which a ll th ese shots
o ve r r u n th eir n arrativ e or, in Barth esian terms, proaireti c fun ction and force a tt e n tio n
on th emselves in some purely imagistic way instead , Bobbie Vinton , blu e sky , and red
roses a t one end , ro aring wind , me chanical ru stling, and ra ven in g black insects on the
oth er.
If, moreove r, su ch a difference from the opening of co nve nt io nal film falls so me ­
where short of effec ting a total break with th e prevailing mod el of filmi c narrative , its
relative di stan ce from that model is non e th e less mad e all the m ore apparent by the
lurch tha t follows ba ck toward typi calit y. Like a second beginnin g, th e shot seq ue nce
that follows opens with a set of establishing long shots of the town o f Lumberton,
simultaneously nam ed as such by th e local radio station on th e soundtrack, after which
we are sh own Jeffrey th e film's protagonist for the first time, p ausing on his way to visit
his hospitalized fath er in order to throw a ston e in th e field where he will soon find th e
se ve re d ear of Doroth y Valens's husband and thereb y set the film' s noi'rish plot int o full
motion, So now, in effect, we are invited to take a d eep breath , relax, and begin a
co n ven tio n al readin g of th e film : onl y on ce again , not quite . For this sequen ce will no
more settle into assured co n ven tio na lity than th e last co m p le tely broke from it. Th e
deej ay's radio patter is slightl y, well , ske wed - ' It's a su n ny da y,' he ch ir ps , 'so ge t those
chainsaws out' - as, o n a visual level, is th e sequence of images itself, in which the afore­
mention ed shot ofJeffrey in the field is follow ed by two brief red-h errin g long shots of
downtown - one of an unknown car pulling onto th e town's main street, the other of an
unknown man sp in n in g what might be a ring o f ke ys as he stands in front of a darkened
store - before the sequen ce slips back into ge ar with a close-up ofJeffre y's father in his
hospital bed as jeffrey's visiting presen ce is a n no u nce d.

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From its outset, then , Blue Velvet is cha racte r ized by th e partial and irresolute opposi­
tion of two di stinct kind s and pl easures of narrative : one character ized by th e relative
dominance of what, foll owin g Barthesian n arrative theory, I have ca lled the semic, and
the o th e r by the eq u ally rel ative dominance o f th e establish in g, fixin g and plotting
fun ctions of the proairetie. Les s pretentiously, of co u rse , we could speak of the
predominance of image ove r stordine, a nd avo id Fr ench poststru cturalist theory alto ­
gether, were it not for the real yet perverse relevance o f Barthes's terms and the
ps ychopolitical valences att ached to them, for this parti cul ar film. T o di scern this
relevance , we need only re call , fir st of a ll, that within that theory the pl acing, naming
an d motivatin g functions o f th e proaireti c, and its predominan ce in conventional
narrative , are held to be d efining sym p to ms o f th e co nstitu tive oedipalit), of su ch
narrative e ne rgies a nd d esires, or perhaps more precisely of the bindin g and co n ta in­
ment of su ch desire ; just as th e at ernporal and never-fully-repressible bursts a nd
upwellings of the semic a r e identified with the ca rn ivalesq ue fr eedom o f the unregu­
lated , post-, pre-, or ev en anti-oedipal social and individu al body. Then all we have to
do is notice how in so far as suc h definition s and ca te go ries do hold water for us, Blue
Velvet gets them - though on ce again, only sort of - wr ong from the start, obse r vin g this
o p p os itio n al distin ction and Houting it at the same time by reversing what one might
have thou ght was th eir 'na tu ral' o rd e r : for what kind of n arrative text is it, after a ll, in
which the fall of th e fath er is preceded by a sequ ence of im ages predomin antly semic in
nature , butfallawed by o ne th at more o r less fall s ob ediently into story-plotting lin e ?
A postmodern text, of course: th e kind of post mod ern work that , as in Cindy
Sherman's fir st accl aim ed ph otographs, is co n ce rned both to hybridize and hollow o u t
the cliche . For sim u lta neou sly hyp errealizing and decentering narrative a nd cine m atic
co n ve n tio n is what Blue Velvet is about, both its way of doing business and the business
itsel f. Visu ally, as Laurie Simmons's description o f Lyn ch 's style su ggests, its te chniques
and effects are most dearly related to those of pop art , thou gh more that o f Rosenquist,
say, than o f And y Warhol ." Such perfect two-dimensionality - so different from the
exp ressio n istica lly cro wded and askew deep sp ace s of classic nair style - simultaneously
flattens and perfects all its glazed gaz e captures , from ro ses to ravenin g insects, soda
fountain booth to severed ear, whil e on the him's so u n d tr ac k, th e same sense is created
and r einforced by Badalamenti's score which , here as in Twin Peaks, Haunts its barefaced
imitation of misteriaso-a-la-H itchcock-composer Bernard H ermann one minute , gush­
ing r omantic strings a la Dmitri Tiomkin th e next, with some dollops of the kind o f
insipid fin ger-popping j azz-blues once written for the Quinn-Martin television detec­
tive se r ies, and so u nd trac k scores of th e fir st living-room fi lms n otrs, thrown in on the

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 SHADES OF NOIR

side. Such pre-digested product thus functions as the musical equivalent of the cliched
dialogue of the script and the two-dimensional visuality of the cinematography, each
overdetermining th e other into an aggregate signal of intentional derivativeness and
knowing banality whose obverse or underside is clearly that moment when, aurally
and/or visuall y, th at whi ch we tak e as th e rzr-natural (the clicking and mandibular
crunching of the in sects, th e robin with the worm in its mouth) becomes indistinguish­
able from sounds of industry, th e sight of the obviously animatronic - in short, the
synthetic co nstr u ctio ns, material and imaginative, of human beings themselves, recog­
nized and felt as su ch.
In ea rly industrial Britain, Keats invited his readers to the edge of one sublime mode
of hyperatrention, a falling into the object's d epths so intense the viewer's own
consciousness is eclipsed ('A drowsy numbness pains/My se nse'). In the postmodern,
late industrial mod e of Lyn ch 's film , how ever, the gleaming but off-kilter perfection of
su ch recherche surfaces as those we have e xa mined constitutes its very own warp , and
th e terrified rapture of th e romantic swoon away from consciousness is replaced by a
queas y awareness o f anxiou s affiliation to a nd guilty/paranoid complicity with all that
we are so familiar with in what we see and hear, as in this scene in which our hero
Jeffrey ha s a talk in the den with Lieutenant Williams, bland-blonde Sand y's father and
police detective, co nseq ue n t to jeffrey's di scovery of th e ea r :

WI LLiA M S: You've found something that is very interesting to us. Very int eresting. I
know you must be curious to know more . But I'm a fra id I'm going to ha ve to ask you not
only not to tell anybody abo u t th e case, but not to tell anybody abou t your find. One day
when it's all sewed up, I'll let you know all th e details. Right now, though, (glan cing
sidelong , sneaking; a puff 0 11 his ciga rette) I ca n't.
J EFFRE Y: I understand . I'm just real curious, like you said .
WILLIAMS : (slightl)'smiling) I was the same wa y m yself wh en I was your ag e. That's wh y I
went into thi s business.
JEFFREY: (lau ghs) Must be great.
WILLI AM S : (fr eezes, sou rs smile) It 's horrible too . I'm sorry Jeffrey ; it just has to be that
way . Anyway J effrey, I know yo u do understand .

Each sentence, every phase , is 100 per ce n t B-m ovie clich e, and delivered as such, with
all the wooden ea r n estnes s the actors ca n muster. Yet I hope my transcription also
conveys something of th e exte n t to whi ch , even as that dialogue rattles ou t, Williams's
suspiciousl y ask ew reactions and e xp re ssio ns move our reactions not so mu ch against
the direction of the clich es as athwart them. On the level of th e storyline , and given our

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 H O M E FIRES BURNING: FAMILY NOIR

past e xperi ence o f both oedipal narrativity in general and f Ilm noir in p articular, they
m a y prompl us to wonder if Fathe r/ De tec tive Willi ams won 't turn out to be o ne of the
bad gu ys aft er all : on th e lev el of what \\'C might call the film's e n u nc iatio n, th ough , a nd
in light o f all e lse we ha ve see n about this film so far, suc h a moment is apt to engend er a
far more fundam ental d istr u st, less th e su sp icio n that we hav e not go t to th e botto m of
this ye t than the full-blown paranoia th at th ere may be no bottom here a t all.
So to th e closin g mom ents of th e film , wh en Jellrey and Sand y and th eir families a re
both co m p le ted a nd co m b ine d around the ex e m p la r y ce n tre of their good love, the
famous mom ent when that robin sh o ws up with the worm in its mouth and J effrey's
Aunt Barbara, lookin g over his should er and munching on a hotdog, says ' I could
never do th at !' provokes a co m plica ted laugh from th e audience. On th e one hand , of
co u r se , it is about both the ironic relation ofthe amorally predatory robin to th e goopy
sp eech Sand y ga ve earlier in the film , in whi ch robins hgured in a dream she had had as
e m ble m s of pure good, and the reinforcing iron y of Aunt Barbara's self-righteous
disavowal o f the very a p pe titivc ness sh e is di splaying by stuffin g h er mouth. On the
other, though, given th e bircl's obvious a rt ificiality, the music's clich ed goopiness, a nd
th e h yp ercomposed Hat ness and stilln ess o f th e mis e en scene , it is also about th e anxious
and d elight Iul possibilit y that Au nt Barbara - and Jeffre y and Sand y, for that mau er>­
are robots , too . And of course th ey are , in the sense that they are constru ctions of
sound and words and light, spaces where Lynch & Compan y's p rojections m eet our
own; a nd in this sense so are all the ch a racte r s in ev ery feature film , Yet if every film in
th e Hollywood tradition invites its audien ce to recite some version of the Mannoni
formul a ./1' sais bini mais qiuuuimhne on its way into and through the story-world it
oilers , Blu« Vt llif t is non e th e less distin ctiv e for th e stead y insisten ce with whi ch it ups
th e volume on its own multiple, hybridized and hyperrealized elements of retrouue e,
pushing' its audien ce to acknowledge its own '1 know ve ry well' at least as mu ch as its
'bu t ev en so . , . " a n d so to taint a nd complicate a heretofore blissfully irresponsible
a n d sa fel y di stanced vo yeurism with its own ad m issio ns of famili arity as co m p licity ,
anxious lack of distance , guilt at home. I I) ' Yo u put your disease inside me!' Doroth y sa ys
to Jcffre y a nd , of him , to cveryon e a ro u nd h er at one point; and so he/we did ; but in
another sense, of co u r se , the disease , 'it " was there/here/ everywh ere all along, and we
have 'it ' insid e liS too .
lt is this 'it ', this recog-nition a nd ad m issio n of th e obvious artifice. that we carry with
us along-sid e and throu gh those obvious elem ents of/iflllnoil' and o r oedipal pys cho­
pathology tha t ha ve th emselv es eli cited so much cr itica l commentary. SOllie writ ers
have concent ra ted o n Lynch 's blending and blurrin g of genres (MacLacha n' s Jeflre y as

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both Philip Marlowe and Dobie Gillis) and ge ne r ic chronotopes (th e sm oky nightclub in
the small town, th e naked 'd a r k woman' in the family's living room) , whil st others home
in on the sh eer mobility of m ale-hysterical fantasy in the film: th e dangerous, vertigin­
ous, yet perpetual oscillations between sad ism and masochism , 'Dad dy' a nd ' Baby',
hetero- and homosexual desire, as all th ese are acted ou t (in both se nses of th e term) in
the film 's excess o f primal scenes Ueffrey with Doroth y, Frank with Doroth y, Jeffrey
and Frank with Ben, Jeffrey with Frank). Yet even those who have attempted to
consider and synthesize both these manifest topical areas have tended to miss , or at
least underestimate, the full me asure, meaning and effect of the de-realizing, de­
naturalizin g formal ope ra tions of the film, and th e extent to which they power the
movement toward what Michael Moon d escribes as 'the fearful knowledge that what
most of us co nside r our deepest and strongest d esires a re not our o wn, that our dreams
and fa n tasies are only co p ies, audio- and videotapes, of the desires of others and our
utterances of th em lip- synching of these circ u lating , e nd less ly reprodu ced and repro­
ducible de sires' eve n before the generic mix is eviden t and the sexual- psychoa nalytic
heyday/m ayhem begins. II What fascin ates and appalls in Blue Velvet, what simulta­
neously underwrites a n d undermines the mixed messages of its generic play and
desublimated oedipality, is the sense of the fr agility of th e sym bolic, its susce p tibility to
the meton ymic 'disease' of constant slippage that is always already inside it, a gynesis of
both film a nd family that irresol ves with out overthrowing, that keeps home un-natural
while forcing us to own up to th e famili arity of all that is o fficially Other and strange,
that makes home-making a dislocating ex p e rie nce , from blue-sky beginning (plenitude
or em p tine ss? true blue or fake void?) to blu e-sky end .

TEIUvIlNATOR 2: ANY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE

Things are somewhat different in th e recent blockbuster sci-fi hit Terminator 2:

Judgment Day Uames Cameron, 1991), if onl y because inv estors a re unlikely to put up
$90 million for a project whose meanings, pleasures and rules o f editing d erive from
the principle of the se miotic e ro sion of narrative conventions, irresolution as an
aesthetic way oflife. The overall regime of pleasure in the blockbuster him is, rath er, a
paradigm of lat e capitalist co nsu me r production: it must keep us co nsta n tly (though not
continuously) engaged without d emanding much attenti on; knock us out with all the

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trouble it has go ne to just to give us an ins tant's satisfacti on ; and not only offer us
options but also affirm a nd even Ratter us for whi chever on es we pick.
T o define blo ckbusters in terms of suc h hard-wired business requirements is,
how ever, not to mark th e point wh ere analysis of their significance ends, but rather to
suggest where it ha s to begin . For if the blockbuster typi cally invites us to 'have it either
and/or both ways', then both th e character of the contradictory options o ffered and the
name and definition of th e 'it' ca n be read as co m p lex signposts sh owing the way to the
mainstream cu ltu re's id eological points de capitan , l~ th e pla ces wh ere co llec tive soc ial
desire - fo r transformation a nd salvage, revolution and restoration , anarchy and
obedience - is sim u lta neo usly fastened and spl it. T h is, to tak e up one early ex ample, is
the interest of those ope n in g scenes of Terminator 2 in whi ch th e two synthetic cr eatu res
from th e future first appear in present-day Los Angeles bent on their opposed
missions , to protect or kill the boy John Conner, and to thi s end outfit th emselves in the
garbs and rol es of ordinary mortal men . Th e T-800, a.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenegger,
cyborg simulacrum of Sarah Conner's would-be killer in the first Terminator film,
arrives in the blue , burn ish ed glory of his hyperrnuscled n akedness in front of an
equally gleaming semi-truck parked across fr om a biker bar he will soon scope out a nd
bust up, leaving in full regalia, in sh ades a n d leathers, and astride a Harley hog, to the
heavy-m etal strains of George 'I'horogood and the Destroyers stuttering 'B-b-b-bo rn to
be bad'. In th e following sequence, however, in which we meet the protean , pro­
grammed-tn-kill Ill/-robot T-I 000 , we are taken to a desolate patch of no-man 's-land
und erneath a cu rving span of LA overpass to which a city cop has been called to
inv estigate th e stra n ge electrical goings-on accompanying thi s unit's passage through
time a n d space : wh ereupon th e T-I 000 , assuming for the moment a proto-hominoid
silver sh ape, sn eaks up on the cop from behind, kills him and takes on his steely-eyed
Aryan form , co m p lete with uniform , as his ce n tral identity for th e rest of th e film .
In the span of these two brief scenes, entertainment professionals James Cameron et
al. h ave alre ady provided us with a wide range and sati sfying oscillation of identifica­
tions and exclus ions, pleasures and disavowals. For starters, there is th e linkage and
differentiation of Arnold in his ali ouo mu scle-builder's po se and th e parked semi
behind him , suggesting as this com p osite image does both Arnold himself as gleaming
ma chine, icon of burly masculinist cu ltu re at its most spectacularly d eveloped pitch,
and Arnold as a display item quite o ut of this dingy quotidian work world altogeth er.
Such a mb ivale nce , togeth er with its options for enjoyment, is then carried right into
and through the mayh em at the biker bar that e ns ues , in whi ch those menacing
scu m bags are first literally summed up by the T-800's hi-tech apparatus th en di sarmed

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and di sr obed, resulting in a new version of th e co m posite Arnold im age, both 'b addcr'
and 'h ighe r ' than the bik e rs, at one a nd the same time pure realization of th eir o u tlaw
nature a nd antith esis of th eir downwardl y mobile sleaze . And th e a m biva le nce of thi s
newly sublated figure will then be further m arked a nd pla yed out against that
constru cted in th e next sequence around th e e vil T-I000, which begins in turn by
cu e ing o ff our co nv e n tio na l identifi cation with the figure of law a nd order poking
a ro u nd in the d ark shad o ws at th e margins o f the normativel y soc ia l, but e nd s by
conflating these two figures - one, a white mal e LA cop - as forml ess e vil (a p articularly
pungent if fortuitous man oeuvre , we may note , give n national exposure of th e racist
brutality of Police Chief Gat es's Los Angeles Police Department a sca n t few months
before this film 's release) .
I will return soon to consider furth er the exact nature and significance of th e agon, or
co nt es t, between thi s bad -gu y-as-good -gu y and th e good-gu y-as-bad . For now, though,
let thi s opening exa m p le se rv e as a demon stration of the pla y of opposition and
symbiosis essential to Terminator 2: th at is, as a d emonstration of processes th at co mbine
a fair a m o u n t of mobility granted to our various d esires and fears with a lack of
ambiguity at an y give n moment as to what we ought to think and feel. One minute th e
bikers a re low-life scum, th en Arnold is a bik er; one minute the LA co p is bravel y doing
his duty, the next minut e he is a remorseless assas sin; yet throughout a ll these
inclusions and exclus io ns we are never in doubt about which sid e to be on. Th e
punctu al clarity of su ch a 'p re fe r re d inv estment ' strat egy, as we might ca ll it, thu s
stands in marked contrast to the real a m bigu ities ofjudgement and feeling th at are th e
warp and woof o f classi c jihn noir, in the figures of, for exa m p le, the morally shad y
detecti ve a nd th e smart, allurin g femme fatal e, and is eve n farther awa y from th e
constant slidin g and seepage within Lynch 's him. In fact, the first thing to observe
about most of th e features offilm noir taken up by Term inator 2 is the degree to whi ch
th ey a re, as in Blue Velvet , both untrustworth y as straigh tforward quotation or appro­
priation yet, paradoxicall y, all the more significant for that.
Take Terminator 2's narrative strategy, on e of the film 's several Iloirish qualities. In
,
classic film noir, as we know , the qu estion of who is in co n tr ol of th e film's narration is
often ce n tra l to its meanin gs and effects. ":' In/ilms noirs like Gilda or Out (1 "the Past , that
question is posed by the disjunction between the male protagonist's tightlipped voice­
over and the sinister twists of the e n acte d plot in whose devious turnings th e figure of
the femme fatal e seems to exe rt a powerful hand. And at first it seems that so m e th ing
of th e same, but with a po stmodern , postferninist differen ce , is true of Term inator 2 as
well. Here, too, the laconi c decisiveness of th e voice-over contrasts with th e narrator's

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Terminator 2: Judgm ent Day (James Cameron, 1991)

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 SHADES OF NOIR

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991)

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 HOME FIRES BURNING: FAMILY NOIR

comparative lack of control over the film's action; only here the destination towards
which the plot careens is enlarged from individual catastrophe all the way to planetary
nuclear holocaust as a result of the en tropic drift of masculinist techno-rationality; and
the tough-guy narrator is a woman.
On this level, then, Terminator 2, like its predecessor, appears to be a sci-fi 'feminist
film noir' pitting its female heroine Sarah Conner against various individual and
collective 'homrnes fatales' in a simple yet effective inversion of the old device. Yet while
such a conclusion is, I think, not entirely false, even less could it be declared simply
true. For one thing, it is obviously not Linda Hamilton who is the big star of Terminator
2, but Arnold Schwarzenegger; nor is it Sarah Conner who, for all her stirring efforts,
is finally able to save the world, if indeed it has been saved, but the proto/semi-male 1'­
800 who supplies the vital edge. For another, and for all the noirish haze and green!
blue/black suffused throughout the film , on the level of narrative there is virtually no
confusion about what is going on, or how to feel about it. Just as clearly as we know
from moment to moment who is good and who is bad, we know Arnold the 'I-800
protector will rescue boy John from the clutches of the wicked 1'-1000; and when boy
John insists they break into the state hospital for the criminally insane and rescue his
mother Sarah, we know they will be able to pull that off as well. When the three of
them, plus Dyson the computer scientist, are on their way to the headquarters of
Cyberdyne Corporation to destroy those fragments of the first Terminator from the
previous Terminator film, which, when analysed and understood, will result in the
construction of the SkyNet system of 'defence' that will in turn trigger off the
holocaust, Sarah's voice-over, atop a night-for-night shot of a dark highway rushing
into the headlights and past, intones the noirish message that 'The future, always so
clear to me, had been like a dark highway at night. We were in uncharted territory now,
making up history as we went along.' By this time, though, such a message comes across
as mere atmosphere, the verbal equivalent of the aforementioned laid-on haze, rather
than as any real entrance into 'uncharted' territory on the part of a plot in which we
know where we are, and where we are headed, each step of the way.
Yet if the relation between narration and enactment in Terminator 2 is less an
innovative extension of film noir than first appeared, it is not hard to locate more
genuine expressions of a noir sensibility in the film's sense of space and time. In terms
of space, Terminator 2 early on takes its leave of the sunstruck residential neighbour­
hood where John Conner lives with his ineffectual foster parents, and spends the rest
of its running time either keeping its distance from or destroying any and all traditional
domestic space. And its classic noir preference for the bleak sprawl of southern

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 SHADES OF NOIR

California freeways, state institutions, research centres, malls and plants over any
closed familial enclaves is matched by its implicit flattening of time even across the gap
of nuclear apocalypse. The premiss motivating Terminator 2 - that in the wake of
nuclear apocalypse a resistance led by the adult John Conner continues to struggle
against the inhuman power of the machine, so that both sides, resistance and pow er
network, send their mechanical minions back in time, one to protectJohn-the-boy and
the other to 'terminate' him - insists on a difference between present and future that
the film's depictions erode. Here in the present, offi cial power - whether in the form of
the sadistically panoptical mental hospital, the gleaming surfaces and security systems
of the soulless corporation , or the massively armed and equipped, anonymous police­
already runs rampant; here already, before the bomb falls, the hardy band of guerrilla
terrorists resists, the fireballs blossom and the bodies pile up in the perpetual dark
night of Hobbesian co n fro n ta tio n between bad anarchy and good .
Terminator 2 thus not only reconstructs the fallen public world and queasy temporal­
ity of classic film noir but also constructs them together in the form of an apocalypse that
has, in effect, already occurred. Like Walter Benjamin's once-scandalous Angel of
History, the film's chronotope offers us a perspective from which modernity appears
less a 'chain of events' than 'one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage, and hurls it in front of [our] feet', a 'storm' that is 'what we call progress'. 1·\
Yet the very incongruity of such a rhyme between the ruminations of a Marxist­
modernist intellectual in Europe at the end of the 1930s and a contemporary Holly­
wood blockbuster film raises its own set of questions concerning what 'conditions of
possibility' must have been met before such a view could become mainstream. What
preconditions must be met before a mass audience can find su ch an anti-progressive
perspective pleasurable, can 'want to believe this', as Leo Braudy says of the rise and fall
of generic perspectives in general; 15 and what consequences follow from Terminator 2's
particular channellings of that desire?
Fredric Jameson suggests that the predominance of dystopic visions in contempor­
ary science fiction signals the general loss of our ability even to conceive of, mu ch less
I
struggle to enact, a utopian social vision, trapped as we are within both an imperialist
nation in decline and the overheated 'perpetual present' of postmodernist culture. 1(;
And much of Terminator 2, with its timed bursts of violence merged with state-of-the-art
special effects, offers itself up to such an interpretive hypothesis as Exhibit A. (Call to
reception theorists: how many in the American audience re cognized in the evil
cybernetic techno-war depicted in Terminator 2 's opening post-apocalyptic sequence an
image of a hysterically celebrated Gulf War just past, in which 'our' machines mowed

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\
HOME FIRES BURNING : FAMILY NOIR

down their human bodies, as the saying goes, 'like fish in a tank' ? And what were the
effects of this surely unintentional echo?) Yet here again, like a good blockbuster,
Terminator 2 also invites us to critique the violence it presents, and quite explicitly, in
Sarah's diatribe to scientist Dyson. 'Men like you built the hydrogen bomb,' she roars.
'Men like you thought it up .... You don't know what it's like to create something.' It is a
speech that might have been drawn from, or at least inspired by, the works of such
essentialist critics of male instrumental rationality as Susan Griffin, or such proponents
of a maternalist-based women 's peace movement as Sarah Ruddick or Helen Calde­
cott; 17 and it is there for the taking, not instead of but right along with the violence it
decries.
The ease with which this moment's feminist critique of Enlightenment takes its place
....
alongside brutal displays of techno-violence, though, should not blind us to its value as
a clue to what- is deeply and genuinely moving ­ in both the affective and narrative
senses of the word ­ in Terminator 2 . After all, the film we have described so far is one in
which a fundamentally uneventful frame (the apocalypse that has already occurred) is
constructed as backdrop for a plot whose terms and ends (T-800 saves boy; saves Sarah;
saves world; destroys evil twin , a.k.a. T-l 000) are all pretty much known in advance. If
the cybernetic machine that is Terminator 2 none the less appears at all alive and in
motion, its assignment rather involves an extensive renegotiation and reconstruction
of the hetero-sexlgender system itself, and that little engine of identity and desire
called the nuclear family in particular. And indeed, we have already hinted at one
important aspect of that renegotiation in our discussion of the noirish space of action in
Terminator 2, which gives us the ranch-style home and residential neighbourhood of
traditional American domesticity as the place of the phoney family (the foster parents of
which are promptly dispatched), and the new 'mean streets' of mall and culvert,
corporate research centre, freeway and desert, as site of the new true one.
This relocation of the family unit of Mommy/Daddy/Baby to the place where the nair
hero used to be, out in public and on the run, is likewise braided with a complex
transfiguration of all three roles in the family romance , part transforming and part
,
regressive in each case . Most prominently is of cou rse ultra-buff Linda Hamilton's
Sarah Conner as fully operational warrior-woman, like Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in
Cameron's Aliens only more so, phallic mother with a complete set of soldier-of-fortune
contacts, cache of weapons and survivalist skills. It; Conversely, there is 'the Arnold',
fresh from Kindergarten Cop and therefore all the more available for refunctioning
from killing machine to nurturant proto-father who, as Sarah's own voice-over puts it,
'would always be there and would always protect him [i.e ., John the son]. Of all the

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would-be fathers , thi s ma chine was the o nly on e that measured up .' And finall y,
rounding out this new holy family is golden-boy J ohn, wh o as grown-up rebel leader
sends Arnold back to the pa st to prot ect his ch ild hood self, but wh o as a kid must teach
both Mom and Dad how and wh en to cool their j ets.
If, as Constance Penley h as shown us, th e first Terminator film p osits J ohn Conner as
'the ch ild who orchestrates his own primal sce ne' to run th e energy of 'in fa ntile sexual
investigation' into th e proj ect of re-marking the difference between the sexes through
remaking/displacin g it as 'the more remarkable difference between human and
other'i!" then in Terminator 2 he must be both father-to-the-Man and father-to-the­
Mom . Arnold must learn fr om him that 'you can 't kill people'; while Sa rah must be
domesti cated a way from th e Moth er-Wolf fury in which she is enmeshed . That in this
latter task, as unerringly ri ght-on as young John is, it helps to have a Dad around is
perfectly evid ent in th e foll ow-up to the film's one overtly e rotic moment, when having
interrupted Mom 's co m ma nd o raid on th e Dyson hom e, John con fron ts her, now
collapsed in a heap a nd moaning 'I love you, John -I always have .' ' I know ', he an swers
hoarsel y, and falls into her e m brace . A second later, thou gh , we are all d elivered from
this hot-and-heavy sce ne before it goes an y farth er and sho rt s o ut the film , thanks to
the presence of Arnold , whose stern let's-get-goin g gla nce a t J oh n literally pulls th e boy
out o f Sarah's dangerous clutches a nd allows the ac tion to roll ah ead.
But for that matter, it is also clear by the e nd of the film that fo r allJohn 's moral se nse
and Sarah's muscles, they both still need Dad- and a Dad who is not that different after
all. For in th e course of Terminator 2 's movement from shop p ing mall to shop Hoor ,
both John and Sarah are d emonstrated to be ultimately ineffectual in their struggle
against 1'-1000 and the forthcoming holocaust alik e. For all her desire to ch a nge th e
dystopian co u rse of history, and all th e paramilitary training, Sarah is unabl e (too
'womanish'?) to pull the tri gger on Dyson: just as , despite the fortitude th at enables her
. to gun down her own T-IOOO simulation when it appears.f" she is incapable of
defeating this tireless, emotionless, yet endlessly mutable villain by herself. Could this
be be cause, as the film also shows us through Sarah's own re current and prophetic
holocaust dream, she herself is after all a split su bj ec t o n ly one of whose forms is
warrior-like - and that on e, com p a red to the apron -frocked housewife-mother on the
other side o f the fen ce , merel y a seco nd a ry product of, and co m pe nsa tory defence
against, her terrible foreknowledge of th e apocalyptic future as th e history-that­
alread y-h u rts ?
At any rate, for whatever reason , deliverance ca n only co me fr om a real man, that is,
from anoth er ma chine-gu y like th e 1'-1000, though one minu s the mutable part, and

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plus a modicum of moral-sentimental sense. 'I know now why yo u cry,' Arnold the '1'­
800 tells the John-boy in that touching final moment between defeating the '1'-1 000 and
lowering himself down into th e vat of molten steel that will terminate him too : 'but it's
something I can never cia.' The moral equivalent of such affective male positioning in
the film, is, of course, that grisly motif we are free to enjoy as sadisticjoke and/or, God
help us even more, take seriously as moral improvem ent: namely, Arnold's oft­
demonstrated commitment to maiming (usually by kneecapping) rather than killing
his human opponents, as per the John-boy's moral command.
By such means Terminator 2 gets it all in its ren egotiation of paternal masculinity,
offering us Arnold's stunted moral-affective capacities as simultaneousl y hard-wired
limitation (push come to shove, he 's still only a ma chine) and virtuous necessity (what a
man 's galla do). And indeed we might as well have come to the same point from the
opposite direction ; for the converse of all I have been saying is also tru e, and equally
well demonstrated in the final victory over the '1'-1000, despite its technological
superiority to our Arnold . How is it , after all , that Arnold the protector is able to rise
from the d ead, as it were, even after the '1'-1000 has driven an iron crowbar straight
through his back ? Or, perhaps more accuratel y, how is it that we find ourselves able to
believe that he does?
This, 1 think, is how. You will recall that at this moment of greatest extremity, a small
red light begins to shine far, far back in his eye - th e sign , we are told, that his back-up
power is kicking in . What then e n co u ra ges us to swallow such a manifestly inadequate
explanation - after all, there is no sensibly consistent reason why a T-I 000 would not
know about, or would fail to notice, an e a r lie r model's alternative energy source - is the
primary distinction between 800 and 1000, most explicitly rendered in the comparison
between Arnold's n ear-death and the T-I OOO's dissolution . For the T-I 000, the liquid­
metal protot ype , there is no deep red light to which it can resort, no power back-up to
call on when all else fails; there is only an orgiastic extravaganza of special effects,
recapitulating with oozy swiftness all the metamorphoses its liquid-metal shape­
changing abilities have enabled it to undertake throughout the film. By contrast, then,
with this horrific (but sp ellbinding!) swoon through difference , is it not clear that
compared with the T-I 000 Arnold, our new man, has a core-self - or, if you will,
individual soul - and just enough of one, whereas the '1'-1000 is merely the e m bod i­
ment of evil dispersion itself, e nd less semiosis as the highest form of te chnocratic
death-rationality?
If so, in its implication that th e capacity, andjust enough ofit. to feel and make moral
choices marks our new adult Daddyman out from both inhuman rationality (or is it

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 SHADES OF NOIR

semiosis?) on one side and the all-too-human (or is it fanaticism?) on the other,
Terminator 2 might plausibly be said to have thrown its family out on the street only to
turn it every which way but loose, that is, only to redirect us and it back to the fixed
ambiguities of a masculinist humanism whose very vertiginousness is uncannily, and
literally, familiar. But then this reconstruction - just at its most triumphantly synthetic
moment, too - half dwindles, half mutates into one final set of ambiguous-available
options for our attention, anxiety and desire. At the close of the film, is our pathos
extended to working-stiff Arnold lowering himself down into the soup, just another
self-sacrificing husband and father off to work at the plant, Just another body doing a
job'? Or do we shift our sympathies to the figure of Sarah Conner fiercely holding onto
John-boy, and see her instead as that arguably more up-to-date figure of the eighties
and nineties: the victimized and abandoned single-mother head of a homeless family ?

CONCLUSIONS IN FLUX

That. it. 'keeps going on like this ' is th e ca tastro p he.

Walter Benjamin 21
I'm in the middle of a m ystery.
Jeffrey in Blue Velvet

So far, we have looked at the overdetermining yet mutually subverting interplay of

formal means foregrounded by Blue Velvet as part and parcel of its project to bring the
urban spaces and ur-narrative of film noir into the formerly secure domestic spaces of
the small town and the family. We have also examined the narrative-dramatic
operations through which Terminator 2 reconstructs the family even as it moves it out to
the mean streets. One film constructed for and consumed primarily by the culturally
up-scale , and therefore with a corresponding emphasis on meaning-through-style; the
other made for a mass audience and, accordingly, with its meanings and judgements
carried largely by its plot. Yet the main burden of this conclusion of sorts must be to
consider some of the social meanings, possibilities and effects implicit in the overall
project taken up by these films in this particular postgeneric, postmodernist moment:
that project, we have been suggesting, is the domestication of film noir.
As a kind of side-door entrance into such considerations, it may be worth taking note
of a few aspects of our two films unmentioned until now: specifically, those that draw
on the economic and racial codes of mainstream , white capitalist culture. The former is

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most obviously referenced in the very selection of a steel mill as the site of Terminator 2's
climactic ending, given the function of steel production in contemporary socio­
economic discourse as the paradigmatic icon of the Fordist industrial world which we
have now, depending on whom you read, shipped off, frittered away, or even
transcended, but in any case lost, in our national economy's shift toward a 'post-Fordist'
regime with service rather than manufacturing industries at its core. Yet similar
allusions to a vanished or vanishing industrial world can be found throughout Blue
Velvet as well, from its frequent reminders to us of its small town's extractive-industry
base (for example, in the deejay's patter, or the image of the mill yard in which Jeffrey
comes to the morning after being assaulted by Frank) to the ominous brick warehouses
in which Frank seems both to live and conduct his dirty work, and arguably even to the
anachronistic spider mike Dorothy employs in the implausibly located nightclub where
she works.
Though the uses to which such imagery is put in each of the two films are multiple
and complex, in Blue Velvet the evocation of industrial culture is part and parcel of its
overall construction of an environment where nature and culture lose their borders,
and danger and pleasure coincide; whereas Terminator 2's uncanny yet nostalgically
recalled foundry adds an extra measure of weight and yearning to the triumphant
restoration and victory of the old male-dominant nuclear family and breadwinner ethic
that went along with the socio-economic erajust past. More generally still, though, and
in keeping with many other contemporary polygeneric films from Lethal Weapon to
Batman, the iconic spaces and imagery of Fordist production and industrial culture in
both our films function as a late-twentieth-century equivalent to the feudal mansion in
the chronotope of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel: namely , as a rum (though a
capitalist one) in which to place the monstrous dangers of the present and/or stage a
regressive deliverance from out of the sex/gender system of the past.
I will have more to say elsewhere on the subject of these new capitalist ruins.~!2 For
now let us turn our attention to the inflections and incitements of racial marking in
these films, a practice whose operations paradoxically take on all the more significance
in so far as racial discourse and positioning may at first sight appear to play such a small
part in our two films' overall schemes, practices and effects. From a normatively 'white'
point of view, after all, racial marking would seem to be an issue only at those rare
moments when someone 'n on -wh ite' shows up on screen, and then only as a question of
how that 'non-whiteness' is defined. What such a normative perspective thus typically,
indeed systematically, fails to acknowledge is the essentially relational operation of all
racial discourse and representation, or in other words the way every construction of

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a/the racial Other generates by contrast an implicit definition of what it means to be 'the
same' - that is, in the present instance, 'white'.
Let us take a quick look back at our two films from this relational perspective, then, to
see what implications we find in their nominally innocuous-to-honorific depictions of
the 'non-white'. In Blue Velvet, there are the two store-uniformed and aproned black
clerks who work at jeffrey's father's hardware store, peripheral even as secondary
characters, and seemingly memorable only because of the whimsically transparent little
shtick they play out in the scant few seconds in which they appear, in which the sighted
one uses touch signals to cue the blind one as to price or number of objects, and the
blind one pretends he has with magical prescience come up with the number himself.
Terminator 2, on the other hand, while 'randomizing' race among those cops and
hospital attendants destined to be casually crippled or killed, places non-whites in
secondary roles of clearly greater significance: Dyson the corporate scientist and his
family as African-Americans; Enrique, Sarah's former soldier-of-fortune comrade-in­
arms, and his family as Hispanics.
In Terminator 2, in fact, the self-approvingly 'nonracist' liberalism we seem to be
meant to read off from these last two sets of non-white characters and groups is more
or less spelled out within the film. Sarah's musings, quoted above, on how well Arnold
the T-800 fills the paternal bill are immediately followed by a softly sunstruck montage
of her old Hispanic running buddy's Mommy-Daddy-Baby unit caught unaware in the
midst of unselfconscious domestic bliss, the sight of which is then as immediately linked
to a recurrence of that dream of nuclear holocaust that separates Sarah from her own
apron-frocked domestic self. Likewise, a short while later, Dyson's more up-scale
family life is depicted in similarly idyllic and conventional terms, Mom taking care of
Baby, Dad smiling over them while hard at work, in the final moment before Sarah's
assault. The liberal progressivism of such representations thus announces itself in the
contrast between the settled, happy domesticity of the non-white families above
(Dyson's) or below (Enrique's) the social level of the aberrant and precarious white one
on which we stay focused. We could put the same point less generously but no less
accurately by saying that such progressivism is itself little more than a stalking horse for
the conservative project that rides in on it, namely, the (re)constitution of the regulative
ideal of the old male-dominant, oedipal-nuclear family for whites, coming at them, as
it were, from both sides.
Moreover, though Terminator 2 neither represents nor endorses any non-familial
social ideal, it still seems significant that both our non-white patresfamilias are associated
from the start with contemporary visions of social disorder and mass violence. For

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many if not most white view ers at least, Sarah 's rap id allusion to Enrique's past as a
con tra, co m bined with his gun-totin g first a p pea ra nce and his famil y's desert location ,
will call up a melange o f unsorted a nd uneasy impressions from Treasure of the Sierra
Madre to th e mainstream media's sp o tty yet h ysterical co verage of a d ecad e of mess y
a n d unpleasant struggle 'd own ther e ', plus attendant a nxie ties over 'their' illegal e ntry
and p eripheral exi stences 'up here'; the Afro -Ame r ica n Dyson, meanwhile, is str aigh t­
forwardly d epicted as th e auth or ofthe technological break throu gh that will eve n tua lly
give u s SkyNet , th e full y autonom ous, co m p u te r ized war technology that will soo n
trigger nuclear h olocaust as the first move in its war against humanity itself. O ne
wonders, in fact , how man y white viewers rec oiled from Sarah 's verbal assa u lt o n a black
man as the in carnation o f value-free and death-bound ma sculinist-corporate techno­
rationalit y, a n d on what level of consciousness they did so, a n d to wh at effect: how ,
d etach ed fr om its unlik ely target, is her didacti c essentialist feminism und erstood? I
h ave no id ea , and would not presume to g uess. At a ny rate , th ough , following thi s
bizarre mom ent, the film 's treatment of Dyson runs once again in familiar ways,
towards familiar ends: it rolls o u t th e Mobius-strip time-tra vel ca usality o f th at eigh ties
blockbuster Bach to the Future in its su ggestion th at Dyson th e black man does not re ally
invent a ny th in g 2 :\ (the breakthrough he co mes up with turns out to be merel y a n
extr a po latio n from those remn ants o f th e first Terminator, from the first Terminator
film , th at his co r po ra te e m p loye r managed to scoop up); a nd , as in man y other film s
featuring a once-w ayward non-white sidekick, it rehabilitates him Gunga Din style , by
including him in th e assault on the power with which he has formerly been associated,
an assault whose victory is, not acciden tally coinc id e n t with his self- sacrifice and death.
These regulative procedures by which whiteness learns from a n d is d efined by its
Othcr(s) even as those Others a rc re-subo rdinated , stigmatized, a nd/o r punished, are
not to he found in Blue Veloet, however - o r not quite. Th ere anoth e r, culturall y hipper
version of th e gam e of r eferen ce and relegation is going on, in whi ch racial differen ce
is placed within quotation marks, and , thu s te xtuali zed, is both e vo ked and winked
away. So the blackness of the store clerks sits next to th e blindness o f th e one clerk and
to the pseudo-magical tri ck th e y both like to pla y, asju st so much se m ic doodling alon g
th e m argins of this e nd lessly d ecentred text in which each ele m ent of th e normal and
conventional is estranged , while each strangen ess o r Otherness is subj ec ted to a
metonymic slippage that re nders it both equivalent to eve ry other otherness and e m p ty
in itself: bla ckness = blindness = stupid tri ck . In the universe constructed by Lynch 's
postrnod ern ae sthetics, there is no n eed e ith er to make liberal gestures towards th e
inclusion of the ra cial Other, or to discipline and punish that O therness when it

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appears . Rather, as th e whiff of Amos ' n And y we ca n sm ell around th e figures of our
two clerks in Blue Velvet suggests, and the overtly racist stereotypes (blacks and cre o les
as figures for a demonicall y sexuali zed and viol ent underworld) in Lyn ch's more recent
film Wild at H eart (1990) make abundantl y clear, even the mo st offensive tropes lTlay be
called back for a culturally up-scale and predominantly wh ite audien ce to enjo y under
the new postmodern dispensation that such hoary ideologemes are really only to be
delected like everything else in th e film, including th e tropes of 'back horne' them­
selves , as simpl y so man y h yperrealized/evacuat ed bits of virt uall y fr ee-Hoating text. ~1
This examination of both our films ' means of (re)producing the locations and
distinctive pleasures of whiteness and their regressive deployments of the new ruins of
Fordist industrial space this brings us back to th e central vortex or stu ck place by which
we may know co n te m p o ra ry 'famil y uoir' wh en we find it: in the apparent dissolution of
the rigid id entity/Otherness categories of the symbolic in general, and those of th e sex!
gender system in parti cular, into a semic flow or play of boundaries from which,
paradoxicall y, those same categories re-em erge with renewed half-life: and in the
astonishingly mobile and contradictory circuitry of desire and anxiety, pleasure and
fear, that this process both releases and recontains. Terminator 2, as we have seen, pla ys
around with border crossings between male and female, human and machine , the
Fordist past and the post-Fordist present, and , for that matter, bio-social pred estina­
tion ('it's in yo u r nature to destroy yo u rsel ves') VlTSUS existential possibilit y ('no fat e but
what we make'), only to redraw th e lines of the old nuclear family syst em as the last best
line of defence against the Huid yet inexorably programmed assaults of the terribly
New. Yet this restoration is itself a tenuous and contradictory one, given its figur ation
through th e asexual (or should it be 'sa fe-se x ua l'.') coalition of a cybo rg Dad and a
warrior-woman Mom, half-assisted and half-constructed through th e educative and
team-building efforts of a child who is thus both effectively as well as literally Father to
himself.~ 5 RIlle Velvet pulls ofl what is finally th e same denaturalizing/restoring act on a
more formal level , by presenting us with a pre-emincntly oedipal narrativ e whose
recuperations of patriarchal order are riddled with artifice and suspi cion, and e ro d ed
by a mod e of skewed hyperobservation that simultaneously fills and estranges, e xceed s
and evacuates the conventional terms in whi ch such narrativcs used to be cou ch ed.
Within contemporary political cu lt u re , we know what to call this meltdown and
restoration of the cat egories by which wom en and non-whites are put back in their
place (even B lue Velvet's Dorothy. likc Terminator 2's Sarah , is firmly, though hyp crbolic­
all y, put ba ck in the mother rol e in that film's closing shots) and whit e men in theirs, at
the same time as the devices of the political rh etoric that does so are brazenl y bared,

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and the very notion o f locati on is sm ir ked away. It s name is Reaganism (or Bushitis, if
you like) . And ce rt a in ly, brushed with r ath er than a gainst th e grain , th e proces s by
whi ch Blue Velvet's Jeffrey gets to answer girl fr ie n d Sand y's doubt as to wh ether he' s 'a
detectiv e or a pervert' by being both, and a good kid besides , is the sa me as that by
whi ch th e old actor got to be sim u lta neo us ly th e world 's leading authority figure and its
largest, most sp ectacularized airh ead . Lik ewi se, our intense enjoym ent in Terminator 2
of the spectacular semiotic mutability o f our protean villain, and the stabilizing
sa tisfactio ns provided by th e return of the classically di stin ct , embodied (if no less
syn th e tica lly produced) masculinity of our Arnold as Good Old Dependable Dad,2G
rhym e with the joys we have taken ov er the pa st four yea rs in the swings fr om Willie
Horton to 'Pinea p p le Head' Noriega to, in Bush's delivery , 'Sod o rn' Hussein , together
with the pleasures available in th e manifestly co n str uc te d image of Bush as , like th e 1'­
800 , another kinder, ge n tle r, ass- kickin g g uy .
Within cultural th eory and practi ce, feminist critics su ch as Suzanne Moore a nd
Tania Modjeski have been swift to notice and co ndem n this same process by whi ch the
dissolution of th e forms and categ o r ies of the patriarchal-oedipal-bourgeois symbolic
ca n be taken over by white male theorists and cultural producers, th e a p tly named
'pimps of postmodernism ', to co-o p t the pl easures of release and reconstru ct new and
more mobile means of domination. t " Yet without dis agreeing in any way with th ese
cr itiq ues, it remains for u s to ste p be yond or outsid e th em , in accordan ce with the old
Benjarninian dictum that it is pre-eminently the task of the historical materialist to
'brush History' - eve n , and perhaps especia lly, th at History that is our own present
moment -c.agamst th e grain ' as wel1.2H In oth er words, we must attempt to re ad the
particular complex of so cial-psychological needs a nd desires that gets ventilated and
redirected in these films not only as raw material for a new so cial co n tract with th e same
old Powers That Be, but also as a set of contradictory energies which , under the sign of
utopia , might be sh aped and ch a n n elled in progressive directions.
To su ch a project, this chapter can onl y contribute a few opening moves. For starters,
I would su ggest that to take th e domestication of jilm nair, or the noil'ization of
domesticity, se r io usly in this way, reading it against its o wn tenden cy, must ultimately
require us to refuse th e very opposition our two film s need to transgress, and
transgress in order to d emand again. More specificall y, we must see that th e very
comminglings of boundary erosion and restitution, semic swoon and symbolic fixity we
have traced in such detail a re a sign that these same categories are no longer
characterized by their mutuall y definin g opposition but by their dialecti cal implosion , a

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 SHADES OF NOIR

re volting-bu t-co nse rv in g action th at d escribes a soc io- po litica l impasse , a sticking 'point
d e ca p ito n' whose close kin ma y be found within co n te m po ra ry theory.
What I have in mind here are th e innum erable , and see m ingly intractable , di vision s
that have appeared over th e past d ecad e o r so, within and across the dom ain of wh at
are still called the 'new social movem ents' , betw een esse n tialist theory and nationali st
political practice on the one hand , a nd poststru cturalist or deconstructive th eory a nd
an ev er-shifting politics of articulation o n th e oth er - not to mention any number o f
un acknowledged and illicit comminglin gs o f th e twO.29 In the first at its most e xtre me
(and, it must be said, caricatured), th e unified id entity of the oppressed group is seen as
both unproblernatically given and as inh e rently su per ior to that of the equally mono­
lithic, uniformly evil oppressor. In th e seco nd, that same identity is seen as shee r
dis cursive relationality, merely one fals e hyp ostatized stop among others in a cha in of
soc ial signifiers in constant Hux , and th erefore open to an y and all so rts of 'in­
differentiated' deconstru ction and rearticulation as we bricoleurs of this co nj u nc tu re see
fit.:Hl T hese two positions, separatel y and at tim es in bafflingly co nt rad icto ry co m bina­
tion, ma y be said to have virt ually cov ered th e field of putati vel y radical theory in the
e ig h ties , or at lea st those parts of it con cern ed with ra ce , ge nd er and sexuality within
the US and British scenes . No r is it useful to point out that both positions are quite
patently subspecies of ahistorical id ealism, as opposed to any properly materialist view:
that only sounds like so much cranky lumberin g from that old outmoded bully-bore
Marxism , trying to push all our struggles into a box lab elled Relations of Production , or
cr us h us all flat under its Mode of Prod u ction stea m ro lle r again.
Though such suspicions have their own historic legitimacy, there is none the less a
cost to throwing out the materialist baby with th e bath water; and in the cusp between
'th e e ig h ties and nineties that cost became increa singly m anifest as a sacrifice of politics
itself. So, for example, Kate Soper among oth ers, writing of the ways both the
essentialist and post-structuralist positions within co n te m p o ra r y feminist theory co n­
duce to co n ser va tisim and/or passivity, points o ut how 'e ithe r difference is essentialized
in a wa y which simply celebrates the "feminine" oth er of dominant cu lt u re without
disturbin g the hold of the latter; or the critique is taken to a point where the "feminine"
and its political and cu ltu r a l agents in th e women 's mov ement and feminist a rt and
literature no longer exist in the sense of ha ving a ny reco gnisable co m m o n content a nd
set of aspirations'."! Either we are right and good alread y, and our Others are
irrevocabl y wrong and evil ; or 'we' are at worst so mebod y else's dying fiction, at best
sheer never-ending flux.
T his is not the place to launch a full historical-genetic investigati on of th e anti-political,

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 HOME FIRES BURNING : FAMILY NOIR

anti-institutional tendency within American cultu re . Yet it see m s clear th at one effect
of th e terrible d efeats dealt o u t here throughout th e 1980s to every potentially
progressive constituen cy has been to deepen widel y held libertarian-individualist
suspicions that no str uc tu ra l or ins titu tio nal tr ansformations fo r the better a re possible,
th at nothin g political ca n be don e . Suc h an in cr eased and se lf-co n fir m ing h opelessn ess
has , I think, had mu ch to do with th e putati vel y radical th eory we hav e produced over
the p ast decade. Wh at is most abse n t from th e present moment of co n fu sio n and
dej ection all alon g th e left , and most ne cessary for its red emption , is th e co n fid e nce
that individuals ca n co m e to gether in coll ecti ve actio n to transform so cieti es str uc tu r­
all y a nd institutionall y for the bett er. In this resp ect, th e reb elling/conserving schizo­
phrenia of radical th eory is at on e with the pl easures of th e rebelling-but-conserving
cinematic texts we have examined: both bein g not so mu ch about th at absence o f
confidence as presupposing it , a nd offering us pleasures th at ca n only appear within a n
aso cial kingdom from whi ch suc h co n fid e nce must have been banished a lon g time ago .
Th e more general form or m ethodological implication of this same poin t might run
as foll ows. If the political events a nd theoretical cr itiq u es of th e past decad e or so hav e
inocul ated us - feminists, peopl e o f colo u r, ga ys a nd lesbi an s, 'post-Ma rx ist' socialists ,
all o f us - against a ny low-grade H egelian fever and its ch ie f assoc ia te d sym p to m, th e
chronic ass u m p tio n o f a progressive dialectic ch ugging away so m ewhe re, anywhere in
the social universe , th ey ought not to blind us to the variou s nonteleological ways in
whi ch so cial desires a n d social r ealiti es continue to work th emselves out di alectically­
nor to o u r responsibilit y to do wh at we can to mak e those di alectics utopian again . It is
in th e se rv ice of precisely such insi ghts and responsibilities that Au/helnmg , that corn y
old co nce p t of 'ca ncelled yet preserved in a hi gh er synthesis', must itself be ca n ce lled ­
as a n atural endowm ent of any group, or tend en cy of any social force - yet preserved,
at lea st as the possibilit y that rad ical practice ca n conn ect with sociall y co nstr uc te d
desire in suc h a way as to make a d ifference. Otherwise, wh at ever the prin cipal locu s of
its e n gag e me n t may be, radical soc ia l and cu lt u ra l th eory is all too likely to be
cond emned to an interminable shuttling quite similar to that we have seen in our two
films, between th e thrilling sublime of one or a no th er form of 'pe r m a ne n t revolution '
and th e d esperate ca tch -u p of attempting to restore and strengthen old id entities and
game rules feared lost.
Or, to r eturn fr om th e metatheoreti cal clouds to familyf£l1ll noir specifically, it may be
that th e way to respond to the irresolute resolution s and rebellious co n se r va tism of our
films without reprodu cing their eq u ivale n ts in th eory is to recognize the le gitimacy of
the n eeds and desires that und erlie the d ynamics o f th e film s' operati ons while

255
 SHADES OF NOIR

refusin g th eir opposed ye t co m m ingled terms. Su ch a utopi an reading would then pa ss

throu gh the recognition that even these admitt edly corrupt a nd perniciou s cultural
produ ctions have both to rest on an d run off a widely h eld co nse nsus th at the old
nuclear, oedipal, male-dominant, breadwinner-ethic-based family is neith er natural
nor desirable, and an equall y widel y held and justifiable an xiet y as to th e brutal chaos
that e ns ue s when th e rules of th at o ld system are tattered o r in abeyan ce without an y
other e me r gin g to take its place: to pass throu gh that re cognition and th en to take th e
combination of desire and anxiety it has found as a resour ce fo r a progressive politics.
In 1983 , as the conclusio n of her survey o f white mal e revolts ag ain st what sh e
dubbed the 'breadwinner ethic' a nd the oedipal-nuclear famili es it produ ced , Barbara
Ehrenreich proposed that 'male [white male , th at is] culture seems to ha ve abandoned
the breadwinner role without overcoming the sexist attitudes that role has perpe­
tuat ed' . :l ~ But she went on to su ggest that th e on ly way to begin to mov e beyond thi s
impasse is to struggle for an expa nd ed, d emocratized , Ie rn in ist expansion of th e
welfare sta te in whi ch women a nd men alike ea r n a 'family wage', and in whi ch wom en
are also provided with the 'va r iety of social supports' ne cessary for th em ' to enter th e
labor market on an equ al footin g with men' - including, and especially , 'reliable , high­
quality ch ild care' .'\:\ Her argum ent is not that such goa ls, once ac h ieved , would
automatically bring a n end to sexist oppression, or ush er in a feminist utopia ; it is
simply that without such gains, little new ground for th e co ns tr u ctio n ofless oppressive
gender roles and relations is likely to open up .
In 1993, of course, after ten more years o f repression , rollback and decay, su ch a
programme ma y see m , like Alec No ve's model of a 'feasible socialism ', all the more a
combination of the hopelessly in sufficient and the wildl y utopian . Yet such a h ybrid
failin g , if failing it be, none th e less seems to me uniquel y exemplary within recent
Am erican cultural theory in its insistence on a given set of programmatic political
go als ;just as that insi stence in turn seems infinitely more ad equate to th e cu r re n t need
to re cover the terrain of political agen cy a nd possibility than an y rehash of the
essentialist versu s poststructuralist debate . The main point here is that for all th e
bleakness of the present moment , and ind eed precisely because of it, we must non e the
less learn or relearn to propose something more real and more properly political as the
outcome of our anal yses th an th e indulgent rag es and self- strokings or identity and/or
the jo u issanc e of poststructuralist free-fall : because th e o n ly alt ernative to su ch a
'cancelled-yet-preserved' ren ewal of politics itself is th e dubious enj oyment of being
permanently stu ck , like Blue Velvet's Jeffre y, 'in the middle of a m ystery' whos e

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 HOME FIRES BURNING : FAMILY NO/R

pleasures most o f the people we sp eak for and with can o n ly a fford to take in eve ry now
and th en , whe n thanks to th e magic o f mo vies an d political ca m p aigns aimed both high
and low , at th e theo re tically sophisticated and at the masses, the cat astrophic 'it goes on
like this' is, at no small ex pe nse , th e su bj ect of a little fu n .

NOTES

An ea rl ie r and abb reviate d version of this cha p te r appears in electronic-text form in

Postmodern Culture, vol. 2, no. 3 (May 1992) . It is publ ish ed here in its entirety with
special thanks to the Center for the Humanities at Oregon Stat e University for
(
granting the author a research fellow ship that allowed him to write it.

I. Gled h ill's ar gum ent for th e su bve rsive ness of
the films noirs o f th e forti es a n d fifties m ay he
found in Christi ne Gledhill , 'K lu/ e I : A
Co n te m porary Film No ir a nd Feminist
C riticism' , in E. An n Kapl an , ed .. WOllin , ill
Film Noir (Lond on: British Film Institute ,
197 8), pp. 6-21.
2. Dav id Bordwell , Janet Sta iger and Kr istin
T ho m pso n. Th e Classical H ollywood St yle (Ne w
Yo rk : Columbia U n ive rsity Pr ess, 1986) , P: 77.
3. Summarized in Robert Starn , S ubversive
Pl easures : Ba kluin, C ultura l Cri ticism and Film
(Baltimore : J ohns Hopkins U nive rs ity Pr ess ,
1989 ), p. l 2 . So bchu k's essa y is, unfortun ately ,
unpublished to d ate.
4 . H ere I feel bound to note th at m y argum ent
regard ing th ese ' neo-noin ' co nve rges with tha t
of Fred ric J am eson co nce rn ing what h e calls
'nosta lgia ' films o f the sevent ies and eighti es.
but with a differen ce: I am less con cer ned to
rel a te their h ollowed-out aesth eti c of 'pa stiche'
to a ny larger an d more glob al 'cu ltu ra l logi c
o f Late Capital' th an to pla ce th at aesth etic
within the particul ar commercial and
institutional co n tex t in whi ch it acq u ires its
ini tial se nse. See Fredric J ameson ,
Postmode rnism , or Th e Culturul l .ogi c of Late
Capita lism (Durh am, NC: Duk e Un ivers ity
Pr ess, 1991), pp. 19-20 and 279- 96 .
.~ . T h om as Scha tz, The Gen ius of the System (New
York: Panth eon , 1988) .
6 . See T odd Gitl in 's account o f the rise a nd fall
o f Hill St reet Blues, and hi s a rg u me n t th at the
'reco m bina n t aesthetics' o f television
production a re the quintessence of lat e­
ca p ita list cu ltu ral produ ction , in h is I m ide
Prim e T ime (New York : Pantheon, 1983),
pp . 27 3- 324 an d 76-80 respectively.
7. Michael Moon , 'A Sm all Boy and O thers:
Sexua l Disorientation in Henry .lames,
Kenneth An ger an d David Lynch ', in
H ortense.J. Sp illers, ed ., Comparatiue A merican
Identities : R ace, S ex ami N at ionality in the Modem
Text (New York: Routledge, 1991) , p . 142.
T h is is th e p lace , moreo ver, to d ecla re th e
ge ne ra l d ebt m y readin g o f Blue Velvet owes to
Moon 's in sist ent explorati on of the film 's
sexual-discursive 'undersid e'.
H. Barbara C reed, 'A j o u rney through Bl ue
Velvet : Film , Fa nt asy a nd th e Female
S pecta to r', New Formations , 6 (Win te r )98H),
p.IOO.
9 . 'Ta ke som ethin g comfo rtin g, famili a r,
esse nt ia lly Am erican ,' Simmons writes , 'a nd
turn up th e co n tro ls, th e visual volu me . It's
overheated technicolor . . . [elvery detail is
pi cture-perfect and it ree ks of dange r and

257
 SHADES
failure.' Quoted from the anthology of responses
compiled in '(Why) Is David Lynch
Important?' Parkett, 28 (1991), p. 154.
10. Mannoni's widely cited formula first appears
in his Clefs pour l'lmagiruurc, au L'Autre Scene
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969). For another
recent consideration of the relationship of the
circuitry of disavowal and enjoyment it
describes to postmodernist culture, see Jim
Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture
and Postmodernism (New York: Routledge,
1989), p. 110 ff.
II. The full sentence from which this quoted
material comes is worth quoting in full for the
linkage Moon makes, and claims the film
makes, between the film's sadomasochistic
homoerotics and the mobile discursivity of the
desires it displays: 'When Lynch has Frank
mouth the words of the song a second time
[Ben having done so, to Frank's anguished
pleasure, back at the whorehouse a short time
before], this time directly to a Jeffrey whom
he has ritually prepared for a beating by
"kissing" lipstick onto his mouth and wiping it
off with a piece of blue velvet, it is as though
Lynch is both daring the viewer to recognize
the desire for each other that the two men's
newly discovered sadomasochistic bond
induces them to feel and at the same time to
recognize the perhaps more fearful
knowledge that what most of us consider our
deepest and strongest desires are not our own,
that our dreams and fantasies are only copies,
audio- and videotapes, of the desires of others
and our utterances of them lip-synchings of
these circulating, endlessly reproduced and
reproducible desires' (Moon, p. 146).
12. Buttoning or quilting points, a concept
borrowed here from Lacan via Slavoj Zizek.
See especially Zitek's insightful and hilarious
essay' "Che vuoi?" " in his The Sublime Object of
Ideology (New York and London: Verso,
1989), pp. 87-129.
13. Not to mention noinsh melodramas of the
same moment: see Mary Ann Doane's
258
OF NOIR
illuminating discussion of these issues in her
The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film oj the
1940.1 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987).
14. Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy
of History', in Illuminations (New York:
Schocken, 1969), trans. Harry Zohn, pp. 257,
258.
15. See the opening pages of his fine discussion of
'classical' film genres in Leo Braudy, The
Wm-ld in a Frame: What We See in Films
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), pp.
104-24.
16. Fredric Jameson, 'Progress Versus Utopia: Or,
Can We Imagine the Future?', Science Fiction
Studies vol. 9, no. 2 (1982).
17. Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring
Inside Her (New York: Harper and Row,
1978); Sarah Ruddick, Maternal Thinking:
Toward a Politics of Peace (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1990).
18. The hysterical panic provoked in (some) male
quarters by the appearance L f Linda
Hamilton's ninja warrior in Terminator 2 and
Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis's
incarnations as vengeful baudidas in Thelma
and Louise in the same summer of 1991 is a
topic worthy of investigation in itself. For a
sample, see Joe Urschel's USA Today editorial,
'Real Men Forced into the Woods', 26-28 July
1991, which argues, as far as I can tell, half­
seriously, that the powerful women characters
and male-bashing plots of the two
aforementioned movies leave men no choice
but. to join Robert Bly's my tho poetic 'men's
movement' and return to nature! I am
gratefUl to my friend Gray Cassiday for
bringing this phenomenon to my attention.
19. Constance Penley, Time-Travel, Primal Scene
and the Critical Dystopia', in Annette Kuhn,
ed., Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and
Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema (London
and New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 121 and
123.
 HOME FIRES BURNING : FAMILY
20. H er e the comparati ve te rm migh t be J en nifer
O'Neal's fatal par alysis a t th e sight of her
clo ned self at th e clima x of The S tepjord W ives
(Br yan Fo rbes 1975).
2 1. Q uo ted, fr om the note s for th e un completed
Passagen- W erk, in Su san Buc k-Mo rss, T he
Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin an d the
Arcades P roj ect (Ca mbridge, MA : MIT Pr ess,
1989 ), p. 375 .
22 . See th e concluding sectio n of Fr ed Pfeil,
'From Pillar to Postmode rn: Race, Class and
Gender in the Male Rampage Film ',
forthcoming in Socialist R eview and in my Wh ite
Guys: Studies in Postmode rn Power, Choice and
Change (fo rt hco ming fr om Verso , 1993).
23. See Fr ed Pfeil , ' Plo t a nd Patriarch y in th e Age
of Rea gan : Readin g Ba ck to the Fu ture and
Brazil', in Another Tal e to Tell: Politics and
N arrat ive in Postm odem Cu lture (Londo n and
New York Verso , 1990), espe cially pp . 235-6.
21. For a p re scient ea r ly warnin g of this
ph en omenon , first spotted in the high-cult
r ealm of th e visual a rt s, see Lucy Lippard,
' Rejecting Retrochic', in Get the M essage? A
Decade of Art for Social Change (Ne w York : E. P.
Dutton, 1984), p p . 173- 8; and for a recent
assessment o f its presen ce and effects in
contemporary Am er ican pop ular culture, see
Su zanna Damna Walters, 'Premature
Postmortems: "Post feminism" and Popula r
Culture', N ew Politics, vol. 3, no. 2 (Wint e r
1991).
25. See Pfeil, 'Plot and Patriarch y', pp . 227 -41.
26. The distin ction betw een the 'classical' a nd the
'gro tesq ue ' bod y is drawn from Bakhtin and
elaborated brilli antl y by Peter Stall ybr ass and
Allan Whit e in their Th e Politics an d Poetics of
Trans gression (Itha ca, NY: Co rn ell Un ive rs ity
Pr ess, 1986). What seem s worth noting he re,
howev er, ab out the figure of 'o ur Ar no ld' and
perhaps ab out other co nte mpora ry ideal­
images of cont e mpo ra r y whit e straigh t
259
NOIR
mas culinity, is th e degree to whi ch the
'classical' a nd 'g ro tesq ue' seem to be mutu ally
co ntained and containing within suc h figures ,
in a way that see ms connected to th e broader
themati c a nd political arg u ment I am making
here.
27. T ania Modleski, 'The Incredibl e Shrinki ng
He(r)man : Male Regression , th e Male Body ,
a nd Film ', Differences vol. 2, no . 2 (19 90) , pp .
55- 75 , and Su zanne Moore, 'Getting a Bit of
the O the r - th e Pimps o f Postrn oderuism', in
Rowena Chap ma n and Jon athan Rutherford ,
ed s., Male Order: Unwra pping Masculinity
(Lond o n : Lawren ce and Wishart, 1988),
pp. 165-92.
28. Benj amin, p. 257.
29. For so me ex am ples of the latter, see my ' No
Basta Te o rizar : In -Dif ference to Solidarity in
Co nte m po rary Fiction , Theory, a nd Pra ctice',
forthcoming in Inderpal Grewal and Caren
Kapl an, eds., Postmodernism find Transnational
Femin ist Practices (Minn eapolis: U niversity of
Minn esot a Pr ess, 1993 ).
30. Exa mp les of the fir st ar e so numerous and
easily com e by tha t it would seem pointless,
and perhaps even preferentiall y abusive, to
single out a few representative instances here ;
the locus classicus of the second tendency,
though, must su rely be Ernesto Laclau and
Chant al Mouffe, H egemony and Sociali st
Strat egy: T tnoards a R adical Democratic Politics
(New York : Verso, 1985).
3 1. Kate Soper, 'Feminism , Hum ani sm and
Postrn odernism', Radical Philosophy, 55
(Sum me r 1990), p . 14.
32 . Barbar a Ehrenreich , Th e Hearts of M en:
American Dreams and the Flight Fum Commitment
(Ga rd en City, New York : Ancho r Press!
Doubleda y, (9 83) , p . 182.
33 . Ibid. , pp. 176-7.
 9

NOIR BY NOIRS TOWARD A NEW

REALISM IN BLACK CINEMA

, M anthia Diauiara

Le film noir es t noir pour nous, c'esi-a-d ire pour le public occide nta l et a rne ricain d es
a n nees 50 .
Raymond Borde and Etienne Ch aurneton, Pan orama du film noir americain

Lookin g eastwa rd from th e low ers o f Riversid e C h u rch , perched among th e university
buildin gs on , the hi gh banks of th e Hud son River, in a valle y far' below , wa ves o f g ray
rooftops d istort th e perspective like the surface of a sea. Below the surface, in the murky
waters o f fetid tenements, a city of bla ck people wh o ar e co n vu lsed in d esperate livin g, like
th e voracious ch u r n ing or millions o f hungry ca n n iba l lish . Blind mouths eat in g th eir own
gu ts. Stick in a hand a nd draw ba ck a nub. That is Harlem.
C hes te r Himes, A Rage in Harlem

Th e re are two modes of j llmnair cr iticism : one is form ali st, the other is co n te n t-base d .
Feminist cr iticism , fo r exa m p le , h as for the most part e m p ha sized the formal ele me nts
ofjilm run r - th e ch ia ro scu ro lighting, th e voice-over narration , th e multiple points o f
view, the co n volu ted plot, the eroticization of violen ce, in order to show h ow th ese
devices o f the ge n re work to stabilize patriarchy, how the genre m aintains itself
through th e production of the femme fatale and th e prevention o f an e me rgen ce o f
other types of women. Formalist cr iticism links the e p ithe t nair to the gr o tesq ue, th e

261
 SHADES OF NOIR

sinister, and the image of women as tr ea cherous. Women , bad g uys, and d etectives are
in these film s, considered 'black' by virtue of th e fact that th e y occupy ind et erminate
and mon strous spaces suc h as whiten ess traditionally reserves fo r blackness in our
culture . In film noir th e opposition between dark and light, underworld a nd 'above
board ', good and evil is blurred and it is the collapse of these boundaries that ca us es the
cha racte rs to partake of th e a tt r ibu tes of bla ckness. From a form alist perspective, a film
is noir if it puts into pla y light and d ark in order to exh ibit a people who become 'black'
because of their 'shady' moral behaviour. Through its focus on formalist devices,
feminist cr iticism exposes [ilm non'« att empt to paint white wom en 'black' in order to
limit or co n tro l their independent agen cy, their self-fashioning . I
Marxist criticism also belongs to thi s first , formalist mode ; it eq uates th e noinjicauou
of film styl e and characters in the genre with p essimism and th e decay of th e cap ita list
system . It is in this sense that, commenting on th e no ir writers of the 1930s and 1940s,
Mike Davi s sta tes that 'N o ir was like a transformational g ra m m ar turning each
ch a r m ing ingredient of th e boost ers' arcadia into a sinister equi valent. Thus, in Horace
McCoy's TIll'} Shoot !JO l:\ I' S Don't Tlu')'? (193':» th e marathon d an ce hall on O cean Pier
became virt ually a d eath ca m p for th e depression 's lost souls.' ~ This reading of the/ilm
noir as a kind of Marxism Inlll/ifu r is echoed by Carl Richardson , in an ex cellent study
e n titled Autops»: An El ement ojRealistu in Film N oir. For Richardson , too ,Jiim n oir deriv es
its realism from a sense of pessimism , a light cast on the dark ba ckground cre a ted by
the Depression: 'It is traumatic for a n individual to lose a set of beliefs . For a world­
wide cot erie of intellectuals and artists , it is a dark , frustrating process. 11 is a film noir
on a large scale .':'
But th ere is anoth er sid e to [il)« noir cr iticism , one that is co m p lica ted through
ethnicity a nd the present crisis in American cities; it involves the description of su ch
films ab out black p eople, or directed by bla ck film-mak ers. I want to make th e
argument here that th e new black directors appropriate th e style of/ilm noir, among
others, to cre a te the possibilit y for the e me rge nce of new and urbanized bla ck images
on the scr een . Whereas th e first e p ig r a p h, tak en from Ra ymond Borde and ttiellll e
Chaum etori 's famous book, describes film I/OiT as purely a style that uses th e tropes of
blackness as metaphors for the white characters' moral transgressions and falls from
grace, th e second epi graph , from Chester Himes's A Ragl' in Harlem, focu ses thenoiT
style on bla ck people th emselves. For Borde and Chaumeton ,Jilm noir is black because
the characters have lost the privilege of whit en ess by pursu ing lifest yles that are
misogynistic, cowardly , duplicitous , that exhibit themselves in an eroti cization of
violence. Himes , on th e other hand , opposes th at which is above - Riversid e Church

262
 HOIR BY HOIRS

and the buildings of Columbia University - and that whi ch is below - Harlem - to
highlight less an aesthetic stat e of affairs than a way of life that has be en imposed o n
black people through social injustice , and that needs to be exposed to the light. Himes's
text is a protest novel which deploys th e noir style to sh ed light on the d esperate
co nd itio ns of people who are forced to live below . Th e nov el's grotesqu e ima gery - 'a
city of black peopl e who are convulsed in desperate living, like the voracious churning
o f millions of hun gry cannibal fish. Blind mouths eating th eir own guts' - ma y be as
co n ven tio nal as an y description of violen ce and pessimism in the n air genre, but what is
unusual about A Rage in Harlem is the way it uses th e conventions of the genre to
subvert its main tenet: that bla ckness is a fall from whit eness . For Himes, black peopl e
are living in hell and white people in he aven not because the one colour is morall y
inferior to the oth er, but because bla ck people are held captive in the valley below th e
towers of Riversid e Church. The noirs in Himes's text a re black people trapped in th e
darknes s of white ca p tivity, and the light sh ed on them is m eant to rend er them visible ,
not white. Himes's text and the recent run of bla ck films that participate in th e
discourse ofjilm uoir (jo e's Bed-Stuy B arbershop: W e Cut I l ead, Deep Cover, One False Mo ue,
Juice. Illusion, Chameleon Street, e tcete ra ) force us to re-examin e the genre and its uses by
black film-m akers . They orient the noir style toward a description of a black public
sphere and a black way of life.
It is clear th erefore that form alist criticism of th e notr genre runs th e risk of reducing
[dms noirs by noirs to a critique of patriarchy or of capitalism, and thus of minimizing on
the on e hand the decon struction of racism in th e renewed ge n re, and on th e other
h and a delin eation of a bla ck way of life in America. I submit that a th ematic or content­
based cr iticism ofjilms n on s by n oirs is more appropriate to anal yse bla ck rage, class
conflict among black p eople, a nd th e sp ecificity of black cu ltu re in th e texts . It is
misleading, for example , to see bla ck [emmelcualrs , neurotic detectiv es and grotesqu e
bad guys as poor imitations of their white counterparts; these cha r acte r s may be
redeplo yed in the genre by black film -makers in order to represent su ch themes as
black rage at white America. In a paradoxical sense, th e redeploym ent of noir style by
black film-makers redeems bla ckness from its genre definition by re casting the relation
between light and dark on the screen as a m etaphor for making bla ck people and their
cu ltu res visible . In a broader sense , black jilm notr is a light (as in da ylight) cast on black
p eople .

263
 SHADES OF NOIR

BLACK RA G E AS FILM NOIR

Se t in H arlem, A Rage in H arlem tells th e story of the entan glem ent of Jackson, an
hon est and 'very religious yo u ng m an ', with underworld charact ers wh o sta bilize their
e n viron men t through moral inv ersions." Jackson's own broth er, Go ldy , is a stool
pi geon who dresses as a Sister o f Mercy, spea ks in biblical riddles, a nd sells tickets to
h eaven in front of a d epartment sto re to Christians 'f ull of larcen y wh o fall for that' .
Gold y lives with two other m en , and 'all three impersonated femal es a nd lived by their
wits. All three were fat and black , whi ch made it eas y' (p . 34) . Theirs is a world policed
by d etectives such as Coffin Ed Johnson a nd Grave DiggerJones who people in Harlem
believe 'would shoot a man stone d ead for not standing straight in a lin e ' (p . 44) . Grave
Digger and Coffin Ed control black people in Harlem by unleashin g their rage on
them: a rage that seems to co ns u m e the detectives themselv es, a nd sp ills out grotes­
quely and in a misogynistic m ann er onto intruders and those Ha rlernites who step out
of lin e:

They took their tribut e, like all real co ps , from the established und erworld ca te ring to the
essential needs of th e peopl e - ga me- kee pe rs, madams, street walk ers, numbers writers,
numbers bankers. But th ey were rough o n purse snatch ers, muggers, burglar s, con men ,
and all st rangers mak ing a ny racket. (p . 49)

The bad gu ys in the text are typi cal noir characters. Slim, Hank and Jodie are outsid ers
in Harlem, small-town thugs from th e South ; they com e north to join their form er
partner, Imabelle, and d ecid e to set up an investm ent 'rack et ' as a way of gaining a
share in the underground informal market. Hank throws ac id in p eople's e yes , and
Slim is described as 'wea ring ov er his suit a long khaki duster like those worn by mad
scientists in low-budget horror motion pictures. The leg end U .S. Assayer was embroi­
dered on the chest' (p. 68) . J odie is on 'a kill-crazy edge with th at knife' which he never
parts with, not even in mom ents of sexual intimacy:

Jodie was staring over her head , lost in his music. He ran his left ha nd slowly back and forth
over her cr isp brown cu r ls as I hou gh he liked the sensation . Hi s right arm rested on his
thigh and in his right hand he held th e bone-handled switch -blade knife, sna p p ing it open
and shut. (p . 145)

Irn abelle, the no vel's femm e fatale, is described as 'a cu sh io ned -lip p ed , hot-bodied ,
banana-skin chick with th e speckled -b ro wn eyes of a te aser a nd the high-arched , ball­
bearing hips of a natural-born amante' (p. 6). Imabell e o pe r ates by sending conflicting

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 NOIR BY NOIRS

messa ges to d iffe rent ch a rac te rs. A trus te d lo ve r in need o f J ackson 's protec tio n , she is
a wife a nd a n ac co m p lice to Slim. J ackson n ever su spects he r eve n wh e n h e find s h er
wit h the gan g that rob bed him . Sh e is able to co m fo rt him with her bod y lan gu age: 'Sh e
was lookin g stead ily int o j ackso n 's eye s. H er lip s form ed th e wo rds, "Co m e o n in and
kill h im, Dadd y. I'm all yo u rs ." T he n she ste pped back, makin g sp ace fo r him to e n te r '
(p . (8). Yet , to Gra ve Digger, Irn ab elle is a ve ry da ngero us woman who 'saddled
Jackson a nd Go ld y wit h th e bod y [Slim 's] a nd planned to la m on th e first train lea vin g
to wn . She d idn 't give a dam n what h a ppened to any of them ' (p . 156) . When Imabelle
cuts a man in th e fa ce with a knife a nd tells th e poli ce th at she has never see n th at man
before , a bystand e r q uo tes :

Black ga l ma ke a fre igh t tra in jump d e tr ack .

Bu t a yalle r ga l ma ke a p reach er Ball d e J ack . (p . 11 7)

The re lations between th e characte rs I hav e j ust d escrib ed in A Rage in Harlem ec ho

th ose o f Th e M altese Falcon a nd man y ot h e r noir text s in whi ch ba d guys co m e to to wn in
search of a lost obj ect whi ch , how ever trivi al or in authen tic it ma y be, drives th e
int rigu e and lea ds th e cha rac te rs to p u rsu e vicious a n d viole n t cr imes th at disturb th e
harm on y o f the und erworld . T h e d r eamlike m anner in which Himes's cha r acte rs slip
in an d out of ra tio n ality is reminiscent of such h ard -bo iled detective nov els as POl) . I080
(jim T ho m pson) , in whi ch th e tow n sheriff is also a se rial kille r. Furthermore, H im es's
te xt e mbod ies the key e le ments o f the f ilm noir ge nre as d efined by Borde a nd
Chaumeton : 'u nstable ra p port a mo ng the members in a cr im ina l gan g . . . dreamlike
and e ro tic relati on s . . . an d m anhunt s tha t tak e place ill th e most unusu al se ttings '." It
is eve n possible to argu e th at A R age in l larlem is a n exot ic book in the m anner in which
it d escribes blac k wa ys of life in Harlem . The text p ositions th e read er as a voyeu r in
d escriptions like thi s:

[Bi llie] was a brown-skinned woman in her mi d dl e fort ies, with a co m pa ct husky bo dy
fillin g a red ga ba rd ine d ress. With a man 's haircut a nd a smoo th , thi ck, silky mustach e , her
face resembled th at of a hand som e ma n . Bu t her ho d y was a cross. The top two button s of
th e dress were open , a nd betw een her two imme nse uplifted breasts was a th ick g row t h of
sa tin y black hair. Wh en she talk ed a d iam ond Hash ed between he r two fro n t teeth . (p . 142)

Him es's bla ck men m asquerad e as wo m en , an d his women look like m en ; two men ,
Jodie a nd Go ldy, bear fe ma le names. T he narrati ve is rh ythmic and d elivered in a black
soul style achi eved throu gh repetition a n d th e use of compound words.

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 SHADES OF NOIR

But more than a replay o f a noir style , A Rage in Harlem , refle cts a black way o f life in
Harlem . As I will sh o w later, Jackson 's j ourne y throu gh th e underworld is a lso a
journe y through cla ss co n flicts in Harl em , an odyss ey through th e clash between th e so­
called r esp ectable blacks and the low-life bla cks , the Christians and those wh o spe nd
th eir tim e in bars. Him es exp lo r es th e n oir style as a way of d escribing black r age at
being trapped in th ese co nd itio ns. By black rage, I m ean a set of violent and
uncontrollable relations in black communities induced by a sense of fru stration ,
confinement and white ra cism. This ra ge often takes the form o f an er o ticized violence
by men against wom en and homosexuals. a savage exp los io n on the part of so me
cha racte rs against others whom they seek to co n tro l, and a p erverse mimi cr y of the
status quo through recourse to disfigurem ent, mutilation, and a grotesque positioning
of weak er characters by stronger ones. Black rage, directed mostly toward o the r
members of the black co m m u n ities, is th e subj ect of such classical novels as N ati ve S on
(Richard Wright) , IIl1e H ollers , Let Him Go (H ime s) and A Rage in Harlem , and film s like
Straight out ojBrooklyn ( Ma tty Rich , 1991 ), Chameleon Street (We nde ll Harris) , Deep Cover
(Bill Duk e , 1992) , B v),z N the Hood (John Singleton , 1991 ) a nd the film adaptation of A
Rage in Harlem (Bill Duke , 1991).
Himes's characters are co n su m ed with a r ag e that the author variously describes as 'a
rage-thickened voice', 'a voice of rage', 'a blind rage', and 'a red raving passion o f rage
and lu st '. But since the male cha rac te rs ca n no t co nt a in or co ntro l this rage , wom en , a nd
especiall y ' h ig h ye llo w girls', become regular targets of viole nce in A Rag e in Harlem. For
example, Grave Digger unl eashes his rage ont o Imabelle with violent slaps to h er face
and threats of mutilation : 'I'll pistol-whip your face until no man looks at you again ' (p.
131). Similarly, Coffin Ed reveals his angry disposition tow ard Goldy, who masqu er­
ades as a woman, in a mis ogynistic mann er: ' And I hate a Codd am female impersona­
tor worse than Cod hat es sin' (p . 52). Lat er in th e text, a 'm id d le-aged church-goin g
man , good husband a n d father of three scho o l-aged dau ght ers' enters into a ' red
ra vin g passi on of ra ge and lu st ' when h e faces resistance from Imabelle: 'Bu t wh en he
thought abo u t a whore hitting a church m an like himself, h e became enraged . He
closed in and clutched her' (p. II4), In fa ct , the text blames Imabelle for jacks on 's
becomin g mixed up with underworld cha rac te r s. For Irn ab elle 's love, Jackson was
read y, 'solid read y to cu t throats , crack skulls , dodge police , steal hearses , drink mudd y
water, live in a hollow log , and take an y rape-fiend cha nce to be on ce more in th e a r ms
of his hi gh-yellow heart' (p. 96). Toward th e e nd of the book, Irnabelle is blam ed aga in
for in citing young bla ck m en to crime: 'Th e Lieutenant looked her over carefully.

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 NOIR BY NOIRS

"Strictly penitentiary bait ," h e muttered an gril y, thinking , It's these hi gh-yellow bit ch es
like h er that ca use these bla ck boys to co m m it so many crimes' (p . 130).
Bla ck rage is a lso released through son gs, dance, prayer and, especiall y, flailin g
about in the d ark . Wh en Hank throws acid in to Co ffin Ed 's face, Himes reports th at the
d etective 'closed his eyes against th e burning pain , but he was so co ns u med with rage
that he began clubbing right and left in th e dark with the butt of his pistol' (p . 70 ). Th e
efforts to escap e from th e police and th e frustration of being co n fined to darkness lead
Jacks on, too, to flail abo u t: ' H e thrashed and wriggled in a blind panic , like a black Don
Quixote fighting two bi g wa rehouses sin gle ha n ded ; he got h im self turned sid ewa ys,
and ran crab-like to ward th e street ' (p p . 74-5). Every tim e Jackson run s awa y from the
police , h e remembers lin es from spirituals, blu es , and folk songs suc h as :

Dis nigger run, he run his be st,

Stuck hi s head ill a Hornet's nest. (p . 74)

People in A Rage in Harlem oft en drive fast, as if they co u ld outrun the situation that
oppresses them. Du ring a p olic e ch ase sequ en ce, Himes poetically describes .I ackson 's
drivin g : ' H e was just runnin g. H e clung to the wheel with both hands. His bulging e yes
were set in a fixed stare on th e n arrow strip of wet brick pavement as it cu rled over th e
hood like a n apple-peeling from a knife blade, as thou gh he were driving undern eath
it' (pp . 134-5) . Jackson's bla ck Cadillac, ra cing a t e ig h ty-five miles an hour throu gh a
red light on II Gth Street , looked to one cab driver like a n 'a u to m o bile ghost' (p . 134).
This passage echoes Richard Wright's short story ' Eig h t Men', in which bla ck boys
running from th e firin g range ora white man are co m pa red to bla ck lightning. Sp eed is
an important theme in black rag e texts , from Ralph Ellison 's In visible Man and Richard
Wright's Nativ e Son, to Bo),z N tlie H ood and Straight out ojBrouJdyn . Like flying in Toni
Morrison's 1977 novel ,'-,oug ojSoiomon, running ill these texts is a d esperate attempt to
leave this world behind a nd find peace in another. Jacksoll wants to drive 'tha t hearse
off th e edge of th e world ' (p . 136) . Earlier in th e te xt, Himes d escribes o n e bla ck m an 's
relation to sp eed as follows : 'Speed gave him power and made him feel as mighty asjoe
Louis. He had his long arms wrapped ab out the steering wh eel and his big foot j ammed
on the gas, thinking of how he could drive th at godd am DeSoto taxi cab straight off the
mother-raping earth' (p. 15).
Himes's narrative coinc ides with the best tradition o f the uoir style when ever he
focuses on scenes of black dehumanization, and th e depiction o f th e grotesqu e :

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 SHADES OF NOlA

Goldy's scream min gled with the scream of the locomotive as th e train thund ered past
ove r head, sha king th e e nt ire tenem en t o f the cit)'. Sha king th e slee p ing bla ck pe o ple in
th eir lice- ridd en bed s. Sh aking the an cient bones a nd th e aching mu scles and th e Lb. lungs
and the uneasy foetu ses o f unwed g irls. Shaking plaster from th e ceiling s, mort ar from
between th e bricks of th e buildin g walls. Shakin g th e rats between the walls, the cock­
roac hes cra wling over kit ch en sinks a nd leftover food ; shaking th e slee p ing Hies hibernat­
ing in lumps like bees behind the cas ings of th e windows. Sh aking the fat , blood -filled
bedbugs crawling o ver black skin . Sha king th e fleas, making th em hop . Sha king th e
sleeping do gs in their filthy pallets , th e sleeping ca ts, th e clogged toi lets, loos ening the filth .
(p. 1(5)

People in Himes's Harlem are cho ked by pow erlessness, eco no m ic d eprivation and
ca p tivity. Th e violence in the text becomes a communicative act which is deployed by
frustrated cha r acte rs, and aimed at people wh o a re perceived as obstacles to freedom
a n d economic empowerm ent. In th e sce ne wh ere Jodi e cu ts Gold y's throat, th e
dehumanization of black people through ca p tivity in H arlem is paralleled to th e
naturalization of the sound of th e train on I ~ 5th Street, and an eroti cization of th e
blood whi ch runs out o f Goldy's wound 'turned ba ck like bleeding lip s' : 'The sweet
sickish p erfume of fr esh blood came up from th e crap-smelling street, mingled with
the foul ten ement sm ell of Harlem ' (p. l Ofi). In A Rage in Harlem , Himes delin eates
black rage, ignited and directed toward self-destruction, and fuelling homophobia and
misogyny . The train's power, whi ch is conveyed through th e loud sound that shakes
th e tenem ents, coin cid es with a d evaluation of black life. The train is also powerful
because of its mobility; nothing hind ers its traversing of H arlem and thus its movem ent
into the whit e world th at co n no tes power, economic prosperit y and fr eedom. Mobilit y
e m po we rs th e train, whi ch shakes those 'small o bj ects' th at ar e trapped between th e
walls , and lack of mobility constitutes a ch eck on the fr eedom of bla ck people in
Harlem . Compared to th e train , whi ch occupies the centre of life at l2 5th Street, bla ck
people look like insects that are unheard and unseen . The a ut h o r of A Rage in Harlem
implies that black lives in Harlem a re always absorbed and rendered in significant by
distractionary forces d eleterious to the community.
The flailing of frustrated ch aracters, the d an ces in th e bar rooms, a nd the ra ge
unleashed onto weaker cha r acte rs in A Rage in Harlem constitute, for Himes, perforrna­
tive acts that mimic th e freedom, th e speed and the power of the train. C lea rl y, Himes's
celebr ation of violence and his asso ciation of th e affectation s of the lawbreakers with a
cool st yle in black culture are common in film noir, 100, wh ere the primary identification

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 NOIR BY NOIRS

lies wit h n eu roti c detectives and bad gu ys. But the re is something e lse at pl ay in th e
identifi cation with lawbreak ers" in A Rage in Harlem. T he ra ge that J odie vents ag ain st
Goldy - 'I bled th at moth er-raper like a boar-h og' - forms a co m m u n ica tive act th at
valori zes him in th e eyes o f the narrator, Hank and himself. Jodie ha s o bta ine d Juice, to
put it in the lingo of a rec ent bla ck film of the same titl e; he is proud of himself becau se
he feels free ; for a moment , he h as rem oved an obstacle out of his wa y.
The use of mobility as a trope o f fr eed om in A Rage in Ha rlem announ ces race as a
modality through which th e noir element is read in Himes's text. Him es shows that th e
real power is with th e tow ers of Riversid e C h u rc h and the universit y buildin gs o n th e
high ba n ks of the Hudson River, and th e train th at shakes everything beneath its path .
Black people in th eir su ba lte rn po sitions are likened to th e 'sleeping dogs', th e 'slee p in g
cats', the ' ra ts between th e walls' and th e 'coc kroac hes cra wling ove r kitchen sin ks and
leftover food '. It is in this sense th at every act of rage in the text is far more thanju st
violence unlea shed against one's own communit y; it also becom es , on th e on e hand , an
expressive act again st incarceration in th e valley, far below th e university buildings,
and on the other hand a r epresentation of class co n flict with in th e bla ck public sp he re .

RACE AN D C LASS IN A RA GE IN IIARLEJ'vI

As we turn now to the qu estion of class co n flict in A R age in Harlem, we mu st first

distin guish between so m e of Him es's depi ctions of the public spheres - the bars, th e
churches, th e police station, the train station, th e barber shops, the bookie joints and
the streets - that interpellat e -black people , a nd often colonize the bla ck life world ." As
indicated above, th e train is asso ciated with escape and freedom for black people in
Harl em . The train station is the sce ne o f co n tes tatio n and legitimation of identity
among blacks of different class origins. l mabelle tri es to p ass for a lady and to ca tch th e
train o u t to Chicago. But sh e is id entified as a 'whore' by a respectable-lookin g bla ck
man who accus es h er of cutting him, and sh e is tak en to th e poli ce station .Jackson, too ,
has his identity compromised at th e train station . He is stopped by a 'bi g fat bla ck man
doing the locomotive shuffl e diagonall y across th e street' . The man, ca lled Big Fats , is
ch a r acte r ized in th e text as a drunk who strolls p ast th e police ca r, but 'no ne o f them
said an ything to Big Fats. No ne ed to borrow trouble with an a ble-bod ied colo red
drunk the size of Big Fats . Esp eciall y if his eyes were red. That's th e way ra ce riots were
started' (p. 121 ).8 Wh en Big Fats re aches out to Jackson and states: '''Short-black-and­
fat like me. You tell 'e m, short and fatty. Can't trust no fat man, ca n they?"

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 SHADES OF NOIR

Jack son th rew th e arm o ff a ngri ly a nd sa id " W hy don 't yo u behave yo u rsel f. You 're a
disgrace to the race" (p . 121). J ackson, by rej ectin g Big Fats, locates his blackness in a n
ethics of respectabilit y th at is cla ss-d eri ved . But a littl e later, a t th e station , a porter
challenges jackson's right to bel ong to a different class o f black p eople by refusing to
chec k hi s luggage un til he di spla ys a ticket. In fact , this sce ne e nd s with Jackson lowered
from th e sta tus of self-proclaim ed respectable bla ck man to that ofoutlaw, like Big Fats.
Himes's point seems to be th at bla ck id entities a re un varying within public sp he res
like the train station an d th e police headquarters in A Ra ge in Harlem. For Himes, wh en
these systems e n te r in relation with th e bla ck life world they reproduce co lo nialist and
repressiv e stru ctures. Th rough them , bla ck id entities are always interrogated and
redu ced to stereotyp es; th e y col onize the bla ck life world, perrniuing onl y th e repro­
du ction o f such bla ck subjects as wh ores, lawbreakers an d falsifi ers, who have to be
pol iced. For th e bla ck subject , the passage through these institu tio ns constitutes a
stru ggle to conserve his/her id entity. Class distin ctions between black people see m to
make littl e differen ce within th ese public sp he re s. Most of the sce nes a t th e police
station sh ow l mabelle fighting for th e right to d efin e herself; but, to the police, the
bla ck women they bring to th e precin ct are all prostitutes : ' A yo u n g white co p h ad
arrested a middle-aged drunken colored woman for prostitution. The big rou gh
brown-skinned man dressed in overalls and a leath er jacket picked up with her claimed
sh e was his mother and he was just walking her home' (p . 50) . Clearl y, for Himes, th ese
public spheres do not constitute good life se rvice in stitutions to the black life world :
th ey obstruct th e em ergence of different classes among blacks, and the reprodu ction of
moderni zed bla ck lifestyles.
For Himes, the e m e rge nce of bla ck cultural, class a nd economic aspirations takes
pl ace in o the r publi c spheres, such as th e ch u rc h , th e bar rooms and the informal
se ctors. It is through his religiou s id entit y that Jackson distinguish es himself from his
twin brother Goldy, his landlad y and others in th e text whose behaviour co n tr ad icts the
Christian wa y: 'jackson was glad non e of his acquaintances knew he had su ch a broth er
as Gold y, a dope fiend crook impersonatin g a Sister of Mercy' (p . 30).
Unlike the train statio n and th e poli ce precinct, which colonize th e bla ck life world in
A Rage in Harl em, Christianity co ns titu tes its public sphere throu gh the presentation of
a way out for bla ck people. For Himes, it is this promise of a good life soc ie ty to
re compense the daily ob stacles in H arlem that rend ers Christianity a ttractive to the
bla ck life world : 'T h e people o f Harlem take th eir r eligion seri ously. If Goldy had
taken off in a flaming ch a r io t and galloped straight to Heaven, th ey would have
believed it - th e godly and th e sinn ers alike' (p. 28). Father Divine, to whom th e text

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 NOIR BY NO IRS

makes several references , and whom people in H arlem 'be lie ved was God', ca p italized
on the changing nature of Christianity, which can adapt to different life worlds, to
create a black nationalist Church , 'a Peace Heaven ', with a black God and a promise of a
good life societ y for bla ck people. Himes uses Father Divine and the signposts of his
abandoned buildings in order to allude to black people's vulnerability to religious
public spheres, and to signal the failure of th ese institutions to lead to the creation of
better societies for black people in Harlem. Clearly, A Rage in Harlem is a materialist
text, and Himes is more concerned to expose th e hypocrisy of the Christian public
sphere, which controls black rage through luring black people with promises of 'tickets
to h eaven'.
The bar rooms and th e informal sectors a re the places where material aspirations are
often realized. As public spheres, the bar rooms enter into relation with the bla ck life
world to produce black culture as a distinct American style. The dances and the songs
document the way of being in black America ; the way characters dress, walk and talk
renders them powerful and 'cool' in the bar rooms:

A medium-sized , brown-skinned man, dressed in a ca m el's hair coat , brown beaver hat,
hard-finished brown-and-white striped coat, brown suede shoes, brown silk tie decorated
with hand-painted yellow horses, wearing a diamond ring on his left ring-finger and a gold
signet-ring on his right hand , ca rry in g gloves in his left hand , swinging his right hand free,
pushed open the street door and came into the bar fast. He stopped short on seeing the ex­
pug grab Jackson by the sh o u ld e r. He heard the ex-pug say in a threatening voice, 'Leave
me see that morher-rapin' roll.' H e noticed the two bartenders clos e in for action . He saw
the whores backing away . He ca sed the situation instantly . (p. 56)

The 'cool cat' described here is Gus, a lawbreaker associate of Hank and Jodie. To
identify with him in this passage is, on th e on e hand, to reproduce the structure of
identification in films notrs where we are placed on the side of the bad guys, femmes
fatales and neurotic detectives. On th e other hand, this identification allows a recog­
nition of the streets and the bar rooms as spheres that generate free spaces within
which black people are able to engender themselves. A significant part of black culture
is reproduced through th ese spaces. The reader's identification with Gus, a lawbreaker
- the desire to stand in his place, dress like him and walk like him - signifies a
revalorization of the lawbreaker as hero in the black community where the black life
world is colonized by the police and other institutions. To break the law is to fight one's
captivity, and to claim the right to invent oneself. Lawbreakers are usually the first to

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 SHADES OF NOIR

challenge th e status quo and to generate new ways of being that later become styles for
the co m m u n ity, symbols of fre ed om, or ele me n ts of black nationalism.
Lawbreakers in A R age in Harlem a lso produce eco no mic narratives from the
informal sector that may be seen as th e Stoff: that is, the m aterial, o f film noir, Just as
Father Divin e's church and other nationalist religious spheres promise a heaven for
bla cks who a re mat erially disenfranchised, th e informal sector provides black people
with an opportunity to beat the system that is inhospitable to them . The gold motif in
the text (on e character is named Goldy ; Hank, Slim and Jodie come 10 Harlem looking
for their gold) embodies the wish to remove th e obstacles of ra cism out of bla ck people's
way, to get rich quickl y and to live free like white people in America. Th e lawbreakers
draw black people into th e informal sector by keeping alive th e dream of becoming rich
promptl y, a nd circ u m ve n ting the colonizing syste ms. Himes's bad gu ys mix the
language used by advertising age n ts on Wall Street with the discourse of black
nationalism to sell their fake gold . Gus lures J ackson into his snare by explaining to him
that the sh ares in the gold mine are res erved for 'wo rt h y' colo u red people :

A re al eighteen-carat gold min e, J ackson . And th e rich est mine in this half of th e world . A
co lo red man dis covered it, and a co lo re d man has form ed a corporation to operat e it , a nd
th ey're selling sto ckjust to us colo red people like you and me. It 's a clos ed co r po ra tio n . You
can't beat it. (p. ( 2 )

Th e informal se ctor, with its vision of black social institutions that will support the
reprodu ction of a bla ck good life soci ety," gen erates more eco no mic dreams for black
people than are workable through public systems controlled by white people. Perhaps
thi s is th e reason wh y, in the Reagan/Bush era in whi ch affirmativ e actio n is curtailed
and the black life world is recolonized, black film-makers are turning to the structure of
film noir wh ere lawbreakers are not simply bad guys, and identification with th em is
pos sible. Himes 's roman sociologiq ue, whi ch glan ces at the bla ck underclass in th e 1950s ,
is, therefore, an interesting paradigm for a re-examination of th e new urban black
films that deplo y th e noir style to unleash bla ck rage against the colonization of th e black
life world in the 19ROs and 1990s.

Noms ON NOIR IN THE REAGAN/B USH ERA

The emergence of black male cine m a in the 19ROs is linked in part to th e development
of rap music, whi ch th ematizes the cu ltu re of bla ck youth in the urban areas . Rap

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 n otn BY NOIRS

mu sicians cre a te d th e condition o f p ossi­

bility for a black good life soci ety wh ere
art that d escribes black ra ge fr om a black
point of view is co m mod itized in order to
rais e bla ck con sciou sness, a nd to uplift
bla ck music p rodu cers in the econ om ic
sp he re . Rap is the music o f identification
par excellen ce with the lawbreakers. The
new bla ck film s use rap musicians (Ice T
and Ice C ube) who impersonate lawless
Deep Cover (Bill Duke, 1992)
men in th e narrati ves and who pla y rap
songs to support th e them es of the films
and reinforce identifi cation with certain
scenes. Crucially, both rap musi c and the
new bla ck films picture black men a n d
women 10 trapped by systems, a nd the
performative acts that e na ble them to
remove obstacles out of th eir wa y and to
reinvent th em selves.
I t is in this vein that Him es's represen­
tation of black rage an d his identification
with the structure of the noir style become
important for the an alysis of black films
today. The attempts by Himes's ch ar­
acters to remove obstacles, by any m eans
necessary, out of their way co inc ides with
an id eology of black progress and moder­
nism whi ch , if present in a film , reinforce
its links with rap music and the n ew black
nationalism , and if absent, assoc ia te the
film with the conventional [ilm noir st yle.
Using Himes's A Ra ge in liar/em as a
Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton, 1991)
paradigmatic text for the way in whi ch
bla ck artists inter th e roots of noir stru c­
ture in th eir works, it is pos sible to distinguish two ca tegor ies ofjilms notrs by noirs in th e
Reagan/Bush era. The conventional catego ry includes films like A Rage in Harlem , One

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 SHADES OF NaiR

False Mo ve (Ca rl Franklin , 1992) and , p ossibl y, New Jack City (Ma r io Van Peebl e , 1991 )
which belongs more to the ga ngste r ge n re than to film noir. The re alist and bla ck
nationalist cate go ry includ es films like [oe's B ed-Stu» Barbershop: We Cut H ead and
M alcolm X. (both Spike Lee), B oyz N the H ood, St ra ight out ofB rooklsn, Chameleon Stre et,
Juice (Ern est Dick erson , 199 2), and Deep Cover .
The film A Rage in Harlem e m p lo ys th e noir genre differently from Himes 's text. Th e
film reintroduces th e funk asso ciated with Himes's characters in bar rooms a nd in th e
streets ; but most of the identifi cation with transgressors, whi ch is innovating in Him es's
text, is attenuated in the film. Gold y no longer m asquerades as a fat black woman goin g
by the nam e of Sist er of Mercy, but instead as a slick Father of Mercy played by Gregory
Hines, Him es's famou s d et ectiv es, Grave Dig ger and Coffin Ed , are no lon ger tou gh
a nd misogynistic cops, but buffoons who always a rrive lat e on th e sce n e of th e cr ime .
Crucially, the role of public sph eres like the police precinct an d the train station are not
shown as hindering the d evelopment of bla ck sub ject po sitions. In the film, Jackson
a nd Irnabelle lea ve Harlem for Mississippi on th e train, wh ereas in th e book lmabelle is
stopped a t the train station. Most of the eroticized violence in th e film is directed
toward white cops, whilst , in the book Him es emphasizes bla ck on black crime ,
misogyn y and sexi sm .
The pow er of th e film lies with its rethernatization of funk as a bla ck cultural element ,
its noir-like narrative structure , and its ch a racte r izatio n o f Irnabelle , played by Robbin
Givens, as a black femme fatal e . Th e scenes of th e und ertak ers' ball a nd Cath y's saloon
a re film ed with a particular recourse to funk th at reproduces bla ck cu ltu re's lawbreak­
ing traditi on . I refe r here to that heroic and d efiant tradition within black cu ltu re that
dares every form of policin g th e bla ck body, mind or air. Artisti c lawbreaking consists
in mimicking through dan ce , song and storytelling the heroic p erforman ces of blacks
who resisted the policing of the bla ck life world in America. 1n the scene of the
undertakers' ball, th e master of ceremon y, with his magic potions a n d snakes danglin g
around his neck , is the m aster of funk. Like the transgressors whose ac ts he is
dramatizing, the m aster of ce r e m o n y must look grotesqu e and terrifying, a nd possess
the powers of a voodoo pri est to be able to exo rc ize his foes. Wh en he sin gs, 'I Put a
Spell on You ', the p eople who dan ce to the tun e are temporaril y e m po were d like him ;
their bodies escape the colonization of the C h u r ch and other co n trolling systems.
Moreover, they e n te r into funk , and become e m a ncip ate d .
Imabell e as th e femme fatale (sh e is a ' killer', she does not ge t killed at the end ),
co n trols th e action s of other cha racte rs around her. Sh e is alway s dressed in red, whit e
or blue , exce p t at th e end wh ere sh e wears a bl ack top with a red skir t. Sh e is as tough as

274
 HOIR BY HOIRS

any man in th e film, but wears a look of

sexualized innocence that keeps her in
everybody's game. Imabelle changes at
the e n d of the film, presum ably leaving
the world of crime to live a forever happy
life with J ackson in Mississippi.
By allowing his cha rac te rs to leav e
Harl em for the South - a temptation that
Spike Lee resisted at the e nd of his film
joe's Bed-Sluy - th e director of A Rage ill
Harlem opted for a nostalgic ending in
which bla ck people are linked to their
roots in th e South . In One False Mo u«, too ,
the violent crimes in the city are relocated
to the South in order to connect them to
the unresolv ed race relations there; and
the protagonists are made to revisit th e
scenes of their 'o r iginal sins ' before A Rage in Harlem (Bill Duke, 1991)
dying. A Rage in Harlem rings a convert­
tional note in its denouement by restoring Irnabelle to a traditional position for women,
namely , wife . The film begins with Jackson thanking God 'for not putting obstacles in
my way, such as women'. Imabelle's involvement with Jackson, at first, seems like a
distraction from Jackson's resolve to save money and be a good Christian. It is
interesting that the him is less ambivalent than the book in its treatment of Christian­
ity's guarantee of progress for black people. But as the story unfolds, Imabelle moves
from the status of minor distraction to prin cipal player who stands up to Jodie, scares
Gold y with her reckless driving, and hnally kills Slim. For a while, Irnabelle is like the
lawbreakers in the book, and the characters in rap songs, who refuse to be colonized by
the system in pla ce . She removes every impediment that stands in the way of her goals.
The informal sector emancipates h er from the traditional roles of mother and
domestic worker. But as the point of view shifts again, we come to see Imabelle through
jackson's eyes. Straight out of th e romance genre, Jackson is a knight, intoxicated by
love, who wants to hght fair and square in the underworld for Imabelle. He throws
away his gun, and asks Slim to put down his .kn ife : 'I'll fight for her like a man .' Slim
gives th e nair response to Jackson's ch ivalry: 'I can't believe you'd say a funk y shit like
that.' We will remember that in the text Jackson says the opposite: 'I'm not going to

275
 SHADES OF NOIR

fight them fair,' in response to Goldy's warning th at 'T hose studs is wanted in
Mississippi for killing a white man . Those studs is dangerous' (p. 43). Himes's
cha racte rs, like rap lyricists, believe that a fair fight will not get th em far in America.
The point of the film of A Rage in Harlem is to cre a te a comic spa ce by mixing the
romance and film noir genres, by deflating th e tough detectives, and by attenuating the
scenes that seem out of bounds by th e rules of bienseance that prevail in Holl ywood . But
the flight of Jackson and Irnabelle to the South signifies surrender to an Afro­
pessimism that views the city as bad and the return to th e South as symbol of the repair
of the black family, identity and natural life. Jackson turns down his share of the money
at th e end, and runs after true love . Clearly, this constitutes an anti-materialistic
denouement, which also veers away from the realistic style of Himes's text, rap music ,
and other new films. By turning to the nostalgic simplicity of the South, the film implies
that bla ck rage is a product of th e city. Jackson looks to the South as a place to rest his
tired feet.
The new black nationalist and realist texts , on the other hand, posit materialist
demands that , as I have shown in Himes's text , resist the colon ization of the black life
world by systems that are controlled by whit e people, and revalorize the public spheres
that emancipate bla ck wom en and men . Even in Hoys N the Hood, though the protagon­
ists gc South at the end of the film , they go to bla ck institutions where they plan to
acquire the knowledge necessary to mod ernize th eir communities. The constr uctio n of
a bla ck co m m u n ity that can emancipate bla ck lives from the gh etto is the goal of many
other recent films. In Deef) Cover, the main character realizes at the end that

. .. public law in this society has a long history of commining offenses against the Afri can
American community, from slavery to .lim Crow and onwards . The very structures erected
to acquire liberties and properlY for African Americans often existed outside of th e law.
So , for an African Am erican to embrace public law and to further pledge to uphold that
law means sacrilicing on som e level a co m mit me nt to a Black nationalist loyalty.!'

InJuice, too, the transformation of the main character at the end of the film co nstitu tes
a step toward the emancipation of the community from the ghetto. It was unfortunate
that Juice and Straight out o/Brooklyn received little attention during the rise of the new
black films. Less glossy than HoyzN the Hood, and, unlike Spike Lee's films, less oriented
toward cross-over and race relations narratives, Juice and Straight out 0/ Brooklyn are
masterpieces of black realism as/ihn noir.Juice imitates the realist style in its detailing of
the everyday life of four urban black youths. We see them wake up in the morning,

276
 NOIR BY NOIRS

get dressed, eat breakfast and leave

home. They are ordinary kids who love
their parents and the other people in the
neighbourhood . But soon the film gets
scary as they begin to skip school, shop­
lift, rob a neighbourhood store and kill
the owner. In one of the scenes, arguably
the most brilliant among re cent film imi­
tations of urban black youth realism, th e
four boys see on television an eyewitness
Juice (Ernest Dickerson, 1992)
news report on the death of one of their
friends, who had just asked them to participate in the robbery that ends his life . As the
audience watches the boys watching their friend on television , art and reality become
blurred, and the structure of identification reveals that people in the audience, too ,
may be related to the four boys on the screen. Th e colonization of the neighbourhood
transforms it into a ghetto, and the value of black life decreases. The boys gradually
change from innocent children to dangerous criminals who terrorize the neighbour­
hood. The friendship relations between them become unstable, and they begin to kill
one another, until one of them realizes the deleterious effects of this vicious circle and
changes. The ending of juice, like that of Deep Cover, restores the characters to the
community, that is, toward a black good life society. The film constitutes a rite of
passage from childhood to adulthood, from chaos to organization, from powerlessness
to empowerment.
It is perhaps due to the nationalist denouements of rap music, of writers such as Toni
Cade Bambara, and of recent black films that Malcolm X, the paradigmatic black
nationalist figure , is able to make a return as a commodity in the public sphere. It is also
remarkable that Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X makes recourse to the new black
realist style and to film nair as a narrative device. Malcolm's transformation in the first
part of the film is similar to character changes at the ends of films like D eep Cover, Do the
Right Thing, joe's Bed-Stu), Barbershop : W e Cut Head, Boyz N the Hood, juice, et cetera .
Through their transformations, these characters acquire a consciousness of the need
for blacks to care for blacks, for resistance to colonizing structures, and for a movement
towards a good life society founded on an amelioration of existing material conditions.
 SHADES OF NOlA
NOTES
I. See E. Ann Kapl an , ed ., Psychoanalysis and
Cinema (New York: Routled ge, 1990). O n
woman as 'd a rk co nt ine nt' , a famili a r device
for linking whit e wom en to blackn ess in o rde r
to discipline and punish th em , see Ella
Shohat, 'Gender and Cult ure of Em pire :
Toward a Feminist Ethn ograph y of th e
Cinema', Qwtrterly R eview of Film and Yideo, vol.
13, nos. 1-3 (1991).
2. Mike Davis , City of Qu artz: Excava ting the
Future in Los An geles (London a nd New York :
Verso, 1990), p. 38 .
3. Carl Richardson , Autopsy: An E lemen t of
R ealism in Film N oir (Me tuc he n: Scarecrow
Press , 1992), p . 183.
9. On the black good life society, see Manthia
4. Chester Himes, A R age in Ha rlem (New York :
Vintage Cr ime/ Blac k Lizard , 1991). All
further referen ces to the novel will be to this
edition.
5. Raymond Borde a nd Etien ne Cha u me to n,
Panorama du film noir ameriCllin (Paris: Les
Editions de Minuit, 1955), p . 46.
6. See Regin a Au stin , ' ''The Black Co m m unity",
Its Lawbreak er s and a Politics o f
278
Identification', South ern California Law R eview ,
May 1992 .
7. See Jiirgen Habermas on the colonization of
the life world by systems in Jiirgen Habermas,
The Theory of Communicative Ac tion, Volu me One :
Reason and the Rationali zati on ofSocie ly (Ne w
York: Beacon Press, 1984) .
8. The Rodney King incid ent is int er estin g in
the light of the sociology of race rel ati on s that
Himes provides here. In spit e of class
differences and the heterogen eity of subj ect
positions, blacks are still int erpellated by suc h
events as the Thomas/Hill co nt ro versy, the
Mike Tyson trial, and th e Rodney Kin g tri al.
Diawara, 'Black Studies, Cultu ra l Studies:
Perforrnative Acts ', Afterimage, Oc tob er 1992 .
10. Whereas the 1980 s a nd 1990 s action films are,
so far, made by black male s, both men a nd
women participate in th e production of lin ear
action-oriented rap mu sic. See Tricia Rose,
'Never Trust a Big Butt a nd a Sm ile', Camera
Obscura, no . 23 (May 1991) .
II. Jacqu ie J on es, ' Under th e Co ver of Blackn ess',
Black Film R evi ew, vol . 7, no . 3 (1992), p. 32 .
 1 0

DEMOCRACY'S TURN ON

HOMELESS NOIR

Dean MacCannell

[A]ny shelter in whi ch ma y be established a viable, temperate relation of one sex to the
other necessitates the intervention . .. of that medium known as the paternal metaphor.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI

In film nair, the proletarian and sub-proletarian areas of American cities are repre­
sented as a kind of space wh ere character is tested, a space of intellectual machismo,
functioning for the left mu ch as the African jungle functioned for the right as the
habitat for a white hero of a certain type. In a 1957 essay, Normal Mailer paints a
monochromatic ethos for the existential man of action who 'goes native':

[N]o wonder that in cert ain cities of America, in New York of course, and New Orleans, in
Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico ,
D.F., this particular part of a [immediate post-World War Two, young adult, white male]
generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. . . . Any Negro who wishes to live
must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no
Negro can saunter down a street with any real cert ainty that violence will not visit him on
his walk. The cameos of security for the average white: mother and the home, job and the
family, are not even a mockery to millions of Negroes; they are impossible. The Negro has

279
 SHADES OF NOIR

the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger. ...
Knowing in the cells of his existence that life is war, nothing but war, the Negro (all
exceptions admitted) could rarely afford the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, so
long as he kept for survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present. ...
So there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night
looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the
existential synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white
Negro."

Mailer describes or, more precisely, invents a black-and-white image from which he can
derive a new 'feeling' or sensibility adequate as 'motive' (in the literary, psychological
and forensic senses) for his 'new urban adventurers', a sensibility that attained ultimate
expression in the notr films of the same period.
What is still lacking, and yet necessary, I will suggest here, is an ideological critique of
the notion of the 'city as jungle' that accompanies this invented sensibility. I will argue
that an unanalysed incorporation of the noir version of the city into left political
consciousness disarms the left when it comes to critical examination of contemporary
urban problems, especially homelessness. I will further argue that the homeless can
teach us humility and to be better dialectitians when it comes to our criticisms of the
current social order.

FILM NOIR AND THE HOMELESS

Perhaps the best way to characterize notr sensibility is as 'false nostalgia' or 'constructed
nostalgia'. What is produced is a sense of loss of something that was never possessed,
something that never was (for example, the 'White Negro'). The stark cinematography
of film noir represented the American city not as a place of childhood roots, nor as an
idealized place where we once lived and left, nor as a place to which we desire to return.
That is, the city is not constituted through a simple nostalgic appeal to a universalizable
'past' and a possible utopic future - as in The Wonder Years, say. Rather it figures as the
guilty horizon of bourgeois comfort and detachment.
That no one would really want to live in the imagined proletarian and subproletarian
space of film noir is precisely the basis for its attraction. It is a space of survival:
demanding, exhausting. Caught in the interior space ofjilm noir, a merely ordinary
person would want to flee to the suburbs, to Levittown or Orange County, California.
But as the fantasy frame for a reality that is represented as 'harsh', 'cold' or 'stark', in

280
 ON HOMELESS NOIR

the end its 'grittiness' becomes the basis for its deeper appeal to the ego: it presents a
version of everyday life in the city that is adequate to the ego's exalted view of itself.
Perpetually exposed to imaginary risk and opportunity, the noir hero proves himself
mentally and physically. The groundless 'nostalgia' these fictions provide historically
disconnects us from the real sources of our suffering while catering to our sense of self­
importance. As such, these films would be found high on any list of manufactured
sensibilities that hold advanced capitalism together on a psychidcultural plane.
One of the nonreversible changes Reagan and Bush visited on America was the
removal of the kind of urban domestic space once inhabited by the poorest of the
working poor. During the 1980s, US cities lost more than half of their low-cost housing
via condemnation, removal or gentrification, processes driven by changes in tax and
building codes aimed precisely at remaking the American urban environment. As the
proletarian areas of the city are renovated and removed, they are not replaced by
quality (or any) housing for the poor. The corresponding growth is in highly profit­
able, architecturally clever southern California style condos priced 'within reach ' of
couples and families with two white-collar incomes. Gone with low-cost housing are the
walk-up, low-rent offices of entrepreneurs content to subsist at a break-even level of
profit. Also gone are the cheap but clean hotel rooms rented by the week or month.
Homelessness is the precipitate of these policies which seek to rebuild the American
city and in the process remove any architectural traces of the working class. The policy
package is part of a larger perverse fantasy of classless capitalism, sometimes called the
'Reagan Revolution', in which Orange-County-style bourgeois utopias are built on
social exclusion. The remaining decent low-cost housing is now in the hands of state
and local agencies and nonprofit organizations that serve the poor. There is intense
inter-agency struggle for administrative control of housing that can be used as
temporary shelter for their clients . Among the poor, there is a struggle to qualify to get
on the waiting lists for the remaining housing. In the meantime they live in the streets,
cars, abandoned warehouses, subways, and in vacant lots .
Following a logic that is something more than historical coincidence, the current
Technicolor film noir renaissance (Public Eye, The Two Jakes, even Barton Fink, etcetera)
occurs exactly as the interior space of classic (1945-55) films noirs is being excised from
the American city. All but gone is the kind of hotel room in which Philip Marlowe once
regained consciousness - the torn window shade, the single bare lightbulb hanging
from a twisted wire, the iron bedstead, the water pitcher and basin used for shaving.
There are no longer blocks of poor-but-respectable families living in faded tenements
for the hero to wander through, looking for some undefined thing that he will

281
 SHADES OF NOIR

recogn ize o n first sight. There a re no more cha racte r istically appropriat e offices for the
hard-boiled detective; and no more by-the-week r ooms for th e femme fatale to rent, no
qu estions as ked.
Whilst th e disappearance of th e actual spaces of(ilm nair has been highl y consequen­
tial for those forced into hom elessness, it has not presented a problem to the mak ers of
revivalist fi lms noirs, who can reconstru ct. virtual gr itt y reality in the form of film sets.
Now we h ave a fictional recuperation of th e proletarian city just as th e actu al
proletarian space is historically lost. This double movement, to the extent that it sh ap es
th e theoreti cal unconscious, stymies und erstanding of th e homeless situation . Who
co u ld possibl y want to save thi s abject , filth y, dangerous sp ace, ex cept as a kind of
fictio nal forbidden territory h abitable only by heroes, villain s a nd fool s? This space was
crea ted to serve as a place from which to Aee, or to enter only as a matter of co u rage
beyond reason . With jails, asylums, old folks' and foundlin g homes , ch a r ity h ospitals
a nd the like , this sp ace defin es the im aginary boundaries o f urban misery. Yet the fact
remains th at the abj ect interior spaces of .(ilm nair, originally a n ostalgic bourgeois
phantasm o f gamey or 'real' subproletari an existence, could , if preserved, serve as a
sh eltering haven for the homeless.

T H E EXERCISE OF T H EO RET ICA L FREEDOM IN FILM NOIR

Film can represent life in su ch a way as to provide critical distan ce and insi ght that
might otherwise be lacking in unreAected experience. Film nair, from the be ginning,
was quick to exercise theoretical licen ce a nd a certain self- consciousn ess in this regard ,
this bein g one of its definin g ch aracte r istics. Wh at does it mean for us to continue to
dream of an industrial ag e , a class-based society and the principle of universal
inclusion , that is, a socie ty in which the proletariat has a h ome and a moral voice, and
ca n make a differencer' There is a kind of innocent cod ep e ndence of film nair
sensibility and Marxist criticism, each providing the images and concepts that the other
believes it needs. i' Mike Davis h as argued that the intentional str u ctu re of Los Angeles­
based film nair uses a n 'existentialized Marxism ' to unmask a 'b r igh t guilty place '; that it
insinuates 'contempt for a d epraved business cu ltu re' and is a 'mirror of capitalism's
future'; 'a kind of Marxist cin ema manqu e', a shrewdly oblique strategy for an otherwise
subversive realism '." Slavoj Zizek similarly but more broadly ar gu es that film nair
exposes a symbolic order that is neither neutral nor benign, within which 'a n obscene
sadistic Other wat ches over me'. ,; In short, film nair affirmed in a popular ge n re that

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 ON HOMELESS NOIR

capitalism is not a fair ga me and it anticipated th e cr itical insight th at patriarchal

judgement only pretends to be disinterested , whilst its true aim is to protect the
privileges certain members o f societ y enjoy over others.
These are crucial insights, but th ey no longer d epend for their conveyance on a
fictional medium with theoretical pretensions . The consequ ences of th e symbolic
disturbance highlighted in these films are now directly lived by those evicted from th eir
most ch aracteristic spaces . Still , there a re things to be learned from th e film s. Classic
film nair, we are repeatedly told, e me rged after World War Two, but it eludes historical
'solu tio ns' because it instantl y be came a cru cial component of its own historical context.
How could an yone try to grasp th e problem atic details of Western post-war self­
understanding without film nail"? Film n air is our faded old black-and-white famil y
album fr om this period. Like other albums, it contains a family embarrassment th at we
would all want to forget , and perhaps some clues about the beginnings of current
diffi culties.

RI TUAL CONST RAI NT IN FILNl NOIR

Democracy had j oined forces with Soviet Marxism to vanquish fas cism . But a grea t deal
of blood had been spilled in the process. It was a war of European against European ,
American ag ainst European. Not everyone who fought against fa scism was d eeply anti­
fascist. There was a close famil y relation betw een the ad ve rsa r ies, horrendous violence,
murder an d guilt, and thus a ne ed for a totemic ritual to distribute the guilt and to try
to reassure that there would not be a repetition of th e violence. Popular cultural
entertainments privileged forms that affirmed that the winners were not perfect and
the losers not all bad , while searching for a new common enemy. By openly questioning
the ultimate 'good n ess' of capitalist and democratic valu es, film notr contributed some
of th e hardest ritual work of exp ia tin g guilt for World War Two. The durability o f th e
genre ma y be tied to its performance of this fun ction . But, as ritual,film noir brought up
a more complex set of critical problems . Like th e mother who favours the bad ch ild
('because no on e else will') left film n air exh ibited a tendern ess toward fascism in th e
pure heart of democracy. One find s in jilm nair an aestheti cs of violence and othe r
fascist values on both sides of a ny moral equation : the 'good gu y' is as likel y as the bad to
resort to intimidation , physical punishment and Justice' without trial.
Thus f ilm nair came to function less as cr iticism of ca p italism and the paternal
metaphor and more as a n inoculation against them . Identification with nair heroes

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 SHADES OF NOIR

allows viewers to live passively within the order of capitalism while imagining them­
selves to be opposed to it. The dice are always loaded against the anti-hero of film noir.
He knows it and persists anyway. He wins a moral victory by fighting corrupt authority
to a draw, engaging in some of the same violent practices as employed by authority.
One is even happy with a near draw if the hero does not lose too badly, given that the
forces against him are massive, even global. The answer to the question of whether or
not film nair can ever be an incisive critique of capitalism cannot be unambiguous, since
it cannot ignore some of these more problematic aspects of the genre.

NOIR'S DARK SECRET - EXCLUSIONARY DEMOCRACY

The still unexamined tension at the heart of film noir is that between senile capitalism
and democracy. Film noir, not necessarily in the mode of full self-consciousness,
anticipated the attack by capitalism on democracy that has just begun, producing the
homeless as its first casualties. The problem between democracy and capitalism seems
to have its origins in an aggressive, pragmatic drive on the part of capitalism to make
democracy do its bidding, or to clear it out of the way. After defeating its external
enemies, fascism and communism, capitalism entered its 'twilight years'; increasingly it
began to turn its fading powers against its own partner, democracy, for harbouring and
promoting a historically antiquated , inefficient ideological surplus. From the perspect­
ive of mature capitalism, the historical purpose of its partnership with democracy was
(1) to break the privilege of aristocratic classes, making way for new entrepreneurial
elites, and (2) to win the hearts and minds of socialists and others still tied to non­
capitalist modes of production by offering them freedom of speech, choice, etcetera.
Once traditional privilege is destroyed, and everyone is involved in the same system of
global economic relations, there is no further need for democracy. In fact, in the
current historical moment, any openness or broad base of decision-making, any
balancing of different interests, any voicing of interests other than those of economic
self-interest, is seen as intolerably opposed to the continued development of free­
market economies. Only a 'sold out' democracy is acceptable, that is, one that goes
through the motions of giving a voice to the people while actually supporting a
narrowing of social and economic interests.
Classic filmnoir has an almost fatal fascination for the confrontation between
capitalism and democracy, which it witnesses with an implacable numbness. In count­

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...

The Big Clock (John Farrow , 1948)

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 SHADES OF NOIR

less films, The Big Clock (john Farrow,

Monsieur Verdoux (Charlie Chaplin, 1947)
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943)
1948), is only one example, a tainted,
slightly compromised, democratic hero
battles corpulent and decadent capita­
lism to a draw, or a near draw. The basic
principle that is compromised in these
films, and in democracy as it is currently
inflected , is inclusion : everyone is sup­
posed to have a ' place' in it; anyone can
win; everyone has a voice . But all too
often this voice (most notably in the form
of the voice-over) is one of bitter compro­
mise. The players in film noir usually
know they are on the take, living off
crumbs thrown to them by their oppres­
sors. Still, they are capable of cynical
detachment, even from their own condi­
tion, able to see all sides of the situation
and their place in it. Only those who
actually admire and look up to their
oppressors are represented as servile and
abject.

LIVING FILM NOIR TODAY

Technically, it is not precisely a 'home' that has been denied the 'homeless'. More
precisely, it is a 'place', or the right to be included in society, criticism, fiction, policy - a
place in the symbolic order. Many of the 'homeless' manage to build architecturally
.. creative homes for themselves from cars and vans, packing crates, parts of freeway
overpasses, subway systems, etcetera. A woman I met in Washington, DC, lived in a
system of boxes over a heating grate on a crowded sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue:
she had an eas y chair with side tables , a Coleman lantern for reading at night, a
portable television which she shared with passers-by , and a large canvas she wrapped
herself and her 'stuff in at night to hold the heat and produce a more-or-less official­
appearing and protected sta ck of boxes. What she lacked was not a home but a proper

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place, a shelter under the dominion of the paternal metaphor." The societal investment
in this kind of place is not to be underestimated . It is also the only kind of location or
address that can be used socially to identify her, that would allow others , including her
family, but also representatives of the police, Internal Revenue Service, the welfare
department, etcetera to find her. In other words, my acquaintance had a home and
even neighbours, but her home did not provide her with a social place and so she was
excluded from the social order in many other crucial ways: she could not register to
vote, apply for work, file a crime report, or any other taken-for-granted right that
requires one to give an address.
This problem is distantly prefigured in film noir by the pseudo-expulsion of the hero
from all 'viable temperate' human relationships. But unlike the homeless , expelled
emphatically from the social order, the film noir hero always hangs onto hope that even
a compromised democracy can continue to have a place for everyone and to guarantee
fundamental freedoms. The hero moves through any and every situation liminally as a
kind of cipher of the unrealized possibility of the coexistence of democratic openness
and capitalistic closure. The hero abjures regular, ordinary, routine, normal, for-profit
pursuits, does not have an evident class perspective, operates within the law only when
it is convenient for him to do so, and has few institutional attachments or obligations.
But he never really gives up his place in the social order. The hero demands a
paradoxical combination of rights: to be completely detached from society and at the
same time to be allowed total access to every part of it. The homeless would see his
combination of attachment and detachment as manifestations of good fortune and bad
faith. He holds himself external to and above specific class, domestic and institutional
relations in order not to be marked by any specificity. He is thus free to enter into
everything. If some heavy attempts to block his entry into a club or a back room where a
deal is being made, he shoves the guy aside. Philip Marlowe walks freely through the
mean streets of the city's underside in one scene and, in the next, strides with the same
nonchalance across the oriental carpets of the hot-house billionaire General Stern­
wood. In its most positive manifestation, film noir affirms the right of Democratic
... Everyman to go anywhere as a matter of principle. Ifhe encounters a worthy adversary
along the way. it can only be himself.
The Ray Milland character in The Big Clock knows from the outset that the
mysterious murder suspect he is supposed to be tracking down is himself. He attempts
to expose the actual murderer while covering his own incriminating trail. His task is
made difficult because he is trapped in the headquarters of a giant prototypical global
corporation (one that operates in all time zones - hence 'the big clock') and because of

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the great diversity of the settings through which he has left a trail to be covered. These
settings include the highest boardrooms and offices of the corporation, a rustic
mountain cabin where he should have been vacationing with his wife, the luxuriously
appointed apartment of his boss's murdered mistress, nightclubs and bars at all levels
from elegant to seedy, the apartment and studio of a bohemian artist, a children's
home, an expensive antique shop, a pawnshop, and finally behind the scenes of
industrial technology, inside 'th e big clock' itself. The Ray Milland character treats
everyone of these settings with equally bemused detachment, showing no partiality
toward, or greater or lesser comfort in, any of thern.f It is left to his lackeys to comment
on one of the bars to which he has been sent in search of clues: 'It's a very sordid place­
disreputable clientele.'
Film nair established democracy's dark side, not as an articulated message but as a
critically constructed mise en scene. The nair hero and contemporary homeless people
are in a 'through the looking glass' relation: originally and in the first place, he and they
stood outside the capitalist social 'totality', giving us our first glimpse of it as something
not neutral, not fully inclusive; he schmoozes and shoves his way back into society,
where he exposes its bias and corruption. But the homeless remain on the outside, not
just outside some desired part of capitalist society: not outside the middle class yet in
the working class, for example. They remain outside everything. outside class itself.
Between film nair and the contemporary situation of the homeless there has been an
absolute shift in what is commonly and implicity understood by the term 'society', a
shift that remains unremarked by sociology and anthropology. The space of film nair
was inclusive in ways that corresponded to an earlier theoretical ideal of society as
promoted in classical sociological texts. Society contained , or made a place for, all its
members from the highest-born to the lowest, from infancy until death and beyond,
for the criminal, the infirm and the insane. This universal catalogue of places was also
the mise en scene of film noir. After Coffman and Foucault we were forced to acknowl­
edge that 'having a place' for some also meant bearing a radically stigmatizing label or a
damaged identity. But under nafve classical theoretical ground rules, no one could be
left out; everyone had to live in society and to remake society together. There was
something resembling consensus that whenever the economic terms of universal
inclusion became visibly intolerable for large numbers in the 'disadvantaged' classes,
wealth should be partly redistributed either via social programmes or, if the other party
is in power, through riots and looting. That the poor, the insane or the criminal could
simply be turned onto the streets, that the 'legitimate' members of society could retreat
into gated and guarded communities. that the poorest of the poor could simply be

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excl u ded fro m 'society' a nd as ke d to 'keep movin g along', th ese exclusio na ry societal
'solu tions' were (an d continue to be - eve n as they e mer ge as historical realit y)
th eoreti call y unth inkabl e. T he victo ry o f ca p ita lism over othe r eco no mic forms has
been acco m pa n ied by a ne w at titude, a casu al in d iffere n ce to war d th e socially
excluded. Now th a t ca p ita lism no lon ger has a n audience , th e homele ss d o not
ne cessa rily cons titu te a n emba rrass me nt.

MURD ER AN D T H E FA MI LY

It is wort hw h ile to as k from what so rt of a rran gem ent th e homeless h ave bee n
excluded ? T h is is th e e xact point at which noir th eoretic al se nsibility mo st effectively
sh ort -circu its history, allowing us to see th e fu tu re by look in g in to the pa st.
A d efinin g ch a racte r istic of fi lm uoir is an insis te nt n on ch alan ce abo ut mu rd er. It may
be committed for a reason, in Slavoj Zize k's words 'vu lga r a nd acquisitive' , or it ma y be
co m m itted just to ' provide a co r pse'." T he hard-b oiled d etective mouths so me tru ism s
about th e ulti mat e cr ue lty of the act as h e sets ou t to find th e killer. H is drive is
form alistic in ways th at go beyond th e con ventions of th e ge nre. Each ste p is motiva ted
mainly by p ro fession alism , a need to ge t th e job done, to clear up all th e loose e nds . H e
becomes othe r than p rofessionally involved in th e searc h fo r th e killer o n ly if the
suspect also turns o ut to be h is love interest (as it often does), his partner, or himsel f.
Gu ilt is so di ffu se in Jilm n oir, so mu ch a part o f th e corrupt bac kgro u n d of the act ion ,
that th e hero can alwa ys plausibly m use, 'Who's to sa y who really did it? Yeah , I kn ow
sh e put in th e knife , bu t was she really the gui lty party? Any more tha n yo u or me?'
This excessive de mand th a t gu ilt fo r murd er be sh ared all a rou n d is th e op e n ing in
Jilm noir for th e perverse accommodation of ca p italism by democracy. It is also the
them e that allows [dm u otr to exa mine the d a rk side o f d em ocracy, whi ch is its nearly
exclus ive right amon g popular e n te rtain me n ts. T he redistribution o f gu ilt th at
ap pears thema ticall y in [dm noir ca n be traced to cha nges in fa m ily st r uc ture th a t came
with th e sim u lta neo us a rrival o f mod e rn econ omic an d democratic relation s: as wealth
is concentrated, in o rd e r fo r the syste m to continue to fu nctio n, guil t for social
pathology must be d istr ibu ted amon g th e inn ocen t." Stan din g in th e way o f thi s
distribution of gu ilt is the tr aditional idea th at responsibilit y fo r fair j u d ge me n t is th e
basi s fo r authority and all othe r se riou s concern for j ustice. Interestin gly, we ha ve
arrived back on th e gro u nd of the old , ori gin al ' pa te rnal me taphor'.
The pre-democratic, so-called 'traditional', patriarchal or oed ip al famil y was

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founded on a murder (the sons murdered their father), and society was reorganized in
such a way as to prevent a repetition of the crime. This is accomplished, in part, by
rendering paternal authority figural. In a metaphoric reprise of the original murder,
the real father disappears from the scene to be replaced by the 'father figure'. The sons
will never be able to get at him again. The original murder was committed out of
jealousy: the primal father monopolized sexual pleasure, keeping all the women to
himself. The killing of the totemic father and the institution of universal marriage
guaranteed women for every man, but only on condition that no one attempted to
become again the totemic father, that is, have all the women. Thus the father figure
stands at the head of the incest-free family, the figure of control, including especially
self-control, measure, temperateness, restraint. He is also the figure of loss of the kind
of intense absolute pleasure that might have been enjoyed by the original totemic
father who is now dead. '[A]ny shelter in which may be established a viable, temperate
relation of one sex to the other necessitates the intervention ... of that medium known
as the paternal metaphor.' That is, real relations are of necessity replaced by symbolic
relations. The symbolic order governed by the paternal metaphor is an efficient
mechanism for the resolution of conflict, the determination of guilt and innocence, and
distributive justice. This resolution and determination is the work of the father figure.
Once he has renounced his own self-interest and deleted total pleasure from the scene,
he can sit in the position of Maxwell's sorting demon, assuring a kind of universal
equilibrium. Of course, on occasion the symbolic order comes unglued, the paternal
metaphor is kicked aside, there is a return to the real, and traditional family members
kill each other. But this is not the kind of murder that is characteristic of film nair.
Murder in films noirs happens off to the side of traditional family relations and
without reason or motive that is commensurate with the crime. Far from being the
intended victim of the crime, the father is usually trying to cover up for some member
of his family. He hires a detective he believes he can control or manipulate because the
detective is reported to have a questionable reputation. The daughter mayor may not
have committed murder. Perhaps she is being blackmailed for some petty trans­
. gression. Whatever happened, the most important thing is to keep it quiet and to set up
the detective to take the fall.
We cannot discover the grounds or the motives for these murders by going back to
the origins of the family and the lethal conflict that traditional family structure was
built upon in such a way as to attempt to hold it down. Rather, it is necessary to go back
to the moment that traditional family structure was inserted into generalized democra­
tic arrangements. By now, it is commonplace to engage in 'politically correct' celeb­

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ration of the 'loss' of paternal authority and the opening of the symbolic order that
began with the modern democratic revolutions, or religious right mourning of the
same loss and opening. Too little analytical attention has been focused on the possibility
that we are not dealing here with a loss, however this might be viewed. It takes a certain
cold-blooded film nair or homeless sensibility at the level of theory to notice, that for all
its pathological manifestations, traditional family structure, under democracy, has
been replaced by something more pathological still.
This is the side of democracy that is becoming the virtual field of ,hard-boiled' critical
theory. Zizek suggests that the introjection of traditional family structure into demo­
cracy involved a specific mutation of the father figure. No longer the 'absen t father',
guarantor of the symbolic order, democracy gave us the present father, not symbolic but
real; this father is not ignorant but obscene. Juliet Flower MacCannell describes the
same transformation in her Regime oj the Brother:

Since the Enlightenment 'traditional' society has been supplanted by what Freud calls an
'artificial group' (die JHasse) making its patriarchal ideals at best a charming fraud , at worst
an ideological cove r for another kind of exercise of power, the command to conformity.
. . . [The leader] is not necessarily Other, in the manner ofa father, not an ego-ideal , but an
ideal ego ... [H]e claims no special right, he is not the privileged son and heir, but only on e
among brothers, As such he acts as the father without being him, and can draw upon
reserves of a now simulated affect (paternal love). Retaining the 'name' of the father he
embodies a misnomer (or a metaphor) , for he is really only first among equals. As mere
metaphor he is obliged to exercise the paternal/parental function of 'p rotectin g and saving'
- a metaphor incarnate is too weak a figure to sustain real community, embracing
diversity, It can only mirror the same. But it is not too weak to found the group as a kind of
simulacrum or art form . .. Had it fulfilled all its promises a democracy so founded might
have provided a new form of human community, and definitivel y displaced the O edipal
model and its malevolent clones. It did not. Instead , it retained the Oedipal form, but not
its substance (to moderate the ego-centered passions ... ). Under the ' na me' of the father
another and sadistic Other - unconscious , superego, It - has begun its reign of pleasure
. and terror. The Regime of the Brother begins. 10

It is here that we find the ground of murder in film nair: committed in the name of ideal
'traditional values', including 'traditional family values', it aims not to protect tradition,
but to use it as a cover and excuse for evil. Under the guise of the traditional father
figure (that is, the figure of denial and lack) a neo-totemic or capitalist father operates
who once again thinks he deserves and can have it all, all the pleasure and all the

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wealth. And 'democracy', in the employ of evil, is used to redistribute the guilt for
excess and usurpation to everyone except those actually responsible for the crimes.
In film noir, the father is not the intended victim of the crime as the oedipal father
was. If a father is implicated, he most likely will have been involved in arranging the
murder, seemingly out of a sense of duty to his family, to protect the ideal 'image' of his
family. He does this not out of concern for his family per se, but because his self­
representation as a 'trad itio nal father', father of lack and self-denial, is a useful cover
for his drive to 'have it all' and his presumptive right to limitless enjoyment. In hard­
core film noir, this obscene father will not even have to pay for his crime. Murder, at a
double remove from the dramatic action, can occur for any reason. Murder is now fully
institutionalized as a taken-for-granted event that is not in itself worthy of co nsid e­
ration or concern. All that is important to the action is the preservation of an image of
ideal bourgeois freedom and respectability. This image is held up as an ultimate ideal,
but it is not. It is only the outer wrapping or mask for the free play of the capitalist
father who pretends to assume the responsibilities of a patriarch but does not and, in
fact, enjoys the privileges of the totemic pere jouissant. This is what film noir is
stammering to tell us about ourselves: trying to warn us about the wrong turn that
democracy, bent by and acquiescing to capitalism, is about to take.
Two films expose this turn with surgical precision: Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur
Verdoux (1947) and Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow ofa Doubt (1943).1l To do so , they must
leave the 'mean streets' of tough-guy film noir and enter the bourgeois interior, the
home. 12 The central figure in both films is an 'ideal' man, handsome, well-dressed,
well-built, intelligent, entertaining, middle-class, and democratic. Juliet MacCannell
comments, 'they are perfect men who are also murderers and assassins'. Verdoux's
crimes may have originated with a mistake he made concerning 'what his wife wants'.
After losing his job as a bank clerk, in order to maintain his crippled wife and son in a
domestic setting of complete bourgeois respectability he embarks upon a career of
serial bigamy and murder, marrying rich women, killing them and giving his inheri­
tances to his first wife and child. He is throughout the perfect model of the modern
man in general in that he can believe absolutely in his own innocence so long as he tells
himself that he is doing it 'for the family'. And if there is a whiff of evil here , it is his wife
and child who would be at fault, because he is driven to commit his crimes only by his
sense of duty toward them. He occupies the middle of the middle, pretending to
continue to be a 'man of affairs', to go to work, to 'do his duty', to be perfectly correct in
every way. And he is absolutely pitiless toward his victims. Of course, only incidentally­
as a kind of by-product of the sense of propriety that causes him to kill - he enjoys

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wealth, freedom, exotic entertainments, and limitless sexual conquests , all of these
being necessary to the performance of his duty toward his wife and child .
Verdoux's piety and pitiless cruelty is matched only by the Joseph Cotten character,
'Uncle Charlie', the 'Merry Widow killer', of Hitchcock's masterpiece. Cotten, on the
run, visits his exaggeratedly respectable sister and her family in an overly idealized
American small town. The sister's family is made up of her husband and two
daughters. The husband is something of a noodle, spending all his time playing a game
with a neighbour in which they attempt to outdo each other in pretending to plot
perfect murders. The eldest daughter, played by Teresa Wright, is very beautiful and is
nicknamed 'Charl ie' after her uncle whom she has rarely seen but who has been held
up to her all her life as the model of intelligent, attractive manhood. The mother's
entire life is based on her admiration for her brother and her fantasies of his travels, his
complex and successful business dealings, his famous associates, all of which he
charmingly takes for granted, wearing the whole mantle of urbane male perfection as
casually as he wears his too-perfectly tailored suits. The rare visit of this important
worldly person to the perfect small town is a major civic event and a special evening is
planned in his honour. Against the grain of all this, his beautiful niece and namesake
comes to suspect that her marvellous uncle is the serial killer described in the radio
reports from distant cities. For most of the film, the viewer has no way of knowing
whether she is correct in her suspicion, or just overly imaginative, projecting evil onto
him to block her incestuous desires. When she first confronts him with her suspicions,
he denies his guilt but sides with the killer saying, 'They are fat cows feeding off of
excess. They live off the remains of their dead husbands. They don't deserve to live.'
The post-oedipal or nair murderer is a capitalist 'angel of death'. The murderer
executes those 'guilty' of nothing except a kind of enjoyment that the capitalist would
want to monopolize for himself. Monsieur Verdoux and Uncle Charlie pause and
notice whenever they find someone enjoying surplus-value, and they kill. The neo­
totemic or capitalist murderer is fully repatriated or taken back into the family as the
'uncle', the 'b ro ther', or the 'obscene father', so long as he succeeds in his seemingly
effortless appropriation of surplus-value. The family , for its part, necessarily becomes
all the more ideal to accommodate the presence of so marvellous a figure.

THE HOMELESS HERO: REAL NOIR TODAY

Unfortunately, we are not yet sufficiently aware of what the homeless already know: in
today's society, no one is guaranteed sheltering protection simply by virtue of being a

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normally behaved, reasonabl y intelligent, educated, moral , productive member of

society. 13 Anyone can be cast out. Homelessness is not a matter of character, identity,
mental or other competency. It involves budget cutbacks, layoffs, rent deposits. If
there can be a lesson for democracy in this negative historical moment, it should be a
reminder that no person, group, class or other social segment has any greater social
standing than as a model for the others. These are not necessarily models that will be
copied or emulated, but always ones that can help to shape knowledge and improve the
general conditions of existence either by positive or negative example. The homeless,
now on the plane of history, tell the truth thatJilm noir tried to an ticip ate : that the moral
formulations of the paternal order are sham.
Statistically, the homeless have been around at least since the beginnings of 'modern
rational capitalism', as Weber liked to call it. But before the final victory of capitalism
they were called 'drifters', 'bums', 'tramps' and 'winos', never 'homeless'. Within the
framework of senile capitalism, the term is assuming heavy imaginary significance.
When one utters or hears the word, one is supposed to experience a pleasurable sense
of security for having a home. But without a simultaneous hygienic suppression of any
capacity for dialectic thought, this word 'h omeless' is potentially dangerous in use, in
the postmodern community. For it blinds us to the fact that the rights of citizens who
still have homes are increasingly infringed upon in subtle and less subtle ways .
The homeless are the expulsed subjectivity of a social form which, by rejecting even
one human being, loses all rightful claim to conscience. The homeless are the soul of
senile capitalism, set to wandering when it died its first death. They move around in
public space, their carts filled with worthless 'belongings', a parody of the other
postmodern figure, the yuppie. What they are actually carrying are heavy spiritual and
ideological burdens . Within the framework of advanced capitalism , they represent
lack. It is precisely this crucial lack, this particular lack of a 'home', which invests them
with significance as the true precipitate of advanced capitalism. Spiritual homelessness
is suffered by every disinherited ch ild of capitalism, but it can never be admitted , not by
the ones who have a material home, those whose role it is to humour and coddle their
obscene father. Only the actually homeless can tell the truth: that everyone under
advanced capitalism is 'excluded but present'. Everyone lives only their relation to
production and consumption, trading in their human relationships for 'an immense
accumulation of commodities', tied less to each other than to their overAowing
shopping carts.
Is it possible to carry this line still further to compare the travels of the homeless to
those of the yuppie tourist? No . It is exactly here before the possibility of two forms of

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nomadism, two different ways of being out of place, that the analogy breaks down,
leaving the homeless and the noir hero together on one side, and yuppie tourists on the
other, providing us with the possibility for a subversive choice in our wandering. The
homeless, the noir hero and the tourist can all be said to constitute a territory by their
movements, following known pathways between points . But the tourist weaves
together all the various attractions and sanitized public fixtures worldwide. His
movements bind together the high points of global culture as framed by global
capitalism. The tourist will set forth on his travels only on the promise that the tour is
circular, secure in his belief that he can go home again . The homeless person and the
noir hero know better. Their movements have nothing to do with the official definition
of social spaces. Their movements outside of official pathways are the primary grounds
for their existence and th ey cannot go home by definition. If a homeless person (or a
noir hero for that matter) stops along the way to watch television in a store window, to
piss in the privacy of a stairwell, to sleep next to the hot lights of a billboard, it is because
these places have been forgotten, at least temporarily, by the official marking and
policing apparatus. They are temporal interstices in advanced capitalism produced by
the momentary presence of the excluded. The tourist assumes that everything is
owned by someone and identifies with the Owner of Everything, nicely staying between
the lines on the officially marked paths that bind Everything together. For the homeless
and the noir hero, the marked path, the road, the sidewalk, the trail that has been laid
down in advance are ea ch only one way of going from place to place, and not
necessarily the best way , or the way that will get them to their destination, or the way
that offers least resistance. They may even feel the need to stay off the road for
purposes of movement. The homeless will use the road for something other than
passage. They may harvest it for aluminium cans for example, as the noir hero harvests
it for false clues that he knows have been laid down by an adversary to trick him, that
will eventually lead him to his adversary. They have no use for the proper boundary or
the separations and hierarchies encoded in spatial arrangements. There are no
internally imposed limits or boundaries around their space that correspond to the
territorial markings of private ownership . And for this reason, they know that they can
never ultimately hide their feelings in the interior of a personal or private 'subjectivity'.
They must hide out in the open, fully exposed .
Their plight in this regard is virtually the opposite of that of the capitalist children
who continue to seek shelter in the home of the father, on the condition of not exposing
the father for what he has become. This compromised consciousness must wage a
constant fight to appear to have a subjective interior, a certain subjective intensity, a

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history of its own of which it can be proud. Those who have sold out to advanced
capitalism for nothing but the appearan ce of having a home, a place, can no more
prove themselves th an th e homeless can hide themselves. In its very drive to represent
itself as being composed of real famili es and communities, in its make-over that
mockingly refers to 'tra d itio n' even after it paints itself up, senile capitalism becomes
nameless and pl aceless . The mind that assumes the burden of guilt for senile capitalism
without full compensation be comes disconnected from everything it claims to value.
All that is left for it is manic th ematization . It engages in a kind of filing frenzy at the
level of th e total soc iety to produ ce the appearance that everything has a 'place' and
nothing ne ed ever be o u t o f pla ce. Everything is thematized: restaurants have themes,
neighbourhoods hav e themes, streets are named after trees in alphabetical series
(Aspen , Beech, Cypress, Dogwood ... ), the town is zoned 'Mediterranean', etcetera.
The only resource that th e last ca p italist community has to draw upon for its
humanity is the homeless. It remains to be seen whether this is democracy's turn. Doe s
capitalism have sufficient characte r to con fro n t its corruption of democracy, to make its
fathers , brothers, so ns and uncles responsible for something other than their own
limitl ess enj oyment and accumulation, all carefully hidden behind the pretence of
tradition , temperance and self-denial? We will know if it is capable of having a
distin ctive character, interesting, con trad icto ry and worthy of respect, when it takes the
homeless ba ck in, all of them. Otherwise, the homeless will rapidly grow in numbers
and consciou sness to the point where only the handful of real capitalists are left with a
'place' 'in' 'soc iety'.

NOTES

I. Norman Mailer, 'The White Negro',
Advertisementsf or Myself (N ew York: G .E.
Putnam, 1959), pp . 340-4 1.
. 2. T he qu estion is almost ee rie in the context of a
policy th at favours export of unskilled and
semi- skilled work to Third World cou ntr ies
while prom oting th e collective fantasy that the
United States has becom e a 'co ns u mer society'.
3. This was a nticipated in Mailer 's final remarks
in 'The White Ne gro': 'It is almost beyond the
imaginati on to conceive of a work in whi ch
the drama of human ene rgy is engaged, and a
theory of its social cu r re nts and dissipations,
its imprisonments, expressions, and tragic
wastes are fitted into some gigantic synthesis
of human action where the body of Marxist
thought, and particularly the epic grand eur of
Das Kapital (that first of the major psychologies
to approach the mystery of social cruelty so
simply and practically as to say that we are a
collective body of humans whose life-energy is
wasted, displaced and procedurally stol en as it
passes from one of us to another) - where
particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital
would find its place in an even more God-like
view of human justice a nd injustice ' (p . 358 ).

296
 ON HOMELESS NOIR
4. Mike Davis, City of Quartz (Lond on : Verso,
1990), pp. 18,21.
5. Slavoj Zizek , EnjO)' Your Sympt om (London and
New York : Routledge, 1992), p. 158.
6. Th is is not to say that th e homeless are not
particular about th eir place 'outside' the
symbolic o rde r. Some homeless fo rm
temporary co mm un ities o f eig ht to twenty
individuals who sleep in g ro u ps for safety a nd
warmth, sitting - sid es tou ching - with th eir
backs ag ain st a buildings a nd legs exte nde d
acro ss the sidewalk. 1 have obse rved that once
an or der in the line-up is esta blishe d , it mainly
hold s night after night. T h us , when som eone
arrives after everyone else has gon e to sleep,
rather than takin g a place at one e nd of th e
lin e, the lat ecomer will usually go to his or her
'proper place' in th e line and demand to be
inserted between her esta blished partn ers.
This, of course , causes eve ryo ne to have to
crowd close r together and shift positions
slightly up and d own th e line ; thi s is usu ally
th e occasion for grumbling, but th e
accommod ation is made.
7. This is also the cent ral plot devi ce in the
1970s television se ries Charley's Angell.
Ch arley, th e phallic figure par e xce llence, is
never present. H e is onl y a disembodied voice
of comma nd. His 'Angels' are his 'sta nd -in '
detectives , att ractive yo ung wom en who d o his
bidding. They are se rved by a eunuch,
Boswell, and their main characte ristic is th at
they ca n fit in an ywhere. Each week the y go
underground into no matter what situ ation:
the violent world of drug lords and
mot orcycle gangs, a form al re ception for the
..
state governor, a suburban high school, water
skiing with a mob ster, rural shacks a nd urban
297
slums, etce ter a. Wherever they go , they are
dressed perfectly for th e part, their sp ee ch
a nd manners so well ad apted to the setting
th at no o ne would suspect that they are not
completel y at home. To th e extent that Charley's
Angels reproduces this crucial as pect of classic
film noir, perhaps the seri es deserves
re cognition as a derivative, loon y genre : 'ditzy
nair'.
8. Zizek, p. 163.
9. T his thesis is full y dependent on theoreti cal
formulations pr ovided by Juliet Flower
MacCannell's Th e Regime of the Brother : After
the Patriarchy (London and New York:
Routledge, 1991) a nd th e work of Slavoj
Zizek.
10. Juliet MacCannell, pp. 11-13.
11. In these remarks I rel y exte nsively o n Juliet
Flower MacCannell's an alysis of the two films
in 'Frate r nite et eg alite : pour les femmes dans
un e culture globale', Dif)lomees, no. 162
(September 1992 ), pp. 166-75.
12. Zizek su ggests th at the 'contingent a nd
nomad ic framin g' of scen es in film noir situ ates
it like an Edward Hopper painting to reveal
th e insid e a nd outside at o nce. T o better
understand the op positio n noirlh omeless, it is
necessary to sustain examination of the
unusual moment in film noir , its glimpses into
th e interior of alle gedly normal homes and
co mm unities. Methodologically, th ere is no
noir devi ce better suited for thi s purpose than
Hit chco ck's Shadoui of a Doubt.
13. In the following paragraphs I return to a
problem ad d ressed earlier in Empty M eeting
Grounds : The Tourist Papers (London and New
York : Routledge , 1992), pp. 105-13.
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
JANET BERGSTROM is Vice Cha ir of the
Department of Film and Television at UCLA.
A founding editor of Camera Obscura, she
worked with thej ournal for over fiftee n yea rs.
The author of a number of articles on Lang,
Murnau , and Weimar cin ema , she re cently
cu rated a retrospective of the films of Asta
Nielsen for the Mu see d'Orsay in Paris. She is
cu r re n tly workin g o n two projects o n French
cinema : a monograph on Chantal Ackerman
and a study of po st-war French f ilm n oir.
JOAN COPJE C is Dir ector of th e Ce nt e r for
the Study of Psych oanalysis and Cu lture and a
professor of English a nd Comparativ e Litera­
ture at the U niversity at Buffalo. She was until
re cently Senior Edi tor of October, working
with the journal fr om 1981 to 1992. Her book
Read My Desire : Lacan against the H ist oricists is
forth coming from MIT Press.
299
ELIZABETH C OWIE, Senior Lecturer in Film
Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury,
was a foundin g ed ito r of ml], a journal of
feminist theory. an d is editor, along with Par­
veen Adams, of Th e W oman in Question (Cam­
bridge. MA : MIT Press/O ctober Books and
London: Verso, 1990). She has a book forth ­
com in g from Macmillan on film theo ry, psy­
choa nalysis and feminist critiques.
MANTHI A DIAWARA is Director of Africana
Stud ies at New York University where he is a
professor of film and literature. He is the
au th o r of man y a rt icles on th eory and film
and his book African CineTTU1 : Politics and Cul­
tu re was re cently published by Indiana
University Press (1992).
FREDRIC JAMESON is Director of the Center
for Critical Theory and Professor of Com p ar­
 SHADES
ative Literature at Duke Univ e rsity . Am ong
his numerou s books, the mo st re cent are Post­
modernism, or Th e Cultural Logic of Late Capita­
lism (London: Verso, 1991) and The
Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the
World System (Bloomington: Ind iana Uni ver ­
sit y Pr ess and London : British Film Institute ,
199 2).
DEAN MACC AN NF.LL is Professor of Co m­
muni ty Studies a nd Dev elopment a t the
U n ivers ity of California, Davis and Adjunct
Professor o f Sociolo gy and C ritical Theory at
the U nive rsity of Ca lifo rn ia, Irvine . H e is the
author of Th e Tou rist: A Ne w Them )' of the
Leisure Class (New York, Schocken , 1976) and
Empty M eeting Grounds (Ne w York a nd Lon­
don : Routledge, 1992).
FR ED PF EIL is th e author o f Another Tal e to
Tell: Politics and Na rrative in Postmodern Culture
(London : Verso, 1990) a mi of Whit e Guys:
Studies in Postmodern Power, Choice and Change,
whi ch is forthcoming fr om Verso. H e is a
professor of English at Trinity Co lle ge, H art­
ford, Connecticut.
D AVI D R EI D is th e editor, most recentl y, of
Sex, Death, and God in L.A . (N ew York : Pan­
theon , 1992) . H e is curre nt ly co m p leting
work on a book ab out N ew York City and th e
300
OF NOIR
Ame rican e m p ire from 1945 to 1950 , to be
titled The Bra zen Age.
MARC VERNET teaches film at th e Unive rsity
of Paris I II and at the American Film Pro­
gram in Paris. Coa utho r, a lo ng with J acques
Aumont, Alain Bergala and Michel Marie, of
Aesthetics of Film (Aus tin : U nive rs ity of Texas,
1992), he has published widely in French and
En glish on film su bj ec ts, including sev eral
importan t a rt icles o n film noir ,
JAY NE L. WALKER is th e author of Th e Mak­
ing of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein fro m T hree
Lives to Tender Buttons (Amherst : U n ivers ity of
Massachusetts Pr ess). Sh e has ta ught at Cor­
nell a nd the University of California , Berke­
ley and tea ches currently in the Writin g
Pr o gram at th e Un ive rsity o f Cali fornia,
Davis .
SLAVOJ ZIZEK is a researcher at the In stitute
of Soc io logy at th e Uni ve rsity of Ljubljana. He
has published several books in Slovene,
Fr en ch and English including, most recently,
Enjoy Your Symptom :J aclfues Lacati In H ollywood
and Out (New York and London : Routledge ,
1992) and , as edi to r, I:;veT)'thing You Alwa ys
Want ed to Know About La wn But Were Afraid to
Ask Hitch cock (London a nd New York : Verso ,
1992).
 aris, summer 1946. This moment marks an analyse the re-emergence of nair in recent years ,

P important event in cinema history, not of

production but of exhibition. For this was the
summer when, after the hiatus of the Second World
most notably in the hybrid forms produced in the
1980s by the merging of nair with science fiction and
horror, for example Blade Runnerand Angel Heart,

War,French critics were again given the opportunity and in films by new black directors such as Deep

to view films from Hollywood. The films they saw, Cover; Straight Out of Brooklyn, A Rage in Harlem

including The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and One False Move. Other essays focus on the open

Laura, Murder; My Sweet, and The Woman in the urban territory in which the nair hero hides out; the

Window, prompted the naming and theorization of a office spaces in Chandler, and the palpable sense of

new phenomenon: film nair. waiting that fills empty warehouses, corridors and

Much of what has been written about the genre hotel rooms. Finally, Shades of Nair pays renewed

since has remained within the orbit of this attention to the lethal relation between the sexes; to

preliminary assessment. While sympathetic towards the femme fatale and the other women in nair. As the

the early French critics, this collection of original role of women expands, the femme fatale remains

essays attempts to move beyond their first deadly, but her deadliness takes on new meanings.

fascinated look. Beginning with an anatomy of that

look - of the 'poujadist' climate that nourished it and ~ Janet Bergstrom, Joan Copjec,

the imminent collapse of the Hollywood studio Elizabeth Cowie, Manthia Diawara, Fredric Jameson,

system that gave it its mournful inflection ­ Dean MacCannell, Fred Pfeil, David Reid and

_ re-explores and calls into question Jayne L. Walker, Marc Vernet, Slavoj Zizek .

the object first constructed by it.

The impetus for this shift in perspective comes ~ iS Professor of English and

from the films themselves, viewed in the light of Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for

contemporary social and political concerns, and the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture at the State

from new theoretical insights. Several contributions University of New York, Buffalo.

ISBN 0 86091 625 1

VE RSO
UK: 6 Meard Street London W1V 3HR

.. USA: 29 West 35th Street New York NY 10001-2291

Cover designed by William Webb

Film still from Double Indemnity © by Universal Pictures, a division of Universal City Studios, Inc.
Courtesy 01 MCA Publishing Rights, a division 01 MCA Inc.

0-86091-625-1

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