An Introduction to Neo-Noir
Coining a
Term
There
was for some time a tendency on the part of film critics to argue that
the label ‘noir’ could legitimately be applied only to a
specific cycle of post-World War Two Hollywood films, the limits of
which were most often fixed as 1941 (the year of John Huston's film
of The Maltese Falcon) and 1958 (with Welles' Touch of
Evil marking the end of the cycle). In recent years, however, there
has been increasing acceptance of a much more flexible use of the term
– in particular, of a chronological broadening of the term, both
to draw in pre-World War Two examples and, more importantly, to expand
the category sufficiently to include the burgeoning phenomenon of 'neo-noir',
which was already beginning to appear at the time that American critics
first adopted the French label.
Silver
and Ward, for example, in their Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference
to the American Style, choose as their first film the 1927 Underworld,
directed by Josef von Sternberg - 'the first modern gangster film in
which the heroes are actually criminals'. At the same time, they push
their analysis forward, including in their list of canonical films noirs
a movie as recent as Scorsese's 1976 Taxi Driver, and separately
discussing neo-noir films up to 1992 (twenty-one films in that year
alone, including Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs). The 1996 Film
Noir Reader (edited by Silver and Ursini) reprints essays that
range over noir from Borde and Chaumeton's seminal piece of the mid-1950s
to, for example, a 1990 Todd Erickson article arguing that noir really
only becomes a genre (neo-noir) in the 80s, when it emerges from its
'embryonic' state in the sixties and seventies. One of the best recent
analyses, Naremore's More Than Night, explores 'noir and its
contexts' from the classic 1940s films to L. A. Confidential
(1997).
This widening of the term, of course, complicates one of the questions
that critics continue to debate. That is, what kind of classification
is 'noir'? Is it a visual style, a tone, a genre, a generic field, a
movement, a cycle, a series - or just a helpful category? Naremore
argues that having a 'noir category' serves an important function: even
if it is not, strictly speaking, a genre (in the sense that, say, the
western or science fiction or the detective story are genres), it is
a label that at the very least invokes 'a network of ideas' that is
valuable as an organising principle. Such is the 'flexibility, range,
and mythic force' of the concept of noir that it belongs 'to the history
of ideas as much as to the history of cinema'. There have been over
three hundred noir-influenced films released since 1971, and, whatever
its generic status, the word 'noir' has become widespread both in academic
discourse and as 'a major signifier of sleekly commercial artistic ambition.'
The 1960s and 1970s
In
both Britain and America, tensions, doubts, failures and signs of dissent
gathered force as the events of the 60s, from the assassination of Kennedy
on, undermined confidence and strengthened the spirit of protest. As
Mailer implies in The American Dream, after the trauma of the
assassination the 'dream' turns to a vision of violence and murder.
At the end of the 60s and in the early 70s, American society was being
shaken by riots in the black ghettos, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy
and Martin Luther King, the growing opposition to the Vietnam War, higher
crime and unemployment rates, Watergate and increasingly vociferous
demonstrations of counter-culture discontent. Though the changes in
British society were less dramatic, there was nevertheless a comparable
movement away from the mood of the 60s. The early 70s saw bitter confrontations
between Government and unions, the collapse of the boom in the stock
market and the property market, rising unemployment and inflation and
worsening conflict with the IRA. Both countries, then, were experiencing
the kind of political and social malaise that made the cynicism and
satiric edge of noir seem all too appropriate.
Even
during the 60s there had been a number of films - some of which Silver
and Ward group with canonical film noir, some with neo-noir - that drew
on the films and novels of earlier decades, and by the early 70s the
phenomenon was attracting considerable critical attention. There was
increased use of the 'noir' label by film critics and more 'consciously
neo-noir' films began to appear (Walter Hill's 1978 film, The Driver,
is singled out by Silver and Ward as one of the 'earliest and most stylised'
examples). Adaptations of literary noir were becoming more numerous:
J. Lee Thompson's 1962 film of John D. MacDonald's The Executioners
(Cape Fear); three adaptations of Chandler novels - Paul Bogart's
1969 Marlowe (an adaptation of Little Sister), Robert
Altman 's 1973 film of The Long Goodbye and the Dick Richards
' remake of Farewell, My Lovely (1975); Altman's 1974 film
of Anderson's Thieves Like Us; the adaptations of Ross Macdonald's
early Lew Archer novels, Harper (Jack Smight, 1966) and Drowning
Pool (Stuart Rosenberg, 1975 - 'the last vestiges of the classic
gumshoe' ); Burt Kennedy's 1976 adaptation of Thompson's The Killer
Inside Me; and three separate American adaptations of the more
nearly contemporary but equally noir Parker novels of Richard Stark
(Donald Westlake): Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967), The
Split (Gordon Flemyng, 1968) and The Outfit (John Flynn,
1973).
Postmodern Nostalgia?
In recent critical debate, one question
frequently raised is whether the fashionable trappings of neo-noir are
themselves symptomatic of an acquiescence in slickly commercial postmodern
nostalgia. The sense that 'noir' created in the 70s and 80s was a 'retro'
and nostalgic avoidance of contemporary experience has been encouraged
by the often-cited essay, 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', in which
Frederic Jameson assigns to film noir a central role in the vocabulary
of commercialized postmodernism.
Referring
to Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), Jameson notes the film's
'faintly archaic feel' and its small-town setting, which 'has a crucial
strategic function: it allows the film to do without most of the signals
and references which we might associate with the contemporary world,
with consumer society - the appliances and artefacts, the high rises,
the object world of late capitalism'.
Leaving aside for the moment the matter
of nostalgic pastiche, the most important question is whether self-consciously
'noir' contemporary narratives are to be seen as escaping from or as
engaging with contemporary issues. There are good grounds for taking
issue with Jameson’s arguments. Even when its settings are retro,
both literary and cinematic neo-noir have been as concerned with exposing
the nature of contemporary consumer society as earlier noir was with
satirising, for example, the conformist ethos of small town America
in the fifties.
A Culture of Consumption
The view of contemporary society as a culture
of consumption, consuming not just commodities but performances and
spectacles - and consuming the consumer - has come to the fore, increasingly
in the 80s and 90s, as one of the dominant themes of literary noir,
shaping the representation of protagonists as well as the content and
structure of narratives. Just as 30s thrillers took deprivation as their
theme, the noir films and novels of more recent decades have turned
their attention to the excesses and dependencies of the society of the
media, the spectacle, the consumer.
Consumerism is obviously not an element
new to noir. The 30s gangsters, characterised by stylish consumption,
'swell clothes', penthouses, high-powered cars, expensive restaurants,
were used as a means of exploring the growth of American consumerism,
often with an anti-consumerist subtext that equated vulgar display with
moral disorder. Close attention to fetishistic detail (hats, guns, shoes
and other accessories) and a general fascination with fashion (for example,
the 'to-be-looked-at-ness' signified by the clothing of fashionably
dressed women) were part and parcel of classic noir.
In
neo-noir films with a retro look, the incorporation of such things can
be seen as a consumer society indulgence (nostalgic window-shopping),
and there are unquestionably neo-noir films of which this is a fair
enough criticism - Mulholland Falls (Lee Tamahori, 1996), for
example, in which (as Naremore says) 'the chief function of these four
tough guys is to light cigarettes with Zippos and model a peacock collection
of suits and accessories'.
Even retro noir, however, often engages
seriously not only with the historical period it represents but with
issues that are of contemporary relevance, and the detailed observation
of consumption, style and decor can be part of the critical thrust of
the film. For example, in Ulu Grosbard 's 1981 film, True Confessions,
a thoroughly noir tale of two brothers set in mid-forties L.A., the
whole style of life of the priest (Robert De Niro) - his surroundings,
his dining out, his golf clothes and clubs - is used to establish him
in opposition to his brother, a detective (Robert Duvall).
The
detective's single brown suit and modest apartment help to confirm his
status as a figure who will pursue the corrupt regardless of the consequences.
They are also, however, no guarantee of his own incorruptibility, and
his conspicuous non-consumption is in part an ironic reference back
to the integrity of the shabby private eye. This is a detective who
has been a bagman and who doesn't 'give a shit' that Jack Amsterdam
did not kill the 'virgin tramp'. He will go after him anyway. True
Confessions is not, then, an exercise in nostalgic reincarnation,
but instead uses retro evocation of the forties private eye films both
to demythologise the traditional genre and to raise complex questions
about moral responsibility and complicity in a corrupt society.
The Durability of Noir
The contemporary refashioning of noir
themes is a manifestation of the flexibility and responsiveness to social
change that have characterised noir from its inception and of the continued
vitality of the form. The transformations of the genre in neo-noir have
helped to clarify some of the constant, recognisable elements of 'the
noir vision', most importantly the moral ambivalence of the protagonist
and his (or in neo-noir often her) ill-fated relationship with a wider
society that itself is guilty of corruption and criminality.
In
the mid-fifties, Borde and Chaumeton drew the conclusion that the 'moral
ambiguity, the criminal violence, and the contradictory complexity of
events and motives' worked together in film noir 'to give the spectator
the same feeling of anxiety and insecurity', and that this was 'the
distinguishing feature of film noir in our time'. Their summary captures
some of the identifying traits of noir, but the persistence of this
'network of ideas' from the 1920s through the end of the 1990s suggests
the necessity of revising the Borde and Chaumeton argument regarding
the historical specificity of noir: 'The noir of dark film is dark for
us,' they wrote, 'that is, for European and American viewers in the
1950s.' If noir is 'the reflex of a particular kind of sensibility...unique
in time as in space', then the historical limits set must correspond
to the greater part of the twentieth century.
Copyright © 2002 Lee Horsley
Sources of the above images
are:
http://www.mdle.com/ClassicFilms/
http://mujweb.atlas.cz/www/pulpfiction/
http://www.filmsite.org/taxi.html
http://www.einsiders.com/reviews/videorisks/thedriver.php
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/
http://www.ifilm.com/image/stills/films/
http://www.culturecourt.com/F/Noir/BodyHeat.htm
http://www.americanpsycho.com/looks/index.html
http://www.wafflemovies.com/trueconfessions.html
http://www.monesi.com/sergio/movies/nov97/laconfid1.jpg
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