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Thursday, October 20, 2005
Readings in Noir midterm
Just to get some outside feedback I have decided to post my midterm for my Theory of Literature class. The class is based around the noir genre of films and books. I've enjoyed it more than any other class I’ve taken this semester and I'll probably delve into my personal reactions to the work later. For now I'll just give you the essay I have written based on the David N. Meyer's quote "in a world without certainty, noir embrace[s] the unpredictable. It provides[s] an outlet for America's...confusion over an unknown future, the demise of any demarcation between right and wrong, the shifting roles of men and women, the frustrations of nonconformity, and the poetic alienation of the outsider.”
David N. Meyers’s quote about noir reflecting the confusion Americans felt in the first half of the Twentieth Century is an apt description of the genre. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity all feed off this cultural displacement that Americans, specifically the white heterosexual middle-class male Americans, were feeling at the time. Woman suffrage had arrived in 1920 shaking up gender roles. Seeing women gain a stronger voice in the matters of the day caused many to fear that the male establishment would lose their long held power over how society functions. Prohibition began at the same time. The government trying to regulate morality but instead it strengthened organized crime and exposed how arbitrary the line between the lawful and the unlawful could be. The Depression of the 1930’s created more unrest in the country with many Americans’ having their way of life turned upside-down, one of them being Chandler himself. The three books listed, as well as the film adaptations of all three, took the internal and external conflicts citizens had to deal with and turned it into drama. There is no reassuring voice to be found telling the audience what is right and what is wrong. These stories live by the blurred line between right and wrong informing reader about society then and now by being as such.
Noir may toil in the crime genre but after examining enough texts it’s clear that these stories aren’t about “whodunit.” In Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep using a private eye as the protagonist is a way to get into the corrupt underworld of a city, San Francisco and Los Angeles respectively. The use of crime as a catalyst for the plot is a way to introduce all these characters involved in some dirty dealing or another. The Maltese Falcon has Hammett play up the secret world of the criminally inclined. Sam Spade is as far from a hero as an anti-hero can get. He gives little mind to the death of his partner expect when it comes to his partner’s wife, who Spade has been sleeping with. He is our guide to a world where the fears of the Depression-era man is ripe for display. There are those nasty foreigners, the fast women, fat and greedy men who use big words and those gays who Lord knows must have some kind of psychological deficiency to act in such a perverted manner. It’s there in one of the first noir book and in Huston’s film adaptation, the first film noir, that ugliness of this world is exaggerated for dramatic effect, as if the world of noir is not realistic but “hyper real.”
The Big Sleep gets even more use out of drowning in the muck of society. It starts with Marlowe entering the elegant and respectable house of General Sternwood while looking rather clean cut. As soon as he meets up with the General he is no longer as sober and well dressed as he praised himself for being at the beginning of the book. The opening transformation of Marlowe is a microcosm for what’s going to happen to him as the plot thickens. He is going to delve deeper and deeper into a world of gamblers, blackmailers, pornographers and the General’s two nutty daughters. Homosexuals are thrown into the mix as well and while we can hope that today’s enlightened world won’t necessarily considers them another group of “no-goodniks” that Marlowe has to deal with a reader in 1939 could see them as “crazed perverts” and just another unsavory group that makes the atmosphere of The Big Sleep just that much more dark. The aversion to homosexuals Hammett hints at in Spade’s character and Chandler makes clear in Marlowe’s is a definite sign of the typical American man becoming uncomfortable with his society. Leslie Fiedler writes in his essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey” about the resentment Spade would have against a “gunsel” like Wilbur. “The existence of overt homosexuality threatens to compromise an essential aspect of American sentimental life: the camaraderie of the locker room and the ball park, the good fellowship of the poker game and fishing trip… (page 4)” Many of the psychological underpinnings of noir are about that comfort being robbed from the strong men who are meant to lead society.
Something else that makes Chandler’s Los Angeles seem darker is that, unlike Spade, Marlowe has some decency to him. He has a code of ethics he subscribes to that isn’t all about serving himself. He genuinely does care for General Sternwood and doesn’t charge the rich man more than the standard fee. In the film version directed by Howard Hawks Rusty Regan was made to be something of a surrogate son to the General. It seems that Marlowe would be much happier to be that surrogate son for the General, perhaps a son-in-law. He doesn’t send the General’s crazier daughter Carmen to jail for the murder she commits but instead tells her sister Vivian to get her some help, showing how he is more compassionate than a character like Spade would be.
The stylized hyper reality of these books reflects the kinky atmosphere of these books. Hammett’s book featured some snappy dialogue for Spade but it was rather straight forward compared to the way Chandler writes. In F.R. Jameson’s article “On Raymond Chandler” there’s a quote from Chandler about his writing style. “I had to learn American just like a foreign language. To use it I had to study it and analyze it. As a result, when I use slang, colloquialism, snide talk, or any kind of offbeat language, I do it deliberately.(page 134)” The use of slang and the fact that the writing of Chandler. Hammet and others appeared in pulp magazine like Black Mask meant that noir was a far more proletariat form of literature than most other contemporary novels. It mined the neurosis of the modern man while speaking to him at the same time.
Cain’s book doesn’t feature lawmen in any real role. It is about the faceless working class, the male members of which might be found reading Black Mask. It features a Southern California housewife and an insurance salesman as the lead characters. Cain alerts readers to the boring way their lives proceed in the inoffensive conversations Phyllis Nirdlinger and Walter Huff have in their first meetings with each other. It’s Phyllis that proves she can bring some excitement into the life of Walter by taking out her husband and living off that big insurance payout that’s sure to come out of his death. Walter then imagines himself as some kind of criminal genius, thinking of just the right way to commit the perfect crime. He feels like a man of importance with something to really distinguish himself from the other anonymous bums that make up the working class of Los Angeles. This puffed up manhood of the outlaw is then subverted when it turns out Phyllis is the real evil genius who is smart enough and powerful enough to get away with murder. More than the other two novels, Double Indemnity is about male dominance being cut off in the face of a real powerful woman, a woman that won’t fit into any pat characterization that some man can come up for her. The real love is instead between Huff and his boss Keyes, as the screenplay by Chandler and Billy Wilder for the film makes clear by the end. The story is not filled with one character after another with that does something uglier to the next one. It doesn’t live by the secret society of Los Angeles’s black market. It’s a story that resides in the darkest places of the average man and woman’s psyche.
Noir might be a prime target for those self-proclaimed guardians of morality who blame it for the furthering coarseness of American society. The usual defense against that reductive argument is that popular entertainment is just reflecting society. Noir uses violations of what some governing body calls law as a way to reflect the world. It just uses a funhouse mirror to do it.
Please don't be afraid to tell me how you feel. I appreciate it!
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