James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

Even before the censorship scandals over Madame Bovary, Ulysses, and The Rainbow, European literature was preoccupied with individual subjectivitya topic that led naturally to explorations of sex and the "Primitive" unconscious. Prior to World War I, in the work of British and American authors such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Maddox Ford (all of whom were indebted to Gustave Flaubert), impressionistic narration and the control of point of view became the hallmarks of modern literary art. Additional support for "deep" narrative techniques, involving stream of consciousness and nonlinear plot, was ultimately found in Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri-Louis Bergson, and Sigmund Freud. Sometimes these techniques were used to reveal savagery or death instincta killer inside us, living below the surface of rational life. 4Furthermore, the new novel mounted an implicit critique of industrial modernity's sense of progressive or nonrepeatable time. As David Lodge puts it, one of the chief characteristics of modernist fiction is that it "eschews the straight chronological ordering of its material, and the use of a reliable, omniscient and intrusive narrator. It employs, instead, either a single, limited point of view or multiple viewpoints, all more or less limited and fallible; and it tends toward a complex or fluid handling of time, involving much cross-reference back and forward across the temporal span of the action." 5

The modernist concern with subjectivity and depth psychology was given a further impetus by social modernity and the emancipation of women, which brought new subjectivities into being. However, the relationship between modernism and the new woman was troubled, particularly in the case of the male moderns, who offered a liberating honesty about sex while at the same time mounting a gendered opposition to establishment culture. A locus classicus is the climactic scene of Conrad's Heart of Darkness (often described as the urtext of British modernism), in which Marlow finds it impossible to tell the truth to Kurtz's sheltered fiancée, "the Intended." At about this time in London, T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound were attempting to replace the flowery rhetoric of late-Victorian poetry with "hard" and "clear" imagery. Attacks on the supposedly genteel, ladylike taste of the middle class were intensified in the years after World War I, when all forms of writing, from verse to journalism, became more plainspoken and "masculine." For those writers who had experienced combat, beautiful images and poetic diction seemed almost obscene: a horse should be called a horse, not a "steed" or a "charger," and a good novelist or newspaper editor should approach language in much the same way as Pound approached poetry, ruthlessly cutting excess verbiage and euphemisms. 6The time was ripe for movements such as the German Neue Sachlichkeit, for the iconoclastic criticism of H. L. Mencken, and for tough-guy stylists such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Ernest Hemingway.

But if the old sensibility was characterized as feminine, so were the more threatening aspects of the modern societyat least in the hands of many male artists. As Andreas Huyssen points out in After the Great Divide (1986), one important characteristic of high modernism was its growing hostility toward mass culture, which it often personified in the form of a woman. (Here it should be noted that the modernists did not dislike popular art; what they increasingly criticized was a commodified, mass-produced, supposedly "feminine" culture that took the form of slick-paper magazines, Books-of-the-Month, and big-budget productions from Broadway and Hollywood.) At this level, the masochistic eroticism of the aesthetes and decadents at the end of the nineteenth century sometimes joined forces with an almost sexual ambivalence toward industrial progress, which was associated with erotic females who threaten men. Consider Franz Kafka's Trial, in which a nightmare bureaucracy is connected with lascivious and enigmatic women; consider also the German art cinema of the 1920s, especially Metropolis and Pandora's Box, in which a beautiful robot and a sexy flapper evoke fears of creeping Americanization. In English literature, a loosely related example is T. S. Eliot's Waste Landone of the most influential poems of the early twentieth century, in which a free-floating male sexual anxiety blends with dystopian horror.

The themes I have been discussing tended to converge on representations of the Dark City, a literary topos inherited from the nineteenth century, which became more significant than ever. William Blake's London had been the blighted, "mind-forged" creation of industrial rationality; Baudelaire's Paris had been the perversely seductive playground of a flaneur; oppressive and pleasurable, alienating and free, the Dark City possessed many contradictory meanings, all of which were carried over into the modernist era. In the twentieth century, however, the streets at night were transformed into the privileged mise-en-scène of the masculine unconscious (most notably in the Nighttown episode of Ulysses, in which a notorious harlot turns men into swine). For some modernist artists, the nocturnal city also began to resemble an American-style metropolisa spreading empire of mechanization and kitsch that endangered the urbanity of old Europe.

A great deal more could be said about high modernism, but these observations should indicate the degree to which early examples of the so-called film noir tend to reproduce themes and formal devices associated with landmarks of early-twentieth-century art. Like modernism, Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s are characterized by urban landscapes, subjective narration, nonlinear plots, hard-boiled poetry, and misogynistic eroticism; also like modernism, they are somewhat "anti-American," or at least ambivalent about modernity and progress. By the same token, critical discourse on these films usually consists of little more than a restatement of familiar modernist themes.

The affinity between noir and modernism is hardly surprising. In the decades between the two world wars, modernist art increasingly influenced melodramatic literature and movies, if only because most writers and artists with serious aspirations now worked for the culture industry. When this influence reached a saturation point in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it inevitably made traditional formulas (especially the crime film) seem more "artful": narratives and camera angles were organized along more complex and subjective lines; characters were depicted in shades of gray or in psychoanalytic terms; urban women became increasingly eroticized and dangerous; endings seemed less unproblematically happy; and violence appeared more pathological.

The qualified transformation of thrillers was aided by Hollywood's appropriation of talent and ideas from Europe, where intellectuals had more power than in the United States, and where a less rationalized, more elite media culture produced the Weimar silent film, the French film noir, and the Gaumont-British pictures of Alfred Hitchcock. The European art cinema was unable to compete with Hollywood on its own ground, but it strongly influenced many American directors and genres. The Weimar Germans (led by Fritz Lang) specialized in gothic horror, criminal psychology, and sinister conspiracies; the French (including René Clair, Marcel Carné, Georges Auric, and Jacques Prévert) produced realist pictures about working-class crime; Hitchcock (assisted by such figures as Michael Balcon, Charles Bennett, and Ivor Montagu) concentrated on international intrigue. What united the three types of cinematic modernism was an interest in popular stories about violence and sexual love, or in what Graham Greene once called "blood melodrama." 9

A similar development can be seen in the world of Anglo-American literature, where the major forms of "bloody" popular fiction, including the detective story, the spy thriller, and the gothic romance, were "made new" in the 1920s and 1930s. These forms had long been of interest to vanguard artistic intellectuals; in fact, shortly after the turn of the century, crime and paranoid conspiracy fiction strongly appealed to the leading psychological novelists in Britain and America. Henry James, for example, experimented with both the ghost story and the spy novel, and Joseph Conrad, who specialized in ironic tales of "secret sharers" and imperialist adventurers, once told a French colleague that society itself was nothing more than a criminal conspiracy: "Crime is a necessary condition for all types of organizations. Society is essentially criminalor it would not exist.'' 10By the 1930s, Wyndham Lewis was complaining that the entire social imaginary resembled a Kriminalroman .