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

If anything characterizes postmodern art, it is what Peter Wollen describes as a relentless "historicism and eclecticism, which plunders the image-bank and the word-horde for the material of parody, pastiche, and, in extreme cases, plagiarism." 30But postmodern movies have a very short historical memory, usually limiting their "image-bank" to the period since 1930. The so-called film noir occupies an especially important position among the available styles; hence at least three generations of young, artistically ambitious directors have made it a favored object of quotation and imitation.

A metafilm like Exterior Night is one example of this tendency. Working outside Hollywood, Rappaport uses elements of burlesque, parody, and "plagiarism" to comment on a lingering fascination with a genre or style, creating his effects not only with cinematography but also with the entire "nexus of fashion" that constitutes the popular conception of film noir. Rappaport's attitude toward the material he borrows or imitates is fairly typical. Although comic parodies of noir can be seen everywhere in our culture (appearing in such different contexts as Dennis Potter's Singing Detective, Garrison Keillor's "Guy Noir," and specific episodes of TV shows like Sisters and Parker Lewis Can't Lose), they seldom have a purely analytic, deconstructive, or critical purpose. Parody in any form is both a conservative and an evolutionary mode; even in Rappaport's case, it seems Janus-faced, expressing affection for the things it mocks, enabling certain motifs to survive and enter into new combinations.

Perhaps for this reason, parody and its more blank-toned cousin pastiche, which are the ludic forms of what Gerard Genette describes as "hypertextuality," are as old as high culture itself. The Greek tragedies were accompanied by the burlesques of Aristophanes, and the history of the novel has been shaped by authors such as Miguel de Cervantes, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Gustave Flaubert, and James Joyce, who use parody or pastiche both to distinguish themselves from earlier models and to form complex links with tradition. Notice, furthermore, that parody has the same kind of importance to the fashion system and the consumer economy. Where film noir is concerned, there are recent TV commercials that use comic parodies of film noir to sell Hellman's mayonnaise and Colombian coffee; there is even an elaborate, black-and-white parody of neo-noir, starring Julliette Lewis and Harry Dean Stanton, which advertises Guess Jeans.

Consider also an article "Fashion Noir" in the fashion section of the November 3, 1993, Los Angeles Times, where Betty Goodwin writes a regular column, "Screen Style." In a short piece devoted to Carl Reiner's comic parody Fatal Instinct, Goodwin notes that the film's costume designer, Albert Wolskey, is "purposely inconsistent in his retro references" and mixes contemporary accessories with a wide range of older styles. Detective Ned Ravine (Armand Assante) wears "22 suits, all a generic blue model with the same black tie." Femme fatale Lola (Sean Young) ''comes off like a tacky 50's starlet in tight, draped, pulled, cinched and cutout dresses." Wife Lana (Kate Nelligan) is an "amalgam of Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, and other '40s stars," cavorting around in "silk peignoirs with feather boas and matching slippers." Secretary Laura (Sherilyn Fenn) has "the poufsleeved innocence of Judy Garland in her 'Andy Hardy' days." The movie as a whole, Goodwin says, is "intentionally dopey," but it nonetheless offers its female viewers something to imitate: "While you might hold the fluffy feathers," Goodwin tells her readers, "try the silk robesthey act as undeniably divine lounging garb." She notes with pleased amusement that the costumes for Lola are "pure Frederick's of Hollywood, circa the 1950s catalogs," and she quotes Wolsky's observation that "the '40s and '50s are the last great period for clothes." In fact, she says, some of Lola's outfits can be obtained at "Repeat Performance," a trendy Los Angeles clothing shop specializing in antique designer fashions.

It might seem odd that film noir, which is commonly associated with seedy hotels, allnight diners, and the haunts of the underworld, should be capable of starting a fashion trend, even in parodic form. But as Clifton Webb says about one of his cocktail parties in The Dark Corner, such movies are also composed of a "nauseating mixture of Park Avenue and Broadway." They usually depict nightclubs, café society, and the homes of the extremely rich. By their very nature, they are deeply concerned with sleek clothing styles, and they repeatedly give us women who signify what Laura Mulvey describes as "to-be-looked-at-ness." Thus when RKO's Murder, My Sweet was released in 1945, it prompted the Hollywood Citzen News to run a long article entitled "It's Murder, but Gowns Are Sweet," by fashion correspondent Florabel Muir, who spends two full columns lovingly describing the costumes worn by Claire Trevor. Rather like Betty Goodwin in 1993, Muir suggests that the bad-girl outfits are a bit excessive and shouldn't be slavishly imitated. The attractive playsuit Trevor wears in her opening scene, for example, is excellent for the beach, but unsuitable for "receiving guests in a stately drawing room"; moreover, Trevor should have avoided wearing a gardenia in her hair, because "gardenias and playsuits do not go together." One of the best costumes, Muir says, is a black dinner gown, ''which would be the perfect little black dinner gown for you, or for anyone, if only it didn't have quite so much glitter" (2 April 1945).

The deliberately flashy noir fashions of the 1940s were by no means limited to women, nor were they simple by-products of studio design. Dashiell Hammett was one of the most dapper literary figures of the late 1920s and early 1930s (as the photograph on the cover of the first edition of The Thin Man was designed to show), and like his character Ned Beaumont, he knew that you were not supposed to wear silk socks with tweeds. Raymond Chandler, who never made such a fashion error, took Hammett's interest in clothing even further. In the second sentence of The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe tells us, "I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them." Whether he was speaking of Moose Malloy (who wore "a shaggy borsolino hat, a rough grey sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated grey flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes"), Orfamay Quest (who carried "one of those awkward-looking square bags that made you think of a Sister of Mercy taking first aid to the wounded"), or Leslie Murdock ("a slim tall self-satisfied looking number in a tropical worsted suit of slate blue"), Marlowe recognized that apparel was a precise index of taste and social position. No wonder he was played in the movies by a former boy-crooner like Dick Powell, who was fastidiously tailored. And no wonder that Chandler himself once picked Cary Grant as the ideal Marlowe. 32

According to Borde and Chaumeton's first edition of the Panorama du film noir américain, noir began to die off at exactly the moment when these and other fashions became dated and accessible to parodists. The coup de grâce, they argue, was lovingly administered by Vincente Minnelli, one of the cinema's most dress-conscious directors, who staged the "Girl-Hunt Ballet" at the climax of MGM's Band Wagon (1953). An eight-minute Technicolor dance number presented in the form of a 1940s-style dream sequence, "The Girl Hunt" stars Fred Astaire as hard-boiled detective Rod Reily and Cyd Charisse as both a blond ingenue and a raven-haired femme fatale. The most stunning moment occurs in a smoky barroom, where Reily, wearing a cream-colored suit, a black shirt, and a yellow tie, dances a steamy number with the "dark" Charisse, who wears scarlet, sequins, and black mesh tights. In a switch on the usual formula, the blond turns out to be the villain whom Reily must pump full of lead. He wanders off at the end with the brunette. "She was bad," he tells us. ''She was dangerous. I wouldn't trust her any further than I could throw her. But she was my kind of woman."