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

Even the comic parodies of noir in the 1980s and 1990s have usually been conservative, given to a kind of window-shopping through the past. 40A qualified exception is Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), which deals with a scandal in the L.A. transit system, and which joins the dark world of Chinatown with the anarchic violence of the old Warner cartoons. A more typical example is a TV show like "The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice," first broadcast in 1985 as a special black-and-white episode of ABC's hit series Moonlighting. This show is introduced by none other than Orson Welles (in one of his last performances), who also makes a brief announcement before each commercial, reminding viewers that nothing is wrong with their color sets.

"The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice" (1985).

The program itself offers the audience a Rashamon-like narrative, in which Mattie and David (Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis), the two bickering private eyes, have separate dreams about a case involving an L.A. developer who plans to revive a 1940s-style nightclub. Mattie becomes Rita, a singer with a big band, and David becomes Chance, a young man with a horn. The major joke has to do with small variations in the content and style of the two fantasies. Mattie's "movie" contains a number of flowery, soft-focus shots, whereas David's is filled with tilted angles, offscreen narration, and seedy locales. The overriding aim of the entire episode is to create a fairly traditional screwball comedy, giving the audience an opportunity to watch contemporary stars recreating yesterday's fashionsart-moderne nightclubs, smoky bars, Vorkapitch montages, big-band music, turned-down hats, slinky evening gowns, suits with shoulder pads and suspenders, pomaded hair, permanent waves, and wise-cracking dialogue, all of it photographed in shadowy black and white. This nostalgia extends even to the hard-boiled elements of David's dream, as the show itself acknowledges. At one point, we see David sitting in the window of a dingy apartment facing onto a neon "Hotel" sign, wearing an undershirt and playing a trumpet into the hot night air. His off-screen voice comments: ''I always play my horn with my shirt off, late at night by an open window, next to a flashing neon light. I know I look good that way."

A roughly similar, albeit noncomic approach to old-fashioned noir can be seen in one of contemporary cinema's purest examples of what Jameson means by pastiche: Joel and Ethan Coen's Miller's Crossing (1990), which borrows selectively from the long tradition of Hollywood gangster movies, and more extensively from Dashiell Hammett. The Coen brothers mix together ideas from The Glass Key, Red Harvest, and The Maltese Falcon, all the while carefully avoiding direct quotation from the novels. Although their film involves a certain amount of burlesque, it is in one sense deeply true to the imaginative world created by Hammett. It shows us a city ruled by gangsters, filled with sadomasochistic violence and ambiguous sexual relationships; it captures the exact feel of pulp dialogue ("What's the rumpus?" the characters say whenever they greet one another and it skillfully evokes Hammett's typical settings and decor. As one instance of this last effect, notice the hero's apartment, which is a synthesis of the high-windowed rooms inhabited by Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key and the sets for Sam Spade's living room in both the 1932 and 1941 movie versions of The Maltese Falcon.

And yet, despite its many horrific and satiric elements, Miller's Crossing is "about" little more than wide-angle lenses, low-level compositions, tracking shots, and the monochromatic look of masculine rooms with leather upholstery and parquet flooring. It is "about" smoking a cigarette in the dark while sitting next to a black telephone, with oriental rugs spread over hardwood floors and gauzy curtains wafting in the night breeze. Perhaps most of all, it is "about" the glamour of men's hats. It begins with a surreal black hat blowing through the woods, and it repeatedly shows us gangsters peering beneath the downturned brims of their fedoras. The protagonist (Gabriel Byrne) wears a particularly dashing hat that he likes to hang on his foot when he sits in a chair with his legs crossed; at one point, making an emergency exit from his room late at night, he behaves like a latter-day cowboy, grabbing his hat and his gun rather than his shoes. Such attention to fetishistic detail is appropriate to the genre, but Miller's Crossing differs strikingly from any of its predecessors in its refusal to engage seriously with American political or social history. Unlike Hammett, unlike the Warner gangster films, and unlike 1970s movies such as Chinatown and The Godfather, it is incapable of (or uninterested in) creating a sense of tragedy. Moreover, in contrast to even the most conservative forms of comic parody, it does not even make us laugh at the things it imitates.

Something else again is happening in Pulp Fiction (1995), which, according to Quentin Tarantino, "isn't noir. I don't do neo-noir." 41This claim is in one sense justified, because the style of Tarantino's work has relatively little in common with the films I have just described. Pulp Fiction is staged in a sharply observed contemporary Los Angeles, made up of cheaply remodeled, mission-style apartment houses; condos with swimming pools and keypad alarm systems; frilly, ranch-style homes in the valley; strip-mall gun stores decorated by Confederate flags; and theme restaurants like Jack-Rabbit Slims, a "wax museum with a pulse," where the menu includes "Douglas Sirk steak." Notice also that the narrative structure is contingent rather than paranoid. Unlike classical film noir, this picture does not resolve its nonlinear plot by attributing causality to some overriding social or psychological determinant. Instead, it strings events together in an amusing pattern of random or coincidental relations, in a style more in keeping with Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991) or TV's Seinfeld than with a modernist text like Double Indemnity.

On the other hand, Pulp Fiction has an obvious source in tough-guy literature, and it creates a montage out of the interrelated fragments of four hard-boiled "short stories," which are woven together in a complex time scheme. It contains allusions to The Big Sleep, Gun Crazy, Kiss Me Deadly, and even Chinatown. ("After you, kitty cat," one of the characters says, echoing Polanski in the last of these films.) Its original title was Black Mask, and its script (cowritten by Roger Avary) was influenced by second- or third-generation noir writers like Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and Elmore Leonard. It could hardly be described as a psychoanalytic movie, but it is filled with sardonic jokes about anality. Its disorienting plot, its atmosphere of "criminal adventure," its disdain for socially responsible messages, and its fascination with B-movie violence would surely have appealed to many of the French critics who invented American noir in the 1940s and 1950s.

Ultimately, the difference between Pulp Fiction and other types of neo-noir has less to do with its structure and sensibility than with its specific "nexus of fashion." For example, its two hit men, Vincent and Jules (John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson), dress in black suits and pencil-thin ties, like Lee Marvin in the remake of The Killers. Both men eschew hats, and instead of slicked-back hair, they adopt the styles of the 1970s: Vincent has long tresses, and Jules has jheri curls. The film's novelty therefore lies in the fact that it draws upon a slightly different range of antecedent texts than the usual dark thriller. Instead of simply harking back to the 1940s and 1950s, Tarantino takes most of his inspiration from the period when both auteurism and the idea of noir gained a strong foothold in America and when a fairly sophisticated film culture coexisted with "bubblegum" music and color TV. He uses old-fashioned materials in much the same way as the Cahiers group in the early 1960s, but his nostalgia extends forward to movies like Mean Streets and Saturday Night Fever (1977), and his cinephilia is combined with a "screen memory" of TV kitsch.