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

Chinatown and most of its imitators are pessimistic stories, involving the disillusionment or death of an alienated white male, a crisis of "family values," and an implicit critique of capitalism. In contrast, Devil in a Blue Dress is optimistic, involving a black protagonist who moves upward toward the middle class and who becomes stronger at the end. This character must confront a tragic personal and social history, but, in the tradition of the mainstream detective novel, he is not crushed by what he sees; in fact, the closing shots depict him as a hero who strides confidently down the sunlit street in front of his house, smiling at mothers and children. (The buoyant effect is heightened by Denzel Washington, who, like all the great movie stars, has a distinctive bodily signaturea razor grin and a relaxed, rolling walk.) Easy Rawlins is clearly no Jake Gittes, and he is quite different from the angry antiheroes in the African-American protest novels of the 1940s. In many ways an improbable construction, he has more in common with a "redemptive" figure like Chandler's Marlowe. It is as if Mosley, Franklin, Washington, and the other creators of Devil in a Blue Dress were looking back across history, from the vantage point of another side of town, to give a somewhat ironic salute to the classic private eyes of white Hollywood. "You and me, too, brother," Rawlins might sayor, in the words of Ralph Ellison, "Perhaps on the lower frequencies, I speak for you."

One day in 1993, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Ara Chekmayan visited a Pennsylvania fleamarket, where he discovered a statuette that looked exactly like the Maltese Falcon. Chekmayan purchased the black bird for eight dollars, and not long afterward, believing it to be one of two identical props that had been used in the famous 1941 Warner Brothers movie, he offered it up for auction at Christie's, who estimated its value at fifty thousand dollars. Before an auction could take place, however, a Los Angeles collector pointed out that identical copies of the statuette could be purchased at forty-five dollars apiece from a book dealer in Long Beach, California. (In that same year, my wife bought one in a Westwood bookstore and gave it to me as a Christmas present.) Chekmayan immediately withdrew his rara avis from sale, and the entire unhappy adventure was noted in People magazine.

The central irony of this story lies in the well-known fact that the "original" Maltese Falcon was itself a fake. Dashiell Hammett's novel can be read as a parable about art and surplus value, showing how a fetish object is created through the sheer power of myth. (Notice also that many of the villains in films noirs of the 1940s were dealers or collectors of fine art.) The irony deepens, however, when we realize that a similar myth has now accumulated around the classic Hollywood cinema. Contrary to what Walter Benjamin hoped in the 1930s, mechanical reproduction has not destroyed the "aura" of exhibition art; instead, the transitory but highly fetishized images of a bygone movie industry have become collector's items or museum pieces. Even the property warehouses of the old studios contain valuable objects. A kitschy statuette originally intended to represent a worthless imitation has been transformed into "the stuff that dreams are made of," if only because Humphrey Bogart touched it.

There is nothing new about this process. The twentieth century offers many examples of mass-produced trivia that become rare and valuable with the passing of time. (Walter Benjamin himself was a collector of popular children's books that eventually became prized items.) But Chekmayan's falcon illustrates two points about the film noir that are worth emphasizing: first, the falcon provides concrete evidence that Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s have become historical artifacts, possessed of a certain artistic or cultural cachet; and second, it reveals that these same thrillers can spread their aura across different media, becoming valuable as other things besides movies. The Maltese Falcon may have begun as a book and a couple of films, but it can become a statue in a museum, or practically anything else.

In effect, the idea of film noir spreads so widely that it helps to constitute what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls our "mediascape," which is made up of both the "capabilities to produce and disseminate information" (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, computers, and so on), and the images created through such media. 1We might even say that noir itself is a kind of mediascapea loosely related collection of perversely mysterious motifs or scenarios that circulate through all the information technologies, and whose ancestry can be traced at least as far back as ur-modernist crime writers like Edgar Allan Poe or the Victorian "sensation novelists." Of course, not everyone in the world is aware of the term film noir, and people find different uses for the things they read or see. Even so, self-conscious forms of noirish narrative continue to appear all around us, blurring the line between our fictional and real landscapes and contributing profoundly to the social imaginaire.

This phenomenon is especially evident in the postmodern environment, where dark Hollywood pictures of the 1940s and 1950s provide motifs, images, plots, and characters for every sort of artifact. For example, the slightly upscale regions of the leisure market frequently draw upon the memory of noir. Bernard Herrmann's music scores have been adapted into concert pieces by prestigious conductors; ambitious novelists such as William Gibson, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, J. P. Ballard, Paul Auster, and Susanna Moore self-consciously allude to the noir literary tradition; the lurid illustrations for pulp magazines provide inspiration for the cover art on the annual ''fiction issues" of The New Yorker; Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, and other crime writers of the 1940s have been published in fine editions by the Library of America; and in March 1993, the O. K. Harris Gallery in New York featured an exhibit by artist Arson Roje, who executed a series of hyperrealistic, eerily colored paintings of publicity stills and lobby cards from the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon. Nor is this borrowing limited to middlebrow, institutional, or "authentic" arts. Film noir served as a minor reference point for Guy Debord and the situationists in Paris, who entitled one of their most famous manifestations The Naked City. More recently, the moods and images commonly associated with noir have influenced such cult TV shows as The X-Files and Millennium. The CD-ROM industry offers guides to Chandler, as well as interactive narratives such as The Dame Was Loaded (1996), which allows the male viewer to play the role of a private eye. Meanwhile, the World Wide Web is filled with information sites about every variety of pulp fiction and psychological melodrama.

The vaguely subcultural world of American comic books has shown an especially marked interest in retro-noir fantasies. Paradox Press, a special division of DC Comics, publishes "graphic novels" in a noir format, and Frank Miller, whose The Dark Knight Returns helped to fuel the Batman craze of the 1980s and 1990s, has produced a series of Mickey Spillane-inspired strips entitled Sin City. (Miller has probably exerted a strong influence on neo-noir as a wholechiefly because of the way he fuses the black-and-white lighting patterns of the 1940s with the hard-body, exaggeratedly sexual poses in contemporary action movies.) Ironically, Mickey Spillane also inspired Ms. Tree, one of the longest-running private-eye comic books in history, which features a feminist private investigator and single mother named Michael Tree. Indeed, the amazingly durable Spillane, who began his career in the comic trade, has written futuristic versions of his original "Mike Danger" stories for a company called Tekno Comics, and in 1996, these illustrated tales of sex and vengeance were being discussed as a movie from Miramax pictures.