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

The only classical films noirs that seem relatively immune from mass-camp readings are pictures such as The Asphalt Jungle, which take place largely outside the studio, in a virtually all-male milieu, and convey an astringent, somewhat ironic attitude toward heterosexual romancehence a more serious cult following can develop around a postmodern caper movie like Reservoir Dogs. It should be noted, however, that even the most condescending forms of mass camp involve affection for the things they mock. Contemporary audiences who laugh at Mildred Pierce or Double Indemnity remain at least partly under the spell of the films. The naïveté of these viewers lies not so much in their amused attitude, but in their implicit assumption that contemporary pictures based on similar themes are somehow more realistic, less burdened by artifice or sentimentality.

In point of fact, most examples of neo-noir are less artistically sophisticated and politically interesting than the films they emulate. Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat treats sex in a manner appropriate to the post-Code era, employing naturalistic acting and a somewhat elliptical cutting style; even so, its narrative structure is conventional, its characters familiar, and its Florida location merely decorative next to Double Indemnity's Los Angeles. In comparison, a picture like David Mamet's House of Games (1987) might seem different. An oneiric, sinister, and sometimes radically ambiguous movie, House of Games is filled with oddly lobotomized performances and artfully repetitious dialogue that echoes Ernest Hemingway without trying to copy him ("I'm a writer. I'm a sort of writer." "Oh, so you're a writer. What do you write when you write?"). It nevertheless provides a classically proportioned, "three-act'' drama with a strong sense of closure, and most of its themes and stylistic effects are taken straight from Hitchcock. The story centers on an arctic, upper-class female who suffers from more neurotic compulsions than Marnie; the editing combines Kuleshovian effects and omniscient, "bird's-eye" perspectives; and the entire staging is designed to create an expressionist atmosphere of eroticized suspense and impending violence. No doubt House of Games is a more fastidious and ostentatiously experimental picture than anything by Brian DePalma, but in the last analysis it is vulgarly Freudian, lacking the passion that makes a director like Hitchcock something other than a superbly skilled, misogynistic technician.

The same adaptation of traditional formulas, with a slightly revisionist twist, can be seen in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992), the two most commercially successful films noirs ever made. Interestingly, the two pictures have a good deal in common: both are directed by Europeans; both star the actor-producer Michael Douglas, who has a talent for portraying angry white males (he even makes the ruthless tycoon Gordon Gekko in Wall Street seem vaguely sympathetic); and both, despite their patriarchal implications, feature stunning performances by women. Alex, the psychotic one-night stand in Fatal Attraction, and Catharine, the Sadeian woman in Basic Instinct, are among the most frightening femmes fatales in the history of movieschiefly because they are viewed without the constraints of old-fashioned censorship and without the mollifying romanticism of Hollywood in the 1940s. Neither film, however, represents an advance over earlier models in terms of style or sexual politics.

Glenn Close has said that she regards Fatal Attraction as a film noir, especially in its original version, which ends with Alex's suicide. 6Unfortunately, because of negative reactions from preview audiences, Paramount and director Adrian Lyne reshot the grim conclusion, turning Alex from a vulnerable character into a Psycho-style killer, and then restoring Douglas's family to a secure if chastened happiness. (Paramount and Billy Wilder also softened the ending of Double Indemnity, but the more superficial and commercially adroit Lyne had certain advantages over Wilder: after the theatrical release, his "director's cut" was marketed to video stores in laserdisk and VHS formats, adding to the studio's revenue.) The first version of Fatal Attraction is in fact an unsettling study of a disturbed woman who at first seems menacing but eventually becomes a scapegoat for the bourgeois family. The film cleverly invites its audience to identify with Michael Douglas, and then shifts the point of view and emotional emphasis toward Close, who gives Alex a plausibility and psychological complexity beyond anything imagined in the script. And yet, despite these virtues, and despite considerable narrative tension and technical sheen, the director's cut of Fatal Attraction is in many ways a less ironic and morally ambiguous treatment of infidelity than André de Toth's modestly budgeted Pitfall (1948), a classic noir grounded in a staunchly conservative view of the nuclear family. Pitfall relentlessly supports conventional morality, causing its restless protagonist (Dick Powell) to pay for the rest of his life because of a single, twenty-four-hour indiscretion. At the same time, it uses the married man's involvement with another woman to reveal tensions between social classes, and it portrays the ostensible femme fatale (Lizabeth Scott) in quite sympathetic terms. Perhaps more significantly, it makes suburban America seem like an iron cage for both the wife and the husband.

Basic Instinct was also marketed in two versions, but the video release was designed merely to give the audience an extra forty-two seconds of nude sex. Few mainstream Hollywood films have so deliberately flaunted their aspirations to soft-core pornography, and few have provided a clearer instance of how the masculine gaze generates fantasies of desire and castration. Basic Instinct is filled with explicit, foregrounded instances of what Laura Mulvey calls "sadistic voyeurism" and "fetishistic scopophilia"most obviously in the early scene in which the sexy young Catharine Trammell (Sharon Stone) sits on a raised, spotlit platform and allows a group of male detectives (representing the point of view of the audience) to look up her dress. Predictably, this scene initiates a narrative that is both Hitchcockian and Sternbergian, oscillating between the protagonist's need to investigate and punish the woman and his equally important need to adore her and be destroyed. (Director Paul Verhoeven previously explored similar themes in The Fourth Man, a 1984 film noir made in Holland, in which a brief moment of male frontal nudity reveals the need to protect the phallus in both its real and symbolic senses.)

Throughout, Basic Instinct wears its noirlike sexual qualities on its sleeve, mixing psychological drama with pure spectacle. Like a perverse musical, it uses a deadly love affair between a rumpled, chain-smoking detective and a wealthy, provocative murderess to motivate a series of sadomasochistic "numbers" and several theatricalized displays of decadence. Also like a musical, it celebrates the union of a male and female who come from different worldsa policeman and a criminal who are trying to achieve the "fuck of the century." Although the policeman is a fairly conventional antihero, the criminal is a decidedly postfemme fatale, resembling a cross between Sade's Julliette and Madonna. Catharine Trammell is not only a great beauty but also a hedonist, an intellectual, a bisexual, and a serial killer who openly mocks Freudian attempts to explain her behavior. She is, moreover, a pure machine-woman in the tradition of Phyllis Dietrichson, her evil redeemed only by Stone's witty performance and by the film's refusal to condemn her transgressions. At the end, she and the detective (who shares her taste for violence) are suspended in a moment of infinite erotic deferral, with an ice pick hidden under the bed.