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

As R. Barton Palmer observes, this conclusion is reasonably complex in its treatment of sex and gender and "very much in the tradition of Hitchcock's Vertigo." But the comparison with Hitchcock (which Verhoeven deliberately encourages) also serves to remind us of important differences: Basic Instinct offers its audience a distinctly latter-day form of surrealism, without the equivalent risk of censorship, without the swooning cult of romantic love, and virtually without the Freudian unconscious.

Such films come dangerously close to the kind of cultural recycling and transformation described in a well-known passage from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990), in which the daughter of a 1960s left-wing filmmaker (lately turned FBI agent) visits the newly constructed "Noir Center" shopping mall in lower Hollywood. Designed to resemble the Bradbury Building, the mall contains, among other things, a mineral-water boutique called ' 'Bubble Indemnity" and a perfume store called "The Mall Tease Flacon." To the young woman, it seems as if yuppification has run to "a pitch so desperate" that she can only hope the whole process is ''reaching the end of its cycle." She grows particularly angry because of what film noir represents in her own historical memory:

She happened to like those old weird-necktie movies in black and white, her grandfolks had worked on some of them, and she personally resented this increasingly dumb attempt to cash in on the pseudoromantic mystique of those particular olden days in this town, having heard enough stories . . . to know better than most how corrupted everything had really been from top to bottom, as if the town had been a toxic dump for everything those handsome pictures had left out. 8

Pynchon is correct when he says that the "weird-necktie" style died sometime in the late 1950s, concurrent with the passing of the old studio pictures, only to be replaced by a variety of ahistorical, slickly commodified, and often "dumb" imitations. Except on television and in direct-to-video formats, the highly rationalized genre system gave way to a kind of shopping-mall cinema made up of superproductions for the masses and boutique pictures for specialized audiences. Most of the big pictures in the neo-noir category have been filled with comic-strip villains, loud explosions, and dialogue that consists mainly of "Fuck you" and "No, fuck you!" For their own part, the boutique movies are often less about characterization and social milieu than about seductive production designs, flamboyant camera effects, and spectacular sexual violence. One example is Peter Medak's Romeo Is Bleeding (1993), which features Lena Olin as the sexiest one-armed dominatrix in the history of cinema, but which never rises above the level of a clever pastiche. A slightly more effective case in point is Larry and Andy Wachowski's Bound (1996), which takes its visual cues from Frank Miller's artfully self-conscious Sin City comic books. (Cinematographer Frank Pope creates a starkly graphic palette of black, white, and gray for this film, adding occasional touches of red for blood and green for money.) On the surface, Bound is sexually unorthodox, inviting us to fully identify with a lesbian couple who are seeking revenge on a distinctly unpleasant male; what is really at stake, however, is a fairly conventional male pleasure of watching two beautiful actresses as loverssomething that Bound does far better than the big-studio remake of Diabolique in the same year.

But the current situation may not be quite so dumb as Pynchon suggests. 9The category of noir has a long and complex history, and it provides images, moods, and stylistic techniques that can be adapted and transformed by good, bad, and indifferent pictures from every level of the marketplace. Speaking purely of the American commercial cinema, it would be difficult to find a better treatment of the doppelganger theme than David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988), a more disturbing depiction of criminal violence than Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990), or a more disconcerting presentation of a psychopath than Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991). These pictures may be subject to criticism on aesthetic or political grounds, but so are the classic films noirs.

Whatever we might say about the 1940s and 1950s, the better contemporary thrillers seldom leave out the "toxic dump" of social or moral corruption; indeed, some element of anger, fear, cynicism, pessimism, or nostalgie de la boue seems necessary to the form. Notice also that film noir has always been subject to appropriation by a variety of constituencies; in the past few decades, it has affected high-end productions such as Batman, independent pictures such as John Dahl's Kill Me Again (1989), and imports such as Bill Bennett's Kiss or Kill (1997)the last of which represents a particularly effective use of old formulas. Noir has also been a favored subject of vanguard or deconstructivist filmmakers. Sally Potter's Thriller (1979) and Manuel DeLanda's Raw Nerves: A Lacanian Thriller (1980) are indebted to classic models, as are a number of "crossover" projects, including David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Hal Hartley's Simple Men (1992), and Atom Egoyan's Exotica (1994).

The best contemporary films noirs seem to me to come from the middle range of the industry, represented by the last few pictures I have mentioned, where modest production values and a relative lack of hype allow directors to explore art-cinema values within the context of familiar narratives. In the United States, the somewhat incestuous relationship between the Sundance Film Festival, The New York Times, and distributors like Miramax and Fine Line has encouraged movies of this type. Each fall and winter, independently produced, noirlike pictures are shown at Sundance, written about in the Sunday Times, and distributed to big cities, where they usually share the same venues with English or Australian imports, Masterpiece Theater-style adaptations, and the few subtitled offerings that manage to find exhibitors. Such films are roughly analogous to the "hybrid" thrillers of the 1950s, and they generate reasonable profits because they fill at least two niches in the market: they appeal to a sophisticated audience, but at the same time they serve as general entertainment in the video stores.

There are so many of these hybridized films that I cannot list them all here. As a way of concluding my description of the noir mediascape, let me offer a brief discussion of three recent examples, which might be termed "independent" or "art-film" noir. In a sense, the three have little in common, but that fact should not trouble us. The idea of noir, after all, can accommodate many different things.

Example 1: The Grammercy Pictures-Universal release of Steven Soderbergh's Underneath (1995) is a remake of Robert Siodmak and Mark Hellinger's more elaborately produced Criss Cross (1949). While he was working on this film, Soderbergh explained to a reporter from The New York Times that "the ideas behind noir . . . are interesting to me, not pastiche or homage." He had no special desire to imitate Siodmak, he said, nor to prove "my shadow's longer than yours"(6 February 1994). Perhaps for that reason, The Underneath is most effective at the points where it diverges from the earlier film. Soderbergh, who is the uncredited author of the screenplay, changes the locale from Los Angeles to present-day Austin, Texas, thereby replacing the 1940s urban jungle with a slightly eerie background of suburban houses and nondescript streets. He also gives more emphasis to the working-class characters' domestic relationships and marginal jobs than to the suspense plot, which involves a botched armored-car robbery. Most strikingly, he transforms the drifter-protagonist (Peter (Gallagher) from a romantically obsessed and rather stolid type (originally played by Burt Lancaster) into a weak-willed homme fatale.