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

Nowadays, both Kiss Me Deadly and Gun Crazy sometimes provoke the same unwanted laughter that greeted Murder, My Sweet in 1953. Even so, Borde and Chaumeton's achievement in discussing these and other films is remarkable. Without complete access to American culture, they identify scores of interesting movies that might have been forgotten, and they create an entire category that functions normatively. Here as in many later writings, noir is not merely a descriptive term, but a name for a critical tendency within the popular cinemaan antigenre that reveals the dark side of savage capitalism. For Borde and Chaumeton, the essence of noirness lies in a feeling of discontinuity, an intermingling of social realism and oneiricism, an anarcho-leftist critique of bourgeois ideology, and an eroticized treatment of violence. Above all, noir produces a psychological and moral disorientation, an inversion of capitalist and puritan values, as if it were pushing the American system toward revolutionary destruction. We might debate about whether such qualities are in fact essential to the Hollywood thriller (if any quality can be essential), but there is no question that they are fundamental to surrealist art.

Via the Panorama and similar writings, surrealism might be said to have provided an organizing metaphor and an aesthetic rationale for the film noir. Perhaps it also fostered the tendency of later critics to read individual pictures slightly against the grain, emphasizing tone or mood rather than narrative closurea technique frequently used to bestow cult value on mass art. But as I have already indicated, French discussion of noir was also affected by existentialist literature and philosophy, which placed emphasis on different matters. Existentialism was despairingly humanist rather than perversely anarchic; thus if the surrealists saw the postwar American thriller as a theater of cruelty, the existentialists saw it as a protoabsurdist novel. For critics who were influenced by existentialism, film noir was attractive because it depicted a world of obsessive return, dark corners, or huis-clos. It often employed settings like the foggy

seaside diner on the road between San Francisco and Los Angeles in Fallen Angel, where Dana Andrews gets off a bus and seems unable to leave. ("I'm waiting for something to happen," he tells Alice Fay. "Nothing's going to happen," she responds.) Or it was like the dark highway in Detour, where Tom Neal keeps thumbing a ride, trying to avoid his brutal destiny.

In the years before and after the war, when the French themselves were entrapped by history, several of the most important themes of existential philosophy were elaborated through readings of Dashiell Hammett, Chandler, and James M. Cain, who were often bracketed with Wright, Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Faulkner. The French actually "discovered" some of these novelists, just as they later discovered the Hollywood auteurs. (In 1946, even Faulkner was a relatively neglected figure in the United States, where much of his income came from movies like The Big Sleep and from a story he had published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre described him as a "god.") The interest of Parisian intellectuals in a certain kind of American literature became so intense that the British author Rebecca West teased Cain, "You were a fool not to be born a Frenchman. The highbrows would have put you in with Gide and Mauriac if you had taken this simple precaution."

There was truth in West's observation. The French liked their Americans exotic, violent, and romantic. 30They wrote a great deal about southern gothicism and tough-guy modernism, and they usually ignored anything that did not offer what André Gide called "a foretaste of Hell." Gide himself declared that Hammett's Red Harvest was "the last word in atrocity, cynicism, and horror"; André Malraux described Faulkner's Sanctuary as "the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the thriller"; and Albert Camus confessed that he had been inspired to write The Stranger after reading Cain's Postman Always Rings Twice.

This passion for literary toughness has an interesting relation to the social and political climate after the war. In the United States, the postwar decade was the period of Korea, the red scare, and the return to a consumer economy; in France, it was the period of colonial rebellion and parliamentary confusion leading up to the Charles de Gaulle government. Authors in both countries who had once been Marxist, such as John Dos Passos and André Malraux, completely reversed themselves; others, such as Dashiell Hammett, were imprisoned or blacklisted. The Western Left had been in disarray since the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the situation in France was complicated by the fact that the country had recently emerged from what the French themselves described as les années noiresa time of occupation, torture, compromise, and collaboration. Faced with a choice between capitalism and Stalinism, many French artists tried to achieve "freedom" through individualized styles of resistance. For them, prewar American novels offered a modelespecially novels depicting a violent, corrupt world in which ambiguous personal action is the only redemptive gesture. In Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (1947), Sartre wrote, "As for the Americans, it was not their cruelty or pessimism which moved us. We recognized in them men who had been swamped, lost in too large a continent, as we were in history, and who tried, without traditions, with the means available, to render their stupor and forlornness in the midst of 32incomprehensible events."

That same year, Sartre claimed that modern life had become "fantastic," made up of a "labyrinth of hallways, doors, and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that 33dot routes and signify nothing." Recalling the fear of Nazi torture recently experienced by French citizens, he advocated a literature of "extreme situations" that would be narrated ambiguously, without "all-knowing witnesses'' (15455). The novel, he insisted, must shift from "Newtonian mechanics to generalized relativity"; it should be peopled with "minds that [are] half lucid and half overcast, some of which we might consider with more sympathy than others, but none of which [should] have a privileged point of view" (155).

Sartre was particularly impressed by Faulkner's experiments with multiple-perspective narration in The Sound and the Fury (1929), but he also praised the way Americans used a free-indirect style. In 1938, he had argued that John Dos Passos was the greatest contemporary novelist; as proof, he quoted a passage from USA describing a fistfight in a Paris café: "Joe laid out a couple of frogs and was backing off towards the door, when he saw in the mirror that a big guy in a blouse was bringing down a bottle on his head with both hands. He tried to swing around but he didn't have time. The bottle crashed his skull and he was out." Here was pure existential consciousness, divested of authorial comment, observing itself in a mirror and registering the action like a camera-obscura, as if René Descartes and Henri-Louis Bergson were the "couple of frogs" laid out on the cafe floor. Here, too, though Satire did not say so, was the familiar voice of American pulp fiction. Sartre believed that this voice amounted to "a technical revolution in the art of telling a story," and for over a decade he and other French novelists tried to emulate its effects, aiming for what Roland Barthes later described as a zero-degree style. 34

Unlike the surrealists, who made the movies essential to their project,

the existentialists were literary and rather dubious about Hollywood. Nevertheless, given the intellectual fashion Sartre helped to establish, it is not surprising that many of the younger French cinéastes embraced American thrillers with special fervor. These pictures were often based on the novels of respected authors; they were sometimes narrated from multiple points of view; and they offered a labyrinthine, enclosed mise-en-scène peopled with alienated characters. Thus in 1955 Eric Rohmer observed, "Our immediate predilection tends to be for faces marked with the brand of vice and the neon lights of bars rather than the ones which glow with wholesome sentiments and prairie air." 35