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

Whatever their limitations, the films I have described are more true to their initial premises than Curtis Hanson's slickly directed adaptation of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential (1997)a big-budget, highly publicized, and critically overrated feature that begins in darkly satiric fashion and then segues into crowd-pleasing melodrama. The three policemen who function as antiheroes in this picturea "celebrity crime-stopper" who moonlights as advisor for a TV show called Badge of Honor, a brooding roughneck who beats up suspects, and a gung-ho idealist who cleverly manages his careerare eventually transformed into righteous avengers, and are much more sympathetic than the equivalent characters in Ellroy's novel. In the concluding scenes, the good guys dangle the bad guys out of office buildings or mow them down with shotguns, and vigilante justice triumphs over official corruption. Hanson and co-scriptwriter Brian Hegeland even devise a happy ending in which the battle-scarred roughneck drives off into the sunset with his true love, an ex-prostitute with a heart of gold.

Unlike Chinatown, which it vaguely resembles, L.A. Confidential uses the past superficially and hypocritically. On the one hand, it attacks Hollywood of the 1950s, making easy jokes about the "reality" behind old-style show business; on the other hand, it exploits every convention of the dream factory, turning history into a fashion show and allowing good to triumph over evil. The film's primary appeal seems to be its stylish "look," and this may explain why, upon its release, the tributary media of the consumer economymagazines, trade bookstores, radio shows, and CD recordingswere flooded with reminiscences of noir, all of them designed to profit from a trend. Even so, L.A. Confidential was only a modest commercial success. The man in charge of marketing the picture for Warner Brothers had a concise way of explaining why it never became a box-office bonanza: ''The bulk of the audience who enjoys film noir are directors, film students, critics and the most ardent, generally upscale film enthusiast" (quoted by David Ansen, Newsweek, 27 October 1997). Another, equally good explanation is that L.A. Confidential is merely nostalgia, lacking the complex historical relevance that Roman Polanski and Robert Towne were able to achieve in the pre-blockbuster years at the end of the Vietnam War.

Questions of value aside, both L.A. Confidential and the intermediate-budget films noirs are deeply symptomatic of today's cinema. Art pictures like the ones I have described, some better and some worse, will continue to appear on theater screens, as will the noirish blockbusters and the hardboiled action movies. If this diverse mixture of things does not exactly constitute a genre, it nevertheless coheres around a taste and a set of market strategies that are ongoing and relevant. It might help if I could end my survey of the late-twentieth-century mediascape with a spectacular insight into why such tastes are importanta Rosebud in the heart of the furnace, as it were, followed by a slow tilt upward to reveal the smoke of corruption in the sky. But the truth is, the history of noir is not over, and it cannot be given a single explanation. No doubt movies of the noir type have always appealed stronglybut not exclusivelyto middle-class white males who project themselves into stories about loners, losers, outlaws, and flawed idealists at the margins of society.

The different manifestations of noir, however, can never be completely subsumed under a single demographic group or psychological theory.

Given the current situation, debates over whether specific films are "truly" noir, or over the problem of what makes up a film genre, have become tiresome. There is, in fact, no transcendent reason why we should have a noir category at all. Whenever we list any movie under the noir rubric, we do little more than invoke a network of ideas as a makeshift organizing principle, in place of an author, a studio, a time period, or a national cinema. By such means, we can discuss an otherwise miscellaneous string of pictures, establishing similarities and differences among them. As I argue throughout this book, every category in criticism or in the film industry works in this fashion, usually in support of the critic's or the culture's particular obsessions. If we abandoned the word noir, we would need to find another, no less problematic, means of organizing what we see.

But I would also argue that even if noir is only a discursive construction, it has remarkable flexibility, range, and mythic force, maintaining our relation to something like an international genre. In America, the musical hardly survives except in animated cartoons, and the last important western was Clint Eastwood's distinctly noirlike Unforgiven in 1992. (Perhaps significantly, the urban-centered romantic comedy remains a popular form and sometimes functions like the flip side of noir.) All the while, the themes of the old thrillersone-way streets and dead ends, mad love and bad love, double crosses and paranoid conspiracies, discontents in the nuclear family and perverse violence in every corner of the societyare as topical as ever and still productive of good films. We may feel a special melancholy when we view the seductive black-and-white films of the 1940s; such films, however, contribute to a recurring pattern of both modernity and postmodernity. The dark past keeps returning. It will do so long after this commentary has ended and the theatrical motion picture has evolved into some other medium.

1. J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 3.

1. Film noir is described as a genre in, among others, Robin Buss, French Film Noir (London: Marion Boyars, 1994); Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968); Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1981); and Jon Tuska, Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984). It is a "series" in Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, Panorama du film noir américan, 194l1953 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1955); a "movement," "period," "tone,'' and "mood" in Paul Schrader, "Notes on Film Noir ," in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 5364; a "motif" and "tone" in Raymond Durgnat, "Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir," in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 3752; a "visual style" in Janey Place and Lowell Peterson, "Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir, " in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 6576; a set of "patterns of non-conformity" in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema (New York: Columbia, 1985), 7477; a "canon" in J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1989); a "phenomenon" in Frank Krutnick, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991); and a "transgeneric phenomenon" in R. Barton Palmer, Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The

American Film Noir (New York: Twayne, 1994). For an argument similar to Palmer's, see John Belton, "Film Noir's Knights of the Road," Bright Lights Film Journal 12 (spring 1994): 515.

2. The dates 19411958 seem to have been first proposed by Schrader, who used The Maltese Falcon and Touch of Evil to mark the beginning and end of the noir period. Schrader's position is accepted by Place and Peterson, "Some Visual Motifs," and by a few writers in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: BFI, 1980). Several other books on film noir implicitly endorse this periodization, even when they do not set fixed dates; see, for example, Telotte, Voices in the Dark, and Krutnick, In a Lonely Street. Most recent discussions treat film noir as a transgeneric form that begins somewhere in the late thirties or early forties and continues to the present day; see Palmer, Hollywood's Dark Cinema, and many of the essayists in Joan Copjec, ed., Shades of Noir (London: Verso, 1993). There are, however, skeptical voices. In the Copjec volume, for example, see Marc Vernet, "Film Noir on the Edge of Doom," 131, an essay that questions the usual historical and stylistic assumptions.