Noir: As American as…

I don’t really know where I am going with this nor where I will end up, but as they say, it’s my party.

The lovely fog of Film Noir has been hanging at the edges of my mind for a while now, for several reasons. First, the wondeful people over at Miramax finally saw fit to release that double-disk set of No Country for Old Men that I’ve always known was coming (the frakking bastards.) Second, the non-sarcastically-wonderful individuals at the Onion’s A.V. Club posted a primer on Classic Crime Fiction. And finally, in the last few weeks I’ve picked up a couple of comics in the new Marvel Noir theme, as well as the final comic in the spectacular 100 Bullets series. Here are my thoughts on Noir, why we love it, the idea of Neo-Noir, and the best of American Crime Film.

In the medium of comics, I am of the opinion that anything other than superhero comics is at least a start. Crime comics have a small but special place in my heart since I am still in the process of writing one, and it’s hard to go wrong with “100 Bullets.” I also got the first issues of “Daredevil Noir”, “Wolverine Noir”, and the full series of “X-Men Noir.” At the moment, I’ve only finished X-Men, but I have to that that I am intrigued. Any book that begins with the death of a major character (spoilers?) scores automatic points with me. I’m also a fan of anything in the “Elseworlds”\Alternate Universe style. But more than anything, it says “Noir” on the cover. That in and of itself would be enough to get my four dollars. The thought that such a thing could even be possible—not just a crime comic, but a noir comic—puts a big old smile on my face. But it also creates questions, as so many things do with me. What is noir? What makes it different than other crime stories?

We like to think of Noir as synonymous with a time period. I believe that this idea comes not just from the films that we know and love—Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, etc–but from the stories and books upon which these films were based. When the A.V. Club posted their Classic Crime Fiction primer, I ran right out and picked up Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and The Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. I read Hammett’s The Thin Man close to a year ago and enjoyed it, but it surprised me a bit to see the list that the A.V. Club posted seemed to be rife with books that had all been turned into films, and many of those classics of the genre. I have realized now, only about 20 pages in, that The Big Lebowski is the Coen brothers’ “adaptation” of The Big Sleep. But all of this doesn’t really say anything about what Noir is, only a vague idea of where it came from.

The name “Film Noir” was given to an era of American film by French reviewers and film enthusiasts. The Americans didn’t even realize they were doing it. The French, you see, had the benefit of perspective. During the occupation of France by the Nazi’s in WWII there was an embargo placed on American film. Once the embargo was lifted, a glut of movies showed up in France, many of them what we would call “B-movies” (films of smaller budgets that were generally produced quickly as filler between “A” releases.) French reviewers and theorists saw in these movies common themes and even a unique visual style, lent in large part by the German film makers of the expressionist school who fled to the US before the war. Thus, the idea of Film Noir has always been more important to filmmakers and theorists than it has been to the general viewing public. And yet, even though film people seem to be the privileged few who are actually aware of Noir, it has a strong foothold in the American consciousness. What is it, though, about Noir that is so uniquely American, despite the French name?

In thinking about this post, I started thinking about what Noir really is. The first thing that comes to mind is the hard-boiled detective, the dame, the crime, and the parade of increasingly eccentric characters and the twists that accompany them. What about Double Indemnity, though? There is still the dame and still some crime, but no detective. What about Blade Runner, which has all the basic elements but takes place in the future? I could go through my entire thought process but I won’t. Suffice it to say, the first model doesn’t fit. As a matter of fact, I don’t want it to fit. Some of my favorite Noir movies are those that take the idea of the genre and drop it into other settings and circumstances.

I deliberately prevented myself from researching this topic because I wanted to come to my own conclusions. So here it is, the Super Special All-Purpose Answer (patent pending) to the question, “What characterizes Film Noir,” is… Tragedy and Truth. These are the two things that all Film Noir seems to have. They are not in equal measure nor are they absolute, but I think they are accurate. First, there seems to be an element of tragedy, in the Greek sense of the word. In those detective stories of old, it seems like the tragedy was always started by a murder, leading the protagonist into a world of tyrants and scandals. This lends itself to a feeling of almost melodrama. I need to pull out my copy of Poetics again to further research the tragedy angle, but I really feel like it’s there, at least in the best cases. Second, there is the search for a truth. Now, it may have been misleading above when I wrote this as “Truth,” but I do not mean the philosophical truth-with-a-capital-T. It’s just a truth, doesn’t really matter what truth, but definitely the relentless, obsessive pursuit of it. This is why the traditional driving character in a Noir is a detective. We like private detectives, I think, because they are unbound by the pomp and procedure, as well as the sometimes negative feelings that accompany the police. Noir being a sub-genre of what we could call “crime”, there should also be a crime involved, but i think even this aspect is flexible, so long as the characters perceive the truth that is being sought as solving a mystery or a crime, the definition still stands.

(It has just now come to mind that under the definition above, the sub-genre that we call “thrillers” could be added. Films like Michael Clayton and the recently released State of Play would fit into my rudimentary classification. I don’t feel like this is an accident. It will take research and another post, but my gut tells me that one could draw a line from the modern thriller to the Film Noir of the past by way of films like Chinatown and the noir of the 70s.)

One more thing on the topic of what Noir is: even though i said that i tried not to do any research, i did look up the definition of Noir so that i knew whether it meant black or just dark. The work translates to black, but i found something else very interesting. Referencing the American Heritage Dictionary, Dictionary.com defines the genre of Noir as “featuring tough, cynical characters and bleak settings.” I like this and i don’t find it inaccurate, but i think of these characteristics as features of a time or set of Noir films, not as a template for future creation.

I wanted to take a film class on Noir before I left college, but I just couldn’t fit it into my schedule (I think I was maxed on the film classes I could take, anyway.) Keep in mind that these are no one’s opinions but my own. However, since I myself became aware of the thing, I have felt of myself as a student of it. Here I wanted to give a quick rundown of my favorite Noir movies and why I love them. First, there is Brick. I was embroiled in the culture of the film school when I became aware of this film, and around that time I I made a short (horrible) film on the subject of Noir and its traditional visual cues–the gun, the fedora, the ashtray on the desk– for my Production 1 class. This was a direct result of listening to Rian Johnson, writer/director, talking about the fact that Brick is really just a Noir dropped into a high school, and how the idea of Noir can hold up even without all of those traditional visual cues. From a screenwriting perspective, I find the film just brilliant in its structure and of course, the dialog: the later especially after watching Miller’s Crossing.

Second is Blade Runner. I still say that this is one of the greatest adaptations in the history of film (more on this in another post.) The film makers were able to see and then to distill the Noir detective story from the original book by Phillip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and make a film that follows the spirit of the book, but has a life of its own.

And third, also last for this post even though the list could go on and on, The Big Lebowski. As I said before, I now realize that this is a loose adaptation of The Big Sleep, but what I loved first about the film is layer after layer of its own self-awareness. The Big Lebowski is aware that it’s an out-of-place Noir story; it’s aware that it’s a Coen brothers film; it’s even aware of its own ridiculousness. But that is what makes the Coen brothers the masters of Contemporary American Noir. They have made a career out of dropping the very basic elements of film noir into unorthodox settings. Whether it’s West Texas; Fargo, North Dakota; or Los Angeles it seems that their entire career has been one long experiment in stretching the limits of what the genre can take, what can be said with it, and what it really means.

i think they finally reached the summit of this mountainous goal with No Country For Old Men. Here, we see all of the traditional trappings of Noir stripped away: there are no fedoras or dames, no detectives or cigar chomping crime bosses. Only a man–a kind of Everyman, for sure, but still unique and interesting enough to be engaging–a bag of money, a Texas sheriff, and a psychopath. Here again is the experiment, as if to say, “Let’s take it all away this time and see if there is still something there.” And of course, there is. There is a self-awareness here also, as I would argue in the film’s somewhat controversial ending, not that in that the film knows that it belongs in the subgenre of Noir, but that it knows it is Noir and stands apart. The question of whose search for truth the movie depicts is one I will leave alone. Draw your own conclusions, I will not argue. i will, however, challenge anyone who tries to tell me that the film is not among the finest that American Noir has to offer.

To finish, I want to talk about a term that I’ve heard tossed around by film snobs and nerds alike: Neo-Noir. I’m not going to get all indignant and say that i get irrationally angry when people use Neo-Noir (not nearly as angry as i get when people talk about Hollywood like something other than a big hunk of land in California) but i do think it is an inaccurate term. The idea of something being “Neo” anything means–to me at least–that there was an old, and now there is a new. The first either died or fell out of favor, and now we have a revival. I don’t think this is the case. Americans have been making these kinds of films since the 20s and 30s, and i don’t believe that we ever stopped. Maybe there has been a revival in recent years, but the line can be drawn directly from Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown and the films of Scorsese to Blade Runner to Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing to Brick to No Country For Old Men. If there is a division in these films, it would be the division that comes from own filmic self-consciousness. Once we were made aware by the men of France who so loved American Film that we really had something special on our hands, the game seemed to change. Since then we have been trying to make Noir films, not merely just allowing them to happen. Right or wrong, I am of those who are keenly aware of the existence of these films in all their beauty and terror, and I am also of those who love them.

I don’t know if I ended up where you thought I would, but here we are. Thank you for listening.