More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

moral vision. For various social and psychological reasons, Bickle is a seething cauldron of inarticulate rage; even so, his noirlike offscreen narration is highly poetic, and Robert DeNiro's introspective, ascetic performance makes him seem like a Bressonian saint. This irony is reinforced by the film's extraordinarily bloody climax, because the characters who receive Bickle's 'protection' and chaste lovea child prostitute and a WASP princess who works in a political campaignare little more than projections of his disturbed sexuality.

^{The psychotic veteran in Taxi Driver (1976). (Museum of Modern Art Stills Archive.)}

On one level, Taxi Driver can be understood as what Robert Ray calls a 'left cycle' response to the popular success of Dirty Harry (1971), Billy Jack (1971), and Death Wish (1974)all of which were melodramatic, right- wing movies about urban vigilantes, clearly inspired by the political turbulence of the Vietnam years. At another level, however, as both Ray and Robin Wood observe, the film is ideologically contradictory or incoherent. The Calvinist Schrader and the Catholic Scorsese have created a deeply conservative picture about original sin and the absolute evil of modernity. Their treatment of sex, for example, has relatively little in common with French surrealism and a good deal in common with such modernist literary works as T. S. Eliot's Waste Land and Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, which I discuss in the next chapter. Like most of the high modernists (as distinct from the political avant-garde), they use images of the nocturnal city to suggest a Dostoyevskian nightmare of the soul. Also like the modernists, they store up what Eliot called 'fragments' of artistic tradition to stave off spiritual despair. Hence Taxi Driver is laden with new-wave allusions to other movies or directors, including not only thrillers of the 1940s (strongly evoked in the music score, which was Bernard Herrmann's last), but also Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, Ford's Searchers, and Godard's Two or Three Things I Know about Her.

^{A postmodern image of film noir.}

Seen in retrospect, Taxi Driver belongs in company with several major Hollywood productions of the decadeincluding The Long Goodbye (1973), Chinatown (1974), and Body Heat (1981)which were made with a nostalgic idea of film noir in mind. However, despite its allusiveness and almost scholarly self-awareness, it is neither a period movie nor a pastiche. Instead, chiefly because of Scorsese, it transforms what Schrader regards as the definitive motifs of film noir into a kind of neoexpressionism that is ideally suited to color and wide screens. Perhaps more important, together with Schrader's own essay, it helps to encourage the notion that film noir is essentially apolitical, characterized by pessimism and existential anguish. ⁴⁹

^{Noir as fashion.}

In effect, film noir did not become a true Hollywood genre until the Vietnam years, when productions such as Taxi Driver appeared with some regularity. Whether classic noir ever existed, by 1974 a great many people believed in it, and American movie critics were regularly exploring its implications.⁵⁰ Some of the best directors of thrillers from the 1950s returned to such films and adapted them to new styles of productionsee, for example, Don Siegel's Charley Varrick (1973) and Robert Aldrich's Hustle (1975). At this point, noir had fully entered the English language, and it formed a rich discursive category that the entertainment industry could expand and adapt in countless ways.

Any proper history of noir in America therefore needs to address or at least acknowledge many things besides Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950samong them, the vast changes in the economics and censorship of movies since the end of World War II; the 'New Hollywood' of the 1970s; the rise of academic film theory; and the increasing dissolution of boundaries between high, vernacular, and commercial art. Today, the 'original' films noirs still circulate, and the literary forms with which they are associated still flourish. Noir in the late twentieth century spreads across virtually every national boundary and every form of communication, including museum retrospectives, college courses, parodies, re-makes, summertime blockbusters, mass-market paperbacks, experimental literature and painting, made-for-TV films (as we shall see, there is a significant B-movie industry known in the trade as ''cable noir'), and soft-core 'erotic thrillers' that go directly to video stores.

Why has noir become so important? The answer is beyond the scope of a chapter, but it seems obvious that the idea has been useful to the movie industry, providing artistic cachet and spectacular opportunities for both the Hollywood auteurs of the 1970s and the sex-and-violence specialists of the 1980s. The more interesting question is whether a category developed by critics to influence what Borde and Chaumeton called 'the occidental and American public of the 1950s' can function in the same way for us. If we could ask the original French commentators what American film noir represented, they might agree that it was a kind of modernism in the popular cinema: it used unorthodox narration; it resisted sentiment and censorship; it reveled in the 'social fantastic'; it demonstrated the ambiguity of human motives; and it made commodity culture seem like a wasteland. Later European art directors (including not only Godard and Truffaut but also Alain Resnais, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Fassbinder) saw noir as a dying form that could be transmogrified; it could retain its psychological and social edge, but it could also be treated at a distance, in the interests of a critical and selfreflexive analysis of contemporary life.

Today, when the media are pervasive and the counterculture hardly exists, film noir represents something far more complicated. Good and bad examples are created in every mode of production, but Hollywood usually reconstructs its old pictures, borrowing the allusive techniques of 1960s art films to make audiences feel sophisticated. ⁵¹ This strategy also extends beyond Hollywood, as two examples illustrate. First is the cover of a presskit for A Dama do Cine Shanghai (The lady from the Shanghai cinema, 1987) by Brazilian director Guilherme de Almeida Prado, in which the star image of Rita Hayworth is used in a nostalgic, somewhat campy way to suggest a movie about movies (figure 5). Second is a page from the fashion section of the New York Times Magazine of May 23, 1993, showing a model dressed in a 'film noir' (figure 6). The caption tells us, 'Something filmy, see-through and black is this summer's No. 1 sensation. It will be seen on the street, the beach, the ballroom and maybe even the board room.'

Obviously, a concept that was generated ex post facto has become part of a worldwide mass memory; a dream image of bygone glamour, it represses as much history as it recalls, usually in the service of cinephilia and commodification. Not every recent instance of film noir (even Prado's work) can be explained in this way. Nevertheless, as Fredric Jameson and others have argued, the term plays a central role in the vocabulary of ludic, commercialized postmodernism. Consequently, depending on how it is used, it can describe a dead period, a nostalgia for something that never quite existed, or perhaps even a vital tradition. One thing is clear: the last film noir is no easier to name than the first. A fully historicized account of the category needs to range across the twentieth-century imagination, engaging in an unusually comprehensive analysis.

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Modernism and Blood Melodrama: Three Case Studies