More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

ruthlessly cutting excess verbiage and euphemisms. ⁶ The time was ripe for movements such as the German Neue Sachlichkeit, for the iconoclastic criticism of H. L. Mencken, and for tough- guy stylists such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Ernest Hemingway.

But if the old sensibility was characterized as feminine, so were the more threatening aspects of the modern societyat least in the hands of many male artists. As Andreas Huyssen points out in After the Great Divide (1986), one important characteristic of high modernism was its growing hostility toward mass culture, which it often personified in the form of a woman. (Here it should be noted that the modernists did not dislike popular art; what they increasingly criticized was a commodified, mass-produced, supposedly 'feminine' culture that took the form of slick-paper magazines, Books-of-the-Month, and big-budget productions from Broadway and Hollywood.) At this level, the masochistic eroticism of the aesthetes and decadents at the end of the nineteenth century sometimes joined forces with an almost sexual ambivalence toward industrial progress, which was associated with erotic females who threaten men. Consider Franz Kafka's Trial, in which a nightmare bureaucracy is connected with lascivious and enigmatic women; consider also the German art cinema of the 1920s, especially Metropolis and Pandora's Box, in which a beautiful robot and a sexy flapper evoke fears of creeping Americanization. In English literature, a loosely related example is T. S. Eliot's Waste Landone of the most influential poems of the early twentieth century, in which a free-floating male sexual anxiety blends with dystopian horror.

The themes I have been discussing tended to converge on representations of the Dark City, a literary topos inherited from the nineteenth century, which became more significant than ever. William Blake's London had been the blighted, 'mind-forged' creation of industrial rationality; Baudelaire's Paris had been the perversely seductive playground of a flaneur; oppressive and pleasurable, alienating and free, the Dark City possessed many contradictory meanings, all of which were carried over into the modernist era. In the twentieth century, however, the streets at night were transformed into the privileged mise-en-scene of the masculine unconscious (most notably in the Nighttown episode of Ulysses, in which a notorious harlot turns men into swine). For some modernist artists, the nocturnal city also began to resemble an American-style metropolisa spreading empire of mechanization and kitsch that endangered the urbanity of old Europe.

A great deal more could be said about high modernism, but these observations should indicate the degree to which early examples of the so-called film noir tend to reproduce themes and formal devices associated with landmarks of early-twentieth-century art. Like modernism, Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s are characterized by urban landscapes, subjective narration, nonlinear plots, hard-boiled poetry, and misogynistic eroticism; also like modernism, they are somewhat 'anti-American,' or at least ambivalent about modernity and progress. By the same token, critical discourse on these films usually consists of little more than a restatement of familiar modernist themes.

The affinity between noir and modernism is hardly surprising. In the decades between the two world wars, modernist art increasingly influenced melodramatic literature and movies, if only because most writers and artists with serious aspirations now worked for the culture industry. When this influence reached a saturation point in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it inevitably made traditional formulas (especially the crime film) seem more 'artful': narratives and camera angles were organized along more complex and subjective lines; characters were depicted in shades of gray or in psychoanalytic terms; urban women became increasingly eroticized and dangerous; endings seemed less unproblematically happy; and violence appeared more pathological.

The qualified transformation of thrillers was aided by Hollywood's appropriation of talent and ideas from Europe, where intellectuals had more power than in the United States, and where a less rationalized, more elite media culture produced the Weimar silent film, the French film noir, and the Gaumont-British pictures of Alfred Hitchcock. The European art cinema was unable to compete with Hollywood on its own ground, but it strongly influenced many American directors and genres. The Weimar Germans (led by Fritz Lang) specialized in gothic horror, criminal psychology, and sinister conspiracies; the French (including Rene Clair, Marcel Carne, Georges Auric, and Jacques Prevert) produced realist pictures about working-class crime; Hitchcock (assisted by such figures as Michael Balcon, Charles Bennett, and Ivor Montagu) concentrated on international intrigue. What united the three types of cinematic modernism was an interest in popular stories about violence and sexual love, or in what Graham Greene once called 'blood melodrama.'⁹

A similar development can be seen in the world of Anglo-American literature, where the major forms of 'bloody' popular fiction, including the detective story, the spy thriller, and the gothic romance, were 'made new' in the 1920s and 1930s. These forms had long been of interest to vanguard artistic intellectuals; in fact, shortly after the turn of the century, crime and paranoid conspiracy fiction strongly appealed to the leading psychological novelists in Britain and America. Henry James, for example, experimented with both the ghost story and the spy novel, and Joseph Conrad, who specialized in ironic tales of 'secret sharers' and imperialist adventurers, once told a French colleague that society itself was nothing more than a criminal conspiracy: 'Crime is a necessary condition for all types of organizations. Society is essentially criminalor it would not exist.'' ¹⁰ By the 1930s, Wyndham Lewis was complaining that the entire social imaginary resembled a Kriminalroman.

Authors like Conrad and James, however, did not seem to be writing for the same public as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. (James described 'The Turn of the Screw' as 'an amusette to catch those not easily caught . . . the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious.')¹¹ In the English language during the first three decades of the century, crime novels were usually conservative, supporting the prewar culture that modernism regarded as bankrupt. The Christie-style detective story, one of the most successful creations of modern publishing, seemed especially retrograde when viewed from a modernist perspective and was sometimes criticized for appealing to a genteel audience of females and academics.¹² Two symptomatic developments of modernity enabled a countertradition to emerge: first was the rapid growth in the 1920s of sensationalized American pulp fiction addressed chiefly to working-class men; second was the development in the late 1920s and 1930s of literary novels about crime, published in hardback and supported by middle-class book clubs. In these venues, a second-generation modernism interacted with mass culture and eventually made its way into the respectable realms of New York publishing, Broadway theater, and Hollywood.

In one sense, the movies had always been interested in the new wave of crime writers; of the four American thrillers initially described as noir by the French, two were remakes. Unlike their predecessors, however, all four of the 1940s pictures were A-budget productions, bearing the marks of literary sophistication, attracting favorable commentary from urban reviewers, and competing for Academy Awards. Likewise, Hollywood was never unaware of vanguard European cinema. The most obvious sign of 'artistic-ness' in America during the interwar years was a slightly UFA-esque or expressionist style, which gained favor soon after the New York premiere of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920. ¹⁴ Hence the most critically respected film produced in Hollywood prior to 1941 was F. W. Murnau's Sunrise, and the most respected film after 1941 was Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. What seemed different about Kane was its synthesis of cinematic and literary modernism: it showed the influence of expressionism, surrealism, and Soviet montage, but at the same time it reminded critics of Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, and the USA trilogy. (On top of everything, it made use of an irreverent, somewhat wisecracking dialogue that was associated with Herman Mankiewicz, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, and the 'newspaper wits' who had worshipped H. L. Mencken.)

Welles was only the most spectacular manifestation of a growing acceptance of modernist values throughout the culture. Eric Hobsbawm observes that before 1914, the philistine public jeered at postimpressionism, Igor Stravinsky, and the Armory Show; afterward, that same public usually fell silent before artistic 'declarations of independence from a discredited pre-war world.'¹⁵ Such art, Hobsbawm remarks, was not necessarily what most people actually enjoyed; it nevertheless managed to coexist with 'the classic and the fashionable,' becoming 'proof of a serious interest in cultural matters' (181). Meanwhile, from the late 1920s until the 1940s, under the shadow of depression, fascist dictators, and European war, many artists turned to socialism and were increasingly attracted to popular forms and realist narratives (a trend encouraged by the Popular Front, which is discussed more fully in the next chapter). Given this tendency, plus the culture industry's appetite for talent, traces of modernism were increasingly absorbed into everyday life.

In the process of becoming normalized, modern art inevitably lost some of its critical edge. Its early manifestations were shocking and willfully difficult, resisting the marketplace and often treating the audience as what Baudelaire and Eliot called a 'hypocrite lecteur.' By midcentury, nearly all the