cigarettes in their mouths.
A similar desire to ape current fashions lies behind films such as Fatal Instinct, which was designed to satirize not only the classics of the 1940s, but also Body Heat, Fatal Attraction, Cape Fear, and Basic Instinct. Much the same thing could be said about Carl Reiner's more effective and technically brilliant parody, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982), which was made possible by the fact that vintage films noirs still circulate as commodities on TV. In other words, even when parody ridicules a style, it feeds on what it imitates. I would go further: much like analytic criticism, parody helps to define and even create certain styles, giving them visibility and status. 'We murder to dissect,' William Wordsworth once said of critics, and parodists could be charged with a similar crime; but scholars and mimics also preserve what they destroy, transforming it into an idea that can be revived by later artists. (This would explain why a series of film-noir burlesques, including The Black Bird [1975] and The Cheap Detective [1978], were roughly contemporary with the rise of neo-noir.)
It seems obvious that both parody and criticism have helped to shape the popular conception of film noir, enhancing its strength as an intellectual fashion and as a commercial product. Even so, we cannot say exactly when parodies of noir began, and we cannot distinguish precisely between parody, pastiche, and 'normal' textuality. Samuel Goldwyn's They've Got Me Covered (1944), starring Bob Hope, contains at least one sequence (photographed by noir cameraman Rudolph Mate) that mimics all the visual conventions of the dark thrillers of its day. A later Hope film, Paramount's My Favorite Brunette (1947), features Alan Ladd in a cameo appearance as a tough private eye. Are these parodies, or clever tributes? Notice also that both Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler occasionally wrote subtle burlesques of their own fiction. Frank MacShane argues that Chandler was a comic novelist and that at least one of his stories, 'Pearls Are a Nuisance' (published in Dime Detective in 1939), is a 'parody from start to finish' (Life of Raymond Chandler, 56). According to MacShane, some of the more flamboyant aspects of Chandler's prose, such as his description of a violent beating in 'Bay City Blues'' and his famous opening to 'Red Wind' ('On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.'), were intended to suggest that 'much of what he was writing was rubbish' (Life of Raymond Chandler, 5657). 34
Even a classic film noir like Out of the Past derives much of its charmat least for contemporary viewersfrom the fact that it verges on self-parody (a quality it shares with The Lady from Shanghai, which was released in the same year). The basic ingredients are almost too familiar: a trenchcoated, chain-smoking private eye; a gorgeous femme fatale; a flashback narrative; a world-weary, first- person narration telling a story of murder, betrayal, and sexual obsession; a downbeat ending; and a haunting theme song played not only by the studio orchestra but also by every jazz band and barroom pianist in sight. (This same tune had been used in Crack-Up, another film noir produced at RKO in the previous year.) The plot, derived from Daniel Mainwaring's Build My Gallows High, is strongly influenced by The Maltese Falcon, and the dialogue (the best of it written by the uncredited Frank Fenton) is rich with quasi-Chandleresque wit. Some of the lines could have been used for all intentional parody like 'The Girl Hunt.' At one point, for example, the good girl (Virginia Huston) remarks that Jane Greer 'can't be all badnobody is.' Mitchum wryly mutters, 'She comes the closest.' Mitchum's offscreen narration has a similar quality. 'I never saw her in the daytime,' he says of Greer. 'We seemed to live by night. What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked.'' All the while, the film as a whole seems intelligently self-reflexive or artful in the way it treats its secondhand atmospherics. When we hear the lines I have just quoted, we see the private eye seated at an outdoor cafe in a Mexican plaza at dusk, directly across from a neon-lit theater called the 'Cine Pico,' which is showing Hollywood movies. From this very spot, the belle dame sans merci makes her mysterious entrance, like a creature of the pop-culture imagination.
The European auteurs of the 1960s and 1970s, who helped create the idea of film noir, were even more self-conscious than a director like Jacques Tourneur; they grounded their work in allusion and hypertextuality rather than in a straightforward attempt to keep a formula alive. Godard and Rainer Fassbinder were especially notable for the way they eschewed melodramatic plots and realistic sex and violence, reducing the private eye and the gangster to comic-book stereotypes (sometimes, as in Breathless and The American Soldier, via characters who imagined themselves as heroes but were actually playing stereotypical roles). Even Truffaut's more lyrical Shoot the Piano Player keeps the old conventions at a playful distance: when Charles Aznavour and Marie Dubois walk down the Paris streets in trenchcoats, the effect is vaguely comic, as if they were on their way to a costume party. The German Wire Wenders, who began his career as an avant-garde artist, and who briefly became a sort of crossover phenomenon, took a somber approach. His most commercially successful film, The American Friend (1977), is a loose adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel, written half in English and half in German, which can be read as a straight thriller modeled on Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray, as a pastiche of certain Hollywood conventions, and as an allegory about the relationship between America and West Germany two generations after World War II. Here and elsewhere, the idea of film noir tends to bridge a gap between Europe and America, between mainstream entertainment and the art cinema. Thus American film noir of the 'historical' period was largely a product of ideas and talent appropriated from Europe, and neo-noir emerged during a renaissance of the European art film, when America was relatively open to imported culture. The second of these two phases was affected not only by the French and German New Waves, but also by an Italian tradition of philosophical noiras in Antonioni's pop-art Blowup and Bertolucci's retro-styled The Conformist (1971). It was also strongly influenced by European directors who made English-language thrillers that were aimed partly at the American market: not only Antonioni, but also Polanski (Repulsion), Boorman (Point Blank), and eventually even Wenders (Hammett).
In America, however, it was difficult to turn far away from commercial entertainment. The younger generation of Hollywood directors tended to incorporate New Wave techniques or retro style into spectacularly violent crime pictures, both attacking and preserving traditional values. Most of their films can be described as parodic in a loose sensethat is, they openly borrow from a large and diverse body of earlier movies, establishing a more or less ironic filiation with a supposed classical norm. There are, of course, many important exceptions to this rule: crime pictures such as The French Connection (1971), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Straight Time (1978), and Miami Blues (1990) can be called noir, even though they make no special attempt to reproduce stylistic conventions of the 1940s and 1950s. I am speaking here of latter-day noirs that have a quality of deliberate allusiveness, as if they were trying to display a certain wit or sophistication about the cinematic past.
One of the most interesting if problematic American attempts to follow in the path of the Europeans is Robert Altman's revisionist production of The Long Goodbye (1973), which subjects the Chandleresque detective film to offbeat casting and a certain amount of derisive parody, all the while making Brechtian jokes about Hollywood. The underlying concept is intriguing: Elliot Gould is intentionally miscast as Philip Marlowe, and the setting is updated to contemporary, dope-crazed Los Angeles, where the private eye becomes a ridiculous anachronism. (Altman referred to the character as 'Rip Van Marlowe,' and at one point in the film we hear a policeman remark, 'Marlowe with an e. Sounds like a fag name.') The feeling of historical dissonance is especially strong at the level of style, which involves Panavision, zoom lenses, improvised dialogue, unorthodox sound recording and mixing, and a rather diffused, pastel-colored photography by Vilmos Zsigmond, who 'flashed' the film stock to degrade contrasts. On many levels, the picture completely reverses the values we associate with Chandler and classic noir: in place of witty dialogue and wry offscreen narration, it gives us inarticulate characters and a mumbling private eye who incessantly talks to himself; in place of carefully framed, angular compositions, it uses a roving, almost arbitrary series of panning and zooming shots that continually flatten perspective; and in place of romantic music, it employs a 1940s-style theme (composed by John Williams) that undergoes countless rearrangementsincluding versions for door chimes, a sitar, and a mariachi band.
Altman turns Marlowe into a chain-smoking slob and a nerdy sentimentalist, and novelist Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden) into an aging Hemingway type who brutalizes his wife (Nina van Pallandt). The theme of macho brutality, which is in some ways the flip side of Marlowe's and Chandler's chivalrousness, finds its most disturbing expression in a scene that the old Breen Office would never have allowed: gangster Marry Augustine (Mark Rydell)
