More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts

The Other Side of the Street

In previous chapters, I argue that film noir occupies a liminal space somewhere between Europe and America, between high modernism and 'blood melodrama,' and between low-budget crime movies and art cinema. As an idea in criticism and as a market category in mainstream entertainment, the term has a similar quality; it describes both action pictures and 'women's' melodramas, problematizing the usual generic or gendered distinctions.

Still other kinds of liminality are depicted in the films themselves. The stories frequently involve characters who have an ambiguous social position between the law and the underworld, or who seem in danger of losing their respectability and falling into a world of crime or madness. The action sometimes moves back and forth between rich and poor areas of town, or it takes place on a borderlandas in Touch of Evil, where an unstable, confusing boundary between the United States and Mexico becomes the locus of hysterical violence between nationalities, social classes, races, and sexes. In such cases, noir offers its mostly white audiences the pleasure of 'low' adventure, having little to do with the conquest of nature, the establishment of law and order, or the march of empire. The dangers that assail the protagonists arise from a modern, highly organized society, but a society that has been transformed into an almost mythical 'bad place,' where the forces of rationality and progress seem vulnerable or corrupt, and where characters on the margins of the middle class encounter a variety of 'others': not savages, but criminals, sexually independent women, homosexuals, Asians, Latins, and black people.

Radical film critics have responded to this situation in mixed fashion. In the 1970s and 1980s, for example, Anglo-American feminists analyzed film noir in two important and interconnected ways: as an instance of what Laura Mulvey calls the patriarchal mechanisms of 'visual pleasure' and as a reflection of male hostility toward women in the postwar economy. The Hitchcockian eroticism of classic suspense movies was shown to rest upon a sadistic gaze that could sometimes become troubled and ironically selfreflexive but that ultimately served a perversely masculine need for social and sexual control; meanwhile, the misogyny of hard-boiled, pop-Freudian scenarios was made vividly apparent. Interestingly, however, feminists have been unable to agree about film noir's specific sexual politics. This conflict is especially apparent in E. Ann Kaplan's introduction to the influential anthology Women in Film Noir (1978), which points out that the various contributors share no single position 'on whether film noir as such is progressive or not. ¹ The problem of arriving at a broad agreement has something to do with the impossibility of defining film noir 'as such,' but it also has to do with the inherently contradictory nature of Hollywood entertainment and with the in-between-ness of the films in question. As Kaplan points out, women characters in film noir are often evil, but because they are ''central to the intrigue,' they take part in an important 'ideological work' normally assigned to males (2). Some of the best-known noir narratives involve displacement of the patriarchal family in favor of lone wolves and spider women. Although the noir femme fatale is usually punished, she remains a threat to the proper order of things, and in a few cases, the male protagonist is 'simply destroyed' because he cannot resist her charms (3). Hence a picture like Double Indemnity, for all its evident misogyny, usually leaves feminist critics in a position of arguing about whether the ideological glass is half full or half empty.² As a moderator for these arguments, the most Kaplan can say is that film noir provides an intriguing 'interplay of the notion of independent women vis a vis patriarchy' (3).

An equally mixed set of responses call be found in critical discussions of masculinity and homosexuality in film noir. Despite the fact that the Production (Code of the 1940s explicitly forbade the depiction of homosexuals, the repressed 'returned' in genres such as the horror movie or the psychological thriller, where implicitly gay characters were treated with a mixture of contempt and fascination. The novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were filled with latently homosexual situations (such as the odd relationship between Philip Marlowe and 'Red' Norgaard in Farewell, My Lovely), and veiled stereotypes of gays were everywhere apparent in the crime pictures derived from those novels. In The Maltese Falcon, for example, the band of criminals is rather like a gay family, and in The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart imitates a lisping bibliophile. In many films, such as The Big Heat, the villain was a homosexual type, though he was never openly acknowledged as such. One of the most curious instances of Hollywood's attempt to conceal the obvious is Laura, an unusually feminist narrative for its day, which casts Clifton Webb as a Wildean aesthete named Waldo Lydecker, but which asks us to view the character as a murderously jealous heterosexual who suffers from a kind of Pygmalion complex. Here and in several other important noirs, a covert homophobia is linked with a populist attitude toward social class: the villainous Lydecker is depicted as a parasitic dandy, in contrast to the more proletarian tough guy who is the hero of the narrative. Notice, however, that Lydecker plays an important role, and at some points he seems like the hero's double. Merely by acting as the villain, he is a much more complex and significant presence than the equally closeted homosexuals in the average Hollywood comedy.

It would appear that the ideology of mainstream melodrama is threatened when women, artistic intellectuals, and vaguely homosexual characters appear as villains, or when the action takes place in an excessively 'abnormal' milieu. This phenomenon has led Richard Dyer and several other critics to argue that the noir category in general expresses 'a certain anxiety over the existence and definition of masculinity and normality' (Kaplan, 91). As Dyer observes, film noir 'abounds in colorful representations of decadence, perversion, aberration, etc.' (Kaplan, 92), and its typically rootless, unmarried heroes provide a somewhat tenuous standard of normative masculine behavior. In many cases, the noir protagonist's ability to serve as a role model is undercut by his quasi- gay relationships with men, by his masochistic love affairs with women, and by his more general weakness of character (see Gilda, Double Indemnity, and Strangers on a Train). Given such protagonists, Frank Krutnick concludes that 1940s noir deals with 'traumatized or castrated males'' who cannot function as the fantasy objects of an ideal masculine ego. The noir form as a whole, he says, is devoted to a 'dissonant and schismatic representation of masculinity' and is 'perhaps' evidence of a 'crisis of confidence' in the male-dominated culture. ³

Whether or not one accepts Krutnick's argument about American society in the 1940s, it seems clear that Hollywood thrillers of the period tended to center on both male and female characters who were morally flawed, neurotic, or psychologically 'damaged.' In a general sense, these films were attempting to inflect melodrama with what I have elsewhere described as an air of modernist ambiguity and psychological determinism. Influenced by American fiction during the 1920s and 1930s, they injected a degree of irony, antiheroism, and perverse violence into adventure stories, thereby expressing what Dyer calls an 'anxiety' about normality. This does not mean, however, that they were inherently homophobic or misogynistic: as we have seen, Richard Brooks's novel The Brick Foxhole, which was filmed in 1947 under the title Crossfire, is an explicit attack on homophobia, and a few traces of the original theme remain in the adaptation. Notice also that the noir sensibility strongly affected various forms of domestic or 'women's' pictures in the 1940s, undercutting the usual formulas. As R. Barton Palmer observes, Possessed (1947) and Cause for Alarm (1947) are somewhat different from an equally 'psychoanalytic' but less noirlike melodrama such as Now Voyager (1942), because they do not provide a 'compromised yet satisfying wish fulfillmentthat is, the heroine put back in her place but offered a different, rewarding life.'' ⁴

Even when film noir is openly hostile toward women or homosexuals, it solicits the psychoanalytic and potentially deconstructive critical discourse that has grown up around it. Moreover, like other Hollywood formulas, it has depended upon contributions by female or gay artists. The only important woman director of the 1940s, Ida Lupino, was responsible for several movies that could be classified as noir, as were women writers such as Daphne du Maurier, Vera Caspary, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Leigh Brackett. One of the most prolific American writers of noir fiction, Cornell Woolrich, was a homosexual, as were directors George Cukor and Vincente Minnelli, who were frequently drawn to noir themes or motifs. In our own day, there have been many examples of hard-boiled detective novels with female, gay, or lesbian protagonists, as well as a number of films noirs directed by women. In the latter group are Maggie Greenwald's Kill-Off (1990), Kathryn Bigelow's Blue Steel (1990), and Lizzie Borden's Love Crimes (1992). The Bigelow and