'There is nothing but trouble and desire.'
Hal Hartley, Simple Men, 1992 One day in 1993, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Ara Chekmayan visited a Pennsylvania fleamarket, where he discovered a statuette that looked exactly like the Maltese Falcon. Chekmayan purchased the black bird for eight dollars, and not long afterward, believing it to be one of two identical props that had been used in the famous 1941 Warner Brothers movie, he offered it up for auction at Christie's, who estimated its value at fifty thousand dollars. Before an auction could take place, however, a Los Angeles collector pointed out that identical copies of the statuette could be purchased at forty-five dollars apiece from a book dealer in Long Beach, California. (In that same year, my wife bought one in a Westwood bookstore and gave it to me as a Christmas present.) Chekmayan immediately withdrew his rara avis from sale, and the entire unhappy adventure was noted in People magazine.
The central irony of this story lies in the well-known fact that the 'original' Maltese Falcon was itself a fake. Dashiell Hammett's novel can be read as a parable about art and surplus value, showing how a fetish object is created through the sheer power of myth. (Notice also that many of the villains in films noirs of the 1940s were dealers or collectors of fine art.) The irony deepens, however, when we realize that a similar myth has now accumulated around the classic Hollywood cinema. Contrary to what Walter Benjamin hoped in the 1930s, mechanical reproduction has not destroyed the 'aura' of exhibition art; instead, the transitory but highly fetishized images of a bygone movie industry have become collector's items or museum pieces. Even the property warehouses of the old studios contain valuable objects. A kitschy statuette originally intended to represent a worthless imitation has been transformed into 'the stuff that dreams are made of,' if only because Humphrey Bogart touched it.
There is nothing new about this process. The twentieth century offers many examples of mass-produced trivia that become rare and valuable with the passing of time. (Walter Benjamin himself was a collector of popular children's books that eventually became prized items.) But Chekmayan's falcon illustrates two points about the film noir that are worth emphasizing: first, the falcon provides concrete evidence that Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s have become historical artifacts, possessed of a certain artistic or cultural cachet; and second, it reveals that these same thrillers can spread their aura across different media, becoming valuable as other things besides movies. The Maltese Falcon may have begun as a book and a couple of films, but it can become a statue in a museum, or practically anything else.
In effect, the idea of film noir spreads so widely that it helps to constitute what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls our 'mediascape,' which is made up of both the 'capabilities to produce and disseminate information' (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, computers, and so on), and the images created through such media. 1 We might even say that noir itself is a kind of mediascapea loosely related collection of perversely mysterious motifs or scenarios that circulate through all the information technologies, and whose ancestry can be traced at least as far back as ur-modernist crime writers like Edgar Allan Poe or the Victorian 'sensation novelists.' Of course, not everyone in the world is aware of the term film noir, and people find different uses for the things they read or see. Even so, self-conscious forms of noirish narrative continue to appear all around us, blurring the line between our fictional and real landscapes and contributing profoundly to the social imaginaire.
This phenomenon is especially evident in the postmodern environment, where dark Hollywood pictures of the 1940s and 1950s provide motifs, images, plots, and characters for every sort of artifact. For example, the slightly upscale regions of the leisure market frequently draw upon the memory of noir. Bernard Herrmann's music scores have been adapted into concert pieces by prestigious conductors; ambitious novelists such as William Gibson, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, J. P. Ballard, Paul Auster, and Susanna Moore self-consciously allude to the noir literary tradition; the lurid illustrations for pulp magazines provide inspiration for the cover art on the annual ''fiction issues' of The New Yorker; Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, and other crime writers of the 1940s have been published in fine editions by the Library of America; and in March 1993, the O. K. Harris Gallery in New York featured an exhibit by artist Arson Roje, who executed a series of hyperrealistic, eerily colored paintings of publicity stills and lobby cards from the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon. Nor is this borrowing limited to middlebrow, institutional, or 'authentic' arts. Film noir served as a minor reference point for Guy Debord and the situationists in Paris, who entitled one of their most famous manifestations The Naked City. More recently, the moods and images commonly associated with noir have influenced such cult TV shows as The X-Files and Millennium. The CD-ROM industry offers guides to Chandler, as well as interactive narratives such as The Dame Was Loaded (1996), which allows the male viewer to play the role of a private eye. Meanwhile, the World Wide Web is filled with information sites about every variety of pulp fiction and psychological melodrama.
The vaguely subcultural world of American comic books has shown an especially marked interest in retro-noir fantasies. Paradox Press, a special division of DC Comics, publishes 'graphic novels' in a noir format, and Frank Miller, whose The Dark Knight Returns helped to fuel the Batman craze of the 1980s and 1990s, has produced a series of Mickey Spillane-inspired strips entitled Sin City. (Miller has probably exerted a strong influence on neo-noir as a wholechiefly because of the way he fuses the black-and- white lighting patterns of the 1940s with the hard-body, exaggeratedly sexual poses in contemporary action movies.) Ironically, Mickey Spillane also inspired Ms. Tree, one of the longest-running private-eye comic books in history, which features a feminist private investigator and single mother named Michael Tree. Indeed, the amazingly durable Spillane, who began his career in the comic trade, has written futuristic versions of his original 'Mike Danger' stories for a company called Tekno Comics, and in 1996, these illustrated tales of sex and vengeance were being discussed as a movie from Miramax pictures.
If Miramax were to distribute a Mike Danger film, it would be contributing to the low end of a motion-picture cycle that began in 1989 with Batman and threatens to die off in the late 1990s with productions like Barb Wire (a sort of noir Barbarella). Over the past decade, Hollywood has regularly issued summertime adventures based on the dark side of comic strips. The formula has not always been profitable, but it accounts for such mildly entertaining if extravagant movies as Dick Tracy (1990), The Shadow (1994), and Batman Forever (1995), all of which are aimed at an audience of older children and adults. The major films in the cycle are derived from slightly infantile and outmoded sources, but in true postmodern fashion, they create glossy, show business 'events,' featuring award-winning actors like Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino and lavish sets by Anton Furst and Joseph Nemec III, who employ a style known in the business as ' 'noir lite.' High production values and straightforward comic-book heroics are mingled with over-the-top performances, double-entendre dialogue, dystopian satire, and a good deal of directorial self-consciousness (as in Batman's allusions to Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang). The result is a pop-art spectacle that tries to provide something for almost everybody, enabling the more sophisticated adults to feel knowledgeable while they regress into nostalgia and childhood fantasy.
As we have seen, modestly budgeted and somewhat nostalgic versions of feature-length film noir have also become a staple of cable television. A typical 1996 picture, Cafe Society (distributed theatrically in 1997), is described as follows in the Showtime program guide: 'The year is 1952. New York City's El Casbah nightclub, where Manhattan's fabulously wealthy gather to wallow in the gluttonies of success. One of them, Mickey Jelke (Frank Whaley), is heir to a tremendous fortune when he turns 25. Ask undercover agent Jack Kale (Peter Gallagher) about him, however, and he'll tell you he believes Jelke to be part of a big pornography ring. Then there's Patricia Ward (Lara Flynn Boyle), another society kid who's probably not what she seems to be. Three characters, one film noir triangle. Coffee?' In some cases, a similar nostalgia (if it is, in fact, nostalgia) extends even to the city streets, which are transformed by the tourist industry into simulacra of old Hollywood sets. The San Francisco tourist office provides a 'Dashiell Hammett walking tour' to complement its 'Victorian Architecture tour' and 'Flower Power tour.' Fans of The Maltese Falcon can visit a dark alley near Union Square, where a brass plaque memorializes the scene of a famous crime. ''On approximately this spot,' the plaque reads, 'Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O'Shaughnessy.'
In one sense, the circulation and transformation of noir motifs is merely an exaggerated expression of modernity itself. The various aspects of the leisure economy have always been related, and film styles or genres
