wholly American film Style.' 4 The term film noir was used in France in the 1930s (if not earlier), and it was first applied to the American cinema by the French; in fact, a great many of the Hollywood films designated by the term were remakes of European pictures, made by emigre directors and writers. Certain of the characteristic expressions of film noirespecially the never-ending cycle ofpoliciers and criminal adventureshave been produced by virtually every medium and every cinema in the world, and no doubt they will continue to be produced. If, as Jean-Francois Lyotard and others suggest, postmodernity is merely a restaging of modernist preoccupations on the grounds of contemporary technology and economics, then noir is likely to be with us for a long time to come.
This being said, the contemporary American scene has distinctive features that mark it off from the past. We can never know exactly how audiences in the 1940s and 1950s viewed the dark movies of their day, but it seems obvious that we view those same films differently, in contexts far removed from the ones for which they were originally intended. The postwar films noirs now occupy the same shelf space in video stores and the same time slots on TV as last year's Hollywood thrillers; their reception, furthermore, is mediated by an extensive critical discourse (as in the case of this book), which gives them a certain status. Some people regard them as artistic visions of paranoia and entrapment; others view them in a spirit of Reaganite nostalgia for the glamour and simplicity of pre-Vietnam America.
In certain instances, the classic films noirs also provide contemporary audiences with material for what Barbara Klinger calls 'mass camp.' Anyone who has watched Laura or Out of the Past in a crowded university auditorium will know that such movies require a suspension of disbelief best achieved at home or in a select revival theater. Some of the most serious lines of noir dialogue, written in the spirit of hard-boiled poetry or psychoanalytic profundity, have become unintentionally funny. (Peggy Thomson and Saeko Usukawa have published two amusing and nostalgic volumes made up entirely of dialogue from classical noir: The Little Black and White Book of Film Noir [ 1992] and Hard-Boiled [ 1994].) Where Laura i s concerned, the camp effect is at least partly intendedany movie that puts Clifton Webb, Judith Anderson, and Vincent Price in the same drawing room is inviting a mood of fey theatricality. In the 1940s, however, camp was a marginal or subcultural style, risking criticism or censure. Today, as Klinger observes, the camp sensibility has been fully democratized by changes in social attitudes about gender and sexuality, by the liberalization of censorship rules, by the critical legitimization of pop art, and by the culture industry itself, which has learned how to market old products in new ways. Camp in the late twentieth century has therefore acquired a kind of 'mainstream chicness,' especially evident in the Batman blockbusters, which is grounded in the audience's sense of superiority over outdated conventions. An almost completely ahistorical mode of reception, it is marked by a strong tendency 'to embrace what is perceived as mediocrity for a transient, disinterested form of recreation without group affiliation or political bite.' 5
The only classical films noirs that seem relatively immune from mass-camp readings are pictures such as The Asphalt Jungle, which take place largely outside the studio, in a virtually all-male milieu, and convey an astringent, somewhat ironic attitude toward heterosexual romancehence a more serious cult following can develop around a postmodern caper movie like Reservoir Dogs. It should be noted, however, that even the most condescending forms of mass camp involve affection for the things they mock. Contemporary audiences who laugh at Mildred Pierce or Double Indemnity remain at least partly under the spell of the films. The naivete of these viewers lies not so much in their amused attitude, but in their implicit assumption that contemporary pictures based on similar themes are somehow more realistic, less burdened by artifice or sentimentality.
In point of fact, most examples of neo-noir are less artistically sophisticated and politically interesting than the films they emulate. Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat treats sex in a manner appropriate to the post-Code era, employing naturalistic acting and a somewhat elliptical cutting style; even so, its narrative structure is conventional, its characters familiar, and its Florida location merely decorative next to Double Indemnity's Los Angeles. In comparison, a picture like David Mamet's House of Games (1987) might seem different. An oneiric, sinister, and sometimes radically ambiguous movie, House of Games is filled with oddly lobotomized performances and artfully repetitious dialogue that echoes Ernest Hemingway without trying to copy him ('I'm a writer. I'm a sort of writer.' 'Oh, so you're a writer. What do you write when you write?'). It nevertheless provides a classically proportioned, 'three-act'' drama with a strong sense of closure, and most of its themes and stylistic effects are taken straight from Hitchcock. The story centers on an arctic, upper-class female who suffers from more neurotic compulsions than Marnie; the editing combines Kuleshovian effects and omniscient, 'bird's-eye' perspectives; and the entire staging is designed to create an expressionist atmosphere of eroticized suspense and impending violence. No doubt House of Games is a more fastidious and ostentatiously experimental picture than anything by Brian DePalma, but in the last analysis it is vulgarly Freudian, lacking the passion that makes a director like Hitchcock something other than a superbly skilled, misogynistic technician.
The same adaptation of traditional formulas, with a slightly revisionist twist, can be seen in Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992), the two most commercially successful films noirs ever made. Interestingly, the two pictures have a good deal in common: both are directed by Europeans; both star the actor-producer Michael Douglas, who has a talent for portraying angry white males (he even makes the ruthless tycoon Gordon Gekko in Wall Street seem vaguely sympathetic); and both, despite their patriarchal implications, feature stunning performances by women. Alex, the psychotic one- night stand in Fatal Attraction, and Catharine, the Sadeian woman in Basic Instinct, are among the most frightening femmes fatales in the history of movieschiefly because they are viewed without the constraints of old-fashioned censorship and without the mollifying romanticism of Hollywood in the 1940s. Neither film, however, represents an advance over earlier models in terms of style or sexual politics.
Glenn Close has said that she regards Fatal Attraction as a film noir, especially in its original version, which ends with Alex's suicide. 6 Unfortunately, because of negative reactions from preview audiences, Paramount and director Adrian Lyne reshot the grim conclusion, turning Alex from a vulnerable character into a Psycho-style killer, and then restoring Douglas's family to a secure if chastened happiness. (Paramount and Billy Wilder also softened the ending of Double Indemnity, but the more superficial and commercially adroit Lyne had certain advantages over Wilder: after the theatrical release, his 'director's cut' was marketed to video stores in laserdisk and VHS formats, adding to the studio's revenue.) The first version of Fatal Attraction is in fact an unsettling study of a disturbed woman who at first seems menacing but eventually becomes a scapegoat for the bourgeois family. The film cleverly invites its audience to identify with Michael Douglas, and then shifts the point of view and emotional emphasis toward Close, who gives Alex a plausibility and psychological complexity beyond anything imagined in the script. And yet, despite these virtues, and despite considerable narrative tension and technical sheen, the director's cut of Fatal Attraction is in many ways a less ironic and morally ambiguous treatment of infidelity than Andre de Toth's modestly budgeted Pitfall (1948), a classic noir grounded in a staunchly conservative view of the nuclear family. Pitfall relentlessly supports conventional morality, causing its restless protagonist (Dick Powell) to pay for the rest of his life because of a single, twenty-four-hour indiscretion. At the same time, it uses the married man's involvement with another woman to reveal tensions between social classes, and it portrays the ostensible femme fatale (Lizabeth Scott) in quite sympathetic terms. Perhaps more significantly, it makes suburban America seem like an iron cage for both the wife and the husband.
Basic Instinct was also marketed in two versions, but the video release was designed merely to give the audience an extra forty-two seconds of nude sex. Few mainstream Hollywood films have so deliberately flaunted their aspirations to soft-core pornography, and few have provided a clearer instance of how the masculine gaze generates fantasies of desire and castration. Basic Instinct is filled with explicit, foregrounded instances of what Laura Mulvey calls 'sadistic voyeurism' and 'fetishistic scopophilia'most obviously in the early scene in which the sexy young Catharine Trammell (Sharon Stone) sits on a raised, spotlit platform and allows a group of male detectives (representing the point of view of the audience) to look up her dress. Predictably, this scene initiates a narrative that is both Hitchcockian and Sternbergian, oscillating between the protagonist's need to investigate and punish the woman and his equally important need to adore her
