'In this incoherent brutality,' Borde and Chaumeton remark, 'there is the feeling of a dream' (12). Indeed, the narratives themselves are often situated on the margins of dreams, as if to intensify the surrealist atmosphere of violent confusion, ambiguity, or disequilibrium that Borde and Chaumeton regard as the basis of noir. ''All the components of noir style,' they write, are designed to 'disorient the spectator' by attacking certain conventions: 'a logical action, an evident distinction between good and evil, well-defined characters with clear motives, scenes that are more spectacular than brutal, a heroine who is exquisitely feminine and a hero who is honest' (14). The 'vocation' of film noir is to reverse these norms and thereby create a specific tension that results from the disruption of order and 'the disappearance of psychological bearings or guideposts' (15).
But film noir was also a prisoner of conventions. Borde and Chaumeton contend that in the 1940s, films about crime and gangs possessed a bizarre quality reminiscent of the surrealists or Kafka; by the 1950s, however, the implicit social criticism in thrillers was smothered by banal plot devices, and the 'exploitation of incoherence' was becoming predictable (180). Even the original pictures were beginning to look dated: at a revival of Murder, My Sweet presented by the Cine-Club of Toulouse in 1953, people laughed whenever Philip Marlowe lost consciousness and disappeared into a black pool, and in the discussion afterward the picture was treated as a 'parody of horror' (181).
From the perspective of the mid 1950s, it appeared that noir was dying. Borde and Chaumeton attribute this 'decadence' to the exhaustion of a formula and to the rise of neorealist social-problem pictures. To these factors, we might add several economic and political determinants: in response to television and the growing leisure industry, Hollywood was turning to Cinemascope, color, and biblical epics; at the same time, many of the key writers and directors of the previous decade had been blacklisted by the major studios. As if to signal the end of a cycle, urban thrillers were increasingly produced for the lower end of the market. Hence, the two pictures of the 1950s that the Panorama singles out as truly disorienting were both filmed on relatively low budgets, without stars. The first is Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1950), the story of a murderous heterosexual couple of 'exemplary beauty' (9), which allows the woman to wear pants and act as the aggressive partner. Borde and Chaumeton regard Gun Crazy as a profound and unselfconscious expression of the surrealist credo; in their words, it is 'one of the rarest contemporary illustrations of L'AMOUR FOU (in every sense of that term),' and it deserves to be called 'a sort of L 'Age d'Or of the American film noir' (118).
Next in importance is the Robert Aldrich adaptation of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which Borde and Chaumeton discuss in their 1988 postscript. Like The Maltese Falcon, this film involves a private eye and the search for a mysterious object; nevertheless, Borde and Chaumeton describe it as the 'despairing opposite' of the picture that inaugurated the noir series: 'From the eve of war to the society of consumption, the tone has changed. A savage lyricism throws us into a world in complete decomposition, ruled by debauchery and brutality; to the intrigues of these wild beasts and specters, Aldrich provides the most radical of solutions: nuclear apocalypse' (277).
Nowadays, both Kiss Me Deadly and Gun Crazy sometimes provoke the same unwanted laughter that greeted Murder, My Sweet in 1953. Even so, Borde and Chaumeton's achievement in discussing these and other films is remarkable. Without complete access to American culture, they identify scores of interesting movies that might have been forgotten, and they create an entire category that functions normatively. Here as in many later writings, noir is not merely a descriptive term, but a name for a critical tendency within the popular cinemaan antigenre that reveals the dark side of savage capitalism. For Borde and Chaumeton, the essence of noirness lies in a feeling of discontinuity, an intermingling of social realism and oneiricism, an anarcho-leftist critique of bourgeois ideology, and an eroticized treatment of violence. Above all, noir produces a psychological and moral disorientation, an inversion of capitalist and puritan values, as if it were pushing the American system toward revolutionary destruction. We might debate about whether such qualities are in fact essential to the Hollywood thriller (if any quality can be essential), but there is no question that they are fundamental to surrealist art.
Via the Panorama and similar writings, surrealism might be said to have provided an organizing metaphor and an aesthetic rationale for the film noir. Perhaps it also fostered the tendency of later critics to read individual pictures slightly against the grain, emphasizing tone or mood rather than narrative closurea technique frequently used to bestow cult value on mass art. But as I have already indicated, French discussion of noir was also affected by existentialist literature and philosophy, which placed emphasis on different matters. Existentialism was despairingly humanist rather than perversely anarchic; thus if the surrealists saw the postwar American thriller as a theater of cruelty, the existentialists saw it as a protoabsurdist novel. For critics who were influenced by existentialism, film noir was attractive because it depicted a world of obsessive return, dark corners, or huis-clos. It often employed settings like the foggy
seaside diner on the road between San Francisco and Los Angeles in Fallen Angel, where Dana Andrews gets off a bus and seems unable to leave. ('I'm waiting for something to happen,' he tells Alice Fay. 'Nothing's going to happen,' she responds.) Or it was like the dark highway in Detour, where Tom Neal keeps thumbing a ride, trying to avoid his brutal destiny.
In the years before and after the war, when the French themselves were entrapped by history, several of the most important themes of existential philosophy were elaborated through readings of Dashiell Hammett, Chandler, and James M. Cain, who were often bracketed with Wright, Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Faulkner. The French actually 'discovered' some of these novelists, just as they later discovered the Hollywood auteurs. (In 1946, even Faulkner was a relatively neglected figure in the United States, where much of his income came from movies like The Big Sleep and from a story he had published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine; meanwhile, Jean-Paul Sartre described him as a 'god.') The interest of Parisian intellectuals in a certain kind of American literature became so intense that the British author Rebecca West teased Cain, 'You were a fool not to be born a Frenchman. The highbrows would have put you in with Gide and Mauriac if you had taken this simple precaution.'
There was truth in West's observation. The French liked their Americans exotic, violent, and romantic.30 They wrote a great deal about southern gothicism and tough-guy modernism, and they usually ignored anything that did not offer what Andre Gide called 'a foretaste of Hell.' Gide himself declared that Hammett's Red Harvest was 'the last word in atrocity, cynicism, and horror'; Andre Malraux described Faulkner's Sanctuary as 'the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the thriller'; and Albert Camus confessed that he had been inspired to write The Stranger after reading Cain's Postman Always Rings Twice.
This passion for literary toughness has an interesting relation to the social and political climate after the war. In the United States, the postwar decade was the period of Korea, the red scare, and the return to a consumer economy; in France, it was the period of colonial rebellion and parliamentary confusion leading up to the Charles de Gaulle government. Authors in both countries who had once been Marxist, such as John Dos Passos and Andre Malraux, completely reversed themselves; others, such as Dashiell Hammett, were imprisoned or blacklisted. The Western Left had been in disarray since the Nazi-Soviet pact, and the situation in France was complicated by the fact that the country had recently emerged from what the French themselves described as les annees noiresa time of occupation, torture, compromise, and collaboration. Faced with a choice between capitalism and Stalinism, many French artists tried to achieve 'freedom' through individualized styles of resistance. For them, prewar American novels offered a modelespecially novels depicting a violent, corrupt world in which ambiguous personal action is the only redemptive gesture. In Qu'est-ce que la litterature? (1947), Sartre wrote, 'As for the Americans, it was not their cruelty or pessimism which moved us. We recognized in them men who had been swamped, lost in too large a continent, as we were in history, and who tried, without traditions, with the means available, to render their stupor and forlornness in the midst of 32 incomprehensible events.'
That same year, Sartre claimed that modern life had become 'fantastic,' made up of a 'labyrinth of hallways, doors, and stairways that lead nowhere, innumerable signposts that33 dot routes and signify nothing.' Recalling the fear of Nazi torture recently experienced by French citizens, he advocated a literature of 'extreme situations' that would be narrated ambiguously, without 'all-knowing witnesses'' (15455). The novel, he insisted, must shift from 'Newtonian mechanics to generalized relativity'; it should be peopled with 'minds that [are] half lucid and half overcast, some of which we might consider with more sympathy than others, but none of which [should] have a privileged point of view' (155).
