Sling Blade is not without flaws (it makes the southern town look improbably nice and almost completely white), but it creates an unusual moral fable, rendered in an austere, sometimes amusingly digressive style. Clearly, such a film does not need to be called noir. Even so, Sling Blade tells an oedipal story involving murder; it deals with a character who cannot escape his past; and it uses low-key lighting to generate a gothic mood. If nothing else, it shows that familiar motifs of noir can be given new and mildly unorthodox applications. Perhaps for that reason, and perhaps because it was something of a populist movie, it became a surprise hit. At some point, Miramax must also have recognized that an actor-director from Bill Clinton's Arkansas (with a name like 'Billy Bob,' no less) could be highly marketable; in any case, Thornton was suddenly transformed into a celebrity, and his screenplay won an Academy Award.
Noir as a dream: Patricia Arquette in Lost Highway (1997). (Museum of Modern Art Stills Archive.)
Example 3: David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) makes a vivid contrast to both of the foregoing pictures and is somewhat easier to describe because its plot does not depend upon the achievement of a goal or the solution to an enigma. A thoroughgoing pastiche, this film brims with allusions to three decades of noir, which it uses to create a dream narrative. Significantly, the screenwriter is Barry Gifford, who worked on Lynch's earlier pastiche, Wild at Heart, and who once wrote an entertaining book about film noir, The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1988). Between them, Lynch and Gifford seem determined to evoke a sense of pure 'noirness.' Almost every image and every character in the film has an archetypal quality: a nocturnal road out of Detour and Psycho; a 'Lost Highway Motel,' where a woman may or may not be dead; an exploding house on stilts like the one in Kiss Me Deadly; an alienated jazz musician who might be a killer; a brooding rebel-without-a-cause who lusts after a gun moll; a sadistic gangster who is obsessed with porn movies and prostitutes; a woman's mutilated body, reminiscent of the Black Dahlia; and not one but two femmes fatalesthe first a redhead like Gilda, the second a blond like Phyllis Dietrichson.
These allusions are treated skillfully, but they did not please American critics, who felt that Lost Highway was excessively dehumanized and self-reflexive. To some extent, I would agree. The film can also be criticized because it relies too much upon the nowadays predictable methods of postmodernist art and because it clearly indulges in a semipornographic, male-adolescent fantasy. 11 Even so, it seems to me an intelligent and weirdly beautiful picture that generates a powerful atmosphere of desire, terror, and dread. Throughout, Lynch's control of sound and image is worthy of his work in Blue Velvet, but in this case he takes greater risks with his audience, completely suspending narrative logic and never abandoning the feeling of a dream. His characters abruptly change their identities or become doubles, his plot twists back upon itself like a serpent, and his cool technique transforms familiar generic motifs into something almost musical or poetic. The total effect is closer to the avant-garde poetry of Eraserhead (1978) than to any of Lynch's subsequent work, and it has the audacity to run against the formally conservative grain of the contemporary art cinema.
To a certain extent, Lynch returns us to the issues in chapter 1 of this book. Whether he intended to or not, he has created something very close to the ideal film noir as the surrealist-inspired French might have imagined it in the decades after World War II. In other words, he gives us Hollywood sex and violence (suggesting far more than he shows) without the excuse of a realistic narrative; he mixes black, deadpan humor with horror; he utterly disorients his audience, never giving them an explanation for bizarre events; and he fetishizes everyday life, making a series of California living rooms and anonymous roadways seem truly uncanny. In the process, he also creates twin femmes fatales (both played by Patricia Arquette), who occasionally metamorphose into a creepy and rather androgynous male (Robert Blake). In 'female' shape, this composite figure is the ultimate fetish objecta voluptuous, fleshy tease with vampire teeth, as stylized and heartless as an American automobile from the 1950s. Even when she is nude, she never removes her wigs or her six-inch heels.
No American thriller has ever gone so far to achieve the 'disappearance of psychological bearings or guideposts' that Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton regard as the main objective of film noir. And yet, despite all its disquieting effects, Lost Highway merely takes us where we have already been. Unlike the ideal cinema of surrealist criticism (or the work of a director like Luis Bunuel), it looks backward to an imaginary past, preoccupied with pop art and the dream imagery of affluent America in the last decade of film noir. It deals impressively with primal anxieties, but it seems to have no destructive anger, no specific politics, no purpose other than regression. Both the filmmakers and the characters keep circling around the same familiar bank of images, drawn like moths to a flame. Thus, for all its horror, sexiness, and formal brilliance, Lost Highway ultimately resembles all the other retro noirs and nostalgia films of the late twentieth century: it remains frozen in a kind of cinematheque and is just another movie about movies.
Whatever their limitations, the films I have described are more true to their initial premises than Curtis Hanson's slickly directed adaptation of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential (1997)a big- budget, highly publicized, and critically overrated feature that begins in darkly satiric fashion and then segues into crowd-pleasing melodrama. The three policemen who function as antiheroes in this picturea 'celebrity crime- stopper' who moonlights as advisor for a TV show called Badge of Honor, a brooding roughneck who beats up suspects, and a gung-ho idealist who cleverly manages his careerare eventually transformed into righteous avengers, and are much more sympathetic than the equivalent characters in Ellroy's novel. In the concluding scenes, the good guys dangle the bad guys out of office buildings or mow them down with shotguns, and vigilante justice triumphs over official corruption. Hanson and co-scriptwriter Brian Hegeland even devise a happy ending in which the battle-scarred roughneck drives off into the sunset with his true love, an ex- prostitute with a heart of gold.
Unlike Chinatown, which it vaguely resembles, L.A. Confidential uses the past superficially and hypocritically. On the one hand, it attacks Hollywood of the 1950s, making easy jokes about the 'reality' behind old-style show business; on the other hand, it exploits every convention of the dream factory, turning history into a fashion show and allowing good to triumph over evil. The film's primary appeal seems to be its stylish 'look,' and this may explain why, upon its release, the tributary media of the consumer economymagazines, trade bookstores, radio shows, and CD recordingswere flooded with reminiscences of noir, all of them designed to profit from a trend. Even so, L.A. Confidential was only a modest commercial success. The man in charge of marketing the picture for Warner Brothers had a concise way of explaining why it never became a box-office bonanza: ''The bulk of the audience who enjoys film noir are directors, film students, critics and the most ardent, generally upscale film enthusiast' (quoted by David Ansen, Newsweek, 27 October 1997). Another, equally good explanation is that L.A. Confidential is merely nostalgia, lacking the complex historical relevance that Roman Polanski and Robert Towne were able to achieve in the pre-blockbuster years at the end of the Vietnam War.
Questions of value aside, both L.A. Confidential and the intermediate-budget films noirs are deeply symptomatic of today's cinema. Art pictures like the ones I have described, some better and some worse, will continue to appear on theater screens, as will the noirish blockbusters and the hardboiled action movies. If this diverse mixture of things does not exactly constitute a genre, it nevertheless coheres around a taste and a set of market strategies that are ongoing and relevant. It might help if I could end my survey of the late-twentieth- century mediascape with a spectacular insight into why such tastes are importanta Rosebud in the heart of the furnace, as it were, followed by a slow tilt upward to reveal the smoke of corruption in the sky. But the truth is, the history of noir is not over, and it cannot be given a single explanation. No doubt movies of the noir type have always appealed stronglybut not exclusivelyto middle-class white males who project themselves into stories about loners, losers, outlaws, and flawed idealists at the margins of society.
The different manifestations of noir, however, can never be completely subsumed under a single demographic group or psychological theory.
Given the current situation, debates over whether specific films are 'truly' noir, or over the problem of what makes up a film genre, have become tiresome. There is, in fact, no transcendent reason why we should have a noir category at all. Whenever we list any movie under the noir rubric, we do little more than invoke a network of ideas as a makeshift organizing principle, in place of an author, a studio, a time period, or a national cinema. By such
