Tendencies of Neo-Noir (pages 1-9) [rough draft]

1.

Noir that Knows it’s Noir

The short version is this: in 1944 the Allies liberated France, and French cinephiles finally caught up on the last four years of Hollywood pictures the Nazis had embargoed. They saw Citizen Kane for the first time, and How Green was my Valley, and Bambi. Hitchcock’s first American films. Three of the Road to… films starring Bob Hope and Cousin Bing. When the Nazis took France, there was no such thing as “A Humphrey Bogart Picture” - he scored his first leading role in 1941. So imagine what is was like to kick the Nazis out and then see Casablanca.

Or The Maltese Falcon. Because it’s not just John Ford and Busby Berkeley playing in Paris, it’s also the B-pictures, the pulp, the melodramas, the crime films. It’s Double Indemnity, The Shanghai Gesture, This Gun for Hire. And, with these films, the French critics turned to each other and said, “Ze Americans, zey are, how you say, having a normal one, hon hon hon.”

Because the Hollywood crime film of the late 30’s, what the French were familiar with, was simple and demure. Cops were good guys, gangsters were bad guys, violence was brief and mostly offscreen. The cop got the girl in the end, the gangster got shot or arrested, justice was done, and everyone who wasn’t dead or in jail lived happily ever after. In these new films, the cops were corrupt and so were the politicians; the girl was sexy and mysterious and maybe wanted to kill you; and the gangsters were both more violent and more sympathetic, their deaths steeped in pathos.

And so, as is the French disposition, they wrote a bunch of essays about this new tendency in American pictures, this darkness. Existential angst is, after all, very French. A lot of these films were based on books by the likes of James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, whose works the French had called “roman noir,” or “dark novels.” So they dubbed this new strain of movies “film noir.”

All through the forties and most of the fifties, they catalogued and analyzed these noir films. At its peak, Hollywood was producing over a hundred noirs a year! Essays, books, glossaries. The French prodded its origins and precursors, settling on The Maltese Falcon as the first proper noir. They pinpointed its recurring elements - the femme fatale, the angel-faced killer, the everyman in over his head, the hardboiled private dick. They discussed its eroticism, its paranoia, its amorality. They declared the cycle had reached its apex with Kiss Me Deadly in 1955, and, with Touch of Evil in 1958, they pronounced the cycle complete. It was over. Fin.

All of this, by the way, was written in French, which most Americans do not speak. Almost none of it would be translated to English for many years. American filmmakers had no idea they’d been making “film noir” anymore than American audiences knew they’d been watching it. To Americans, The Big Sleep was a mystery movie; The Postman Always Rings Twice was a domestic drama; The Naked City a police procedural; Criss Cross a gangster film. Though no doubt aware that movies had taken a turn in the 40’s, and that German expatriates in Hollywood had popularized long shadows and canted angles, no one stateside commented on the fixation with liberated women, smoky jazz bars, and criminal subcultures, nor what the mix of fascination and revulsion felt for them said about the wound World War II had left on the American psyche.

The first documented use of the phrase “film noir” in America was in 1959, a year after the cycle was declared dead.

Of course, these bounding points are an analytical convenience. Film noir didn’t end in ‘58 any more than it began ‘41. That’s not how things work. There was a period where something was starting to happen, a period where something was happening, and a period where it was not happening so much anymore. For the purpose of discussion it is useful to demarcate the thing itself from pre- and post-, and Maltese Falcon to Touch of Evil is tradition, but where the lines are drawn isn’t that important. I can say it’s The Letter to Odds Against Tomorrow and Nino Frank can’t stop me! Him dead.

So noirish films didn’t end in ‘58 but they slowed to a trickle. Films with the vibe popped up steadily if not frequently all through the 1960’s - some of them are interesting, some of them fucking own. But something shifted in the 70’s. An interest was renewed. Some of the French Discourse had finally made its way stateside to be eaten up by critics and students in a bunch of newly-minted film programs. And, in 1972, the first major, widely-read, English-language essay on film noir, written by an American, explaining the genre to the nation that invented it, was published: Paul Schrader’s “Notes on Film Noir.” And shortly thereafter the trickle turned into a stream.

I couldn’t say with confidence this essay caused a resurgence. More likely both the essay and the run of films that followed it were effects of a growing critical interest in the pulp of a previous generation. But we soon saw the release of Hickey & Boggs, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, and, by the time we get to Chinatown, it’s clear something that was not so much happening was very much happening again.

Nowadays we call that something “neo-noir.”

These movies were self-consciously noir, made by people who knew the genre’s tropes for an audience expected to recognize them. The Long Goodbye takes the protagonist of The Big Sleep and drags him unwittingly into the 70’s, his hardboiled voiceover repurposed as the mutterings of a man out of time; Eddie Coyle is played by Robert Mitchum so audiences would remember Out of the Past; Chinatown casts the director of The Maltese Falcon as its villain for similar reasons; Mean Streets takes its name from a Raymond Chandler quote describing the hardboiled detective; when Harry Moseby confronts his wife’s lover in Night Moves, the man straight-up compares him to Sam Spade; the femme fatale of Body Heat buys her man a fedora, in case the riff on Double Indemnity wasn’t clear enough.

Familiarity made room for subversion, deconstruction. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are archetypes, tough guy PI’s with moral codes, who solve the case and come out on top even if it costs them greatly. Gould, Nicholson, and Hackman all play riffs on this archetype: Gould shows us how out of place a moral code is in the Watergate era; Nicholson tries so hard to come out on top he runs up the cost until it’s too great to bear; Hackman’s need to solve the case, to seek the expected narrative closure, drives him to his own destruction.

The first run of neo-noirs are rife with this reaching back, this grabbing of old tools to see, now that we know what they are, how they can be repurposed, how they can comment on the present as well as their own history. How the wake of World War Two resembled that of Vietnam, and how it differed. Classic noir was, in many ways, America processing its anxiety about women in the workplace, Black folks on the radio, and gay men operating in secret under its nose; neo-noir came about in the aftermath and ongoingness of women’s lib, civil rights, and the Stonewall riots. How would America process its anxiety this time? And how often might one such locus of anxiety get to be the star… or the director? Given noir’s themes of precarity and corruption, of a mean world purpose-built to keep you from succeeding, of urban streets crawling with dirty cops, it’s kinda weird all the classics starred straight white men.

The only noir that knows it’s noir is neo-. And, once you know what it is, what it’s been, that’s when you see all it can be.

2.

It’s (Usually) Widescreen and (Usually) in Color

Let’s get the technicals out of the way: obviously, neo-noir, like most film since the 60’s, usually forsakes the old academy ratio (1.37:1) in favor of regular (1.85:1) or anamorphic (2.35:1) widescreen, and it’s typically in color.

This raises the (unexpectedly discursive) question: can a film be noir if it’s in color?

Here’s what critics and academics love to debate, what seemingly every essay on noir has to devote at least a paragraph to: is film noir a genre? Should we analyze it as a genre, as we would the western? Or is it more of a cycle, like the French New Wave? Or is it more of a movement, like Dogme 95? Or is film noir just a style?

Certainly it has a style. And there are a lot of elements to that style which persist in its modern incarnation: the shadows cast by Venetian blinds, cigarettes hanging from the corner of a mouth, fedoras, snubnose revolvers, dames with long legs, rain slick city streets, and, of course, that pulpy dialogue. But the most iconic, the most recognizable, the easiest way to clock a classic noir by sight is that high-contrast black and white. Blacks so deep Anish Kapoor gets his lawyer on the phone.

That kind of black and white was a recent innovation. Film stocks in the 30’s weren’t very sensitive, you had to shine a lot of light onto a scene to register an image. Typically, a bright key light to make the character visible, a fill light to ease those harsh shadows, and a backlight to create separation between foreground and background. By this point, so many foot-candles are in play that any long, deep shadows have been dispelled. But by the 40’s, high-speed black and white that could film in low-light conditions had hit the market, allowing filmmakers to explore low-key lighting with higher contrasts, or forsaking the key entirely and just using a rimlight. The possibilities of this film stock were explored all over Hollywood, but noir is where it was pushed to extremes, and that infamous style was physically impossible a decade earlier.

Now, if noir is a genre, visuals can change over time. But if it’s a style? Can you change the central stylistic feature and still call it noir? Or is it, at that point, something else entirely?

The fun thing about this debate is literally nothing hangs in the balance. Like, Chinatown is in color; okay, so does that mean I shouldn’t compare J.J. Gittes to classic noir PI’s like Mike Hammer and Jeff Markham? Oh, no no, he’s obviously drawing on that tradition. And should I not talk about Evelyn Mulwray exploiting and subverting the “can she be trusted or not?” tradition established by femmes fatales like Gilda? No, the movie relies on the expectations set by those actresses. Should I overlook noir’s tendency to take the bloom off of Los Angeles, and how Chinatown shows the systemic origins of the city’s corruption? Oh, absolutely not, the movie’s provoking that conversation intentionally! Oh, so there’s actually no genre analysis tools that get locked in a cupboard if noir turns out to be a style. Y’all just like to argue. This is Chicago and New York yelling about pizza; the argument’s more important than the food.

For our purposes, neo-noir is a genre, and it can be in color. The more interesting question is: what does color bring to the noir?

The obvious? Things are what the are: blood is red [Killing them Softly], bombshells are blonde [L.A. Confidential], dresses are blue [Devil in a Blue Dress], money be green [Bound]. Where the 40’s embraced a high-contrast stylism, the 70’s went for a low-contrast realism, though for similar, technical reasons: there was, again, an affordable, high-speed film stock new to the market that could shoot in low-light conditions, this time in color, but the trade-off was the images were low in contrast and saturation. Some worked against this [Chinatown] while others learned to work within it [The Long Goodbye, Taxi Driver], embracing a gritty realism that borrowed more from the Italians than classic noir did the Germans [neorealism vs. expressionism]. (Why is it always the Axes?) Also, classic noirs were typically shot on studio backlots, allowing for complex lighting setups, where 70’s neo-noirs were shot guerilla-style in the street with natural light.

But by the 80’s, films stock got more varied and studios started writing checks to New Hollywood directors. Since then, noir can look like anything.

Today, neo-noirs set in the classic noir era - that is, period pieces - will often use a muted palette - greys, dark greens, and navy blues [Motherless Brooklyn, The Outfit, Miller’s Crossing, Hollywoodland] - or, alternately, a warm, sepia color grade [Live By Night, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Chinatown, Devil in a Blue Dress], to, even in color, evoke the black and white films they’re drawing on. Neo-noirs set in the present more often tint the frame with neon lights [Blade Runner, Gemini, Blow Out, Mona Lisa], as that’s a familiar feature of nighttime in the urban jungle that noir before color couldn’t depict; it’s also a means of, as Kyle Kallgren put it, “lighting the darkness,” illuminating the scene without dispelling its shadows. Also, now and again, neo-noir will choose black and white [The Man who Wasn’t There, The Good German, Mickey One, Renaissance] as an aesthetic affectation, making it abundantly clear which tradition they are following in. This is rare, happening only about as often as classic noir was in color, which was a thing! [A Kiss Before Dying, Leave Her to Heaven, Bad Day at Black Rock, Accused of Murder] But black and white means something different to the neo-noir; classic noir’s contrast, its long, dark shadows, its stark angles, those were ways of stylizing what was, in the end, a practical reality: color film was expensive and mostly used for musicals and epics. Even the A-picture noirs with name actors were comparatively modest in budget. Now that color is the standard, and knowing how to light for black and white a somewhat more specialized skill, any film forsaking color is a deliberate choice, in much the way doing a crime film or melodrama in color would be in the 50’s. Today, black and white is a statement.

All that being said, none of these trends are consistent, and the film that follows one is less common than the film that forsakes them all. Neo-noir is far more visually heterogenous than classic noir ever was, despite its more intentional affiliation with the genre. As you’ve maybe gathered from the title of this video, neo-noir’s visual language doesn’t have rules, only tendencies.

3.

It’s Post Code

§1 Blood, Blow, Breasts, and Blasphemy

One of Hollywood’s most significant upheavals happened during the stretch between classic noir’s “end” in the late 50’s and neo-noir’s ascent in the early 70’s: the fall of the Hays Code in 1968. Every classic noir ever produced in America was subject to its strictures about what could and could not be depicted on film.

“[A]ction showing the taking of human life, even in the mystery stories, is to be cut to the minimum. These frequent presentations of murder tend to lessen regard for the sacredness of life.”

“Because of its evil consequences, the drug traffic should never be presented in any form. The existence of the trade should not be brought to the attention of audiences.”

“Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown. In general, passion should be so treated that these scenes do not stimulate the lower and baser element.”

“Obscenity in word, gesture, reference, song, joke, or by suggestion (even when likely to be understood by only part of the audience) is forbidden.”

“The just rights, history, and feelings of any nation are entitled to consideration and respectful treatment.” (Yeah, this one meant we weren’t allowed to criticize the Nazis until 1939.)

And yet, what caught the French eye in 1944 was film noir’s brutality, eroticism, tough talk, and criminality. This despite any depiction of blood, sex, profanity, or the drug trade being strictly verboten. The structure of film noir can’t help being shaped by this tension between what is of interest, what is allowed, and what you can get away with: okay, the taking of human life must be kept to a minimum; what constitutes “minimum?” Say the villain is definitely a murderer, his back is to the camera, and our view is blocked by a window frame: then can he die in a hail of bullets? [This Gun for Hire] What if the guy he’s shooting at is entirely in the shadows? [The Big Combo] If the whole plot hinges on two people having an affair, you can’t say the seduction is gratuitous! [The Postman Always Rings Twice] And we’re not supposed to have homosexuals, even coded ones, but do the censors recognize the codes? [The Maltese Falcon]

This is how it worked. The aesthetics of noir were often shaped by directors (Otto Preminger most famously) playing games of chicken with the censors.

So what happens when a genre that by necessity built its vibe on implication and inference takes a nap through the 60’s and wakes up with no more Production Code? At the best of times, this allows a refreshing directness, iconic moments that could’ve never happened under the Code. [Basic Instinct (leg uncross), Taxi Driver (“who the fuck you think you’re talking to?”), Chinatown (nose cutting), Pulp Fiction (overdose scene)] At the worst of times, there’s a kind of “look how grown up we are” posturing. A lot of gory, horny pastiches and direct remakes of the classics, especially in the 70’s and early 80’s.

I’m not here to echo the Hays Code. All that stuff was taken out of the Cain and Hammett novels for moralistic reasons, and putting it back in is a reclamation of sorts. And the line separating an iconic moment from “I’m a big boy today!” is subjectively drawn. We can scoff and say “I don’t think Double Indemnity is improved by watching the characters frick.” But sensuality is an artistic tool. The femme fatale is a character who uses her body as a weapon. There is power in the withholding [Double Indemnity], but there is also power in the showing [Body Heat]. Even in purely aesthetic terms - Body Heat’s lusty vibe is kind of unparalleled. There is merit in watching her frick. All’s I’m saying is: less so watching her explode?

But noir has always been a lurid affair, a common place to poke at taboos, both justifiably or self-indulgently. Neo-noir periodically gets fixated on a particular transgression - violence in the 70’s [Taxi Driver’s final shootout], sex and drugs in the 80’s [Fatal Attraction, Scarface], profanity in the 90’s [Pulp Fiction’s “does he look like a bitch”] - but filmmakers usually get the worst excesses out of their systems after a few years. Once they’re done copycatting whoever used it to good effect and it stops being the shiny new toy, it becomes just one of many tricks in the bag.

§2 Crime, Unpunished

One of the Hays Code’s most unbendable rules was, crime could not pay. Anyone committing a crime must face judgment. If the crime is in some way forgivable, they might end the movie reformed. But if the crime is serious? They have to be dead or in jail by the credits.

It’s impossible to tell how much of noir’s fatalism stems from this.

Just about every noir I’ve ever seen contains at least one murder. Broadly, the movies hinge on murder. And murderers, accomplices, and accessories have to end up arrested or shot. But murder isn’t really murder; murder is a proxy for criminality and criminality is a proxy for sin. Noir is about engaging with an irredeemable darkness that exists just out of view, and the Hays office dictated this darkness must be kept at bay.

In other words, an irredeemable world had to - through death, conviction, or repentance - be redeemed.

Here’s how filmmakers went about it: in the tendency of classic noir, straight society is but a thin membrane stretched across a teeming criminal underworld. Here, in the light of day, life is productive, dignified, safe. It’s also stifling. There is an ache in the soul of Johnny Forbes [Pitfall]. He spends his days in the office and his evenings in the suburbs with the housewife and the little boy, and he’s just supposed to do this, week after week, for the rest of his life. Walter Neff has resisted the pull of the white picket fence for precisely this reason, even if he is delaying the inevitable [Double Indemnity].

Can we blame either of them if the attention of a beautiful woman makes them feel alive? Even if the only way to approach her is to step into the shadows?

Just outside the idyll we call “normal life” is the dangerous and chaotic criminal underbelly. Essayists sometimes call it The Maze. It’s a world of beautiful women, yes, and also guns, smoke, booze, and jazz, reversals, double- and triple-crosses, corruption and seduction. You’re never sure, there, what is true, who you can trust. The beautiful woman wants you to leave your wife, rob her boss, kill her husband. The stories that wend their way through The Maze are strangled, convoluted; if you’ve seen D.O.A. you probably remember Bigelow sitting down at the police station and saying “I need to report a murder… MINE!” cuz the hook is he got poisoned in San Francisco two days ago and only has a few hours left to live! And you probably remember the bit early in his flashback where there’s, like, a horny slide-whistle every time he looks at a lady? What was that about? Oh, and when he finds out he’s been poisoned and he’s trying to figure out who did it and he ends up in, like, a car with a bad guy, and he uses a trolley to get away from him? That was awesome. And then he confesses to his girl she’s all that matters but can’t bring himself to tell her he’s dying! And you know he should probably just spend his last hours with her but he just has to find the truth even though it won’t save him! And then he finds out who did it and tells it to the cops just minutes before collapsing and his last thought before dying is of his girl?! Ugh! Iconic.

But do you remember who poisons him? Or why?

Everything made sense while you were watching it, each scene connected to the next, but, like many noir plots, it’s hard to recall, after the fact, how all those beats fit together. This is in keeping with the hardboiled mystery tradition, with Hammet and Chandler, who hated the parlor room reveal scene. They wanted mysteries that could be enjoyed even if the final chapter were missing. (That makes sense, since their early novels were serialized, and there was no guarantee a reader would see the ending.) So a mystery’s job was more often to drive action than to set up a third-act payoff; a villain was more interesting for their characterization than for their evil plans. By the film’s end, we understand Bigelow was just a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time and he never stood a chance; that feeling is more important than which route through The Maze he took.

Guys like Forbes, Neff, and Bigelow enter The Maze for a variety of reasons. Most often, they’re chasing money or a pair of legs (often both), but sometimes it swallows them up without warning - Roy and Gilbert get kidnapped [The Hitch-Hiker], Manny’s a mistaken identity [The Wrong Man]; it literally jumps in front of Mike Hammer’s car [Kiss Me Deadly]. And once they’re in, they’re in, and the rules of civil society are suspended. This is dangerous, but, also, in a way, liberating. There, you can do something other than live the rest of your life like a schnook.

But once a noir protagonist sets foot in The Maze, they are, traditionally, doomed.

Now, this was a requirement of the Hays Code: you run with the criminals, you get punished like one. You don’t get away with the loot, you don’t run off with the crime boss’ girl; thieves and adulterers end up dead or in jail. Always. This is so pervasive, it’s often written into the screenplay [Edward G. Robinson’s speech in Double Indemnity]. Where noir differs from other crime films made under the Code is the protagonist’s downfall is rarely played as good triumphing over evil, but desperate people grasping for a better life, or for justice, and getting ground up for having tried.

What we can’t know is whether this fatalism was a result of the Hays Code or of the moralism which produced the Hays Code. We can imagine filmmakers wanting to rebel against the conformity of the 40’s and 50’s, to reject the 9-to-5, wealthy institutions, compulsory heterosexuality, racism, the straightjacket of marriage before the no-fault divorce, political corruption, and the military-industrial complex, and getting audiences to sympathize with people who rebelled against these things before coming to ruin was as close as one could get to critique. But we don’t know how they’d act if the Code were lifted. If the filmmakers had had a choice, how many would let the dangerous woman run free, the bank robber get away and start fresh? And how many, without the Code, would make their criminals more violent, more sexual, more sacrilegious, but would ultimately dispatch them all the same? How much was “too much”? How far from the moral majority was “too far”?

Post-Code neo-noir is able to tackle this question, and its answers run the gamut.

A protagonist who enters The Maze may still end up dead [After Dark, My Sweet], may still end up arrested [Point Break], may survive and get the girl and it’s a happy ending [True Romance], may survive and get the girl and that’s fucking horrifying [The Player], may survive and get the girl and whether that’s good is a real head-scratcher [Suture], may survive and avoid jail but lose their soul [The Pledge], may end up in jail but the criminal justice system is bullshit [The Onion Field], may turn out to have been the villain all along [The Usual Suspects]. The protagonist’s ultimate fate may be unclear [Drive, In Bruges, The Long Good Friday]. The villain’s purported guilt may be undetermined [Memories of Murder, Cutter’s Way, Phoenix]. The femme fatale might die [One False Move], go to jail [Black Widow], escape by the skin of her teeth [Emily the Criminal], or make off with the loot and sip mai tais on a beach someplace [Body Heat]!

The possibility of crime going unpunished expands the noir palette. It also exposes filmmakers to new pressures; where, in classic noir, a crooked cop may die nobly in a shootout while trying to redeem himself, in neo-noir that might get retconned in the next scene cuz studios hate a downer ending! [L.A. Confidential]. Far from a theme born of necessity, fatalism today is something directors have to fight for. Fatalism’s one of noir’s core tendencies, which is interesting, since we’re unsure how many classic directors were performing it as a concession to the studio. Depending on how we interpret the Hays Code’s influence on the classic era, a neo-noir with a happy ending can be read as a betrayal of the genre, or as its culmination.