What Does Noir Mean in America Today?

This is the final day of the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon, co-sponsored by Farran Nehme of Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and benefiting the Film Noir Foundation's efforts to restore a print of The Sound of Fury (1950).  If you've enjoyed the blogathon posts here and on other blogs and have not yet donated to the Film Noir Foundation, please consider following this link and doing so now.

I'm going to conclude the blogathon here at USIH by taking up a question that I almost posed in my blogathon kick-off post a week ago: what is the status of film noir in U.S. thought and culture in the early twenty-first century?

I

In a typically witty 2007 essay in Esquire, the cultural critic Chuck Klosterman (and former colleague of mine at the University of Leipzig's American Studies Institute) mused about his experiences touring Germany and the ways in which Germans misunderstand the United States:

During a weekend in Frankfurt, I went to an exhibit at the Schirn Kunsthalle art museum called "I Like America." This title (as one might expect) was meant to be ironic; it's taken from a 1974 conceptual art piece called I Like America and America Likes Me, in which German artist Joseph Beuys flew to New York and spent three days in a room with a live coyote and fifty copies of The Wall Street Journal. (This piece was a European response to the destruction of Native American culture, which made about as much sense to me as it did to the coyote.) The bulk of "I Like America" focused on German interest in nineteenth-century American culture, specifically the depictions of Buffalo Bill, cowboys, and the artistic portrayal of Indians as noble savages. It was (kind of ) brilliant. But it was curious to read the descriptions of what these paintings and photographs were supposed to signify; almost all of them were alleged to illustrate some tragic flaw with American ideology.

And it slowly dawned on me that the creators of "I Like America" had made one critical error: While they had not necessarily misunderstood the historical relationship between Americans and cowboy iconography, they totally misinterpreted its magnitude. With the possible exception of Jon Bon Jovi, I can't think of any modern American who gives a shit about cowboys, even metaphorically. Dramatic op-ed writers are wont to criticize warhawk politicians by comparing them to John Wayne, but no one really believes that Hondo affects policy; it's just a shorthand way to describe something we already understand. But European intellectuals use cowboy culture to understand American sociology, and that's a specious relationship (even during moments when it almost makes sense). As it turns out, Germans care about cowboys way more than we do.

Although I think Chuck exaggerates the non-importance of the cowboy in the United States today--he really needs to visit Oklahoma City's lavish National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum the next time he's out here--I think, broadly speaking, he's correct.  The iconography of the West, once central to American culture, is now of, at best, regional importance.  

The cultural significance of genres and their iconography come and go.  Once culturally central forms like blackface minstrelsy and the Western eventually lose their centrality... though they often leave traces that last long after their heyday. Everyone knows the Western. Occasionally a revisionist Western--like Unforgiven, HBO's Deadwood, or, most recently, the Coen Brothers' True Grit--becomes popular and salient. And the form is certainly familiar enough to produce genre-bending efforts like Joss Whedon's scifi Western Firefly and its movie sequel Serenity.   But cowboys, even metaphorical ones, simply make less of a difference in American life today than they did in the mid-20th century.

The same, I think, is not true for film noir.  But proving that this is the case is, of course, kind of tricky.

II

In an effort to chart the place of noir today, I took my copy of A New Literary History of the America (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009) off the shelf.  This doorstopper of a book, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollars, attempts to present a new, roughly chronological look at the sweep of American culture through two-hundred original essays, often framed around cultural events. Film is well represented; David Thomson was on the editorial board of the book.  And it's fascinating. I have a hard time imagining reading it from cover to cover, but it's the kind of book that one very easily gets lost in.

As far as I can tell, film noir goes entirely unmentioned in its pages.

Noir lurks around the edges of William Beard's essay on Hitchcock's Psycho (pp. 885-889).  It almost comes up in Howard Hampton's piece on the film critic Manny Farber's 1962 essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (908-913).  Film noir might have been mentioned in passing in William J. Mann's piece on Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (880-885), as the director had previously made two or three great film noirs.  But it isn't.  Joseph McBride's essay on Citizen Kane (752-757) also might have provided an occasion to discuss noir, but it doesn't. Instead we get a reexploration of the Sarris-Kael auteur theory debate over whether Kane was Orson Welles's picture or Herman J. Mankiewicz's.  Film noir doesn't even make an appearance in Walter Mosely's essay on "Hardboiled" (598-602).  Sunset Boulevard gets a parenthetical mention in Douglas McGrath's celebration of Preston Sturges (742-747).  But that's about it for film noir.

It's always hard to draw conclusions from dogs that don't bark, but the total absence of noir from Marcus and Sollars's volume really surprised me.  Both because noir is still a vibrant part of U.S. culture...and, just as importantly for a new literary history, because it has been for decades. And because Greil Marcus has always seemed like a noir kind of guy to me, a critic whose books often describe dark cultural pasts that we cannot entirely escape.

III

I got a bit more satisfaction running "noir" through the Google Ngram Viewer for American books between 1945 and the present.  This was more what I'd have expected.  Not much action before the 1970s. Then a noticeable bump in the mid-1970s, followed by a decrease in the early 1980s, a plateau in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then a pretty steady increase in usage since then.

But it's hard to draw conclusions from Google Ngrams, as fun as they are.

IV


I do think the significance of noir--and with it today's neo-noirs--have changed since talk of film noir burst on the American scene in the 1970s.  You'll recall Paul Schrader's prescient declaration about film noir and the 1970s in his seminal "Notes on Film Noir" (1971) which I quoted a week ago:

American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character, but compared to such relentlessly cynical films noir as Kiss Me Deadly or Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the new self-hate cinema of Easy Rider and Medium Cool seems naive and romantic. As the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late Forties increasingly attractive. The Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties were to the Sixties.

Schrader proved to be right about both the decade that was just beginning and the films that Hollywood would make in the near future (at least until Jaws and Star Wars appeared). Noir, in Schrader's sense, remains a fine narrative mode for discussing the Seventies.  Jefferson Cowie's excellent history of the era, Stayin' Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class begins its first chapter with a horrific bit of real-life noir: the triple murder of dissident United Mine Workers union activist Jock Yablonski, his wife, and daughter in the morning of December 31, 1969. The murders had been ordered by UMWA President Tony Boyle, whom Yablonski had unsuccessfully tried to defeat.  As Schrader had predicted they would be, the Seventies as presented by Cowie were a decade of retrenchment and dashed hopes.

The great early neo-noirs of the 1970s engaged in the sort of social commentary that Schrader seemed to crave in his essay.  Films like The Long Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974) take place in societies that have become utterly corrupt. Our guide in each case is a Chandleresque shamus. Chandler's own creation, Phillip Marlowe (Elliott Gould), in the case of The Long Goodbye and the very Marlowe-like Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown.

But if Chandler's Marlowe was able to stand apart from his corrupt society in a way that maintained his sense of honor and dignity, in the world of these neo-noirs this was less possible.  In The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman reimagined Marlowe as a kind of Rip van Winkle, waking up with his mid-century values in the very different world of 1970s Los Angeles.  Until the very end of the film, he seems more than a little lost.  And Chinatown's Jake Gittes is humiliated in ways Chandler's Marlowe never is.  His nose is cut by a thug (tellingly played by the film's director, Roman Polanski), a kind of upwardly displaced castration that makes Jake spend much of the film wearing a ridiculous bandage on his face.  And the film ends with Jake utterly flummoxed, having fundamentally misread his situation.  At film's end he is not only unable to stop the evil of his society, but also unable to entirely comprehend it.

V


I largely agree with Andrew's general conclusions about recent neo-noir in his post on Sin City (a film I haven't seen, so I can't comment on): if earlier noirs (and neo-noirs) were deeply dependent on a sense of alienation, American culture has now largely discarded the idea of alienation. Post-alienation America, as Andrew suggests, has post-alienation noirs.

Though the neo-noirs of the early '70s were unlike their mid-century classic noir predecessors in a variety of ways, alienation continued to play a key role in them.  In both The Long Goodbye and Chinatown, evil (to use Andrew's phrase) "bubbles out from under the surface."  Gould's Marlowe is a deeply and frankly alienated character.  Jake Gittes puts up a better front at times but is as well.

But if today's neo-noirs don't draw on the alienation that was much of the attraction of the genre to filmmakers and critics in the early 1970s, what is the continuing attraction of noir in post-alienation America (as Andrew puts it)?

Andrew provides one answer that apparently works for films like Sin City and 300:  the highly aestheticized violence of noir makes it an attractive mode for a particular kind of cinematic nihilism.

But there are other attractions of noir, as well. One of the most vital remains its sense of cool.  In classic noirs this could be an important response to the alienated world in which the noir protagonist found himself.  Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity and Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard are doomed from the moment we see them on the screen. But their witty voiceovers give them a sense of power, even in the face of (or in the case of Gillis after) death.

As I've suggested above, some '70s neo-noir protagonist suffer the indignity of having their cool shattered.

Some recent neo-noirs, I think, are often played so as to emphasize a sense of cool, in a way that more thoroughly displaces any sense of alienation in the characters' worlds.

To take two very different examples:

In the Coen Brothers's comedy noir The Big Lebowski (1998), the Dude (Jeff Bridges) is thrust into a Chandler-like plot involving kidnapping and deception among L.A.'s rich and powerful and L.A.'s demimonde.  But through it all, he really only cares about bowling, his white russians, his friends, and his rug (since it really tied the room together).  The Dude is something that earlier noir protagonists almost never were: truly indifferent about the corruptions of his world, though in a way that establishes a kind of integrity about the few things that matter to him.

Rian Johnson's Brick (2005) is a film with a much more serious tone. It imagines a Hammett-like world inside a contemporary southern Californian high school.  The conceit works in part because, like many a hardboiled novel, high school is dominated by tightly nit cliques, arcane argot, and a desire to be cool.  Although the film has some black humor in it, Johnson is playing for keeps. It begins with a murder, which we and Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the high school student turned PI, take deadly seriously.  But there's still a sense that, since this is high school, it's only a stage (in both senses of that word).

VI

Let me conclude this post by thanking my fellow USIH bloggers for their excellent contributions to this blogathon.  Here are the earlier posts:

My post on Moonrise

Andrew Hartman's post on Sin City

Tim Lacy's post on Touch of Evil

Ray Haberski's post on The Third Man

David Sehat's post on The Maltese Falcon


and my post on film noir and U.S. intellectual history.

And don't forget to donate to the Film Noir Foundation.  If you've read this far, you really should!

What Does Noir Mean in America Today?

This is the final day of the For the Love of Film (Noir) Blogathon, co-sponsored by Farran Nehme of Self-Styled Siren and Marilyn Ferdinand of Ferdy on Films, and benefiting the Film Noir Foundation's efforts to restore a print of The Sound of Fury (1950).  If you've enjoyed the blogathon posts here and on other blogs and have not yet donated to the Film Noir Foundation, please consider following this link and doing so now.

I'm going to conclude the blogathon here at USIH by taking up a question that I almost posed in my blogathon kick-off post a week ago: what is the status of film noir in U.S. thought and culture in the early twenty-first century?

I

In a typically witty 2007 essay in Esquire, the cultural critic Chuck Klosterman (and former colleague of mine at the University of Leipzig's American Studies Institute) mused about his experiences touring Germany and the ways in which Germans misunderstand the United States:

During a weekend in Frankfurt, I went to an exhibit at the Schirn Kunsthalle art museum called "I Like America." This title (as one might expect) was meant to be ironic; it's taken from a 1974 conceptual art piece called I Like America and America Likes Me, in which German artist Joseph Beuys flew to New York and spent three days in a room with a live coyote and fifty copies of The Wall Street Journal. (This piece was a European response to the destruction of Native American culture, which made about as much sense to me as it did to the coyote.) The bulk of "I Like America" focused on German interest in nineteenth-century American culture, specifically the depictions of Buffalo Bill, cowboys, and the artistic portrayal of Indians as noble savages. It was (kind of ) brilliant. But it was curious to read the descriptions of what these paintings and photographs were supposed to signify; almost all of them were alleged to illustrate some tragic flaw with American ideology.

And it slowly dawned on me that the creators of "I Like America" had made one critical error: While they had not necessarily misunderstood the historical relationship between Americans and cowboy iconography, they totally misinterpreted its magnitude. With the possible exception of Jon Bon Jovi, I can't think of any modern American who gives a shit about cowboys, even metaphorically. Dramatic op-ed writers are wont to criticize warhawk politicians by comparing them to John Wayne, but no one really believes that Hondo affects policy; it's just a shorthand way to describe something we already understand. But European intellectuals use cowboy culture to understand American sociology, and that's a specious relationship (even during moments when it almost makes sense). As it turns out, Germans care about cowboys way more than we do.

Although I think Chuck exaggerates the non-importance of the cowboy in the United States today--he really needs to visit Oklahoma City's lavish National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum the next time he's out here--I think, broadly speaking, he's correct.  The iconography of the West, once central to American culture, is now of, at best, regional importance.  

The cultural significance of genres and their iconography come and go.  Once culturally central forms like blackface minstrelsy and the Western eventually lose their centrality... though they often leave traces that last long after their heyday. Everyone knows the Western. Occasionally a revisionist Western--like Unforgiven, HBO's Deadwood, or, most recently, the Coen Brothers' True Grit--becomes popular and salient. And the form is certainly familiar enough to produce genre-bending efforts like Joss Whedon's scifi Western Firefly and its movie sequel Serenity.   But cowboys, even metaphorical ones, simply make less of a difference in American life today than they did in the mid-20th century.

The same, I think, is not true for film noir.  But proving that this is the case is, of course, kind of tricky.

II

In an effort to chart the place of noir today, I took my copy of A New Literary History of the America (Cambridge: Belknap, 2009) off the shelf.  This doorstopper of a book, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollars, attempts to present a new, roughly chronological look at the sweep of American culture through two-hundred original essays, often framed around cultural events. Film is well represented; David Thomson was on the editorial board of the book.  And it's fascinating. I have a hard time imagining reading it from cover to cover, but it's the kind of book that one very easily gets lost in.

As far as I can tell, film noir goes entirely unmentioned in its pages.

Noir lurks around the edges of William Beard's essay on Hitchcock's Psycho (pp. 885-889).  It almost comes up in Howard Hampton's piece on the film critic Manny Farber's 1962 essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (908-913).  Film noir might have been mentioned in passing in William J. Mann's piece on Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (880-885), as the director had previously made two or three great film noirs.  But it isn't.  Joseph McBride's essay on Citizen Kane (752-757) also might have provided an occasion to discuss noir, but it doesn't. Instead we get a reexploration of the Sarris-Kael auteur theory debate over whether Kane was Orson Welles's picture or Herman J. Mankiewicz's.  Film noir doesn't even make an appearance in Walter Mosely's essay on "Hardboiled" (598-602).  Sunset Boulevard gets a parenthetical mention in Douglas McGrath's celebration of Preston Sturges (742-747).  But that's about it for film noir.

It's always hard to draw conclusions from dogs that don't bark, but the total absence of noir from Marcus and Sollars's volume really surprised me.  Both because noir is still a vibrant part of U.S. culture...and, just as importantly for a new literary history, because it has been for decades. And because Greil Marcus has always seemed like a noir kind of guy to me, a critic whose books often describe dark cultural pasts that we cannot entirely escape.

III

I got a bit more satisfaction running "noir" through the Google Ngram Viewer for American books between 1945 and the present.  This was more what I'd have expected.  Not much action before the 1970s. Then a noticeable bump in the mid-1970s, followed by a decrease in the early 1980s, a plateau in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then a pretty steady increase in usage since then.

But it's hard to draw conclusions from Google Ngrams, as fun as they are.

IV


I do think the significance of noir--and with it today's neo-noirs--have changed since talk of film noir burst on the American scene in the 1970s.  You'll recall Paul Schrader's prescient declaration about film noir and the 1970s in his seminal "Notes on Film Noir" (1971) which I quoted a week ago:

American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character, but compared to such relentlessly cynical films noir as Kiss Me Deadly or Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the new self-hate cinema of Easy Rider and Medium Cool seems naive and romantic. As the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late Forties increasingly attractive. The Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties were to the Sixties.

Schrader proved to be right about both the decade that was just beginning and the films that Hollywood would make in the near future (at least until Jaws and Star Wars appeared). Noir, in Schrader's sense, remains a fine narrative mode for discussing the Seventies.  Jefferson Cowie's excellent history of the era, Stayin' Alive: the 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class begins its first chapter with a horrific bit of real-life noir: the triple murder of dissident United Mine Workers union activist Jock Yablonski, his wife, and daughter in the morning of December 31, 1969. The murders had been ordered by UMWA President Tony Boyle, whom Yablonski had unsuccessfully tried to defeat.  As Schrader had predicted they would be, the Seventies as presented by Cowie were a decade of retrenchment and dashed hopes.

The great early neo-noirs of the 1970s engaged in the sort of social commentary that Schrader seemed to crave in his essay.  Films like The Long Goodbye (1973) and Chinatown (1974) take place in societies that have become utterly corrupt. Our guide in each case is a Chandleresque shamus. Chandler's own creation, Phillip Marlowe (Elliott Gould), in the case of The Long Goodbye and the very Marlowe-like Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown.

But if Chandler's Marlowe was able to stand apart from his corrupt society in a way that maintained his sense of honor and dignity, in the world of these neo-noirs this was less possible.  In The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman reimagined Marlowe as a kind of Rip van Winkle, waking up with his mid-century values in the very different world of 1970s Los Angeles.  Until the very end of the film, he seems more than a little lost.  And Chinatown's Jake Gittes is humiliated in ways Chandler's Marlowe never is.  His nose is cut by a thug (tellingly played by the film's director, Roman Polanski), a kind of upwardly displaced castration that makes Jake spend much of the film wearing a ridiculous bandage on his face.  And the film ends with Jake utterly flummoxed, having fundamentally misread his situation.  At film's end he is not only unable to stop the evil of his society, but also unable to entirely comprehend it.

V


I largely agree with Andrew's general conclusions about recent neo-noir in his post on Sin City (a film I haven't seen, so I can't comment on): if earlier noirs (and neo-noirs) were deeply dependent on a sense of alienation, American culture has now largely discarded the idea of alienation. Post-alienation America, as Andrew suggests, has post-alienation noirs.

Though the neo-noirs of the early '70s were unlike their mid-century classic noir predecessors in a variety of ways, alienation continued to play a key role in them.  In both The Long Goodbye and Chinatown, evil (to use Andrew's phrase) "bubbles out from under the surface."  Gould's Marlowe is a deeply and frankly alienated character.  Jake Gittes puts up a better front at times but is as well.

But if today's neo-noirs don't draw on the alienation that was much of the attraction of the genre to filmmakers and critics in the early 1970s, what is the continuing attraction of noir in post-alienation America (as Andrew puts it)?

Andrew provides one answer that apparently works for films like Sin City and 300:  the highly aestheticized violence of noir makes it an attractive mode for a particular kind of cinematic nihilism.

But there are other attractions of noir, as well. One of the most vital remains its sense of cool.  In classic noirs this could be an important response to the alienated world in which the noir protagonist found himself.  Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity and Joe Gillis (William Holden) in Sunset Boulevard are doomed from the moment we see them on the screen. But their witty voiceovers give them a sense of power, even in the face of (or in the case of Gillis after) death.

As I've suggested above, some '70s neo-noir protagonist suffer the indignity of having their cool shattered.

Some recent neo-noirs, I think, are often played so as to emphasize a sense of cool, in a way that more thoroughly displaces any sense of alienation in the characters' worlds.

To take two very different examples:

In the Coen Brothers's comedy noir The Big Lebowski (1998), the Dude (Jeff Bridges) is thrust into a Chandler-like plot involving kidnapping and deception among L.A.'s rich and powerful and L.A.'s demimonde.  But through it all, he really only cares about bowling, his white russians, his friends, and his rug (since it really tied the room together).  The Dude is something that earlier noir protagonists almost never were: truly indifferent about the corruptions of his world, though in a way that establishes a kind of integrity about the few things that matter to him.

Rian Johnson's Brick (2005) is a film with a much more serious tone. It imagines a Hammett-like world inside a contemporary southern Californian high school.  The conceit works in part because, like many a hardboiled novel, high school is dominated by tightly nit cliques, arcane argot, and a desire to be cool.  Although the film has some black humor in it, Johnson is playing for keeps. It begins with a murder, which we and Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the high school student turned PI, take deadly seriously.  But there's still a sense that, since this is high school, it's only a stage (in both senses of that word).

VI

Let me conclude this post by thanking my fellow USIH bloggers for their excellent contributions to this blogathon.  Here are the earlier posts:

My post on Moonrise

Andrew Hartman's post on Sin City

Tim Lacy's post on Touch of Evil

Ray Haberski's post on The Third Man

David Sehat's post on The Maltese Falcon


and my post on film noir and U.S. intellectual history.

And don't forget to donate to the Film Noir Foundation.  If you've read this far, you really should!

Bonus Weekend Noir Blogging: Frank Borzage's Moonrise and the Politics of Race

I've decided to break our regular weekend silence by continuing our participation in the For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon, which concludes on Monday.  Below the fold you'll find what I hope is an interesting post on Frank Borzage's Moonrise, a film which has been hard to see for many years but is, at least for the moment, readily available for your viewing pleasure.  But I wanted to devote the space above the fold to encouraging you to donate generously to the Film Noir Foundation.  Our blogathon hosts inform us that this year's donations are lagging well behind last year's take.  The problem is apparently not the level of participation--which is as high as it was last year in both blogging and donating--but rather the absence of a small number of big donations that the blogathon generated last year but has not generated this year.  While it would be wonderful if such donations reappeared at the last minute this year, it's more likely that we can make up some of the shortfall by improving significantly on the number of small donors taking part. So, if you haven't given yet, please consider clicking on the black bird above.  It's the stuff that dreams are made of. (For more information on the blogathon and where the money is going, see here.)

Frank Borzage is so often called an under-appreciated director that it seems almost ridiculous to consider him under-appreciated anymore.  But while the amount of attention garnered by Borzage has risen enormously in the last quarter century or so, most of his films remain hard to see.  For years, virtually the only Borzage film available on DVD was the wartime variety musical Stage Door Canteen (1943), in part because it had slipped into the public domain.  The director's many great melodramas, including among many others the silent Seventh Heaven (1927), which garnered Borzage the very first Academy Award for Best Director, and his trio of films set in interwar Germany, Little Man, What Now? (1934), Three Comrades (1938), and The Mortal Storm (1940), were available only on videocasette if at all.  

Then, in late 2008, the hideously overpackaged, but absolutely essential Murnau, Borzage, and Fox box set of DVDs was released.  Suddenly, four great Borzage silents (along with scraps of the lost film from 1929, The River) and six early Borzage sound titles were available. And since then, a steady trickle of other Borzage releases has appeared on DVD, including Three Comrades and the once extremely hard to find No Greater Glory (1934).

Borzage is best known as a director of melodramas, "seven hanky" pictures that took great advantage of the soft-focus photography that the director himself pioneered in the 1920s.  He directed only one film noir: Moonrise (1948), which was also his last great film (and arguably his only significant post-World War II effort).¹  Like most of his output, it has been tough to find on home video.  The film was once available on Laserdisc, and is still available on VHS (though even this may be out of print at this point). But there's no DVD and, as far as I know, no plans for one.  Those interested in seeing Moonrise have had to wait for it to show up--as it occasionally does--on TCM.

Then last fall, the film suddenly appeared on Netflix Instant View.  So, for the moment at least, Borzage's one film noir is available for your viewing pleasure (assuming, that is, you have a Netflix account).  Run, don't walk, to your Netflix queue and add Moonrise.  Or, better yet, clear out an hour-and-a-half of your time and just watch the damn thing!  It's the weekend.  Live a little!

Moonrise is an unusual noir in many ways, most immediately in its setting: rural Virginia. Danny Hawkins (Dale Clark) is the son a murderer who was hanged for his crime. His childhood was spent being teased and bullied about the fate of his father and he fears that he, too, has his parent's "bad blood."  As a young man, he gets in a fist fight over his dad with a longtime nemesis, Jerry Sykes (Lloyd Bridges) and accidentally kills him. He successfully hides the body, but now he has a murder of his own weighing on his conscience.  And, it turns out, Jerry had just proposed marriage to Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell), the woman that Danny loves.

All of this exposition takes place in the extraordinary montage sequence that opens the film:

It should already be clear that, as unusual as its setting is, there's a lot that's quite typically noir about Moonrise: its morally ambiguous protagonist, haunted by his past; its plot involving a crime and its consequences; and its look. Even more than most other noirs, Moonrise looks like something from interwar Germany. Though the film takes place largely outdoors, it's entirely filmed on soundstages.  And Moonrise is a gloriously beautiful movie. Maybe I'm being overly swayed by the title (which is, in fact, from its source novel), but at times Moonrise recalls the first act of F.W. Murnau's American masterpiece Sunrise (1927), with its swampy nighttime shots of the village.

But this is also very much a Frank Borzage film. A great photographer of actors and especially their faces, Borzage makes the most of the very physicality of his terrific cast, even focusing on Gail Russell's nervous habit of clenching her hands as a way of establishing the character she is playing.  But most Borzagean of all, this is a film that ultimately finds redemption for its protagonist, which is a very unusual way for a film noir to end, especially one from the late 1940s. And unlike, say, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), a noir with a formally redemptive ending that is partially undercut by thickly layered irony, Moonrise is strikingly unironic, not least about the power of love and the possibility of grounded and successful masculinity.²

Despite its relative unfamiliarity to all but cinema nerds, so much has been written about Moonrise that there might seem to be little to add.  But I do want to call attention to one aspect of the film that is not as frequently discussed as it should be.

One of Moonrise's most striking characters is Mose, an elderly African American man played by Rex Ingram.³  Nearly everyone writing about Moonrise notes what an unusual character Mose is.  Devoid of the poisonous stereotyping found in most black characters in classical Hollywood cinema, Mose is a figure of great wisdom and dignity, who is also a confidant of the film's (white) protagonist, Danny Hawkins. Before we ever meet Mose, we are told about how well read he is.  And Mose ultimately tells Danny what he needs to hear to own up to his own crime and re-embrace his humanity.  Ingram called it "the best role ever written for a Negro."

Somewhat surprisingly, very little has been written about what the film has to say about race.  Certainly nobody--neither Mose nor the white characters--discusses the color line in the movie, despite the fact that the film is set in Virginia, older characters frequently mutter about "Yankees," and the Civil War is even explicitly invoked in a scene set in an abandoned antebellum mansion (which apparently sits next to Mose's much more modest home).   And the few lines uttered by Mose about being black that appeared in the novel don't appear in the movie.

However, I entirely agree with Holger Römers's sense that Mose's place in Moonrise

call[s] into doubt the widely held opinion about this auteur’s œuvre that “[i]n the end”, as Hervé Dumont summarizes, “[Borzage] shows only limited interest in social mechanisms.”

Römers correctly notes that a role like that of Mose would have stood out for audiences at the time (who certainly wouldn't have seen Mose as a somehow post-racial figure) and that Mose has a number of dialogues about nature and humanity with the almost equally unusual character of Clem Otis (Allyn Joslyn), one of Hollywood's--let alone film noir's--few thoughtful and non-violent Southern sheriffs.

Mose also spends the entire film talking about "race," though the word is never used in the context of the color line. Instead, he talks about the "human race" and the "dog race" (Mose keeps a pack of coonhounds and works as a hunting guide).  Mose's final words in the film--which Römers notes don't appear in the source novel--are spoken to one of his dogs: “If a man knows how to rejoin the human race, once he’s resigned, it helps, Mr. Dog, it helps.”

If Moonrise avoids the most obvious facts about the politics of race in the real world of the American South, it is shot full of subtler racial politics.  To take another example:  the town features a (white) soda jerk, whose exaggerated hipster lingo--like most mid-century hipsterism--obviously has a debt to African American cultural...though, again, the film never draws attention to this point.

I would go further than Römers, however, by noting that Borzage's handling of race in Moonrise is entirely typical of the serious, but often indirect, engagement with politics that one frequently encounters in Borzage's films. One of the reason that critics have spilled so much ink denying that Borzage was interested in politics is that the director made three films before Pearl Harbor set in interwar Germany and dealing at least in part with the rise of fascism.  Two of these films--Little Man, What Now? (1934) and Three Comrades (1938)--were made at a time when the Production Code Administration was still scrupulously avoiding offending the Nazis, lest Hitler's government try to interrupt the flow of Hollywood product to European screens.  Indeed, the German consul in Los Angeles spent months pressuring Joseph Breen to shut down production of Three Comrades, which was based on an Erich Maria Remarque novel.

Nevertheless critics have gone out of their way to claim that Borzage's German trilogy--or at least its first two parts--isn't really concerned with politics at all.  And even The Mortal Storm (1940), the third of the films which focuses entirely on the rise of Nazism, is sometimes seen as imperfectly antifascist.  Borzage's apolitical reputation was bolstered over the years by the producer Victor Saville's repeated (and apparently false) claims that he himself had to direct the key scenes involving Nazism in The Mortal Storm, as Borzage was so naïve about German politics in 1933 that he imagined it to be like Democrats and Republicans.

In fact, Borzage's films are deeply political, though also very unconventional in their politics.  Borzage's own political beliefs were always very private, though there is some evidence to suggest that he was fairly conservative.  His only public statements about politics were some rather dyspeptic anticommunist declarations in Cold War-era interviews.  Certainly his German trilogy contains little Popular Front-style antifascism.  Though not at all apolitical--as their reputation suggests--these films are in many ways antipolitical, suggesting that love--which in Borzage's films has a truly transcendent quality--can provide a path for their characters to escape the morass of German politics, though, especially in the final two of these three films, that escape might have to take place in the afterlife.

I've thought a lot more about Borzage's German trilogy--about which I write a bit in my book and more in various conference papers that I really need to get around to expanding and publishing--than about Moonrise.  But I suspect that a careful reading of the later film will reveal a kind of melodramatic politics of love and race. Unlike the German trilogy, each of whose films feature on-screen acts of political violence from which its protagonists hope to escape, Moonrise entirely avoids representing the actual, violent politics of race in the American South....as, indeed, any Hollywood film of the 1940s would have had to.  It doesn't even seem to present these politics in a displaced form (as does, say, They Won't Forget (1937), which turns the antisemitism of the Leo Frank lynching into a story about purely sectional hostilities). And yet in telling a story about a (Southern white) outcast's return to humanity--and giving an African American a central role in leading him there--Moonrise presents a powerful racial message of a sort that one doesn't expect to find, especially in a film noir.

_______________________________________________________

¹ As befits its director, Moonrise has a very well developed reputation as an underappreciated masterpiece.  There are some excellent essays about it available online, none better, in my opinion, than Holger Römers's "'The Moral of the Auteur Theory': Frank Borzage’s Moonrise (and Theodore Strauss’ Source Novel)," from issue 42 of the online film journal Sense of Cinema. Though the essay takes the form of an argument with Andrew Sarris about auteur theory, it's in fact a wide-ranging appreciation of the film which, unusually, discusses its source material as well.   Readers wanting a more comprehensive discussion of the film should take a look at Römers's piece; as you'll see, I've drawn a lot on it for this post.

² This lack of irony is one of the things that separates it from its better known cinematic cousin,  Charles Laughton's rural, expressionist noir masterpiece, Night of the Hunter (1955).

³ Ingram is, incidentally, a fascinating figure.  Trained as a physician--he was the first African American to graduate from Northwestern Medical School--he was apparently discovered on the street in Hollywood in the 1910s.  After Paul Robeson, he was probably the most significant African American actor in Hollywood in an era in which significant roles for blacks were nearly nonexistent. Today, he's best known for his appearance as the genie in the Alexander Korda version of The Thief of Bagdad (1940), but he's also terrific in Sahara (1943), one of the most frankly anti-racist of the World War II combat pictures. 

Bonus Weekend Noir Blogging: Frank Borzage's Moonrise and the Politics of Race

I've decided to break our regular weekend silence by continuing our participation in the For the Love of Film (Noir) blogathon, which concludes on Monday.  Below the fold you'll find what I hope is an interesting post on Frank Borzage's Moonrise, a film which has been hard to see for many years but is, at least for the moment, readily available for your viewing pleasure.  But I wanted to devote the space above the fold to encouraging you to donate generously to the Film Noir Foundation.  Our blogathon hosts inform us that this year's donations are lagging well behind last year's take.  The problem is apparently not the level of participation--which is as high as it was last year in both blogging and donating--but rather the absence of a small number of big donations that the blogathon generated last year but has not generated this year.  While it would be wonderful if such donations reappeared at the last minute this year, it's more likely that we can make up some of the shortfall by improving significantly on the number of small donors taking part. So, if you haven't given yet, please consider clicking on the black bird above.  It's the stuff that dreams are made of. (For more information on the blogathon and where the money is going, see here.)

Frank Borzage is so often called an under-appreciated director that it seems almost ridiculous to consider him under-appreciated anymore.  But while the amount of attention garnered by Borzage has risen enormously in the last quarter century or so, most of his films remain hard to see.  For years, virtually the only Borzage film available on DVD was the wartime variety musical Stage Door Canteen (1943), in part because it had slipped into the public domain.  The director's many great melodramas, including among many others the silent Seventh Heaven (1927), which garnered Borzage the very first Academy Award for Best Director, and his trio of films set in interwar Germany, Little Man, What Now? (1934), Three Comrades (1938), and The Mortal Storm (1940), were available only on videocasette if at all.  

Then, in late 2008, the hideously overpackaged, but absolutely essential Murnau, Borzage, and Fox box set of DVDs was released.  Suddenly, four great Borzage silents (along with scraps of the lost film from 1929, The River) and six early Borzage sound titles were available. And since then, a steady trickle of other Borzage releases has appeared on DVD, including Three Comrades and the once extremely hard to find No Greater Glory (1934).

Borzage is best known as a director of melodramas, "seven hanky" pictures that took great advantage of the soft-focus photography that the director himself pioneered in the 1920s.  He directed only one film noir: Moonrise (1948), which was also his last great film (and arguably his only significant post-World War II effort).¹  Like most of his output, it has been tough to find on home video.  The film was once available on Laserdisc, and is still available on VHS (though even this may be out of print at this point). But there's no DVD and, as far as I know, no plans for one.  Those interested in seeing Moonrise have had to wait for it to show up--as it occasionally does--on TCM.

Then last fall, the film suddenly appeared on Netflix Instant View.  So, for the moment at least, Borzage's one film noir is available for your viewing pleasure (assuming, that is, you have a Netflix account).  Run, don't walk, to your Netflix queue and add Moonrise.  Or, better yet, clear out an hour-and-a-half of your time and just watch the damn thing!  It's the weekend.  Live a little!

Moonrise is an unusual noir in many ways, most immediately in its setting: rural Virginia. Danny Hawkins (Dale Clark) is the son a murderer who was hanged for his crime. His childhood was spent being teased and bullied about the fate of his father and he fears that he, too, has his parent's "bad blood."  As a young man, he gets in a fist fight over his dad with a longtime nemesis, Jerry Sykes (Lloyd Bridges) and accidentally kills him. He successfully hides the body, but now he has a murder of his own weighing on his conscience.  And, it turns out, Jerry had just proposed marriage to Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell), the woman that Danny loves.

All of this exposition takes place in the extraordinary montage sequence that opens the film:

It should already be clear that, as unusual as its setting is, there's a lot that's quite typically noir about Moonrise: its morally ambiguous protagonist, haunted by his past; its plot involving a crime and its consequences; and its look. Even more than most other noirs, Moonrise looks like something from interwar Germany. Though the film takes place largely outdoors, it's entirely filmed on soundstages.  And Moonrise is a gloriously beautiful movie. Maybe I'm being overly swayed by the title (which is, in fact, from its source novel), but at times Moonrise recalls the first act of F.W. Murnau's American masterpiece Sunrise (1927), with its swampy nighttime shots of the village.

But this is also very much a Frank Borzage film. A great photographer of actors and especially their faces, Borzage makes the most of the very physicality of his terrific cast, even focusing on Gail Russell's nervous habit of clenching her hands as a way of establishing the character she is playing.  But most Borzagean of all, this is a film that ultimately finds redemption for its protagonist, which is a very unusual way for a film noir to end, especially one from the late 1940s. And unlike, say, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953), a noir with a formally redemptive ending that is partially undercut by thickly layered irony, Moonrise is strikingly unironic, not least about the power of love and the possibility of grounded and successful masculinity.²

Despite its relative unfamiliarity to all but cinema nerds, so much has been written about Moonrise that there might seem to be little to add.  But I do want to call attention to one aspect of the film that is not as frequently discussed as it should be.

One of Moonrise's most striking characters is Mose, an elderly African American man played by Rex Ingram.³  Nearly everyone writing about Moonrise notes what an unusual character Mose is.  Devoid of the poisonous stereotyping found in most black characters in classical Hollywood cinema, Mose is a figure of great wisdom and dignity, who is also a confidant of the film's (white) protagonist, Danny Hawkins. Before we ever meet Mose, we are told about how well read he is.  And Mose ultimately tells Danny what he needs to hear to own up to his own crime and re-embrace his humanity.  Ingram called it "the best role ever written for a Negro."

Somewhat surprisingly, very little has been written about what the film has to say about race.  Certainly nobody--neither Mose nor the white characters--discusses the color line in the movie, despite the fact that the film is set in Virginia, older characters frequently mutter about "Yankees," and the Civil War is even explicitly invoked in a scene set in an abandoned antebellum mansion (which apparently sits next to Mose's much more modest home).   And the few lines uttered by Mose about being black that appeared in the novel don't appear in the movie.

However, I entirely agree with Holger Römers's sense that Mose's place in Moonrise

call[s] into doubt the widely held opinion about this auteur’s œuvre that “[i]n the end”, as Hervé Dumont summarizes, “[Borzage] shows only limited interest in social mechanisms.”

Römers correctly notes that a role like that of Mose would have stood out for audiences at the time (who certainly wouldn't have seen Mose as a somehow post-racial figure) and that Mose has a number of dialogues about nature and humanity with the almost equally unusual character of Clem Otis (Allyn Joslyn), one of Hollywood's--let alone film noir's--few thoughtful and non-violent Southern sheriffs.

Mose also spends the entire film talking about "race," though the word is never used in the context of the color line. Instead, he talks about the "human race" and the "dog race" (Mose keeps a pack of coonhounds and works as a hunting guide).  Mose's final words in the film--which Römers notes don't appear in the source novel--are spoken to one of his dogs: “If a man knows how to rejoin the human race, once he’s resigned, it helps, Mr. Dog, it helps.”

If Moonrise avoids the most obvious facts about the politics of race in the real world of the American South, it is shot full of subtler racial politics.  To take another example:  the town features a (white) soda jerk, whose exaggerated hipster lingo--like most mid-century hipsterism--obviously has a debt to African American cultural...though, again, the film never draws attention to this point.

I would go further than Römers, however, by noting that Borzage's handling of race in Moonrise is entirely typical of the serious, but often indirect, engagement with politics that one frequently encounters in Borzage's films. One of the reason that critics have spilled so much ink denying that Borzage was interested in politics is that the director made three films before Pearl Harbor set in interwar Germany and dealing at least in part with the rise of fascism.  Two of these films--Little Man, What Now? (1934) and Three Comrades (1938)--were made at a time when the Production Code Administration was still scrupulously avoiding offending the Nazis, lest Hitler's government try to interrupt the flow of Hollywood product to European screens.  Indeed, the German consul in Los Angeles spent months pressuring Joseph Breen to shut down production of Three Comrades, which was based on an Erich Maria Remarque novel.

Nevertheless critics have gone out of their way to claim that Borzage's German trilogy--or at least its first two parts--isn't really concerned with politics at all.  And even The Mortal Storm (1940), the third of the films which focuses entirely on the rise of Nazism, is sometimes seen as imperfectly antifascist.  Borzage's apolitical reputation was bolstered over the years by the producer Victor Saville's repeated (and apparently false) claims that he himself had to direct the key scenes involving Nazism in The Mortal Storm, as Borzage was so naïve about German politics in 1933 that he imagined it to be like Democrats and Republicans.

In fact, Borzage's films are deeply political, though also very unconventional in their politics.  Borzage's own political beliefs were always very private, though there is some evidence to suggest that he was fairly conservative.  His only public statements about politics were some rather dyspeptic anticommunist declarations in Cold War-era interviews.  Certainly his German trilogy contains little Popular Front-style antifascism.  Though not at all apolitical--as their reputation suggests--these films are in many ways antipolitical, suggesting that love--which in Borzage's films has a truly transcendent quality--can provide a path for their characters to escape the morass of German politics, though, especially in the final two of these three films, that escape might have to take place in the afterlife.

I've thought a lot more about Borzage's German trilogy--about which I write a bit in my book and more in various conference papers that I really need to get around to expanding and publishing--than about Moonrise.  But I suspect that a careful reading of the later film will reveal a kind of melodramatic politics of love and race. Unlike the German trilogy, each of whose films feature on-screen acts of political violence from which its protagonists hope to escape, Moonrise entirely avoids representing the actual, violent politics of race in the American South....as, indeed, any Hollywood film of the 1940s would have had to.  It doesn't even seem to present these politics in a displaced form (as does, say, They Won't Forget (1937), which turns the antisemitism of the Leo Frank lynching into a story about purely sectional hostilities). And yet in telling a story about a (Southern white) outcast's return to humanity--and giving an African American a central role in leading him there--Moonrise presents a powerful racial message of a sort that one doesn't expect to find, especially in a film noir.

_______________________________________________________

¹ As befits its director, Moonrise has a very well developed reputation as an underappreciated masterpiece.  There are some excellent essays about it available online, none better, in my opinion, than Holger Römers's "'The Moral of the Auteur Theory': Frank Borzage’s Moonrise (and Theodore Strauss’ Source Novel)," from issue 42 of the online film journal Sense of Cinema. Though the essay takes the form of an argument with Andrew Sarris about auteur theory, it's in fact a wide-ranging appreciation of the film which, unusually, discusses its source material as well.   Readers wanting a more comprehensive discussion of the film should take a look at Römers's piece; as you'll see, I've drawn a lot on it for this post.

² This lack of irony is one of the things that separates it from its better known cinematic cousin,  Charles Laughton's rural, expressionist noir masterpiece, Night of the Hunter (1955).

³ Ingram is, incidentally, a fascinating figure.  Trained as a physician--he was the first African American to graduate from Northwestern Medical School--he was apparently discovered on the street in Hollywood in the 1910s.  After Paul Robeson, he was probably the most significant African American actor in Hollywood in an era in which significant roles for blacks were nearly nonexistent. Today, he's best known for his appearance as the genie in the Alexander Korda version of The Thief of Bagdad (1940), but he's also terrific in Sahara (1943), one of the most frankly anti-racist of the World War II combat pictures. 

Sin City as Neo-Noir; Or, the Aesthetics of Post-Alienation

(This is the fifth in our film noir series. Thanks to Ben, David, Ray, and Tim for their highly entertaining and insightful posts, and special thanks to Ben for getting USIH involved. See his original post for details on the film noir blogathon and the Film Noir Foundation.)

Unlike my colleagues, I am not dedicating my blogathon contribution to one of the noir classics. Instead, I will analyze the not-so-hidden meanings of a recent film that fits the neo-noir category, among other genres, in the typical postmodern fashion of mixing and mashing: Sin City, the 2005 adaptation of Frank Miller’s neo-noir “Dark Horse Presents” comic series from the early 1990s (itself based loosely on a 1950s graphic novel series). Co-directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez (with “special guest director” Quentin Tarantino), Sin City gives beautiful, digital form to an ugly urban dystopia (“Basin City”), with an all-star cast that includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, Benicio del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Josh Hartnett, and Elijah Wood, among others. Watch the trailer for a taste:




The Sin City plot, so far as one exists (among the three self-contained stories within the film), is not really worth summarizing here because it is immaterial to the meaning of the film. What is that meaning? At the most obvious level, the film is about the banality of violence. Shot mostly in black-and-white, which enhances the noir elements of the film, the only color consistently laid over the colorless screen is red. Blood red. There’s a lot of red because there’s a lot of blood. But despite of all the blood, despite all the violence, despite all the torture, there is no remorse. The viewer is not asked to feel bad for the people getting slaughtered. The viewer is not asked to feel anything. We’re meant to let the violence wash over us as we concentrate on the powerful if detached aesthetics of Basin City.

Sin City’s failure to garner an empathetic, much less sympathetic, audience was the crux of a host of ambivalent to negative reviews. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes disapprovingly:

The soporific vibe isn’t helped by the fact that “Sin City” has the muffled, airless quality of some movies loaded with computer-generated imagery. The film feels as if it takes place under glass, which makes conceptual sense, since the characters don’t bear any resemblance to actual life: they don't have hearts (or brains), so there’s no reason they should have lungs or air to breathe. At the same time, Mr. Miller and Mr. Rodriguez's commitment to absolute unreality and the absence of the human factor mean it’s hard to get pulled into the story on any level other than the visceral. When stuff goes blam, you jump like someone who’s landed on a whoopee cushion. But then you just sit there, wrap yourself in the dark and try not to fall asleep.

Acclaimed New York Times film critic A. O. Scott also wrote about Sin City in an essay linking it back (as well as Kung Fu Hustle) to the first film to effectively mix real people with cartoons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which played explicitly on neo noir themes, right down to the 1930s Los Angeles setting. Scott writes:

But even if the technology is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently wonderful, its applications can be worrisome. It is curious that the new techniques are so often used in the service of parody and nostalgia… And the result is often that the old forms, as they are spiffed up and retrofitted, are also emptied out. Mr. Rodriguez, for example, has rendered a gorgeous world of silvery shadows that updates the expressionist cinematography of postwar noir without expressing very much at all. His city, with its tough guys and femmes fatales, feels uninhabited, and the social anxiety and psychological unease of the old film noirs has been digitally broomed away. Instead, "Sin City" offers sensation without feeling, death without grief, sin without guilt and, ultimately, novelty without surprise. Something is missing—something human.

Both Dargis and Scott are correct in the descriptive sense. But they seem to miss the larger point. The brilliance of Sin City—and it is brilliant—lies not in its ability to connect to its audience in some human capacity, but rather, in the ways that it reflects America circa 2005, desensitized to horror by its awful war in Iraq and revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib—torture sanctioned by the upper rungs of the chain of command. Silja J. A. Talvi overtly makes this link in an article she titles “Torture Fatigue,” where she quotes psychologist Bruce Levine: “When you become disconnected from your own alienation [from society], you become cut off from your humanity… You become numb to all kinds of atrocities.”

I think Levine is onto something with his “disconnected from your own alienation” phrase. As historian David Steigerwald argues, alienation is no longer a concept used to describe our current state. Instead, we’re collectively numb. It’s in this context that we need to situate Sin City. In contrast to mid-century film noir, when cynicism was meant to be felt as something, perhaps as a symptom of alienation, Sin City is utterly devoid of feeling. And rightly so. In his post on The Third Man, Ray poses a bifurcation between noir and liberalism, the former too despairing, the later at least offering a message of redemption, if not a naïve one rooted in a predictably happy ending. Sin City does not work along these lines. It represents a void, plain and simple.

Or take Tim’s contextual analysis of Touch of Evil. Tim writes:

I think something of the significance of film noir, at least in the 1950s, is in the way that the genre captures that slice of the repressed dissatisfaction, always roiling below the surface, of the decade. If the period’s intense anti-communism resulted in idealist visions of America (i.e. as the proverbial “city on the hill”), then noir captures that city’s messy undercurrents. The aesthetic beauty in those films alerts us to their artistry, but their mood reflects what every close-up of the decade reveals: flaws, cracks, and imperfections in the foundational narrative.

In contrast, Sin City is not a return of the repressed in this sense. Everything is out in the open, nothing bubbles out from under the surface, because there is nothing. Just violence. And beauty.

Nihilism wrapped in aesthetics is, of course, one of the historical characteristics of fascism. Another recent Frank Miller adaptation, 300, a fictional account of Spartan resistance to the Persian Empire, has in fact been charged with expressing militaristic values approaching fascism. In his typically amusing yet overstated way, Slavoj Žižek argues against this liberal consensus grain. In an essay titled “The True Hollywood Left,” Žižek relates the Persian Army—multicultural, hedonist, with the latest in long-range weaponry—to U.S. imperialism. Conversely, he relates the disciplined Spartans to the resistance to American imperialism and advises the left to quit distrusting discipline as a means to an end.

But what makes Žižek’s essay on 300 more interesting, and relevant to a discussion of Sin City, is his political analysis of the film’s form. 300, like Sin City, is highly stylized digital unreality. Žižek writes:

What makes 300 notable is that, in it (not for the first time, of course, but in a way which is artistically much more interesting than, say, that of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy), a technically more developed art (digitalized cinema) refers to a less developed one (comics). The effect produced is that of “true reality” losing its innocence, appearing as part of a closed artificial universe, which is a perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament. Those critics who claimed that the “synthesis” of the two arts in 300 is a failed one are thus wrong for the very reason of being right: of course the “synthesis” fails, of course the universe we see on the careen is traversed by a profound antagonism and inconsistency, but it is this very antagonism which is an indication of truth.

Žižek’s conclusion is cryptic at best. But what I take him to mean is that westerners witness horror via the mediated unreality of modern, digital technologies. We don’t feel horror. Only our victims do. This is the “profound antagonism” of Sin City. This is the aesthetics of post-alienation.

Sin City as Neo-Noir; Or, the Aesthetics of Post-Alienation

(This is the fifth in our film noir series. Thanks to Ben, David, Ray, and Tim for their highly entertaining and insightful posts, and special thanks to Ben for getting USIH involved. See his original post for details on the film noir blogathon and the Film Noir Foundation.)

Unlike my colleagues, I am not dedicating my blogathon contribution to one of the noir classics. Instead, I will analyze the not-so-hidden meanings of a recent film that fits the neo-noir category, among other genres, in the typical postmodern fashion of mixing and mashing: Sin City, the 2005 adaptation of Frank Miller’s neo-noir “Dark Horse Presents” comic series from the early 1990s (itself based loosely on a 1950s graphic novel series). Co-directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez (with “special guest director” Quentin Tarantino), Sin City gives beautiful, digital form to an ugly urban dystopia (“Basin City”), with an all-star cast that includes Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Brittany Murphy, Benicio del Toro, Rosario Dawson, Josh Hartnett, and Elijah Wood, among others. Watch the trailer for a taste:




The Sin City plot, so far as one exists (among the three self-contained stories within the film), is not really worth summarizing here because it is immaterial to the meaning of the film. What is that meaning? At the most obvious level, the film is about the banality of violence. Shot mostly in black-and-white, which enhances the noir elements of the film, the only color consistently laid over the colorless screen is red. Blood red. There’s a lot of red because there’s a lot of blood. But despite of all the blood, despite all the violence, despite all the torture, there is no remorse. The viewer is not asked to feel bad for the people getting slaughtered. The viewer is not asked to feel anything. We’re meant to let the violence wash over us as we concentrate on the powerful if detached aesthetics of Basin City.

Sin City’s failure to garner an empathetic, much less sympathetic, audience was the crux of a host of ambivalent to negative reviews. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis writes disapprovingly:

The soporific vibe isn’t helped by the fact that “Sin City” has the muffled, airless quality of some movies loaded with computer-generated imagery. The film feels as if it takes place under glass, which makes conceptual sense, since the characters don’t bear any resemblance to actual life: they don't have hearts (or brains), so there’s no reason they should have lungs or air to breathe. At the same time, Mr. Miller and Mr. Rodriguez's commitment to absolute unreality and the absence of the human factor mean it’s hard to get pulled into the story on any level other than the visceral. When stuff goes blam, you jump like someone who’s landed on a whoopee cushion. But then you just sit there, wrap yourself in the dark and try not to fall asleep.

Acclaimed New York Times film critic A. O. Scott also wrote about Sin City in an essay linking it back (as well as Kung Fu Hustle) to the first film to effectively mix real people with cartoons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which played explicitly on neo noir themes, right down to the 1930s Los Angeles setting. Scott writes:

But even if the technology is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently wonderful, its applications can be worrisome. It is curious that the new techniques are so often used in the service of parody and nostalgia… And the result is often that the old forms, as they are spiffed up and retrofitted, are also emptied out. Mr. Rodriguez, for example, has rendered a gorgeous world of silvery shadows that updates the expressionist cinematography of postwar noir without expressing very much at all. His city, with its tough guys and femmes fatales, feels uninhabited, and the social anxiety and psychological unease of the old film noirs has been digitally broomed away. Instead, "Sin City" offers sensation without feeling, death without grief, sin without guilt and, ultimately, novelty without surprise. Something is missing—something human.

Both Dargis and Scott are correct in the descriptive sense. But they seem to miss the larger point. The brilliance of Sin City—and it is brilliant—lies not in its ability to connect to its audience in some human capacity, but rather, in the ways that it reflects America circa 2005, desensitized to horror by its awful war in Iraq and revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib—torture sanctioned by the upper rungs of the chain of command. Silja J. A. Talvi overtly makes this link in an article she titles “Torture Fatigue,” where she quotes psychologist Bruce Levine: “When you become disconnected from your own alienation [from society], you become cut off from your humanity… You become numb to all kinds of atrocities.”

I think Levine is onto something with his “disconnected from your own alienation” phrase. As historian David Steigerwald argues, alienation is no longer a concept used to describe our current state. Instead, we’re collectively numb. It’s in this context that we need to situate Sin City. In contrast to mid-century film noir, when cynicism was meant to be felt as something, perhaps as a symptom of alienation, Sin City is utterly devoid of feeling. And rightly so. In his post on The Third Man, Ray poses a bifurcation between noir and liberalism, the former too despairing, the later at least offering a message of redemption, if not a naïve one rooted in a predictably happy ending. Sin City does not work along these lines. It represents a void, plain and simple.

Or take Tim’s contextual analysis of Touch of Evil. Tim writes:

I think something of the significance of film noir, at least in the 1950s, is in the way that the genre captures that slice of the repressed dissatisfaction, always roiling below the surface, of the decade. If the period’s intense anti-communism resulted in idealist visions of America (i.e. as the proverbial “city on the hill”), then noir captures that city’s messy undercurrents. The aesthetic beauty in those films alerts us to their artistry, but their mood reflects what every close-up of the decade reveals: flaws, cracks, and imperfections in the foundational narrative.

In contrast, Sin City is not a return of the repressed in this sense. Everything is out in the open, nothing bubbles out from under the surface, because there is nothing. Just violence. And beauty.

Nihilism wrapped in aesthetics is, of course, one of the historical characteristics of fascism. Another recent Frank Miller adaptation, 300, a fictional account of Spartan resistance to the Persian Empire, has in fact been charged with expressing militaristic values approaching fascism. In his typically amusing yet overstated way, Slavoj Žižek argues against this liberal consensus grain. In an essay titled “The True Hollywood Left,” Žižek relates the Persian Army—multicultural, hedonist, with the latest in long-range weaponry—to U.S. imperialism. Conversely, he relates the disciplined Spartans to the resistance to American imperialism and advises the left to quit distrusting discipline as a means to an end.

But what makes Žižek’s essay on 300 more interesting, and relevant to a discussion of Sin City, is his political analysis of the film’s form. 300, like Sin City, is highly stylized digital unreality. Žižek writes:

What makes 300 notable is that, in it (not for the first time, of course, but in a way which is artistically much more interesting than, say, that of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy), a technically more developed art (digitalized cinema) refers to a less developed one (comics). The effect produced is that of “true reality” losing its innocence, appearing as part of a closed artificial universe, which is a perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament. Those critics who claimed that the “synthesis” of the two arts in 300 is a failed one are thus wrong for the very reason of being right: of course the “synthesis” fails, of course the universe we see on the careen is traversed by a profound antagonism and inconsistency, but it is this very antagonism which is an indication of truth.

Žižek’s conclusion is cryptic at best. But what I take him to mean is that westerners witness horror via the mediated unreality of modern, digital technologies. We don’t feel horror. Only our victims do. This is the “profound antagonism” of Sin City. This is the aesthetics of post-alienation.