Some Thoughts on the Port Huron Statement and U.S. Intellectual History

The Port Huron Statement used us to write itself, not the other way around….There’s no fucking way that I could have written it. It’s not possible if you read it.  And there’s sections of it I don’t remember at all. And I don’t know who wrote them.  So, it was fifty people at the crest of a great movement, having gone through the experience of jail in Mississippi and Georgia…There’s a way in which the words just came gushing forth….Something takes you over; it’s not that you are in charge.

-- Tom Hayden, "The Port Huron Statement at 50," Madison, Wisconsin, May 4, 2012 

MAUDE (Julianne Moore): Tell me a little about yourself, Jeffrey.
DUDE (Jeff Bridges):  Well, uh. . . Not much to tell.  I was, uh, one of the authors of the Port Huron Statement.--The original Port Huron Statement.
MAUDE:  Uh-huh.
DUDE: Not the compromised second draft. 

-- from The Big Lebowski (1998)

What’s gone on in the last 18 months is, to me, a fulfillment of virtually every dimension of participatory democracy, which was the dream at Port Huron fifty years ago, as outlined in the statement. And I hope to convince you that it’s a perspective and a framework that has a recurring life, independent of its authors, independent of its publication, because it always arises where people suffer too much and the institutions are too slow in making a response. 

-- Tom Hayden, "The Port Huron Statement at 50"

I

June 15, 2012, marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement. This year has already seen a large number of academic events reflecting on the document's golden anniversary, including a conference at UC Santa Barbara in February, a dialogue on the Port Huron Statement between Noam Chomsky and Tom Hayden at MIT in April, and a short series of lectures at the Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change at UW Madison in May.  Many reflections on it have also appeared in print.  One of the constants at these events has been the participation of Tom Hayden, who is usually credited with writing the Statement.

Although any reflection on the Statement is historical, the concerns of the various fora on its fiftieth anniversary have not principally been historical, which is fair enough.  Hayden, and many others, see the Statement as a living text. And much of the discussion of it has involved its relationship to our current political situation.

Nonetheless, the Port Huron Statement is an historical text. Given the interests of this blog, I think it's worth briefly reflecting on its significance for U.S. intellectual history.

II

There is no question in my mind that the Port Huron Statement is a significant--and canonical--text in American intellectual history. Indeed, I'd argue that, now that Lester Frank Ward's "Mind as a Social Factor" has been restored, the single most significant omission from Hollinger and Capper's American Intellectual Tradition reader is the Statement.

Its historical significance lies in at least three things:  First, it richly reflects a number of important strands in twentieth-century American thought. Deweyite pragmatism, C. Wright Mills's analysis of the power elite, existentialism, as well as the ideas swirling around the ongoing Black freedom struggle, are perhaps most clearly reflected in the text. But it is also in creative dialog with the mainstream of post-war liberalism and, at least implicitly, the Marxism of the Old Left.

Second, it captures a very particular, important, and brief moment in American history and thought.  The Statement truly could not have been written three years earlier and would not have been written three years later.  It emerged most directly from then very recent experiences of the civil rights movement in the South. Both Tom Hayden and Paul Potter had been beaten while working for civil rights in Mississippi earlier in 1962.  The point of view of Port Huron is very much that of people of relative privilege already bound up in others' struggles for justice.

Though it emerged from these social struggles and a sense of the failures of the status quo, the Statement also reflects the optimism of the early Sixties. One of the first things that Tom Hayden did when the Port Huron Statement was drafted was to travel to Washington, D.C. in the hopes of presenting it to President Kennedy.  They managed to get a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who apparently did get a copy of the Statement to the President.

Within three years of the Statement's writing, however, LBJ had begun to escalate the War in Vietnam and the black freedom struggle had begun to split over questions of goals and tactics. The War would come to dominate the politics of the New Left in the second half of the decade. And the relationship of SDS to both those in power and to the Marxist legacy of the Old Left began to change dramatically and rapidly.  By the end of the decade, a younger generation of SDS leaders had largely repudiated Port Huron as too "reformist."

The third historical significance of the Port Huron Statement is related to the second: the text became almost instantly canonical.  SDS had come into existence when, two years earlier, the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth wing of the old, socialist League for Industrial Democracy, had changed its name. But SDS really as an organization in its own right with the framing of the Statement, which, in its movement away from anticommunism, also drove a wedge between SDS and its erstwhile sponsor, the LID.  The Port Huron Statement thus initially defined what SDS stood for.  And as SDS, along with SNCC, defined what the emerging New Left stood for, academics and public intellectuals turned to the Statement to understand what was going on politically on campus.  Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau's The New Radicals: A Report with Documents (1966) included a long excerpt from the Statement.*

But even as the Statement became an object of journalistic and academic analysis in the mid-to-late 1960s, its significance within the movement began to wane, as noted above.  By the late Sixties, those writing about it frequently noted that it had fallen into disfavor among the current leadership of SDS.  But the declining importance of the Statement for the movement only served to highlight its historical significance...and thus its canonicity.

III

In a sense the first two quotations with which I started this post reflect the extent to which the Statement is a generational marker, the first in a serious mode, the second in a humorous one.  In Hayden's account, the statement wrote itself...which is very close to saying that it was written by its historical moment (though not quite...and I'll get back to how below).  The Coen Brothers' use of the Statement as an important piece of backstory for Jeff Bridge's Dude in The Big Lebowski presents it as a different sort of generational marker.  Once, it would appear, the Dude was politically involved; now, we know, he's the ultimate slacker, more concerned about White Russians and the fate of his erstwhile rug ("it really tied the room together!") than anything else.  The absurdity of the former political commitments of Baby Boomers like the Dude have been a frequent object of humor in turn-of-the-millenium U.S. culture. And the cult popularity of The Big Lebowski apparently has led some young people today to associate the Port Huron Statement with the Dude.

But although the statement is often (correctly) seen as a product of its particular moment, Hayden and others of his generation frequently treat it as strangely timeless.  Much of Hayden's talk in Madison in May, from which the above quotations are taken, revolves around his presenting participatory democracy as a truly eternal idea. This is reflected in the last of the three quotes with which I started this blog post.  Participatory democracy, says Hayden, is "a perspective and a framework that has a recurring life, independent of its authors, independent of its publication, because it always arises where people suffer too much and the institutions are too slow in making a response."

This sense of the timelessness of the ideas of the Statement also appears in the comic entitled "The Port Huron Statement Today" that the historian Paul Buhle and the cartoonist Gary Dumm recently created for New York high school students.  Today's social struggles, the comic suggests, are exactly the same struggles that SDS addressed in 1962 and they admit of the same solutions.  This view is most immediately captured in this panel from the comic (which, incidentally incorporates an image from the late '60s rather than the period in which the Statement was actually framed):

I have no problem whatsoever with the desire to treat the Port Huron Statement as a living document. I think, in many ways, it is.  But I also think that, both politically and historically, treating its message as entirely eternal is inadequate.  Most obviously, the Statement is a document that is absolutely of its time, from its highly gendered language to its very existentialist assumptions. Anyone who tries teaching the document today will, for example, immediately recognize that this is a text written by and for people who have read Camus...and young people today by and large have not.  Understand this text entails, among other things, having a rich understanding of its moment.

But the vision of an eternal Port Huron Statement has another, equally important downside.  Put simply, the vision of the Port Huron Statement failed.  It did not even sustain the organization that produced it for half a decade. It did not transform the U.S. as its authors hoped it would. That does not, of course, mean that there is nothing of value in the Statement or that many of its ideas might not succeed in the future. Far from it. But grappling with the historical failures of the Port Huron Statement is a necessary part of understanding it historically...and, I'd argue, renewing a version of its politics (if one wants to do so).

This point is also poignantly illustrated by the third of the quotes with which I began this post.  Writing in the midst of the ongoing battle to recall Gov. Scott Walker, Hayden sounded an optimistic note in early May:  "What’s gone on in the last 18 months is, to me, a fulfillment of virtually every dimension of participatory democracy, which was the dream at Port Huron fifty years ago, as outlined in the statement."  But of course, that effort ultimately failed on June 5. Ever since, the internet has been overrun with a variety of postmortems trying to figure out what went wrong.  Though the left, like any political tradition, can and should find sustenance in its history, it will be better served if it treats that history in a slightly more hardheaded fashion.  The Port Huron Statement was a watershed of early New Left thought. But it didn't--and doesn't--provide all the answers.

_________________________________________________
* The Port Huron Statement is a very long document and it is frequently reprinted in edited form without that fact being made clear.  Nowhere in Jacobs and Landau's book do they indicate that they were reprinted merely an excerpt (though the ellipses in the text would have informed the careful reader).  Similarly the link to the "full text of the statement" on the Wikipedia page on the Port Huron Statement currently leads until recently led to a different, long excerpt that appears on the University of Virginia's Sixties Project site, again without noting that the document has been severely edited (I just changed the link myself so that it now leads to an actual copy of the full text).

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!