sovay | It ain't right and it ain't natural

alexx_kay offered a definition of film noir in comments and my brain generated a textbrick in reply. It maxed out the character limits for LJ-comments, so as long as I'm thinking in public, I might as well stick it here.

That starts me thinking about how I define noir—if indeed I have a definition for it. I think of it as a style or a mood as much as a genre; I find it much easier to categorize by the themes it examines or the emotions it evokes than by the elements that comprise its plots. It's not precisely the cinematic counterpart of hardboiled or pulp fiction, although there's a lot of overlap and interaction between the two. Crime films can be noirs, but they don't have to be. I think it has phases, influenced by the prevailing concerns of the times. For me, I think all of the best examples of film noir are categorized by varying degrees of moral ambiguity and a theme of instability: the world isn't what you thought it was, the person you love isn't who you thought they were, you aren't who you thought you were. Something you have always taken for granted drops out from under you. It could be your scruples, it could be your heart. Why pick just one? I agree with you that a deep suspicion of institutions is part of it, whether that means the law or government or marriage or the American dream. Noir is the genre where things go wrong, where all the national anxieties come out to play. I think that's one of the reasons that—despite the visual and verbal stylization that are also hallmarks of the genre—it feels much more realistic to me than many of its contemporaries. I don't think it's merely that my life has been on the rocks for months and therefore I am more inclined to believe a narrative full of bad decisions and moral fog than one which ties up all loose ends in a heteronormative Technicolor bow. The Production Code sold America the white picket fence and the sanctity of marriage, 2.5 children and a proper respect for authority; its Catholic morals permitted a very narrow range of acceptable behavior for its heroes, its good people who were both exemplars to the populace and assumed points of identification. Populate a genre with grifters and gangsters and social deviants and people with just plain bad judgment, on the other hand, and all of a sudden the range of representation explodes in all directions. It doesn't matter if the final curtain still sees the guilty punished and the good rewarded, sometimes with whiplash speed before the credits roll; all of the stuff outside the lines was still there. These last eight to nine months getting formally interested in film noir have reminded me of my initial plunge into pre-Code cinema, where all of a sudden I could find heroes with heroin habits and triumphantly promiscuous women and romantic Jewish bootleggers who bumped off any tough who roughed up the heroine. Noir has given me female heroes and antiheroes, sympathetic queer characters and monstrous men, failure modes for everything from personal integrity to the patriarchy, a skeptical scrutiny of all kinds of American myths and values. I don't mean you can't find anything interesting in other genres of the time—subversion gets in anywhere it can. Stories always say something about the people who tell them. You want to talk id-fests, anyway, check out an MGM musical sometime. Whoo boy. But I am starting to feel as though film noir is where a lot of the transgressiveness displaced from the pre-Code era ended up and then multiplied with new social issues like the independence of women during wartime or the shock of soldiers returning to civilian life or the whole question of America's postwar place in the world, not to mention the atom bomb.¹ A lot of really good noir has an ethical dimension, not necessarily in that any of the characters are Aristotelian models, but in that the stories themselves care about exploring questions of ethics—loyalty, betrayal, identity, justice, what people hold on to, what they relinquish, what they'll acknowledge, how far they'll go—even if they have no answers. That, too, I find more realistic than being instructed as if by a primer for a school I don't believe in. I am making all of these statements based primarily on American film noir, of course. I have a decent knowledge of British noir and some familiarity with French noir, though mostly if it's by Jules Dassin—I think of Jean-Pierre Melville as moving into the neo-noir period. I know almost nothing about Japanese or Mexican noir and other nationalities are blinking question marks, though I'd like to learn more. Everything I say here could be wrong. I don't yet have a comprehensive data set. I am really enjoying the collection process, though.

Tagged for Patreon because it's still spinning off my thoughts on Criss Cross (1949). I appreciate the excuse to examine my own free-floating opinions and see if I can nail some of them down.

1. Pre-Code movies are still generally better about race, in that I associate them with shockingly unstereotyped black characters every now and then. I'm a little cautious of saying that any Hollywood era was really great on the subject. I still want to see some of the so-called race films, made outside of the Hollywood studio system by black production companies with black casts specifically for black audiences. Their existence fascinates me and very few of them have survived. I don't know if an equivalent existed for Asian-American audiences. That's an entire topic of its own.

It ain't right and it ain't natural

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