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Guess I'm not a swimmer—I'm the type of girl you can drag down
I'm very sorry, Paste magazine, but your article on "The 100 Best Film Noirs of All Time" is exactly the sort of thing that frustrates me about film noir criticism. It's smart and nuanced—
See, noir didn't play by any rules, not really. We think of noirs as urban stories, but that's not always the case—for every L.A. and N.Y.C.-set saga, there's a small, heartland tragedy. We think of a never-ending, rain-soaked night—sunlight replaced with neon and nocturnal reflections, the optical trickery of mirrors and shadows—but in contrast, the days of noir scorched its characters. We admire its heavily stylized approach—exaggerated camera angles, tension-crafting mise-en-scène, flashbacks, deep focus and trademark shadows—but also its neo-realist and documentary-like experiments. We talk about noir plotting and tropes, but in fact it drew liberally from the gangster pics of the Depression/Prohibition era, crime procedurals, heist movies, horror films (again, the German Expressionist influence), romantic melodrama, Gothic thrillers, tawdry B-movies, and that other quintessentially American breed, the Western. Though its blueprints were everywhere, noir forged its own language, its own playbook, its own universe . . . Noir is a state of mind, of subconscious, a fever dream, an existential crisis.
—in exactly the same measure as it's teeth-grindingly obtuse, falling right back on the same stereotypes it was taking such pains to complicate a minute before:
You couldn't say the same for the ladies, what with that Madonna-whore complex running rampant through noir's icky Freudian gender dynamics. Unless they were a good, subservient girl, women were brazen, sexual bitches, more often than not smarter, and more powerful, than the guys—at least at the outset. Extrapolated to the off-screen world, the logic was, solve the crime, solve the problem. Put the femme fatale in her place, show the girl—the world—who's boss. Take it all back. The nightmare was made wish-fulfillment. It's not overreaching to read all of this from the 300 or so titles generally considered the classic noir canon. Remember: The folks at the Hollywood Production Code couldn't handle it either, mandating changes in service of propriety, i.e., social conformity. (Had Will Hays, Joseph Breen, and their censoring kind not been around, noir would've been an even more nihilistic realm.)
It is damn too overreaching! Look, please, I know I can't be the only person in eight decades who has seen women in noir with agency. I have printed evidence that viewers who are not me have noticed that some noirs just flat-out star women. (I have seen noirs where if there were women I didn't notice. We can argue about what that means for representation, but at the least it means they were not functioning Jordan Peterson-style as symbols of chaos to be overcome.) I have even encountered the suggestion that they come in more flavors than bitch/reward. For God's sake, just yesterday, here's Imogen Sara Smith on three noir roles by Ida Lupino, including a beautiful description of the character Lupino wrote herself in Private Hell 36 (1954), and she doesn't once claim that Lupino atypically transcends the inescapable misogyny of noir, nor does she try to twist the plots around to prove that Lupino is really either a compliant sweetheart or Satan. But I keep running into the other view, presented as casually and unthinkingly as something everyone already knows and agrees on, and at this point I feel toward it as I feel toward Russian troll farm misinformation. Paste briefly escapes its blinkers with Mildred Pierce (1945), but crashes them right back on to categorize Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night (1952)—a world-wounded woman returned in midlife to her fishing hometown of Monterey, trying to reinvent herself with a stable marriage while falling into the self-destructive orbit of a caustic misogynist with whom she has blow-the-bloody-doors-off sexual chemistry—as a femme fatale. I feel like a stuck record. Just stop. Anyway, if your list of hundred best film noirs (and neo-noirs) includes Obsession (1949) but not The Reckless Moment (1949), I have nothing to say to you.
See, noir didn't play by any rules, not really. We think of noirs as urban stories, but that's not always the case—for every L.A. and N.Y.C.-set saga, there's a small, heartland tragedy. We think of a never-ending, rain-soaked night—sunlight replaced with neon and nocturnal reflections, the optical trickery of mirrors and shadows—but in contrast, the days of noir scorched its characters. We admire its heavily stylized approach—exaggerated camera angles, tension-crafting mise-en-scène, flashbacks, deep focus and trademark shadows—but also its neo-realist and documentary-like experiments. We talk about noir plotting and tropes, but in fact it drew liberally from the gangster pics of the Depression/Prohibition era, crime procedurals, heist movies, horror films (again, the German Expressionist influence), romantic melodrama, Gothic thrillers, tawdry B-movies, and that other quintessentially American breed, the Western. Though its blueprints were everywhere, noir forged its own language, its own playbook, its own universe . . . Noir is a state of mind, of subconscious, a fever dream, an existential crisis.
—in exactly the same measure as it's teeth-grindingly obtuse, falling right back on the same stereotypes it was taking such pains to complicate a minute before:
You couldn't say the same for the ladies, what with that Madonna-whore complex running rampant through noir's icky Freudian gender dynamics. Unless they were a good, subservient girl, women were brazen, sexual bitches, more often than not smarter, and more powerful, than the guys—at least at the outset. Extrapolated to the off-screen world, the logic was, solve the crime, solve the problem. Put the femme fatale in her place, show the girl—the world—who's boss. Take it all back. The nightmare was made wish-fulfillment. It's not overreaching to read all of this from the 300 or so titles generally considered the classic noir canon. Remember: The folks at the Hollywood Production Code couldn't handle it either, mandating changes in service of propriety, i.e., social conformity. (Had Will Hays, Joseph Breen, and their censoring kind not been around, noir would've been an even more nihilistic realm.)
It is damn too overreaching! Look, please, I know I can't be the only person in eight decades who has seen women in noir with agency. I have printed evidence that viewers who are not me have noticed that some noirs just flat-out star women. (I have seen noirs where if there were women I didn't notice. We can argue about what that means for representation, but at the least it means they were not functioning Jordan Peterson-style as symbols of chaos to be overcome.) I have even encountered the suggestion that they come in more flavors than bitch/reward. For God's sake, just yesterday, here's Imogen Sara Smith on three noir roles by Ida Lupino, including a beautiful description of the character Lupino wrote herself in Private Hell 36 (1954), and she doesn't once claim that Lupino atypically transcends the inescapable misogyny of noir, nor does she try to twist the plots around to prove that Lupino is really either a compliant sweetheart or Satan. But I keep running into the other view, presented as casually and unthinkingly as something everyone already knows and agrees on, and at this point I feel toward it as I feel toward Russian troll farm misinformation. Paste briefly escapes its blinkers with Mildred Pierce (1945), but crashes them right back on to categorize Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night (1952)—a world-wounded woman returned in midlife to her fishing hometown of Monterey, trying to reinvent herself with a stable marriage while falling into the self-destructive orbit of a caustic misogynist with whom she has blow-the-bloody-doors-off sexual chemistry—as a femme fatale. I feel like a stuck record. Just stop. Anyway, if your list of hundred best film noirs (and neo-noirs) includes Obsession (1949) but not The Reckless Moment (1949), I have nothing to say to you.
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Then there’s the type of review where someone apparears to have slept through the movie and then complains it had no plot to speak of.
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Staffer 1: I love Noir films; they're so atmospheric.
Staffer 2: Yeah, all that [list of stereotypes about Noir that are argued against in your first quotation]
Staffer 3: But actually, they're not just those things. They also draw on Westerns.
Staffer 1: Yeah, and German expressionism.
Staffer 2: But women are always either innocent girl or bitch, amirite?
Staffer 3: Yup.
Staffer 1: Well there was this one film I saw....
Staffer3: That was an exception.
Staffer 1: Should we look around and see if there were other exceptions?
Staffers 2 and 3: Naaah. We know we're right.
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I did! Definitely agreed that it's a noir that just also happens to be Victorian.
Among other things, it’s the closest to vulnerable I’ve ever seen Sydney Greenstreet act.
Yes. He did not usually get that much to work with that way. It was directed by Don Siegel of all people.
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I don't know! It's a really annoying thing! Can I blame Foster Hirsch?
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Yikes. Yeah, that is a case where the author is definitely not dead and the interviewer who wants not to get that way should watch their step.
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Oh, wow. I mean, sure, the opening monologue in the theatrical cut is stupid, but it's not that stupid!
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I think I find it especially aggravating where noir is concerned because it took exactly one movie to make me realize how wide and three-dimensional women's roles in noir could be. If you are the sort of person who's watched upwards of a hundred noirs easily, how can that not have happened to you? The Reckless Moment isn't the only possible entry point. There's a lot of noir out there!
Staffer 1: Well there was this one film I saw....
Staffer3: That was an exception.
Staffer 1: Should we look around and see if there were other exceptions?
Staffers 2 and 3: Naaah. We know we're right.
Yeah, okay.
On the bright side, it made me angrily review Clash by Night.
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I stand by my feelings about The Reckless Moment and they missed Act of Violence, too. I had not heard of a chunk of the neo-noirs, though, and some of those look spectacularly weird enough to be worth it.
But I agree, their analysis and characterization seems really fucking blinkered.
And I don't get it! If you watch movies, don't you notice them? *inchoate howl into the void goes here*
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Aaaaaaaaaaagh thank you I really am trying to find ways to think about it even though it knocks my impostor syndrome into paralytically high gear aaaaaaaaaaagh.
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Rather than argue with you about your not being an imposter (though I can and happily will argue that another time), I'll just suggest that you could embrace imposter reviewing and imposter publishing with swagger--DOES NOIR DEMAND ANY LESS???
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Yay! Enjoy.