New notions of noir

THE Wilson Quarterly has a sure-to-be-classic essay on an obvious but slippery question: why did post-war America, by most criteria prosperous and self-confident and optimistic, immerse itself so gratefully in the gloom and doom of film noir? Two reasons, suggests Richard Shickel. The first was the changing perception of the big city; the second was the influence of psychology, not least on Alfred Hitchcock.

The big city, says Schickel, came to look less glamorous than it had done in the 1930s:

Noir quickly noted the gathering flight to the suburbs and the countryside. Or, at least, the desire of many people to join that flight. The genre began to offer this dichotomy: the suburbs as a clean, spare, safe, if not very interesting place to love a plain little woman and to raise healthy, normal children, versus the city, whose glamour was at once more menacing and more tempting than it had ever been. This new noir mise en scène (rain-wet streets, blinking neon signs, fog-enshrouded alleys) often gave the metropolis the aspect of a wounded beast. It was either attempting to entangle people who thought they had made their escape from it, or it was obliging these refugees to return to its mean streets in order to free themselves of some past terror or transgression that now haunted their dreams of happiness.

As for psychology:

The past had not been much of a presence in pre-war movies, in part because the movies had not yet discovered Freudian psychology. Whatever personalities we encountered had been shaped—­by the slums, by the orphanage, by mysterious fate— before the movie began. There were few flashbacks, and almost no references to earlier incidents that might condition a character’s actions in the present. But once Alfred Hitchcock made the noirish Spellbound in 1945, that would no longer do. Explanations were required, and the noir style was ideal for dark dream and memory sequences. Middle-class America might be engaging in mass amnesia, but noir, bless its twisted little heart, could not forget anything.

I wonder if Schickel hasn't underestimated in his essay the influence of the horrors seen close-up by Americans in the second world war and then pushed to a distance afterwards—into the world at the edge of the vision where noir begins. I wonder, too, if he is right to leave out the vertiginous implications of nuclear weaponry on popular mood. But still, it's a great read, and it's a far more sophisticated and sensitive analysis than the conventional wisdom it is sure to overturn, that noir reflected (in Paul Schrader's words)

The disillusionment many soldiers, small businessmen and housewife/factory employees felt in returning to a peacetime economy.

On the contrary, the economy was fine. It was everything else that was bothering them.

First Proof  Film  

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