By Michael Bayer
In the 20th century, the world was brought to the brink. If the depravities of World War II didn’t destroy us, then nuclear annihilation would surely do the job. As if by a miracle, humanity made it through, but the evidence of our near-annihilation is everywhere.
The ruins of war became a natural part of the human landscape in the middle of the century. Japan, France, Britain, Philippines, Poland. Most of Europe and Asia were dotted with blocks of destruction, small mountains of rubble. In Germany, a whole genre of films was labeled trümmerfilm (“rubble film”), making use of the bombed-out settings to reinforce the depressed postwar mood. Perhaps the perfect specimen is Wolfgang Staudte’s Murderers Among Us (1946).
The United States, for the most part, escaped physical damage to the homeland. Our ruins took a different form: as invisible changes to the American soul. In a nutshell, this is the condition from which sprung film noir. And “if film is the most technologically advanced form of Plato’s ancient cave,” said communications scholar Read Mercer Schuchardt, “then we are the willful prisoners seated and watching the filmed version of reality.”
Noir is the attempt at mastery over an irrational universe. It’s not as simple as a moral battle between good and evil, but a plunging into the chaos. It’s the scramble for self-protection, a scramble for a self alone in the meaninglessness.
Existentialism, the assertion that existence precedes essence, that the only meaning in life is of our own creation, was the philosophical foundation of the 20th century. Of the three grand originators – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger – of the existentialist tradition, Nietzsche perhaps foreshadowed our postwar alienation the most astutely. He said humanity would “limp on” through the 20th century “on the mere pittance” of the old, decaying, God-based moral codes, and that the 21st century would bring a period of dread and an unsuccessful scramble for new values.
Film noir thrived on the popularity of existentialism, its attendant angst like fuel for the cycle. The noir protagonist fights the slide down to nihilism, to predetermined nothingness, by asserting his only remaining asset: freedom. No wonder film noir was born in America.
Noir characters are trying to find their place in the universe, but it often feels like a hopeless pursuit. Sociologist Alan Woolfolk writes, “Film noir tells us that existence is irredeemably fractured, that the self can neither be integrated into a community nor find a home in the universe, that self-identity is itself highly contingent and subject to disintegration.”
The noir anti-hero is our existentialist avatar up on the screen, the archetypal, damaged man lost and alienated in an anonymous city, every interaction a mini existential crisis, his search for meaning drawing him toward criminal temptations. Indeed, the city and the ironic isolation it engenders comprise the perfect existentialist setting. That’s why there’s relatively little nature in film noir; when it does appear, it typically represents an escape (Desperate, 1947; The Prowler, 1951; Tomorrow Is Another Day, 1951), sometimes back to the innocence of childhood (The Asphalt Jungle, 1950).
Like the concept of film noir, existentialism was also popularized by the French in the mid-20th century. Its leading public proponent was Jean-Paul Sartre, who prescribed community, perseverance, and social justice as a buffer against spiritual emptiness. Sartre’s intellectual cynicism was detectable in American hardboiled fiction and found its way into early film noir. So often told with a first-person point of view, the most extreme example found in Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1946) in which the camera is the eyes of the protagonist for the entirety of the film, film noir was uniquely psychological. Much of the suspense was generated by the character’s sense of free will and the consequences of choices. Author John Gardner called this the “Sartrian anguish of choice.”
Film scholar Jason Holt characterized much of film noir as not realism but psychological realism, a style where “realism is conveyed through surreal, expressionistic means.” Many noir narratives seem to dance on the fringe of dreams (Voice in the Wind, 1944; Vertigo, 1958) while others make manifest the characters’ psychology through often impressive dream sequences (Stranger on the Third Floor, 1940; The Man Without a Face, 1941; Spellbound, 1945). In Dementia (1955), almost the entire film is a dream sequence on the verge of absurdism.
Existentialism has a symbiotic relationship with Freudianism, which peeled back the psychological layers to expose human instincts and irrational desires. The growing midcentury popularity of psychoanalysis lent film noir a sense of gloomy introversion in a typically extroverted, ebullient Hollywood. Psychoanalytical themes were sometimes part of the plot, but more often were introduced through dream sequences and hallucinations. And while existentialists tended to eschew Hollywood and popular entertainment, surrealists embraced it, perhaps in part because of its absurdity. French film critic Nino Frank, credited as the first to recognize and name film noir in 1946, was an ardent surrealist.
Sartre recognized the temptation of suicide in a meaningless existence; crime was the final, nihilistic stage just before death, often used as an exciting pretext for committing suicide. Paradoxically, by identifying the danger of nihilism, film noir helps us avoid it. The characters flirt with nihilism, engage in irrational acts of evil, but typically resist succumbing to it entirely. From out of the shadows emerges a deep human need for love, belonging, or truth.
Surrealists and modernists desired to create art that would stretch reality or find meaning through heightened chaos. Emphasize extreme situations or extreme acts like Nietzsche’s Superman. Exist in a psychoanalytically charged atmosphere. Embrace moral ambiguity. Maximize narrative ambiguity through time shifting and alternating points of view. Employ unreliable narrators. Just as modernist writers like Joyce and Faulkner dove so deep into the subconscious that their texts were often impenetrable, film noir seemed to probe the postwar, post-traumatic mind. But these touches were often subtle and around the edges since noir had to entertain within the Hollywood moneymaking machine.
The noir cycle may have run its course during the modern era, but it’s worth asking: Is film noir postmodern? Yes, it shook up all the cinematic norms and moral standards of the time, like the twist of a kaleidoscope, but did it deny the existence of a single, grand narrative? Did it deny the assertion of objective truth? These rejections were the foundation of postmodernist thought.
Originating with the Frankfurt school of social theorists between the wars, which had identified social injustice as the driving force behind the appeal of totalitarianism, the postmodernism that arose in academia in the second half of the 20th century claimed that knowledge is uncertain, meanings are unstable, and truth is merely the product of power hierarchies in society. Critical theory, which attempts to deconstruct society and culture to identify underlying power structures, is a direct descendant.
According to media critic Paul Cantor, the Frankfurt school claimed to have discarded Marxism as outdated but actually just recast it from an economic theory to a cultural theory. By the 1960’s, Marxists knew they were losing the economic argument, so shifted focus onto the harmful social effects of a capitalist culture (today, this includes inequities in race, gender, and other cultural categories). And what produced capitalist culture more than Hollywood?
During its Golden Age, Hollywood was quite possibly the most overt and obnoxious manifestation of capitalist culture anywhere in the world. But with its stories of greed, its toxic temptations and deadly disappointments, film noir seemed to be an important exception here. In noir, capitalism and market competition rarely produced health and prosperity for all involved. Many American noir directors who had fled Europe, especially Germany, had brought their Frankfurt school and cultural Marxist influences with them. This meant locating and exposing injustices in the American capitalist culture but in a way that would be subtle enough for both producers and audiences to tolerate.
© 2024 Heart of Noir
