By Michael Bayer
Film noir is fundamentally anti-social.
As perfectly represented in Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” the painting most closely associated with the noir cycle, these films illustrate our alienation, our loneliness, our inability to connect with each other. Especially at night.
Noir is world-weariness, and the world in the 20th century was exhausted. The men who came home from the war brought battle scars and emotional problems with them. American culture had changed dramatically since they’d left and would continue to do so at an accelerating pace, which only added more friction to these soldiers’ re-entry into society. Symbolized by the iconic Rosie the Riveter image from U.S. wartime propaganda, millions of women had entered the U.S. workforce during the war, contributing to the manufacture of munitions and supplies and to economic output in general. This was a jolt to traditional gender roles, in which men provided the resources and women cared for the home, and these women weren’t necessarily eager to go back home after the war. Gender conflict was born. As with so many noir storylines, order had been disrupted but not restored.
Some critics have theorized that the femme fatale, the noir woman who uses her beauty to trap and manipulate men into criminal acts, symbolizes the threat men felt from female independence. Contrary to popular belief, however, most noirs had no femme fatale by the traditional definition. Noir women worked. Mostly, they toiled as secretaries, waitresses, nurses, performers, or prostitutes disguised as something else by the Production Code, but occasionally they were professionals in male-dominated fields (Laura, 1944; The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, 1945; Spellbound, 1945; The Accused, 1949) or entrepreneurs (Mildred Pierce, 1945).
No matter her occupation, the not-so-unspoken rule was that once she married, she would become a full-time wife. In film noir, women tended to disappear after they married, or, if they remained a character post-honeymoon, boredom drove them to madness or crime (see Crime of Passion, 1956). Once children arrived, however, everything was made right again. The dutiful wife became a devoted mother. Yet, even when the nuclear family existed, it was very often disrupted by adultery (Pitfall, 1948), home invasion (The Desperate Hours, 1955), or an even greater shock (The Big Heat, 1953); these disruptions were traumatic in the 1950’s when tranquil domesticity seemed to be practically required by the Eisenhower administration.
Speaking of President Eisenhower, his Interstate Highway Act in the 1950’s connected Americans like never before. Paradoxically, not unlike the Internet decades later, an innovation that helped us find each other and spend time together also created psychic distance. Highways enabled suburban sprawl and “white flight,” which changed the complexion of cities permanently. Geography was no longer destiny; mobility increased competition for jobs, social status, lovers, and mates. One’s exterior marketability seemingly became more important than interior character.
This greater social distance invited increased alienation and either exacerbated or reflected (or both) new social problems. Unlike the escapism built in to so much of Hollywood’s output, film noir became an outlet for cold, hard reality. In fact, at the time, many noirs were forced into a category called social problem films. Aside from general malaise and meaninglessness, divorce (Strangers on a Train, 1951), addiction (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955), racism (No Way Out, 1950), and juvenile delinquency (Violent Playground, 1958) very naturally found their way into noir.
Americans needed help navigating their emotions, and Freudianism emerged to fit the bill. Psychoanalysis made for a useful lens through which to explain the terror of the noir landscape: it symbolized modern inquiry, addressed existentialist dread, and exposed the causes of our darkest motivations. French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton wrote that the injection of psychology exposed the “irrational character of criminal motivation.” As a sort of adjunct to existentialism, Freudianism gave film noir its focus on introversion, which made for more complex characters. It furnished the memories, dream states, and hallucinations which injected gloom and foreboding to film noir narratives.
More significantly, psychology gave noir much of its stylistic complexity. By exploring the subconscious, scripts allowed for elaborate dream sequences that exaggerated subjective psychological states, often with extreme expressionistic lighting. New narrative strategies could emphasize interiority, using the camera as a character’s first-person point-of-view, scanning a room or walking down a hallway; in Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1946), the entire film is shot from this perspective. Time became more fluid and disorienting, the use of flashbacks becoming one of film noir’s identifying features. Sometimes confessional, other times investigative, flashbacks introduced the question of narrator reliability. Some noirs used a flashback for almost the entirety of the film (Night Editor, 1946) while others took a page from Citizen Kane and used a variety of flashbacks from a variety of characters (The Killers, 1946). A flashback within a flashback added further narrative distortion; John Brahm’s The Locket (1946) set the time warping record with a flashback within a flashback within a flashback.
Film noir used crime as a pretext for addressing clinical psychiatry (Spellbound, 1945; Nightmare Alley, 1947; Behind Locked Doors, 1948), but, like most films from the classic era, it often treated the subject cartoonishly. Psychoanalysis was still a new subject, and Hollywood wasn’t known for scientific acumen. Sodium pentothal was commonly used as a convenient “truth serum” for tying up plots. According to Borde and Chaumeton, psychoanalysis was “easiest to vulgarize” for dramatic effect, especially in a psychiatric hospital. What could be more dramatic — and more noir — than a building full of crazy people?
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