Old and Gray: How Film Noir Comes "Out of the Past."

(In case there was ever any doubt, I did indeed try to pack as many puns, cliches, double-meanings, metaphors and symbolism into the title of this post as was humanly possible, and I am proud to say that I have succeeded. If there are any suggests for further shameless literary plugs or double entendre, I would love to hear them.)

"There is a difference between writing literary fiction, and writing genre fiction," said my English 63 professor, on the first day. It was one of my most highly anticipated classes; that rare celestial event where academia and actual student interest mingle and merge so that neither quite eclipsed the other, but rather coexisted in a happy, twilight amalgam of learning for enjoyment's sake or enjoyment for learning's. It is the academic equivalent of the moon and sun being clearly visible at the same time in the sky, shining brilliantly down upon the Earth with uncommon vibrancy and luminescence; it happens, every so often, but so rarely that ancient cultures arranged their calendars so that the next occurrence would synonymous with the End of Days...

As an aspiring science fiction writer, I didn't mind that my chose field was not included in the course syllabus; writing was writing was writing, I told myself. So what if the class didn't focus on my chosen specialty, which tended to have swaggering suits of robotic armor and voracious, brain-eating alien worms than Freudian cigar-symbolism and allegorical allusions to emasculative complexes of overly-observant male infants. Both were legitimate forms of self-expression, and if (as Freudians and Lacanites insisted) most of my ideas were really reactive manifestations of my prepubescent sexual insecurities, post-pubescent psychosexual inadequacies and repressed erotic desires for my parents, pets, siblings, spouses, selves and the occasional inanimate object...then really, anything was possible.

So, the dedicated genre-fictionist that I was, I paid rapt attention.

"There is a difference between writing literary fiction, and writing genre fiction," said my English 63 professor. "In genre fiction, the writer has the luxury of relying on previously held conceptions and generally accepted conventions of the form, held by the reader and established by antecedants and predecessors who either had the luxury of absolute, revolutionary creativity and insight, or the benefit of transcendant writing ability and nigh-preternatural imagination and vision. In genre fiction, the writer need not waste valuable time establishing such rules or conventions, instead relying on the previously-held familiarity of the reader to such rules or conventions to generate connection and narrative understanding of the issues being addressed. In genre fiction, therefore, the reader comes to the piece with a large part of the story about to be consumed already formed and internalized, and the genre writer need only draw this part out and pretty it up in some new and relatively creative way."

"In true fiction, however, such conventions are by definition absent. The writer must start essentially tabula rasa, and create such conventions and stylistic instruments from scratch. In short, with literary fiction, the writer actually has to have talent."

The sound you are now hearing, is the sound of the sun colliding with the moon and swallowing it whole. [Note: "sun"=academia, "moon"=all of my hopes and dreams as a writer].

This was not, of course, what my professor actually said; rather, this is what Daniel the Aspiring Sci-Fi Writer heard. More than likely, her words were decidedly more diplomatic and down-to-earth. More than likely what she really said was:

"Genre fiction has its place, but what we're going to be focusing on is literary fiction, which has a different set of constraints and expectations associated with it."

Still, the idea that genre fiction was somehow "preconceived" and "conventional" was decidedly injurious to the pride of a young genre-fictionist, who had always assumed that he (like every other artist in human history), was wholly-and-completely-and-indubitably-original-and-anyone-who-disagreed-was-either-wrong-or-a-fool-or-both-so-there! But, once cooler heads prevailed, and wounded pride gave way to tacit (but seethingly indignant and brooding) acceptance, I came to the startling, and somewhat rationalizing, realization that this was not only true for genre fiction and film, but also its greatest asset.

With any piece of literature or film, audience participation is in many ways the most important, and ultimately the most unpredicatble and uncontrollable, variable in determining a given work's success or failure. The most important of these, of particular saliency for film and cinema, is the concept of "suspension of disbelief."

"Suspension of disbelief" refers to an audience's willingness to (quite literally) "suspend" their passing judgment on a film's realism or verisimilitude in exchange for something that the film offers: sensory stimulation, emotional evocation, intellectual thought provation, or just simple personal entertainment.

Every film, by very nature, is somehow unrealistic, fantastic, or impossible; if they were anything else, they wouldn't be "films." Even relatively mundane or "practical" works of cinema like Out of the Past have, when logically analyzed, fantastic or impractical events and devices within them that render it wholly impossible and logically unsustainable. How, for example, did Jeff Markham manage to be involved (either directly or indirectly) with so many murders and betrayals, uncover so many plots and schemes and attempts on his life without incurring the suspicion of the authorities sooner of coming to any kind of physical harm until literally the penultimate scene of the film. Moreover, how was Kathie able to manipulate so many men to do her bidding so easily, in such an apparently short time, without being discovered or suffering the consequences for so long? For that matter, what are the odds that Fischer would be in San Francisco gambling at precisely the same crowded track as Jeff and Kathie, at precisely the same time, and just "happen" to see Markam in the throngs of thousands? And let's not even get into the odds that Stephanos might've randomly travelled through the podunk town that Jeff was hiding in, and happened to see him pumping gas without Jeff's knowledge (given Jeff's preternatural ability to sense danger and avoid it so far).

There are, of course, attempts to explain this available in the context of the film (Markham is a detective of preternatural ability, Kathie is uncommonly beautiful and sociopathically charming, etc.), however even these "explanations" are so far-out and beyond the realm of probability that they should scarely be convincing to anyone of reasonable mental faculty or acumen. As I have stated previous in relation to film, we know consciously (or at least, we should know) that the events portrayed are so impossible, so outlandish and so beyond anything remotely possible in common experience or everyday life that we should find them laughably absurd and ridiculous.

But we don't. And I, for one, certainly wasn't laughing.

The reason for this, put simply, is that as an audience familiar with the genre of film noir and mystery, we understand the impracticality implicit in the film as part of the "film noir ethos," and accept its impracticality as easily as we ignore it in favor of our continued enjoyment and understanding of the film and it's narrative. As Neale states in his article,

"[Genre films] do not consist only of films; they consist also, and equally, of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema, and which interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process."

Thus, these "logical breaks" are unique in that, while they may differ drastically from the reality which we normally inhabit, they are not glaringly obvious or jarring when presented in film, by virtue of the fact that they are in keeping with the viewer's expectation of what film noir "accepts as true." Kathie is successfully manipulative because she's beautiful. Jeff is successful in avoiding danger because he is clever. Fischer finds them because Jeff and Kathie get careless, and Stephanos finds Markham becase, well, these things happen.

We simply accept the logical fallacies of film noir as just "the way things work" in the universe of the cinematic style, and award the film verisimilitude and credibility, because it is "the way things work;" at least, in the realm of film noir convention. Detectives, in film noir, are by definition heroic (or anti-heroic), clever, and somehow "a cut above the rest" in terms of their cunning, moral fiber, and ability to discern the truth from lies and fact from fiction. Police, by film noir convention, are inherently and by very nature corrupt or incompetent, or (more than likely) some grand combination of both. And women, by their very nature, are beautiful and charming and cunning and manipulative, and routinely make fools of men, because they are women and that's what they do best.

[Note that the attitudes or opinions expressed within this blog are not necessarily those of this post's author. Well, maybe they are, but they are not in anyway intended to be offensive the feminist movement or insensitive to the status of women...look, just please don't hurt me.]

Because we are familiar with these "workings" and tropes as part of the narrative devices and familiar thematic traits particular to the genre, we can overlook their lack of reality or relation to true experience, and ascribe the film a level of verisimilitude that may or may not be warranted by realism alone. As Neale points out, audiences taking in a film with a tenuous relationship to reality does not expect it to compare to the normal laws of plausibility necessary for understanding or acceptance. No one watching Fiddler on the Roof seriously contemplates the practicality of Jewish peasants choreographically singing and dancing as they go about their daily routines in Imperial Russia (although I will admit wondering why the Fiddler is on the Roof to begin with, but we'll continue the suspension of disbelief and pretend that actually makes sense).

To put it simply, genre films make use of commonly held expectations and identifiable tropes and schema to advance its narrative story without having to ponderously explain otherwise impractical or inexplicable events that might impede an audience's acceptance or enjoyment of a film.

Put even more simply, we accept the unacceptable because we expect what we are expected to, so if you don't mind, shut up and let me enjoy the movie!

Thank you!

That Movie Magic

"How did he DO that!" gasped a four-year-old Japanese boy, as a he gazes, up wide-eyed and slack-jawed, at a stage in Operyland, Tennesee (Nashville's answer to Disney World, and sort of a spiritual predecessor to Dollywood).

The object of this boy's fascination was a stage magician, famous in Opryland and nowhere else, whose name not even he remembers anymore. The trick in question was no big feat; it was no Copperfieldian de-materialization of the Statue of Liberty, no Houdinite stunt of death-defiance, no David Blaneist act of self-mutilation involving a razor blade, car battery, and apparent blunt force trauma to the head. It was a simple trick, by modern standards: an avian "evaporation," by which lively and particularly spirited canary was made to vanish as if it were never there.

I knew, of course, how he had done it.

Vaguely.

Some unseen hand, no doubt belonging to a beautiful, busty, Bunny-like assistant (or burly Bulgarian stage hand), would somehow remove the bird from the cage as the magician laid the supposedly "mysical" cloth upon it, leaving the cage empty and the crowd amazed whence the cloth was removed. I knew all of this, of course; I had seen it a million times, and by age four I was already something of a magician myself (I could make my mother's quarters disappear faster than she could pretend to humor me). Even so, when the man in an outrageous top hat and shimmering black cloak asked for a "volunteer" from the audience and selected my mother, my death grip upon her arm could only be released by his choice of a different victim to vanish.

I knew, it wasn't real, of course. I knew it for a fact. But the art of a true magician, however, is the one which can make his audience forget what they know.

This is the allure of the film.

There is no act, no single illusion of smoke and mirrors or sleight of hand that can compare to the magic and mysticism of the movie. It draws in and fools even the greatest human minds, it tricks and bamboozles the most cunning and conniving members of the supposedly "advanced" human race. The movie makes fools of us all, but like any good magic trick, we thirst for it all the same.

Pascal Bonitzer's piece "Off-Screen Space" touches on the concept of film as a willing fiction on the part of the film, accepted on the part of the viewer as truth, but with the implicit understanding on the part of all parties that the viewer "doesn't really think" that the flashes of light on the screen are real. As Bonitzer says, we "question the 'authenticity' of a costume, criticize the actor 'behind' the character, wonder whether a background is or is not a back-projection," rationalizing logically about the inherent and glaringly obvious fictive aspects of a film's experience.

We know that Natalie Portman is not in fact an epileptic girl in Garden State. We know that real life doesn't cut-on-action or shot-reverse-shot during dialogue (at least, not without the use of some seriously heavy, industrial-grade hallucinagens). We know that men, no matter how "super" cannot fly. To think otherwise would be spectacular self-delusion and detachment from reality. And yet, every day, millions of four-year-old boys across the nation and around the world will galavant around their homes bearing undergarments on top of their trousers, and bathroom towels around their necks, ever watchful of green glimmers of Kryptonite.

Even though we know that it is just red dye and a pressurised hose, we gasp asMajid commits suicide right before our very eyes in Cache. Even though we know that is just an artfully made latex mask, we shriek in terror at the approach of Freddie Kreuger in Nightmare on Elm Street. And even though we know that Hugh Grant is not (unfortunately) the Prime Minister of England, we still cry at the end of Love, Actually...

...some of us. Not me of course. That would be...stupid...

But Bonnitzer raises and excellent point, albeit just in passing; as an audience we do criticize films that are somehow "unbelievable" or ruin the suspension of disbelief that makes truly artful films such an exquisite experience to behold. We laugh at horror movies that are "so fake," and mock kung fu and Western films that ruin an otherwise compelling and moving tale with over-wrought mannerisms and poor-quality acting. It is, as Bonnitzer says, a "critical 'pulling back,'" and "very much a defense against the impression of reality'" that the films attempt to generate; we resent these films with their half-assed acting and hackney'd plots, their low-budget production and no-budget effects. They are pale imitations of the truth, unbelievable and unfaithful facsimiles of reality and plain and outright lies. As rational, logical, non-delusional individuals, we are put off by their indignity and intolerable attempt at perfidity. But not because they tried to trick us, but because they did a piss-poor job of doing so.

We are inexplicably critical and picky of the lies we enjoy having spun to us.

Because of this, we also criticize films as if the things they show us are very real (or, if not quite real, then real enough that they deserve to be treated judged as such). Who among us hasn't thought to themselves, "My God...Anakin is such a whiney little douche," while watching Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. Who hasn't secretly found themselves rooting for the "challenger" in Rocky, despite knowing logically that a) he has no chance, and b) he isn't real! We know what we know, and we can't help but know it. But, god dammit,

"GET UP, ROCKY! GET UP!"