On Film Noir
Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947)
The western genre is about a progress as a historical process: the founding of the American legal order, the emergence of Statehood as the foremost instrument of modernity and its discontents. Film noir, a contemporary genre to the western, stares straight into the eyes of a society which is the direct consequence of that historical process, that is, progress come full circle: corruption, decadence, suspicion, crime, cynicism, hopelessness.
Whereas in a western there is a choice to be made – they are precisely it, epics and tragedies concerning the emergence of ethics and the rule of law – film noir is essentially the other end of that trail: there is no choice to be made anymore, as everyone is entangled in the fatal machinery of fully industrialized society. Weber's disenchanted world; the Frankfurt school's late capitalism and the administered world; Kafka’s grotesque penal colony; Eliot’s Waste Land – philosophical and literary peers to the dark world of film noir. The subject, guilty from the get-go, shattered in urban decay, is but a vehicle of incomprehensible, irresistible forces, a lone figure squeezed up from all sides, leading to inevitable conflict and disarray. In Bob Dylan’s “Can’t Wait” (Time Out of Mind, a very noirish album) he sings: “that’s how it is when things disintegrate”––– film noir in a nutshell.
It’s a world of defeatism, triumph is not possible, the only respite lies in running away, hiding, changing names, a new town, a new job, a new love, a new distraction— for a while, until the reckoning. The western is about formation; in film noir the world is coming apart. Georg Lukács, in his criticism of the Frankfurt School’s utterly negative, pessimistic and defeatist approach to philosophy and society, derided of their attitude with a strangely noirish turn: they live in Grand Hotel Abyss, says Lukács, that is, a last resort of civilized and lustful life overlooking the bottomless abyss of the times from which there is no escape. All of noir takes place in Grand Hotel Abyss.
Film noir’s fatalism is of a strange kind. It is not religious (as in some Christianity), nor is it metaphysical or cosmological, much less aristocratic (as in Homer). It is, as it were, technological. We’re all engulfed in the great machinery of the world, like Chaplin’s Tramp stuck in the assembly line in Modern Times. The fatalism of production and reproduction: the world–– its societal structures and norms, the morals, relations and institutions, the drives and the consequences, the dynamics of love and violence–– all is made, used up and then remade again, as before, like a product, each of us with a proper irresistible function. And no way out of it.
