Noir - a glass darkly
Noir has come a long way, ironically for a genre impressing itself upon most people’s minds as a very concrete set of tropes and mechanics, rooting from a very specific time and place in the American ethos of a recuperating America, but to approach it as a genre is to err on the side of generalization. With its penchant for mutating and transposing upon various story-templates, national and general perceptions, it can be scene as something more flexible, an anamorphosis of style that rewires other genres or modes of storytelling.
All you need for cinema is a gun and a girl
Jean Luc Godard
But training our lens directly on the amniotic waters of noir from the specters of neoliberal cynicism left behind from the Depression-era hardboiled fiction reconstituted and transfused with stylistic imports like German Expressionism and Neorealism is a groggy endeavor as this form of post-Marxist analysis has already been run dry. What is instead more interesting is if like true amateur Lacanians, we situate this problem into revealing itself through parallax, by seeing where noir goes when it has to surface through various lamina of taboo, repression, standards of propriety and prosperity that express themselves materialistically.
Noir always emerges out of the shadows, very much like the Shadow, it constitutes itself in the constitutive gap that the Logos of a system leaves . Capitalism is just another coat for Aionic Time to cycle itself, its booms and bursts become the vessels for a greater periodicity of our tendency to bloom and disperse. As such, it is in the periods of the general recession, the point breaks of modern societies when noir shores up its greatest cultural currency. The Great Depression, The Americana of the Cold War, 70s stagflation , post 9/11 . The great optimism and momentum of free enterprise leaves in its wake a great psychic recess in our landscapes whereby the principle of free trade, merely a garb for the more predicative ideal of agency, mobility, seeks to find its dialectical corrective in a labyrinth of desire. From this, a metaphysics of Noir fatalism is born.
These stories found in noir the medium to bring to the screen, the existential anxieties that grip a society suffering through multiple crises of political and social identity. It is during this period that the traditional forms of stories mutate in a couple of interesting ways.
Reversal onto the self of sexuality:-
Sexual repression and puritanism rather than being a source of trepidation based anxiety or religious , is hard wired into the culture. Furtive sexuality in these films like Ugly, Gandu, Raman Raghav 2.0 from India, Memories of Murder, Oldboy, Killing Them Softly rears itself as Lethal desire and obsessive lust in these films. The investigation may even gradually turn into a descent into madness, depravity or death, an eternal labyrinth where it appears that all that the lead is following is his own chain of libido. There is even an insipid misogyny inherent in the role of women in these narratives:- Sphinxes locking the mystery of meaning itself within their sexuality. Objects awaiting the Gaze.
The plot unravels often in tandem with the gradual unravelling of the Femme Fatale (emotionally, sexually and of course physically).
Only in the some of the so called neo-noirs is this problematic antagonism cushioned somewhat by a layer of irony , reflexivity or in the case of certain absolute Masters, a countermovement via Image. See how this scene in Lost Highway unfolds ( in a typical Lynchian rhythm) where Patricia Arquette as the Blonde, at gunpoint, does a striptease in a dingy lair as Manson’s I Put a Spell On You pounds on. In an adverse movement: the more she strips, the more opaque she becomes, gradually transforming into a Femme Fatale. This fantasy projection reveals it’s gloss in this turn of the screw from one fantasy to another .
Tapestry of the Law( Homosocial):-
While the heterotopic frontiers of the Western have more generally offered a more fertile ground for diffracting the homosocial ties that have been buried under the Western Myth.
Eve Sedgewick defines the homosocial as a neologism signifying the “the emotionally charged, non-sexual bonds between men that reinforce patriarchal structures and blur the lines between friendship and desire”. However, given the sublation of desire implicit in it’s constitution, it’s more fruitful to correlate it to an example of Aufheben. The homosocial both quilts and thus institutes the latent anxieties of homosexual desire in both fiction and the cultural matrix feeding noir in a normative form. The murky opacity of female sexuality and the fragile social fabric threatened by the mystery gets its dramatic counterpoint in the frolicsome relationship between the protagonists often sparked into being by romantic rivalry, more classically seen in the triangle of Neff, Haynes and Phyllis in Double Indemnity, deconstructively by the Coens in Miller’s Crossing and more recently through a queer lens in Love Lies Bleeding.
Metaphysical aporias:-
What noir also acts as a portal to, in the more abstract variations on the genre, are metaphysical labyrinths. Noir itself centers around the notion of a search, of investigations into the nature of a crime. This could translate itself to very interesting variants where the limits of an episteme are treaded.
Georges Bataille often spoke of the constituents of a society to be of two characters - the homeogenous superstratum and the heterogenous substratum. While the homogenous was the structure of the transactional, perfunctory and operative nature of a society, the customs and regulations that bound it against constant effervescence ,the heterogenous was a place of shifting currents, of values and motives incommensurable and constantly in play. These could be analogized at points to the unconscious, the samskara-skandha, or the Lacanian real.
The playground of the normal noir, even though stoked with nihilism, genuine or postured, nearly always played within ontic certainty of the Law. Where parties on both side of it, acted conversely or along with it .
Through the metastasized parodies of really idiosyncratic noirs though, the underlying aporias inherent in the worlds spawned from noir were lluminated. The examples are many, the decoupled subject in Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes, Paul Auster’s disappearing narrators in The New York Trilogy and the specular entanglement at the heart of the Michael Mann’s Manhunter and it’s source.
Here, the crime and the quest to solve it both dissolved into a haze of performative facades, where the particularities of the crime seem to blend into the anxious fugues, identity limbo , sexual fugues and existential malaise that created them. Even the subject-object dichotomy could become decoupled, burning a hole through the moral laminas crystallized in history at that point. The fallout from these narratives was therefore, a sense of vertiginous uncertainty. Any trail to follow disappears like the Footprints in the Sand where those entering the funnel of the narrative would not realize when their agency dissolved into the background noise shaping them.
It was this kernel of the uncanny that would blow over into paranoid conspiracy mania and corresponding solipsism that the 21st century would shepherd in. The resulting state is that of a agreed upon blase, of bubbled hyperstition.
To look at noir through these lenses is to see the undercurrents that had been gestating since the turn of the century. To think that these fictions have been long since been overgrown by our strides in defining ourselves would be a misstep. They have shaped the cultural currency that all social apparatuses have dabbled in this century, even outside of fiction.
It is always edifying to look at the spores growing out of time’s arrows.