The Divided Self and the Dark City: Film Noir and Liminality

Borders and Borderers

The American film noir is a cinematic tradition whose representations are thoroughly liminal. What I mean is that the protagonists of these films characteristically find themselves straddling the border between competing forms of identity, as they often enter into perilous rites de passage through a nightmarish version of contemporary urban reality. Only seldom do these borderers emerge from that "dark city" (which is sometimes just a moral or psychological condition) to enjoy the transfiguration and triumph of a conventional happy ending. By way of illustration, let me begin by rehearsing some familiar details from what is arguably the best-known and most influential American film noir. In Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), an adulterous couple plot and then carry out a crime that is meant to be understood as an accident. That crime will pay by releasing insurance benefits to one of the perpetrators, and at a bonus "double" rate, but only if the coroner rules that the death in question is no murder, rather the result of an unfortunate and accidental tumble from the back of a train.

And so Walter (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) must become like the crime they commit, which is carefully designed to seem one thing though it is actually something quite different. During the thorough investigation of the "accident," they must struggle to maintain their ostensibly respectable identities. In outline, at least, their plan is both simple and ingenious. If there is no crime, there are no malefactors to be punished. If the accident, however, is interpreted as a crime, then Phyllis will immediately become the prime suspect according to the principle of cui bono and Walter, who sold the policy that now spectacularly pays off, will automatically fall under suspicion as well. To carry off the required elaborate masquerade, Walter and Phyllis become performers as soon as they begin plotting. In addition to playing at remaining "himself" even as he rejects that identity, Walter is even called upon to impersonate the dead man at one point. After carrying out the murder, the pair must stay "in character," which proves difficult after the accident theory is shown by the insurance company investigator to be untenable. A key effect of the narrative is that it highlights the willed, constructed nature of social roles, whose "naturalness" is thereby called into question. For once Walter and Phyllis determine to become other than what they were, they are forced by the very logic of their plan to inhabit self-consciously, and inauthentically, the roles they had previously performed unthinkingly: the pleasant housewife loyal to her husband and the successful insurance agent dedicated to his company's financial well-being and the steady advancement of his own career.¹

Their situation comes to resemble closely that of those involved in what anthropologist Victor Turner terms "cultural performance," those rituals and other modes of symbolic action that seem part and parcel of the everyday, but in which, Turner argues, "violence has to be done to commonsense ways of classifying the world and society" because performers must remain themselves even as they strive to inhabit another identity. Cultural performance, so Turner believes, therefore does not simply express or reflect "the social system or the cultural configuration," but "offers a critique, direct or veiled, of the social life it grows out of, an evaluation (with lively possibilities of rejection) of the way society handles history" (22). As Walter and Phyllis discover, the critical nature of the experience resides chiefly in the fact that, to quote Turner, "the 'self' is split up the middle—it is something that one both is and that one sees and, furthermore, acts upon as though it were another."

Double Indemnity dramatizes this distancing from and yet reflection upon the nature of ordinary experience. Narrator of the flashback in which he is the principal character, Walter is both the subject and object of the resulting narrative. The disjunction between the experiencing-I and the narrating-I (always a feature of character narration) in this case emphasizes an already existing split that opens up within...