The Philosophy of Neo-Noir (review)

This volume is a sequel to the 2006 volume The Philosophy of Film Noir, which focused on films of the 1940s and 50s renowned for their disorienting cinematic techniques, their inversion of moral values, and their stock of characters haunted by dark secrets in their past. An American form first identified and named by French critics, noir has proven to be highly adaptable to different eras and locales. The present volume surveys a range of films over the past half century which either continue the noir tradition, or adapt the noir sensibility and aesthetic to such popular forms as mysteries, thrillers, science fiction, and even comedies. The volume doesn’t settle the academic question of whether the films it examines constitute a distinct genre or, for that matter, are associated with a discrete period. If anything, these essays suggest that neo-noir not only covers a much larger time span than classic noir, but, much like postmodernism, it is a phenomenon that shows no sign of ending anytime soon.

Having demonstrated in the earlier volume that noir is ideally suited to grapple with profound philosophical issues, Mark T. Conard now shows this to even more true of noir’s modern and postmodern offshoots. It’s not that these films embody a particular philosophical view; rather, as Richard Gilmore observes in his essay, neo-noir is an inherently self-reflective form that itself “functions as a kind of philosophy of noir.” Traditional philosophical problems are presented in original ways, as Basil Smith shows Christopher Nolan doing in Memento with respect to Locke’s theory of memory-based identity. If one philosophical tradition is shown to inform neo-noir works, it is existentialism. Although, as Andrew Spicer reminds us, this European phenomenon had only an indirect influence on American film noir through the mediating and more immediate agency of hard-boiled crime fiction, the process appears to have been reversed in the self-conscious genre of neo-noir. R. Barton Palmer describes the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There as a film that “deliberately existentialized” James M. Cain’s classic noir aesthetic, and “accommodated [it] to Camusian absurdism and Sartrean nausea,” while Judith Barad treats Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner as a parable of Sartre’s inquiry into what it means to be human.

Besides finding radically new ways of presenting traditional problems of epistemological ambiguity associated with classic noir (missing persons, mistaken identity, lost memory, etc.), neo-noir intensifies characters’ and viewers’ experiences of moral ambiguity. Thus, Douglas L. Berger shows how the murder of a cop schooled in Kantian philosophy in Harold Becker’s The Onion Field becomes a case involving the possible “murder of moral idealism” itself. Aeon J. Skoble’s chapter on Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan and the chapter by Jeanne Schuler and Patrick Murray on Roman Polanski’s Chinatown present these films as tales of moral corruption harking back to Plato’s views on justice. Skoble provocatively suggests that moral ambiguity may not really be “a hallmark of film noir at all” since “many classic noirs turn out to present clear visions of right and wrong.” Much of the difficulty in pinning down what is meant by noir (let alone neo-noir) lies in the inherent ambiguity of the term “dark” itself—a term that can refer either to the obscurity of the moral choices the protagonist must make, or to the heartless world that confronts him, or to his own heart of darkness.

Taken to the extreme, the hyper-ambiguity of neo-noir verges on “postmodernist relativism,” as Conard shows in his essay on Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. (Since Tarantino claims that his films are “not noir. I don’t do neo-noir,” some explanation for including an essay on this filmmaker would be welcome.) While Conard asserts that “there can be no such thing as redemption” in Tarantino’s “postmodern world,” other neo-noir filmmakers offer the prospect of intellectual and spiritual development. Donald R. D’Aries...