The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism by Shannon Scott Clute and Richard L. Edwards (review)

Shannon Scott Clute and Richard L. Edwards' The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism is a singular text with respect to its methodology and format. With respect to the former, the authors' "poison" is Oulipianism, which derives from the French acronym for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle or "Workshop of Potential Literature." Hence the book's subtitle. This method represents a critique of all other existing methodologies: "this text aims to introduce a new approach to the study of film noir that avoids the holes and double binds created by the pervading methodologies" (4). More constructively, the Oulipian method is intended to "liberate the potential of film noir," a potential "obscured" at the moment by "inclusionary and exclusionary logics" (16).

Clute and Edwards' "workroom" is predicated on synthesis understood as mathematical constraint as well as analysis or what they call "plagiarism by anticipation," the way in which texts self-consciously comment on themselves and thereby foreshadow or "anticipate" critical scholarship. An example of "synoulipistic" activity is the "simple mathematical constraint" that the authors employed to delimit their sample text: "We decided to add the total running time of the set of films that interested us . . . and divide by the number of films in the set. The average running time of the films in the sample set was approximately 102.087 minutes, so we limited ourselves to 102 noiremes" (47). The bulk of the book is comprised of these noiremes, which consist of an image or two together with the authors' "investigative notes."

I have sketched the contours of Clute and Edwards' methodology because it suggests something of the flavor of the authors' brand of Oulipianism, which, their periodic nods to "fans", and "aficionados" of film noir notwithstanding, tends toward the abstruse. Bluntly, if The Maltese Touch of Evil is a "road map into the twisted world of film noir" (to invoke one of their podcast listeners), it's pretty hard sledding.

One irony is that although Clute and Edwards repeatedly remark upon the "good-humored ethos" of their approach, they're not especially gracious with respect to other critics. Consider their critique of The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (1998) where Robert Ray mobilizes Surrealism in the form of automatism and aleatory practices to explore the elective affinity between film noir and the 1941 film, Life Begins for Andy Hardy. Ray's reading is wonderfully suggestive, but because he marries Surrealism and Oulipianism, Clute and Edwards are forced—on strict methodological grounds—"to part company" with him (285 n2 and 285 n3).

For Clute and Edwards, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy is a symptom of the current aporia of noir studies: "the more one reads of noir scholarship, the more one has the impression everyone has been trying to understand noir constraint in an oulipian sense, but often without the prerequisite knowledge of the Oulipo to make their positions explicit" (italics mine, 35). Here, the authors verge on a form of theoretical narcissism or imperialism, as if their method subsumes everyone else's. (Psychoanalysis, despite the fact that it has a historical relation, like Surrealism, with classic noir, is also, of course, anathema.)

But let me cut to the chase: Does the authors' methodology "create rigorously structured and systematic wonder, from which may come new information" (xv)? I'd be remiss at this point if I didn't mention that "information" is crucial to Clute and Edwards' project since the set of films on which The Maltese Touch of Evil is predicated derives from those discussed in their podcast series, Out of the Past: Investigating Film Noir. This series (and here one's reminded of the origins of film noir itself in the Série Noire) is an exemplary instance of "digital humanities scholarship" (8), not least as it can be compared to an "active user-generated electronic database" (9). However, the relative...