Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood

5 The Neo-noirers: Fugitives, Surrealists, and the Return of the Degenerate Detective

chapter 5 The Neo-noirers Fugitives, Surrealists, and the Return of the Degenerate Detective The sympathetic film noir fugitive of the cultural front and the stonefaced , scientific working-class cop of the McCarthyite cold war were defined in their respective historically contingent moments, but once defined they then existed as tropes, with each subsequently reinvoked in successive periods of the crime film and television series, adding these past associations—what George Lipsitz calls “material memories”—to the moment in which they re-materialized. This chapter examines three of those moments. The first is a duel that took place on television for four decades between two of that medium’s foremost producer-auteurs, each of whom was formed in the twin crucibles of the classic crime film period: Roy Huggins, creator of The Fugitive (1963–67), who identified himself with the cultural front and called the motif of the innocent fugitive pursued by an authoritarian government “the American theme”; and Jack Webb, who introduced and codified the HUAC-era police procedural on television in 106 · · · Chapter 5 Dragnet (1952–59). The Fugitive brought the bohemian/beatnik ethos to the American mainstream and helped lay the foundation for more widespread protests, come, while Dragnet extended the quietism engendered by the Hollywood HUAC hearings as the everyday “Joe,” officer Friday, reduced the populace to quirky, reluctant witnesses and criminals. The noir themes and style returned, in an instantiation that might be termed “neo-noir,” amid the blatant repression—that is, blatant to working-class people and minorities—of the Reagan and Bush eras. The term “neo-noir” is sometimes applied to all noir after the classic 1941–55 period (see Silver and Ward’s Film Noir), but it might be better used to describe the 1986–92 period. A majority of the films that constitute neo-noir were made in that period, and its periodization in this way grounds the term and links film noir, through its reappearance in a time of political repression and its use by directors to tell harsh truths, to the classic 1945–50 period. Here, especially in the work of the surrealist auteur David Lynch, particularly Blue Velvet (1986) and Twin Peaks (1990–92), the style was deployed to emphasize the two Americas, as the country in proto-Victorian fashion had split into a bright, decaled surface and an invisible and grimmer underbelly. Finally, post-9/11, the launching of a new cold war with “terrorism” replacing “Communism” (with lowercase “communism” indicating the characterization of the new enemy as more global than the contained and more specific earlier menace) has featured on television an almost programmatic return and rerun of the police procedural (including a brief revival of Dragnet in 2003). There are almost no counter-narratives in the crime film and television series, but the noir spirit is being kept alive in detective fiction so that, just as the 1930s authors paved the way for 1940s cinematic noir, so too, as the current “permanent war” consensus dissolves, these authors may find themselves spearheading a more openly antagonistic moment. Dueling Discourses: “Just the Facts, Ma’am” versus the Twitch of Innocence B-film production, in which both film noir and the procedural flourished , had effectively ceased in Hollywood by 1955. The most obvious immediate formal companion to the low-budget film with its working- The Neo-noirers · · · 107 class audience was the television series, with a short shooting schedule for each weekly episode and an audience of those who, with the lowering of the price of the television by the mid-1950s, now found series television cheaper entertainment than the movies. Thus it is no surprise that the themes of the B-crime film migrated also and propelled the careers of two of the medium’s most successful auteurs, with each constantly promoting one discourse over the other and consistently rewriting each other from the 1950s to the 1980s. Both are still primarily identified with the series that most directly appropriated each discourse . Webb’s Dragnet, “the most successful police series in the history of television” (Brooks and Marsh 217), was also the one that proved the viability of series television, while Huggins’s The Fugitive, “the most self-consciously noir series and undoubtedly the most successful one” (Ursini 284), was voted best dramatic series of the 1960s by TV Guide, with the finale being the most watched program on television up to its time, commandeering...