"The Power of Blackness": Film Noir and Its Critics

There are people who think I dwell on the ugly side of life. God help them! If they had any idea how little I have told them about it.

Raymond Chandler, Later Novels and Other Writings

In addition to writing his famous detective novels, Raymond Chandler coauthored (with Billy Wilder) the screenplay for Wilder's brilliant Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir based on a James M. Cain novel by the same name. Like Chandler, Wilder was criticized for focusing on "the ugly side of life." Late in life he was asked the following question: "When you started in film, there was a kind of angst pervading Central Europe after World War I. Did your background, being Jewish in a culture that was becoming rabidly anti-Semitic, create a darker attitude toward life?" Wilder's response was succinct but telling: "I think the dark outlook is an American one" (Porfirio 101). In this essay I want to argue that Wilder was right: despite the French name and the German influence (for example, expressionism) upon this cinematic genre, film noir is American to the core, having its source not only in post-World War II paranoia but also in American literary Gothicism.

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Scholars, of course, have recently substantiated Wilder's observation in terms of a larger historical canvas. The New Historicism has shown to what extent our wealth and prosperity came at the price of slavery, genocide, child labor and other underdocumented horrors. Hence, critics have been willing to take popular culture more seriously than they had in the past, for cultural maps of all kinds seem relevant to unearthing America's "secret" history. Yet even here film noir poses a special problem because its literary antecedents (for example, Raymond Chandler) and its themes—alienation, angst, and an unstable universe—seem to act as a bridge between high and low cultures. That is, no one would think it odd if in a course on "high modernism" students were asked to read T.S. Eliot's TheWaste Land in the context of Wilder's Double Indemnity. When, after murdering the husband of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) says that his own "footsteps" were "the walk of a dead man" (Wilder and Chandler 73), Eliot's famous line from The Waste Land comes to mind, a line that could serve as a gloss upon an infinite number of film noirs : "I had not thought death had undone so many" (l. 63). Not surprisingly, Chandler used Eliot's poem with considerable effectiveness in two Philip Marlowe detective novels, The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940).

Perhaps another explanation for film noir's popularity, and not just among academics, lies in the general sense of malaise felt by Americans as the "American Century" has come to a close (qtd in Steel 404). Vietnam, Watergate, corporate scandals and coverups, fin-de-siècle paranoia, especially after 9/11, and now Iraq, are only a few of the ills that plague the end of the old century and the beginning of the new. More generally, there is the matter of "unfinished business" and residual guilt. Problems that the "American Century" should have solved but did not continue to hover over the nation like a black cloud. The unsolved problem of the color line and the shifting roles of women have caused critics like Julian Murphet, Eric Lott, E. Ann Kaplan, Janey Place, and Manthia Diawara to investigate the racial and gender dimensions of film noir. The enigma of the femme fatale in film noir is a case in point, for she is a figure from the past that mirrors present concerns. Pragmatic, sexy, smart, and independent —this "dark" lady is nevertheless imprisoned by Hollywood's conventions, those that in turn reflect the society at large.

As a subject of critical inquiry, film noir remains problematic. Is it a Hollywood film genre like the western and the musical or is...