The Private Eye Detectives in the Movies by Bran Nicol (review)

Scholarly treatments of film noir have one commonality: the ebullience with which commentators describe their objects of study and reveal the intrigues hidden within them. Approaching films not as discrete compositions, but rather as a collective array of evidence, such commentators begin to resemble detectives on the search for clues imperceptible to others; that is, they begin to resemble the paranoid protagonists of the films themselves, who, in order to compensate for a lack of understanding, create coherent but arbitrary systems out of available evidence. Of course, by now we shouldn’t be surprised that noir, which James Naremore has suggested might be “entirely a creation of postmodern culture,” would unfold outside of itself in elaborate, reflexive, and self-aware ways.²

We should be careful, though, like Bran Nicol in his book, The Private Eye Detectives in the Movies, not to assume that every film in the noir cycle depicts such a detective protagonist. Wisely, this is the first of two situating moves that Nicol makes: his book focuses exclusively on the professional private eye – a character ubiquitous in studies of film noir but actually featured in relatively few of those films. As the author explains, “Rather than being an irremovable fixture in every world created by film noirs, the private eye is more of a representative figure, someone who encapsulates the qualities of the noir world.”³ Limiting its scope to this figure, Nicol’s book avoids the warren of critical takes on the aesthetic and historical origins of noir.⁴ The conditions are thus set to break new ground (and curtail the book’s page count). Then, with his second situating move, Nicol consolidates the innovative promise of the first; however, in the process of doing so he joins the group of commentators reading into the noir universe whatever remains unresolved in their personal and/or historical moment.

Broadly construed, Nicol’s second move is to extract the symbolic connotations of the term “private eye,” but to focus our attention more on the first word.⁵ His book concerns itself with how the private realm is revealed by investigators in these films—which include early noirs of the 1940s, 70s revivifications, and more modern neo-noirs. For instance, Nicol devotes Chapter Three to how the symbolically “homeless” figure of the private eye, whose livelihood is inexorably tied to his work, entices viewers to consider the meaning of “home” in a post-war culture. Ample support bolsters this claim, but it’s also seemingly informed by a period in the author’s personal life. As an aside within the Acknowledgments section,⁶ Nicol writes the following: “Researching and writing this book spanned four homes, three towns, and two jobs. It is perhaps not surprising that I began to see in films about the private eye, that fearless, nomadic, ‘lone wolf’, a subtle but unmistakable yearning for stability.”⁷ Regardless of the comment’s sincerity, its inclusion suggests that the author’s personal transience affected his perspective on his target subject.

In much the same way, Nicol brings a specific historical moment to bear on the subject of the private eye in film. According to the author, the unveiling gaze of the private eye reveals the private realm just as it unavoidably endorses “the norms, values, and prejudices of the prevailing social order.”⁸ In a century where technology has blurred the distinction between private experience and public consumption, Nicol understands the private eye as contributing to the panoptic logic of modern society. Invoking the 2011 News of the World saga – wherein journalists used investigators to conduct surveillance, compile dossiers, and intercept voicemails of private citizens of the United Kingdom – may already seem outdated,⁹ but the political stakes of such actions are clear to readers who, since 2013, have been made aware of global surveillance programs run by government security agencies. Nicol challenges the “heroism” of private eyes, as they are mythologized in film, because of how they ultimately service...