Back to the Future

 

Noir is a reflection of its time.  I think you can argue that Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde is proto-noir, published in 1886, and clearly psychological fiction, even if not characterized as such.  But classic noir is identified with the immediate postwar era, from 1945 into the early ‘50’s.

The immediate precursor, both for style and for a gleeful moral ambiguity, is the gangster picture of the 1930’s – Warners the studio that capitalized most heavily on the raw energy of actors like Cagney and directors like Walsh.  I couldn’t say where the distinction, or definition, comes into play.  The Maltese Falcon came out in ‘41; is it noir, exactly?  The Big Sleep came out in ‘46, but Bogart has ration tags on his windscreen, so it dates to the end of the war, not after.  The picture most people would agree on is Double Indemnity, released in ‘44.  Barbara Stanwyck comes down those stairs?  You know Fred MacMurray is toast.  My own favorite would be Out of the Past, 1947, which is clearly deep into noir convention, by that point.  The exchange on the beach, when Jane Greer tells Mitchum she’s a bad girl, and not to be trusted, and Mitch has the classic comeback, which could serve as the epitaph of so many dumb clucks, from Garfield to Burt Lancaster: “Baby, I don’t care.”  (The source novel is Build My Gallows High.)

Kiss Me Deadly, from 1955, is beginning to slide into different territory - a little Them, with its radioactive ants.  Cold War noir is genre in itself, culminating in The Manchurian Candidate, or Eddie Dmytryk’s hallucinatory Mirage.  Kiss Me Deadly is still pretty relentlessly weird, Ralph Meeker completely unsympathetic, but so determined, and Gaby Rodgers, who didn’t get much traction, after this picture, as one of the more extreme psycho femme fatales of all time.  Don’t open the box!

There’s a pretty clear demarcation, between the first Bond, Dr. No, in 1962, and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, released in ‘65.  Ian Fleming knew from derring-do, he’d been a Royal Navy spook, mounting false-flag operations in Nazi-occupied Europe, but Bond was total moonshine.  He was also an archetype, predatory and calculating.  Le Carré’s sensibility was a course corrective, unglamorous and weary, and there were quite a few real spy-handlers, in CIA and MI6, who actively disliked the way le Carré peopled his secret world.  They accused him of moral relativism, but it was also so un-Bond, shorn of imperial carelessness. 

 

The noir world is arbitrary and violent.  You can draw a direct line between Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet and Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye.  Powell is more the wiseguy, and Gould the more passive, but they both affect not to care, as if they could let the world go about its business – but they in fact feel it very deeply, hiding an abiding empathy under a veil of scorn.  And if I prefer Powell, in black-and-white, it may simply be that his disguise slips when you least expect it.  Powell represents his era, just as Elliott Gould does.  Powell, or Mitchum, or Bogart – I’m thinking particularly of his astonishing performance in High Sierra – are both brittle and resilient.  Gould just seems stoned, half the time, which makes the ending of The Long Goodbye even more shocking.  You don’t realize how much Marlowe has invested of himself, until that last moment. 

So, what to make of the neo-neo-noir, such as Sicario, or Don Winslow’s border trilogy?  You could call it brutish and nihilistic, in keeping with Age of Trump, but it still seems to me inherently conservative, in that a rough justice prevails, a balance is restored.  The resolution of Sicario is disturbing in the extreme, and its sequel even bleaker, and yet, as cruel as it is, it’s dramatically satisfying: it sets things right.  We may not agree with it, but it brings a kind of order out of dystopian chaos, a reckoning. 

 

My point, here, is perhaps that we get the noir we deserve.  If it settles the score, baby, I don’t care.