Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy

By Robert B. Pippin

The crime melodramas of the 1940s known now as film noir shared many formal and thematic elements, from unusual camera angles and lighting to moral ambiguity and femmes fatales. In this book Robert Pippin argues that many of these films also raise distinctly philosophical questions. Where most Hollywood films of that era featured reflective individuals living with purpose, taking action and effecting desired consequences, the typical noir protagonist deliberates and plans, only to be confronted by the irrelevance of such deliberation and by results that contrast sharply, often tragically, with his or her intentions or true commitments. Pippin shows how this terrible disconnect sheds light on one of the central issues in modern philosophy--the nature of human agency. How do we distinguish what people do from what merely happens to them? Looking at several film noirs--including close readings of three classics of the genre, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai, and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past--Pippin reveals the ways in which these works explore the declining credibility of individuals as causal centers of agency, and how we live with the acknowledgment of such limitations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9780813932019

Book preview

FATALISM IN AMERICAN FILM NOIR

PAGE-BARBOUR LECTURES FOR 2010

University of Virginia Press

© 2012 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2012

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Pippin, Robert B., 1948–

    Fatalism in American film noir : some cinematic philosophy /

Robert B. Pippin.

        p. cm. — (Page-Barbour lectures for 2010)

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3189-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3201-9 (e-book)

    1. Film noir—United States—History and criticism. 2. Fate and fatalism in motion pictures. I. Title.

    PN 1995.9.F54P58 2011

    791.43’6556—dc23

2011018971

In memory of Miriam Bratu Hansen

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1

Trapped by Oneself in Jacques Tourneur’s

Out of the Past

2

A Deliberate, Intentional Fool in Orson Welles’s

The Lady from Shanghai

3

Sexual Agency in Fritz Lang’s

Scarlet Street

4

Why Didn’t You Shoot Again, Baby?:

Concluding Remarks

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work in early form began as the 2010 Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, and I am grateful to Walter Jost and Talbott Brewer for the invitation to deliver the lectures and for their hospitality during my stay. The three lectures were also given at the University of Chicago in the same year under the sponsorship of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, and I am grateful to Eric Slauter for arranging these highly fruitful conversations. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in New Literary History 41, no. 3 (2010), and a version of chapter 3 appeared in Critical Inquiry 37, no. 5 (2010), and I am grateful to the editors of both journals for permission to reprint. Versions of chapters were presented as lectures at Stanford University, Duke University, Rutgers University, Dartmouth College, Williams College, Colorado College, Wesleyan University, Columbia University, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Siemens Stiftung in Munich, and l’Université Paris i/Panthéon-Sorbonne, and I profited from the questions and discussions. I am especially indebted to a number of people for discussions about the lectures and the films, especially to Lanier Anderson, Jim Conant, Michael Fried, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Joshua Landy, Ruth Leys, Toril Moi, Dan Morgan, Gabriel Palitz, Thomas Pavel, Christine Stansell, George Wilson, and Robert von Hallberg.

I owe a special debt to my friend and colleague Miriam Bratu Hansen, the founder of Chicago’s Cinema and Media Studies program and an inspiring presence at discussions of film, literature, and much else on campus. Miriam died shortly after the completion of this book, much of which she read and generously commented on. This book is dedicated to her memory.

FATALISM IN AMERICAN FILM NOIR

INTRODUCTION

Motion pictures of actors representing fictional characters doing things engage our responsiveness in manifold ways. Some responses are distinctly aesthetic (in the original sense of sensual), have to do with credibility, compellingness, excitement, concern, fear, anxiety, and identification, and most of all simply with pleasure; perhaps a distinctly aesthetic pleasure, perhaps a distinctly cinematic aesthetic pleasure. These are relatively (though not completely) unreflective responses, and so some criterion for sensible and affective success must be observed or the photographed action aesthetically fails and there is no pleasure or engaged response. We are bored, repelled, confused.

Another kind of responsiveness has to do with commercial aspects of the industry and the status of movies as commodities. We see (we pay to see) recognizable movie stars usually repeating specific character types, in genres so established that our expectations and reactions are predictable, and we seem to enjoy such predictability and repetition.

Some responses are possible only in the medium of film. The speed of the narration and the point of view and the distance from the actors can be controlled and varied as in no other medium, and audiences originally had to learn, had to be taught, how to follow such narratives and adjust for such points of view.

Some responses are more complexly psychological. We seem to take a distinct sort of interest in being invisibly present at filmed action, especially at filmed moments of great intimacy or violence or terror. Moreover, as the technical powers of movies grow and we are able to represent compellingly almost any sort of world or event, movies seem more and more connected with the deepest human fantasies, and the intensity of the pleasure we take in the experience of such fantasies has begun to dwarf what is possible in all the other arts. Such a pleasure has inspired many sorts of explanations, many of them, understandably, complex psychoanalytic explanations.

But some responses engage our intellectual faculties, understood in a broad sense, especially with respect to what characters do, with respect to actions. We have to make sense of what characters do, and for classic Hollywood realist narratives, we bring to bear on that question the ways we attempt to make sense of our own and others’ actions.

There are certainly great gaps between what we do when we try to understand what we and others normally do and what we do in trying to understand moving pictures of actions. Movie characters are not, of course, real people, and perhaps ultimately these cinematic images make some specific sort of sense to us only within the artificial and varying boundaries set by a medium-specific aesthetic object, and in an experience that is quite distinct from ordinary perceptual and emotional experience, an aesthetic experience. Moreover, screen characters are the products of such a dizzying array of factors—the screenplay, the mise en scène, the particular requirements of the studio where it was made, the director, the actor’s performance—that the shape, strains, and tensions in a given character can be multiply overdetermined. But while screen images are not persons, and film narration is sui generis, there cannot be two completely distinct modalities of such sense-making: one for ordinary life and another governed by an incommensurable movie or dramatic or diegetic or aesthetic logic. Motion pictures of characters, whatever else they are, are still representative, doubly representative, actually, since the complex, imputed author of the film (which might include all the factors listed above)¹ is representing actors who are (if the director allows it) themselves representing a person’s life and action, all in ways they think will be understood. So at bottom there has to be a great overlap with action explanations in ordinary life and in our attempts to follow a plot. This is especially true when the film presents characters acting in ways that demand some considerable effort to try to understand what is happening and why, when characters act in ways that seem initially baffling, or where motivations are opaque in some way, or when it is simply hard to know what is happening, what act description is relevant.² I want to talk about a whole genre of such cases shortly. Understanding within the narrow limits on information set by the director what some represented character is trying to do and why is simply unavoidable and fundamental in understanding realist Hollywood narratives. It is fundamental because no other effect can be relevant if we start out watching at the meta-level or if we move immediately to the psychological question of why we are moved to feel this way or that, or why the film was a commercial success or failure. For such questions to get any grip, we have to know what might be moving us, and that what has to include what we take characters to be doing or trying to do and why we think they are. In just this limited, minimalist sense of understanding the plot of the movie, many noirs open up onto questions of action, agency, and action explanation that are extraordinarily complex.³ This all would get more complicated still when we try then to take full account of the distinct aesthetic medium of film and the uniqueness of the film-viewing experience, but there is an enormous amount of great philosophical importance going on when we try to explain what I am identifying as the minimum conditions for the intelligibility of filmed action, and that attempt need not prejudge or mislead us about these further issues. They are just distinct questions.

Moreover, we need this overlap at the outset of any discussion because the brilliant achievement of the core group of great noirs is to show how terribly limited explanations that focus on the moral psychology of individuals turn out to be, given how little of the future they can actually effect as individuals (the explanation of what happens does not finally lie with what they try to do and why they try to do it, however natural that assumption is to realist narratives), given how unstable, provisional, and often self-deceived are their claims to self-knowledge, and given how little in control they are of their criteria for deliberation, how absurd it is to expect them to be able to step back, as it is said, from their commitments and desires and goals and reflectively deliberate about what they ought to do.⁴ But this feature, too, is not unique to noirs, film, or aesthetic objects. It is a limitation of which any attempt at action explanation in life must also take account. We shall have occasion in the films under discussion to see how important the opening overlap expectation is in order to set us up for the disappointment involved in discovering how little attention to the subjective inner life of the characters is relevant to what happens.

No group of Hollywood films demands more sustained effort in this regard than those that have come to be designated as film noir. So, first, what is designated by this label? As commonly used, the name refers to a group of films, called by some a genre, produced roughly between 1941 and sometime around the mid-to late 1950s. (Many critics date the classic noir period as occurring between 1941, with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, and either 1955 with the rather bizarre, almost avant-garde noir by Robert Aldrich, Kiss Me Deadly, or the highly stylized, theatrical apotheosis of the noir style in 1958 with Welles’s Touch of Evil.) Many of what we now, still somewhat controversially, call the authors of these films, the directors, were European, and some of the most important were very influenced by the German expressionist filmmaking of F. W. Murnau and G. W. Pabst.⁵ I mean the likes of Billy Wilder (aka Samuel Wilder), Jacques Tourneur,⁶ Fritz Lang, Rudolph Maté, Otto Preminger, Edgar Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Curtis Bernhardt, William Dieterle, André de Toth, and the largely unclassifiable Alfred Hitchcock, together with some like-minded Americans such as Orson Welles, Henry Hathaway, Nicholas Ray, Jules Dassin, Edward Dmytryk, Joseph Lewis, Joseph Losey, and a few others.

The story of this designation is well known. After a long wartime period during which no American movies could be shown in Paris, French critics were astonished at what they saw when the films returned. They especially expressed amazement at what had happened to the American gangster film or crime melodrama or private-eye thriller, and some argued that the movies being produced were qualitatively different, as if a new genre altogether, much darker and stranger than those previously made. In 1946, the journalist Nino Frank compared the films to the série noire novels and coined the name film noir. Eventually Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton published a very influential book in 1955, and the convention was firmly established: the Americans had been making film noir, even though all during the classic period of the 1940s no one had any idea that they were making such film noir. (As we shall see, it is quite appropriate that this would all become clear only afterward.)

The genre designation was and is controversial. Paul Schrader, in an influential 1972 article, explicitly denied that film noir was a genre, and he argued that noirs could be roughly grouped together only by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood.⁷ I think that there are distinct aspects of convention and especially theme that do set noirs much more distinctly apart, but in the following I am just going to assume that Stanley Cavell’s suggestions about how to think about this issue in his book Pursuits of Happiness are correct. He notes that we should not think of a genre as an object with features in common, especially because new members of the genre can add features, or compensate for features most others have. Cavell relies on Wittgenstein’s idea of a family resemblance and the crucial and difficult view that the members of a genre are what they are in view of one another.⁸ I think Cavell’s characterization fits noirs as well as comedies of remarriage, especially when he writes:

It may be helpful to say that a new member [of a genre] gets its distinction by investigating a particular set of