In a Lonely Street

Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity

Frank Krutnik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134973170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

Taking issue with many orthodox views of Film Noir, Frank Krutnik argues for a reorientation of this compulsively engaging area of Hollywood cultural production. Krutnik recasts the films within a generic framework and draws on recent historical and theoretical research to examine both the diversity of film noir and its significance within American popular culture of the 1940s. He considers classical Hollywood cinema, debates on genre, and the history of the emergence of character in film noir, focusing on the hard-boiled' crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain as well as the popularisationof Freudian psychoanalysis; and the social and cultural upheavals of the 1940s.

The core of this book however concerns the complex representationof masculinity in the noir tough' thriller, and where and how gender interlocks with questions of genre. Analysing in detail major thrillers like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past and The Killers, alongside lesser known but nonetheless crucial films as Stranger on the Third Floor, Pitfall and Dead Reckoning Krutnik has produced a provocative and highly readable study of one of Hollywood most perennially fascinating groups of films.

Part I
Classical Hollywood, genre, film noir

Chapter 1
Classical Hollywood: film and genre

THE CLASSICALHOLLYWOOD FILM

For the bulk of its classical period, that is, from the mid-1910s to the late 1950s, the American film industry was dominated by a small number of vertically-integrated companies who co-operated as a business community (rather than simply competing against one another) in order to exercise an oligopolistic control over the cinema business. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s these major companies were: the fully integrated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Loew’s Inc.; Paramount Pictures; Warner Brothers; Twentieth Century-Fox and RKO; and the production–distribution companies Universal (-International), Columbia and United Artists. The control they maintained over film production, distribution and exhibition effectively allowed them to dictate access to the screen, and to regulate also the permissible and standardised forms of the cinematic product.¹ Regularly and efficiently, these companies produced high-cost feature films for a mass audience which attended the cinema on a frequent, even habitual basis. The need to maintain quality standards, while controlling costs, resulted in the organisation of the production process within a fixed-site studio. Production was controlled by managerial staff (who supervised several films at once) and was subject to an intensive division of labour, with separate departments responsible for cinematography, screenwriting, set-design, etc.² However, although in many ways Hollywood modelled itself on contemporary American industry, the nature of its product was unique. Whereas most industries seek a high level of product uniformity – so cars of one model, for example, are as identical as possible³ – it was essential in order to draw audiences repeatedly to the cinema that each film differed from others. However, with film-production being both capital- and labour-intensive, it was also necessary to regulate the parameters of difference. Hollywood managed this both through an efficient control over production and marketing, and the institutionalising of procedures of narrative elaboration and containment.

Specialising in narrative representation, Hollywood developed and transformed the novelistic mode of popular fiction.⁴ The classical fiction film tends to pivot around individual characters, their emotions, desires and actions. It is centred most often upon a dynamic, goal-orientated protagonist who is engaged within, and defined through, two causally-related trajectories:⁵ (i) the ‘generic’ story: for example, the commission or detection of a crime; the adventure; putting on a show and; (ii) the heterosexual love story. Individual genres represent different balances of these two lines of action. For example, in the romantic melodrama or the romantic comedy the love story tends to be dominant. However, in male-orientated genres such as the Western and the gangster film, the role of the woman is often marginalised, the drama being concerned principally with relations between men in a context of ‘masculine testing’. In many of the ‘tough-guy ‘film noir thrillers, as will be shown later, the generic story (of the crime or investigation) and the love story are often (con)fused.

But besides the specific issues and conflicts with which the drama is concerned, the Hollywood fiction film mobilises and systematises a more general – though generically diversified – narrational process. This process engages the ‘metapsychological economy’ of the spectator, who makes identifications not solely with the desires or goals of specific characters, but with the dialectic of narration itself (which pulls between pleasure and anxiety, between equilibrium and disequilibrium, between process and stability). The activity of narration – the channelling of the multiple sounds and images into a dynamic systematisation of meaning – is fundamentally ‘dialogic’. The classical entertainment film, as a process of narrative representation, does not simply act upon the spectator: rather, the spectator and the film interact.⁶ As John Ellis suggests, the viewing of a film is far from a passive activity:

It is a work because it involves the expenditure of emotional energy and the taking of emotional risks in order to produce a sense of pleasurable satisfaction at the conclusion of the process. The process itself is a constant testing: a position of partial unity is held throughout the film by the viewer, who sees something of the truth throughout. But the film refuses to reveal all its truths until its conclusion, where everything falls into place for the spectator.⁷

The spectator translates his or her own desires into the matrix of fantasy positions made available by the film, and thus makes a ‘contract’ with the film (and through the film, with cinema). In submitting to an engagement with the fictional process, the spectator offers in exchange not just money (at the box-office) but also a psychical/emotional investment.

The performance of the film institutes a dynamic play of positions, and hence desires, in which both the film and the spectator have specified obligations. Whereas the spectator must process what is seen and heard, the film must uphold its own end of the contract: it must permit the spectator to derive pleasure and meaning from its fictional play. Each separate shot of the film thus represents aview constructed specifically forthe spectator, with the editing of shots into sequences tending to offer the spectator a ‘totalising’ overview (significant narrative details are highlighted in close-ups; new locations are signalled through establishing long-shots; dramatic events are underscored by musical punctuation).⁸ The spectator’s comprehension must not be sacrificed totally, although it can momentarily be set in jeopardy - for films can toy with surprise and seeming incoherence, especially as a means of intensifying the pleasure of recognition. It is also worth stressing that a measure of instability is, indeed, also fundamental to the very process of narrative. As Stephen Heath has noted,⁹ the narrative process of the Hollywood film is inaugurated by the disruption of a stable situation. Through the process of reordering and rebalancing of the elements of that disruption, the narrative moves towards an ‘inevitable’ re stabilisation. The initial destabihsation serves, then, as a localised transgression of order: localised because it is necessary for (or ‘for the sake of) the very mobilisation of the process, and also because it is immediately subjected to conventionalised procedures of narrative elaboration and containment. The cinematic performance of the film as narrative is, then, by no means an impromptu performance, and neither is it hermetic. To be both meaningful and pleasurable, a film relies upon sets of rules and conventions which are shared both by the individual spectators who constitute the audience, and by the performer (not just the film in itself but also the cinema as institution, since the film operates a specific mobilisation of a general cinematic process of representation). These rules and conventions include the general classical narrative and stylistic norms, the star system and the genre system.

Gill Davies¹⁰ has suggested as a model for considering the dynamics of realist narrative – of which the Hollywood fiction film is a particular modality – the mystery or detective story. In such stories, the narrative process is inaugurated by a direct transgression of order which is defined in terms of social law (i.e. a crime, generally a murder), with the detective serving as the intextual agent of narrative (re)ordering. The detective examines and sifts the evidence and judges the truth of the characters’ conflicting testimonies, seeking to banish equivocation and to identify and countermand the criminal agency which is the source of narrative destabilisation. A more pertinent model, however, for approaching the narrational process of the Hollywood film is provided by comedy. As Steve Neale and I have suggested,¹¹ comedy narratives are also dependent upon a transgression of norms, rules and codes of conduct, but this transgression is clearly structured within the context of a final and inevitable realignment. Comedy provides the site for an allowable disruption of order, serving as an acceptable space wherein transgression has a central but controlled function (as an integral part of the system).

The narrative machinery I have just described is overt in comedy, but it is integral also to the other modes of Hollywood narrative – and, I would suggest, to the process of mainstream fiction in general. Although transgression is essential to the pleasure in and of fiction, the potential risk to which it gives rise must be carefully regulated, otherwise it may threaten, rather than allow, pleasurable satisfaction. In the fantasy mesh mobilised through the fictional text, the spectator or reader has of necessity to allow him- or herself to be subjected to a process of multiple (and fluctuating) subjective positioning – identifying, for example, with the different positions of desire structured through the narrative, with the goals of specific characters and with the viewpoint of the camera or the authorial voice. However, the familiarity of the narrative, stylistic and generic rules permits this flux of positions (which opens onto the possibility of a divided subjectivity, a subject-in-process) to be held in place. In this sense, the film operates like the daydream.¹² Robert J. Stoller has suggested how the daydream fantasy (specifically, but not exclusively, of the order activated in sexual ‘perversions’) represents a channelling of psychical energy that pulls between the lure of pleasure and the threat of anxiety:

If the daydream is to work it must not arouse too much anxiety without also ending excitement. This is done by introducing a sense of risk into the story. A sense of risk: in reality, the risk cannot be too great or anxiety will arise. One can only have the impression of risk.¹³

In the narrative process of the Hollywood film, it is similarly a question of a contained risk because, as John Ellis notes, ‘the disruptions are provided for a short while and then brought back into line’.¹⁴

It is at this juncture that one can stress the function of genres as modalities of the general regulatory system of classical Hollywood narrative. Genre represents a system of standardised variation at the level of narrative itself. Like the star system, the genre system served as a framework for the mass-production of films, but it was also a means by which these films could operate as sites of meaning and pleasure. The genre system allowed both a stabilisation of expectations – the films of one genre conforming to parameters established across pre-existing texts (not solely films) – and the production of an essential degree of differentiation (the various genres).

THEHOLLYWOODGENRESYSTEM

Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery see the classical Hollywood style as representing for its audience ‘an important part of their horizon of expectations, establishing what a fictional film is supposed to look and sound like’.¹⁵ Genres functioned as dynamic subsystems of the Hollywood style, for they served as different ways of ordering and diversifying its potentialities.¹⁶ As Steve Neale has remarked,

Genres produce a regulated variety of cinema, a contained and controlled heterogeneity that explores and exploits the optimum potentiality of cinema’s resources and, in particular, the narrative system it has adopted as its aesthetic and ideological basis.¹⁷

The specific film conformed not only to the general parameters of the Hollywood style but also to the particular norms of the generic subsystem. Generic specification was also a strong selling point, with terms like ‘Western’, ‘horrorfilm’, ‘musical’, ‘crime thriller’and ‘romantic comedy’ having a wide circulation among the industry, the trade press (Variety, Motion Picture Herald, etc.), fan magazines, newspaper reviewers and audiences.

However, the boundaries between genres are by no means fixed and precise, and moreover a genre cannot simply be defined in terms of the elements it contains. As Leo A. Handel has suggested

A picture is never a hundred per cent western, mystery, or comedy, but it usually includes many other basic story types. A western picture might, and often does, include elements such as mystery, romance and so on.¹⁸

Furthermore, generic labels tend to be very loose, demarcating broad and at times far from contradictory parameters. For example, there are many different forms of comedy – comedian comedy, romantic comedy, family comedy, the ‘comedy of manners’ – and in many instances terms such as ‘mystery’, ‘thriller’, ‘suspense film’ and ‘crime film’ are used interchangeably. Rather than seeing genre as a strictly rule-bound context, then, one should stress that any process of generic designation locates very broadly defined sets of discursive configurations, narrative procedures and stylistic emphases.

Steve Neale has stressed that the difference between genres is never

a question of particular and exclusive elements, however defined, but of particular combinations and articulations of elements, of the exclusive and particular weight given in any one genre to elements which in fact it shares with other genres.¹⁹

As Neale suggests, although heterosexual desire has a widespread vcurrency in the Hollywood film, it does tend to play a specific and dominant role in musicals and melodramas and not in most Westerns and war films.²⁰ Similarly, violence is not specific to the Western or the gangster film, but it does tend to be related to the disruptions of law and social order which are pivotal to the narrative process of these genres.²¹ As this suggests, there are marked ‘relations of kinship’ between genres. For example, the melodrama (e.g. Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows (1955)), social comedy (e.g. Vincente Minnelli’s family comedy Father oj’the Bride (1950)) and the musical (e.g. Minnelli’s Meet me in St Louis (1944)) can represent different ways of handling the same sets of issues and cultural tensions, notably, the conf...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I Classical Hollywood, genre, film noir
• Part II Film noir: sources and determinants
• Part III The representation of masculinity in the noir 'tough' thriller
• Appendix 1 'Hard-boiled' Hollywood: 1940-50 (filmography)
• Appendix 2 1940s crime-film cycles
• Notes