Critical Theory and Film

Rethinking Ideology Through Film Noir

Fabio Vighi

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441124937
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Critical Theory and Film brings together critical theory and film to enhance the critical potential of both. The book focuses on the Frankfurt School, most notably the works of Adorno and Horkheimer, as well as associated thinkers.
It seeks to demonstrate that cinema can help critical theory repoliticize culture and society and affirm the theoretical and political impact of cinematic knowledge. After discussing how the Frankfurt School saw cinema as an instrument of capitalism use to promote the cultural and political regimentation of the masses, Vighi then proceeds to demonstrate that critical theory can in fact suggest a different verdict on the progressive potential of cinema. Each chapter focuses on a key critical theory concept that is explained and redefined through film analysis to unravel the hidden presuppositions and most radical consequences of critical theory. A unique contribution to the literature, this volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series offer an innovative reading of film as a critical tool, drawing on the latest developments in Lacanian theory.

1

The dialectic’s narrow margin: Film noir between Adorno and Hegel

Self-limitation in film noir

One of the well-known paradoxes of film noir is that it emerged out of a synthetic combination of Hollywood’s industrially produced, mainstream cinema and the artistically minded, modernist European sensibility. Among others, James Naremore (1998: 40–95) argues that American film noir brings together in an unprecedented way the techno-ideological might of Hollywood and the artistic and intellectual sophistication that by then was largely dominant in Europe under the generic term ‘modernism’. The standard historicist argument is that film noir came to represent an intriguing amalgamation of Hollywood’s traditional, monolithic cinematic style and the European artistic legacy:

The affinity between noir and modernism is hardly surprising. In the decades between the two world wars, modernist art increasingly influenced melodramatic literature and movies, if only because most writers and artists with serious aspirations now worked for the culture industry. When this influence reached a saturation point in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it inevitably made traditional formulas (especially the crime film) seem more ‘artful’: narratives and camera angles were organized along more complex and subjective lines; characters were depicted in shades of gray or in psychoanalytic terms; urban women became increasingly eroticized and dangerous; endings seemed less unproblematically happy; and violence appeared more pathological. (Naremore 1998: 45)

This oft-recited line of thought essentially registers the American culture industry’s hegemonic ability to incorporate a heterogeneous and recalcitrant artistic tendency, which nevertheless is supposed to have remained surreptitiously active and implicitly subversive within the Hollywood system. What this view tends to overlook, however, is the consideration that the structural limitations imposed by Hollywood on European ‘art cinema’ might have been decisive not only in the creation of noir, but especially in helping those modernist aspirations to find a mode of expression that could also strengthen rather than merely weaken and dilute them.

This argument is based on the well-known Hegelian paradox, on which I will return later, concerning the necessary encryption of the infinite within a finite context: True (infinite) depth of meaning is not to be found in the supposition that limitless combinations and synergies of significations are possible, but, on the contrary, it depends on an encounter that clearly delimits the potentially endless proliferation of a given notion. The intrinsic wealth of noir, its extraordinary cultural resonance within film as a whole but also within other disciplines,¹ is therefore strictly correlative to its historical encounter with a boundary, a rigid structural framework that paradoxically allowed it to flourish, to express itself fully. It is not merely that Hollywood and the European tradition suddenly came into dialogue with each other, and that the chance encounter produced a framework (noir) where these traditions can be seen as smoothly ‘speaking to each other’, exchanging their respective cultural legacies. Rather, the emergence of noir works as a tremendously persuasive example of how indispensable a frame is for a given potential to expand. I claim that the ‘Hollywood frame’, the set of rigid conventions Hollywood so explicitly embodies (particularly inflexible during the so-called Golden Age), was essential to the birth of noir in the 1940s – and, in a way, it also retroactively reveals how the European tradition itself, in its best, most inspired manifestations, was already the expression of a distinct act of framing, of self-limitation, rather than the result of unencumbered artistic or experimental opening out. What is important to add at this stage, especially in connection with noir, is that the act of framing which allows a given potential to actualize itself is never fully successful. In more general terms, reality appears to us not only because its potential infinity is subjected to a limit, but because something within the delimiting frame, oddly enough, seems to elude the frame’s compass. In psychoanalytic (Lacanian) terms, we would say that every symbolization of reality, in itself necessary, produces an enigmatic surplus of sense (the Real), which persistently disturbs the symbolic space, threatening its consistency and our relative ‘peace of mind’.

It is through this awareness that we are able to explain the typically noirish effect of what I would call ‘the hole within the frame’: Somewhere within the diegetic space, the frame itself has redoubled, it has reproduced itself in inverted form, thus creating the typically paranoid feeling that the (noir) character, in his effort to control reality, is actually being controlled, watched by an invisible gaze. This tension between the necessity of the frame and its internal redoubling – the passage from the frame (which we use in order to ‘capture’, make sense of reality) to the frame within the frame (from which reality, as it were, looks back at us) – does not simply embody an exciting cinematic trope, but provides us with the elementary mechanism behind the formation of sense, the mechanism explaining how reality itself comes into being. The first great merit of film noir is to make such mechanism explicit, in all its ambiguity: Reality ‘holds up’ for the noir subject provided he manages to avoid that reality’s enigmatic, not–fully symbolized, feature (as a rule embodied by the femme fatale) turns into a gaze, in so far the latter is homologous to the hole or gap in reality’s fabric that threatens to swallow him. The noir hero knows well that there is a narrow margin, a minimal difference, between the configuration and internal consistency of reality and its disintegration. The dialectical point, of course, is that the hole or crack that undermines reality in its symbolic constitution, bringing forth its fundamental meaninglessness, is the subject itself – the subject in over-drive, defined by the intrinsic excess of desire.²

If the above considerations are plausible, then our discussion of noir risks taking us almost to the opposite end of Adorno’s well-known reprimands against the culture industry’s totalitarian penchant for neutralizing and homogenizing all authentic inspiration and critical potential therein contained. Similar to that of Adorno, Fredric Jameson’s defence of high modernism is based on the view that modernist art as a rule offered significant elements of resistance against the voracious appetite of the culture industry, its intrinsic ideology and the economic logic it projected upon artistic creativity. (Here we should remind ourselves that the relationship between modernism and film qua harbinger of modernity was highly ambiguous even when approached from within the modernist camp. As a quintessential product of modernity, film was eschewed by such modernists as Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot, who regularly ridiculed the new medium, denying it any artistic value or cultural force. On the other hand, literary modernists like James Joyce, Antonin Artaud and Virginia Woolf saw in film the potential for a progressive encounter between modernism and mass modernity.) Although both Adorno and Jameson are wary not to ascribe to high modernism the status of a pure aesthetic condition unaffected by structural (economic) relations, they nevertheless view the advent of mass culture in the first half of the twentieth century as a manifest threat against the aesthetic and critical capacity of art.

With this in mind, it would perhaps be appropriate to rethink the basic coordinates of the usual debates of the ‘mass/popular/entertaining (American) culture vs. elitist modernist (European) art’ kind.³ Rather than lament the involution and loss of the work’s artistic value under the co-optative logic of late capitalism, or, conversely, blindly proclaim the democratic appeal of popular culture, it is critically more incisive to explore those manifestations of the culture industry where the formal, internal logic of what is produced more palpably speaks against its economic function. If subjected to theoretical scrutiny, a cultural commodity often turns out to be much more complex than its exchange value might indicate. It is not, then, merely a matter of praising the modernist quality of film noir,⁴ for we should primarily acknowledge that noir is a Hollywood phenomenon through and through, the name given to a type of cultural commodity that was mass produced in the studios exactly like Westerns or melodramas, irrespective of the difficulty encountered in defining it.⁵ Film noir, I argue, offers the ideal terrain to develop what we might call an immanent critique of cultural commodities of the filmic kind – a critique that searches, first and foremost, for signs of the dialectical composition of the commodity itself.

Let us briefly consider one of the films noirs that more subtly explores the relationship between modernism and mass culture, namely Fritz Lang’s widely acclaimed Scarlet Street (1945) – on which I will also return later, albeit from a different angle. For the time being, we shall observe how Lang – perhaps the prototype of the émigré European director in Hollywood – depicts the connection between the artwork and its mass consumption. Chris (Edward G. Robinson) is a humble, undistinguished clerk in 1930s’ New York who in his free time enjoys painting, secluded in the bathroom of his flat. Neither his philistine wife nor his friends are able to appreciate the quality of his work, which, since it does not conform to their unsophisticated understanding of pictorial realism, they deem odd and even ludicrous. The paintings, to which Chris himself does not attach any specific artistic significance (he paints as a hobby), are eventually appropriated by a young couple, Kitty (Joan Bennett) and Johnny (Dan Duryea), who are unmistakably characterized as vulgarians, models of the new mass-consumer type: Kitty is an empty-headed young woman thoroughly desensitized by the amount of rubbish she consumes (including ‘cultural junk’, as underlined by her obsession with the ‘Melancholy Baby’ tune she plays again and again on the phonograph), while Johnny is a reptile-like, repugnantly cynical crook with petit-bourgeois aspirations. By mistaking Chris for a famous painter, they see in his work only a potential source of financial gain. No attempt is made to comprehend the artwork aesthetically; instead, the latter is automatically turned into exchange value, an object of consumption to be sold and profited from.

It is easy to read into this plot the Adornian critique of mass culture as a diabolical corruptor of genuine art. Each character, except the sophisticated art critic who recognizes the significance of Chris’s paintings, is an ordinary American citizen displaying a remarkable insensitivity towards culture and an equally notable uniformity of bad taste, trapped in a homogenized environment where anything remotely cultural is conceived as either a commodity or a hobby. However, the distance between Lang’s film and Adorno’s disparaging assessment of mass culture remains considerable, measurable as it is by the simple consideration that Chris himself, the painter and unwitting creator of modernist works, is neither an artist nor an intellectual by any stretch of the imagination, but rather a stereotypically benumbed member of mass society, just like the rest of the characters. What sets him apart, then, has nothing to do with social consciousness; on the contrary, his difference emerges as a classic instance of what psychoanalysis has labelled the ‘return of the repressed’, an unconscious libidinal impulse, triggered by repression, which here first finds its outlet in the sublimated domain of art, while later it turns into blind homicidal fury (Chris’s assassination of Kitty). On this point – the theme of the ‘objectively unconscious’ dimension of art – we find an element of contact with Adorno’s aesthetic theory, and yet the possibility of a Hollywood film retaining such a speculative value is unthinkable for Adorno. In Lang’s film, the encounter between modernism (Chris’s paintings) and a 1930s’ mass modernity already dominated by cultural regression (mindless pop music, shallow radio programmes, hobbies in one’s ‘free time’ etc.) does not only sanction the triumph of the culture industry, but also yields an ambiguous image of unconscious defiance which, however embalmed in negativity and despair, inscribes a minimal discrepancy within the anonymous sameness of modernity. My specific claim is that a dialectical analysis of noir ought to focus on such discrepancies in order to underscore not their insubordinate difference from the ideological closure that typifies the cultural apparatus in which they are conceived, but rather their speculative coincidence with it.

Let us briefly return to the issue of the European influence on film noir. While from a historicist angle it is perfectly satisfactory to claim that the symbiotic relationship between the European legacy and Hollywood ‘generated an intriguing artistic tension’ (Naremore 1998: 48), at the same time, I suggest that reflections concerning this symbiosis take a more openly dialectical configuration. How exactly did the encounter between two antagonistic conceptions of film happen to give rise to noir? Perhaps it is too generic to ratify such encounter as one of mutual influence, while it remains simplistic to claim that Hollywood unilaterally absorbed and redeployed the talent of many European émigrés directors, writers, musicians and film technicians,⁶ who therefore would have had to conform to the tight rules of the American film industry, sacrificing at least part of their artistic or even political aspirations. Indeed, part of the thesis of this book is built on the dialectical reversal of this claim. As anticipated, I argue that the exhilarating novelty incarnated by film noir materialized because, rather than stifling the talent flocking in from the old continent, the technical and ideological constraints imposed by the Hollywood studio system allowed it to fulfil its potential. If such a claim seems misplaced at this early stage of the analysis, then the least one can propose is that contact with Hollywood imposed on most of these émigrés a healthy recalibration of their artistic experimental penchant: Talent was forced to take less conspicuous – and less conscious – forms of expression, and as a consequence it flourished.

One should pause here to reflect on the dialectical quality connoting the emergence of the noir phenomenon, in so far as noir can and should be regarded as an original ‘category of thought’: Film noir did not come about as the result of a conscious decision made against other external standards or demands, but its birth as a cinematic form of consciousness can be characterized as the result of film’s encounter with its own immanent self-limitation. Film noir, in other words, appeared in the early 1940s on account of the inner dynamism of film as a particular mode of thinking, its unfolding fuelled by a series of internal stumbling blocks such as the clash between Hollywood and the European modernist tradition. Of course, this logic is generally applicable to any significant development of the cinematic medium. In fact, from a dialectical angle, any noteworthy form of film-related consciousness comes forward through the encounter with an inherent limit, rather than as a mechanism of seamless progress.

As anticipated, the Hegelian dialectic tells us that subordination to an external limit should not immediately be referred to a condition of coercion, but, on the contrary, it may foster freedom, facilitating self-realization. Why? Not because awareness of the limit can be conducive to its overcoming, but because the presence of an external, ‘objective’ limit (of artistic freedom of expression, for instance) often overlaps with an ‘enabling self-limitation’, that is, with a boundary internal to my subjectivity that allows me to achieve self-identity and thus act freely. The perception of an external obstacle thwarting my potential is thus more often than not an illusion masking the fact that the concrete realization of my potential needs a degree of self-limitation, a framework within which to assert itself. In order to be able to exercise freedom, I must be embedded within a self-enclosed unit of sense, a background or framework which, simply put, confers meaning upon my actions. While in my everyday life I do not perceive this background, its presence is ab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• 1   The dialectic’s narrow margin: Film noir between Adorno and Hegel  
• 2   Critical Theory’s dialectical dilemma  
• 3   A configuration pregnant with tension: Fritz Lang for Critical Theory  
• Coda: The enjoyment of film in theory  
• References
• Index