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More
recently than I care to admit, I was a video store clerk. I’d like
to think I’ve moved on to bigger and better things, but one perk
I do miss is all the free movies. Free movies are why I’ve seen
a lot more crime/noir films than I’ve read crime/noir books. I’m
trying slowly to remedy that imbalance, but right now I’m going
to celebrate movies—the steady stream of fantastic crime movies
that have been produced in the wake of Pulp Fiction, the film that rather
single-handedly revitalized the genre way back in 1994. Some folks call
these movies Neo-Noir, as good a term as any, though perhaps a little
odd for those of us who know that noir never really went away.
But there is something unique about the best of these Neo-Noir movies,
and it comes down to a customer complaint I received one day at the video
store where I worked. The customer was returning Christopher Nolan’s
masterpiece Memento—returning it early. Moreover, he wanted his
money back. When I asked him if there way something wrong with the tape,
he said, “There sure as hell is. It runs backwards. I can’t
get it to run the right way.” I wanted to ask him if he’d
gotten past the opening credits, which literally do run backwards, or
if he’d started watching the movie itself, in which the individual
scenes themselves run forward, but the scenes are arranged together in
reverse chronological order. But I didn’t want to get into it with
him. I just gave him his money back and chalked him up as a philistine.
Anyone watching Memento or Pulp Fiction will immediately recognize the
“something unique” that many of the best Neo-Noir films display.
It is formal innovation, formal experimentation—the willingness
to mess around with the way the story is told. Memento tells its story
backwards (with some elements running chronologically forward, clearly
delineated from the other elements because they are shot in black-and-white).
Pulp Fiction unravels as a series of interconnect short stories: each
short story is chronological, but the intersections between the stories
are not always chronologically exact. Thus, Vincent Vega can be shot to
death in an apartment bathroom and appear later in the movie perfectly
alive and well.
Some people can’t tolerate this kind of nonsense. In most movies,
even most crime movies, audiences are not asked to think much about how
a story is put together. In fact, the old Hollywood line usually runs
parallel to what the poet Samuel Coleridge called “the willing suspension
of disbelief.” That is, readers and audiences convince themselves
to stop thinking “this is just a movie/book” and start emotionally
experiencing the story as if it were real. This is the bread and butter
of fiction. If we can’t evoke emotional responses in our readers,
we might as well pawn our laptops and cameras.
The problem with movies that are formally innovative—that mess around
with the way the story is told—is that they keep the audience aware
of their artifice, their fakeness. It’s much harder to let oneself
get lost in the alternate reality of The Usual Suspects when one is being
confronted with several competing versions of the same story. David Lynch’s
Mulholland Drive is even more daunting because the way Lynch messes around
with narrative is even more convoluted. He rearranges so much in the last
third of the film that actors are suddenly playing different characters,
dead people are inexplicably resurrected, and the chronology becomes oddly
circular, perhaps even incomprehensible.
Even a movie as old as Psycho has its moments; when Marion Crane is hacked
to bits in the shower, the audience response is not only “oh, poor
Marion, must she be so harshly punished for her sins?” It is also,
“hey, Hitch, you can’t kill off the main character twenty
minutes into the movie.” We are responding to the emotions that
the story itself evokes, but we are also responding to the manner that
Hitchcock and Joseph Stephano tell the story. The Psycho example illustrates
that form is most noticeable when it is audacious and jarring. When it
is conventional, we don’t think about form much at all.
In previous essays I’ve tried to articulate some reasons why I love
the crime/noir genre—reasons which I hope explain why other people,
like those reading these essays, also like the genre. I’ve been
on fairly safe ground so far, as one is hard-pressed to find too many
people who say they enjoy predictable plots, flat characters, shallow
themes, and dull atmosphere. But I’m fully aware that my love for
formal innovation is shared by only a minority of viewers and readers.
Most people can’t stand it. Most people want their money back after
watching a few minutes of Memento or Mulholland Drive. They simply can’t
stand to see the firm foundations of Story get so destabilized. They complain
they can’t get “into” the story emotionally if they
have to constantly stay intellectually attuned to its formal components.
I’m not going to try to argue against people’s reactions,
as it is terribly difficult to convince anyone that they shouldn’t
have the feelings they have. Still, I’ve never bought the idea that
the human mind is so simple a machine that we can’t respond in two
entirely different ways simultaneously. People complain that formal tinkering—such
as the shocking revelation at the end of The Usual Suspects that suddenly
questions every apparent truth in the narrative—“pulls them
out of the moment.” They might say it’s rather like being
suddenly asked by your partner during sex if you paid the electric bill
this month. But I wonder: aren’t we clever enough creatures to be
able to feel and think in two different directions at the same time? I
can be sad for Marion Crane as she slumps down dead in the bathtub and
I can simultaneously wonder what Hitchcock thinks he’s up to by
killing her off.
In many cases, formal experimentation actually enhances the emotional
effect of the story. The Usual Suspects ruminates for two hours on the
nature of con men and the lies that they tell, but the viewer doesn’t
quite get the gut-punch pain of being conned until the last reel when
he discovers that he himself has been lied to. Jules Winnfield’s
decision to find redemption in Pulp Fiction is an interesting turn of
events, but it is made all the more powerful by the dramatic irony caused
by the non-chronological storytelling (kudos to my teacher Dr. Paul Schmidt
for this observation). In the diner Vincent Vega chides Jules for his
decision to reject his criminal life, but the viewer feels the catharsis
of that decision more strongly because we’ve already seen Vega get
gunned down for his sins. We’ve seen the fate that Jules escapes.
In Austrian director Michael Haneke’s brilliant and deeply disturbing
Funny Games, the sick psychological torture that two psychopaths unleash
on an innocent family becomes even more unbearable when one of the psychopaths
begins implicating the audience, first winking at the camera, then asking
us what we’d like him to do to the poor family next.
My vote for last year’s best movie is Rian Johnson’s Brick.
It takes all the conventions of a classic hardboiled detective story and
sets it in a California high school, so that the sleuth is a teenage boy,
the police commissioner is the vice principal, the femme fatale is the
art major, etc. Plenty of folks hated this movie because they did not
find the dialogue to be authentic to the way modern California teenagers
speak. But it’s a conceit—Dashiell Hammett’s dialogue
from the mouths of Laguna Beach kids. It’s not supposed to be realistic,
and yet some folks simply can’t get emotionally involved in something
with so obvious a conceit. Fine, but I still contend that the conceit
makes the movie even more emotionally powerful. Never before have the
tropes of hardboiled noir been made so emotionally familiar and resonant
to me as when they were combined with my own memories of the trauma of
being a teenager in love.
Not all formally experimental movies are noir, just as most noir films
are not formally experimental. But I’m intrigued by how frequently
the very best movies seem to combine the two: Pulp Fiction, Memento, Brick,
Funny Games, The Usual Suspects, Mulholland Drive, Closer. Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind is one exception—a genius formal experiment
with absolutely no noir elements whatsoever—but otherwise formalism
and noir seem like perfect bedfellows. Formal experiments that require
us to piece together a story quite obviously mirror the kind of work detectives
do when they are piecing together a case, so formal experiments can be
said to immerse the viewer into the mindset of the sleuth. Formal experiments
are also disturbing, confusing, upsetting, frustrating—all emotional
conditions perfectly suited for the dark alleys of crime fiction. What
better way to get the viewer to feel the pain of victimization than to
victimize the viewer, as in The Usual Suspects and Mulholland Drive?
Some of the prevailing motifs of noir are directly addressed by formal
experiments as well. Both Memento and Mulholland Drive contain the familiar
noir element of the amnesia victim, and both films use unique form to
place the viewer inside of the mindset of an amnesiac. Memento is told
in reverse chronology so that we can know as little about Leonard’s
true self as he knows about it. Mulholland Drive suddenly changes course
and reassigns characters to new roles to approximate the sense of dissociation
of the self that comes from amnesia. Like many noir films, The Usual Suspects
addresses the subjectivity of truth—and then goes as far as to question
its own identity as an objective story. Funny Games explores the age old
question of guilt and blame by making the viewer feel guilty and blameworthy
even for watching the exploits of two guiltless psychos.
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