NOIR by Rabbi David Wolpe

“The eye has a light part and a dark part. One can only see through the dark part”
Talmud

Why does noir stir our souls? For some the darkness is only a pose; that is the literature that ends up discarded, forgotten. It is the adolescent noir, the boy in his bedroom chewing on the eraser and writing gloomy poetry. But the real noir, where we feel the writer’s mortal struggle with shadows, that takes hold of us, makes us feel that this shadow is somehow our real home, the soul’s resting place.
What is it about the code of noir that is so deeply enmeshed with our internal world? Noir seems composed of two elements, each in themselves true and deep, which can never be reconciled. The first is the reality of evil. Noir has no traffic with redemptive social programs, or gradualist therapy – it believes in evil. Literature that does not believe in evil can take no more than a racing dive into the human psyche. You must go down, down to a place where there are no explanations, no etiologies, no therapies. Just blackness. Just the cruelty that people do to one another. Where power is its own pleasure and horror its inevitable result.
The second reality is the necessity of a moral order. In classic noir literature we feel the evil because it is set against goodness. Man is the only animal that both laughs and cries, wrote Hazlitt, because man is the only animal struck by the difference between what is and what should be. In that terrain noir lives, its trenchcoat a symbol of fending off the swirling mess of a world that will in the end, strip the characters naked. Moral ambiguity thrives in the noir literature but only by making clear what goodness is, by holding up the standard which the characters acknowledge and periodically, violate.
That is why the prose of noir, like the prose of this essay, can so easily overheat. Who can write calmly about the dark if there is a glint of light? And the hero, if hero there be, must be disillusioned, if not at first, then in time. For in the world of noir, even though some ideals strike us as credible for the moment, in the end disillusion sounds like truth.
Bruen’s Jack Taylor’s drinking is not a disease. It isn’t allowed the comforting label of self-medication. It is the sensibly self-destructive reaction of a man who lives in disillusionment. What saves his humanity is wit, because noir wit is the recognition that we all know this makes no sense, that we can step back and achieve the distance that mockery gives us, yet the world grinds on, taking us with it, nonetheless. Humor saves the noir hero, but only for an instant; the pain roars back, mocking the mockery that was a brief respite. The French poet Valery said it for all noir literature when he commented that God made the world from nothing, and the nothing still shows through.
So characters are not only individuals, but primal forces. Women incarnate sexuality, men violence, both careening toward a plot that seems carved into the structure of the world. It never changes; there is a straight line from Delilah to Dietrich. Some will be credulous and others cunning, but in the end no one will win.
Why is it noir, and not “black”? The French name carries intimations of sexuality, to be sure; just saying it in French hikes up a hem. But also there is a swirl to the sound of the word, an image of sinking into something murky and endless, that will in time envelop us all. Since of course that is at the bottom of the noir pool – death. The specter that haunts us all gives noir its pain and power. Like the poisoner’s victim, we all see it coming, but too late to find an antidote. The slow inevitable ending of a fragile creature; it is the story of noir, and our story.
It remains only to be said that, done right, it is also a helluva read.


Rabbi David Wolpe
Sinai Temple
10400 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90024