Noir and Its Heretics by David Schmid, University of Buffalo

I’d like to thank the indefatigable Lou Boxer and the other organizers of Noircon for inviting me to be a part of this event. As I look over the program for this weekend, I’m blown away by the phenomenal array of talent they’ve put together, so much so that I’m especially grateful to be going first! And the other presenters will realize, by the time I finish my presentation this evening, that they have many reasons to be grateful to me, too, because I confidently predict that no one will need to say, “Well, that’s a tough act to follow!”

OK, enough self-deprecating humor: to business! I’m going to begin by sharing a couple of quotes with you from a conference paper entitled “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” by the British critic Stuart Hall, in which he talks about how to define the discipline of cultural studies. Their relevance to my subject will perhaps not be immediately clear, but I hope that it will become so as I go on:

“Cultural studies has multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. It is a whole set of formations; it has its own different conjunctures and moments in the past. It has included many different kinds of work.”

“Now, does it follow that cultural studies is not a policed disciplinary area? That it is whatever people do, if they choose to call or locate themselves within the project and practice of cultural studies? I am not happy with that formulation either. Although cultural studies as a project is open-ended, it can’t be simply pluralist in that way…it does have some will to connect; it does have some stake in the choices it makes. It does matter whether cultural studies is this or that. It can’t just be any old thing which chooses to march under a particular banner…there is something at stake in cultural studies.”

Replace the phrase ‘cultural studies’ with the word ‘noir’ in those two quotes and you’ll see where I’m going with this. I’d like to assume for the moment that part of our purpose for gathering here this weekend is to answer, or at least discuss, that elusive question: “What is noir?” My own modest contribution to that effort in this presentation is to suggest that this question cannot be answered; and that even if it could, we shouldn’t answer it in too restrictive a fashion. Why? Because noir, as I will later explain, is a heretical category, and we should keep it that way. At the same time, and this is where the quotes from Hall come in, although I do not want us to define noir too precisely, and although I would always want to stress the variety of types of work and products that can be gathered under the capacious category of ‘noir,’ I also would not want to argue that noir can and should mean anything at all. Because, just as Hall argues in relation to cultural studies, it does matter whether noir is one thing or another; there is something ‘at stake’ in such definitions. In this presentation, I want to try and describe that sense of ‘at stakeness’ as it relates to noir.

Part of the reason I want to do so is that it seems to me that today we are coming perilously close to a situation where ‘noir’ can mean anything at all. Consider the following more or less random sampling of products out there right now that all make use of or draw upon the ‘noir’ label.

First, there are the efforts of various publishing houses that have committed themselves to preserving and extending the legacy of noir fiction. Probably one of the best known such projects at the moment is the remarkable series of volumes published by Akashic Books that exemplifies their ambition to achieve reverse gentrification of the literary world:

http://www.akashicbooks.com/noirseries.htm

This is the kind of idea that is so brilliant, you’re convinced that someone must have had it long ago. Except that no one did. It makes perfect sense, especially for a volume like Los Angeles Noir because, as editor Denise Hamilton puts it, “Los Angeles is the birthplace of all things noir.” Part of what’s so entertaining about the series, though, is the fact that it’s also willing to explore territory whose noir affiliations are considerably less obvious, as in Toronto Noir! This is a city I thought I knew well, as I live just down the road in Buffalo, but this volume certainly gave me a new perspective on it! And speaking of Buffalo, I feel compelled to ask, Where is ‘Buffalo Noir’?!

Publishing houses doing the same kind of work would include the superlative Hard Case Crime series:

http://www.hardcasecrime.com/

(how many other projects can boast an endorsement from Spillane himself?!), Millipede Press, with their wonderful reprintings of David Goodis titles such as Nightfall and Street of No Return (the latter with a fine introduction from our very own Robert Polito)

http://millipedepress.com/

Busted Flush Press, dedicated, in their words, to “fine thrillers and hard-boiled crime fiction reprints”:

http://www.bustedflushpress.com/

and finally, in an important reminder that noir is always an international phenomenon, a great website called “International Noir Fiction,” which reviews and discusses a very large number of crime novels from outside the US.

http://internationalnoir.blogspot.com/

So far, so good, you may be thinking, and you’d be right, but the imprimatur of the label of noir also gets used for a staggering array of other products and cultural phenomena. There is Noir, the 26-episode Japanese anime television series produced in 2001 by the Bee Train animation studio. The series follows the story of two young female assassins who embark together on a personal journey to seek answers about mysteries from their past.

http://www.animegalleries.net/category/85

There is Noir the collective of multimedia artists, which is what you’ll find if you’re unwise enough to type in noir.org on your computer.

http://www.noir.org/About.html

There is Christian Noir, a blog that explores how Christians are portrayed in books and films. One of the most recent posts interprets the Coen Brother’s No Country for Old Men as an example of Christian Noir, with Javier Bardem’s character being Satan loosed upon the world in the last days:

http://aka-california.blogspot.com/

There is a fashion line called Noir, founded in 2007 by Danish designer named Peter Ingwersen. His mission, he says, is to “create meaningfulness in the luxury segment.” According to the website, if you are looking for a snappy white suit, a dangerous micro mini, or a great shrunken bomber, “he’s your man.” Keep that in mind, Lou.

http://www.noir-illuminati2.com/

A much more widely known appropriation of noir is Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion character, Guy Noir, Private Eye:

http://www.visability.com/Static/Images/APHC_GuyFront_LG.jpg

But there’s obviously no shortage of more obscure examples of our culture’s fascination with noir, such as animal-related noir! The book, Pet Noir for example, aims, according to its website, to “put the cat back into catastrophe and the dog back into doggoned” by collecting and then illustrating a clutch of recent true crime cases involving animals.

http://www.marinaomi.com/petnoir.html

Even more bizarre is the story of Park Ranger Jordan Fisher Smith’s years spent patrolling the American River Canyons, an area of land caught in limbo when plans to inundate it with water and build a dam were delayed, thus turning the land into a dangerous free zone for criminals. The resulting book about his experiences is entitled Nature Noir, and no less a critic than Mike Davis provides the book with a rave review. That’s right, that’s the same Mike Davis who wrote City of Quartz, in which he perceptively describes Chester Himes’s two pre-Harlem novels set in wartime LA, If He Hollers Let Him Go and Lonely Crusade, as LA noir that provides “a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the psychotic dynamics of racism in the land of sunshine.” Davis has similarly high praise for Smith’s Nature Noir which, he says, “invents a new genre” with its “brilliant interweaving of murder, irony and natural history.”

http://www.naturenoir.com/

And finally, what is probably my favorite category, there are the musical appropriations of noir, such as Ukulele Noir, a band that Lou, and correct me if I’m wrong, Lou, struggled manfully to bring to Noircon:

http://www.ukulelenoir.com/

And they are joined by Accordion Noir, whose website defines their aim as “ruthlessly pursuing the belief that the accordion is just another instrument”:

http://accordionnoir.org/drupal/

Now, my intention here is not to police the boundaries of the category ‘noir’ by labeling some of these appropriations legitimate and others illegitimate (although I must admit that I’m tempted to do exactly that when I see the Noir fashion line!). Rather, what I’d like to do is to point out that in the vast majority of the examples I just showed you, noir has become little more than a style, a mood, an atmosphere, a collection of clichéd visual tics. Has the category of ‘noir’ now been broadened so much that it has been essentially emptied of meaning?

A number of critics have noted and written about the broadening of the concept of noir. In his indispensable book More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, James Naremore refers to something he calls the “noir mediascape,” which he describes as follows: “a loosely related collection of perversely mysterious motifs or scenarios that circulate through all the information technologies.” But we should probably remind ourselves in this context that noir has always been a fairly loose and baggy category. As far back as 1955, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, in their book A Panorama of American Film Noir, the original and therefore seminal extended treatment of the subject say that, "We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel...." Subsequent critics would go on to define noir even more broadly, some calling it a genre, others a style, or a mood, a series, a cycle, a period, or any combination of the above. As one study puts it, with a fine sense of understatement, “There is no consensus on the matter.”

One response to this undecidability, of course, has been to stabilize it by attempting to establish a canon of noir texts, and this has been an especially popular strategy among students of film noir. This is why you will find someone like Frank Krutnik, for example, explaining in his wonderful book, In a Lonely Street: film noir, genre, and masculinity, that he will be concentrating on the so-called “tough thriller” because this “will have the advantage of disentangling from the highly cluttered map of noir a body of films which can be seen to operate in generic terms.” This is the kind of move that can create a canon, and in its worst versions, this can lead to completely unprofitable discussions about which films or books really count as noir, and which should be dismissed as mere pretenders.

To some extent, there has been a similar tendency toward canonization in literary noir (altho’ film noir will never be surpassed in this inglorious respect). Although I am a tremendous admirer of the handsome Library of America volumes featuring the crime novels of the 30s, 40s, and 50s (and so ably put together once again by Robert Polito),

I can’t deny that I regard this ascendancy of noir to the pinnacle of literary respectability as a moment of profound danger as well as profound opportunity. Can noir, in other words, hang on to its heretical status when it becomes an orthodoxy? Or should we, to make the motif of heresy work just a little harder, burn noir at the stake?!

In order to answer that question, I need to explain exactly what I mean by heresy. The standard dictionary definition of heresy is any opinions or doctrines at variance with the official or orthodox position. That seems reasonable to me, but I would add that in my view, it’s important to remember that heretics are themselves members of the church or faith with which they disagree and thus distinct from non-believers. I still believe in the concept of noir, in other words, but I believe in it precisely because it is heretical in the way that it consistently goes against the official and orthodox position, and it’s this oppositionality, this subversiveness, this heretical thinking, that I want to preserve in noir. This is what’s at stake in any definition of noir. Once again, I find Naremore’s work useful here, especially when he explains why he continues to use the concept of noir when he finds so much about it unsatisfying:

“It may seem odd...that after questioning most of the usual generalizations about film noir in my first chapter, I go on to use the term in a familiar way and to employ a more or less conventional historiography…Like all critical terminology, it tends to be reductive, and it sometimes works on behalf of unstated agendas. For these reasons, and because its meaning changes over time, it ought to be examined as a discursive construct. It nevertheless has heuristic value, mobilizing specific themes that are worth further consideration.”

So what are the specific themes that I think are usefully mobilized by the concept of noir? To put it another way, what aspects of noir do I regard as being more substantive and more useful than the stylistic clichés that have become so widespread?

In “Noir Redux,” an interesting guest column (written by Megan Abbott? I’m not sure) on Sara Weinman’s blog, “Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind,” the blogger remarks that prognosticating about the future of noir is difficult because “so much of (classic) noir is, in many ways, deeply nostalgic, filled with yearning for a Time Before (before world wars, before perceived urban decay, before … well, a lot of social progress). You could argue that, when one tries to “do” noir today, one either has to 1) embrace the nostalgia fully (by simulating classic noir, deadpan) or 2) take a kitschy, ironic perspective.”

http://www.sarahweinman.com/confessions/2005/08/noir_redux.html

I think this is a fascinating point, not least because it touches on the complicated question of the temporality of noir. We’re all familiar with the way noir is obsessed with the past, especially with what comes “out of the past,” and so its recycling as a nostalgic category makes perfect sense, but is it possible that noir also has an element of futurity about it? Noir was always a retrospective category, after all, applied after the fact. Does this suggest that noir has a kind of predictive value? Perhaps we can discuss this later, but for now I want to emphasize that part of the problem with either the deadpan or kitschy simulations of classic noir that the “Noir Redux” blogger mentions is that they can so quickly shade over, sometimes unconsciously, into parodies, and that to me is problematic. Why?

At the end of his underappreciated book Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood, Woody Haut asks George Pelecanos whether he thinks contemporary noir is in danger of becoming a parody of itself. Here’s what Pelecanos says:

“First of all, most producers don’t even understand what noir is. Sure, they know the signs: Venetian blind shadows, cigarette smoke, etc. But they don’t understand the core psychological aspects, the undercurrents of claustrophobia and anxiety which drive noir. Contemporary noir tends to be a parody, and it has been for some time. Look at the last of the original film noir cycles in the 1950s—Kiss me Deadly and Touch of Evil are outsized comments on the genre. So, now what we often get is a parody of a parody. The best noirs of the last few years have come to us in disguise: urban drama, like Menace II Society, or westerns, like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven…As long as we have these permutations, then the tradition is alive.”

Pelecanos’ comments make noir parody sound damn near unavoidable, but there is a way in which we can keep the focus on what Pelecanos describes as “the core psychological aspects, the undercurrents of claustrophobia and anxiety which drive noir.” And that’s by reminding ourselves, as the “Noir Redux” blogger goes on to say, that “noir isn’t just nostalgic (even if some of its more famous characters are), but is also essentially anarchic, e.g., an attack on status quo, or an outsider romance.”

To take a phrase from Val Wilmer’s great book on free jazz, noir is “as serious as your life,” not in the sense of being po-faced or humorless, but definitely in the sense Mike Davis talks about when describing California noir: “Noir was like a transformational grammar turning each charming ingredient of the boosters’ arcadia into a sinister equivalent.” Apply the concept of boosterism to the American Dream, and you’ll have a sense of the scale of what I’m claiming for the heretical significance of noir, its ability to provide a politically engaged critique of the American experiment. Note that I say ‘politically engaged’ and not necessarily ‘politically progressive.’ James Naremore argues, I think correctly, that noir “certainly isn’t a proletarian art,” and so I don’t think we can read off or demand any particular set of political opinions from Noir (that would simply be another form of orthodoxy). But, as Naremore goes on to say, noir’s “protagonists are very often social outsiders or criminals,” and so for that reason, it can “never been accused of promoting moral uplift or the American Dream.”

Noir is at its most heretical and, I would argue, its most noir-like, when it is providing this type of critique of the multiple orthodoxies that define America, and this is why I have a profound disagreement with a recently published book by Thomas Hibbs entitled, Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption (Spence Publishing, 2008), which argues that although noir seems bleak and cynical on the surface, the meaning behind the phenomenon is a good deal more complex and significantly more positive: What is significant about these films is not just that they present a dark and dismal world but that they display their main characters as on a quest for love, truth, justice, and even redemption.

Even if I thought thus was true, I would not want my noir to possess any redemptive qualities, thank you very much! But I don’t think it is true, which makes me reject this argument even more firmly. So, what types of noir would I recommend as heretical? Well, this is a gesture fraught with danger, of course, because what could be more contradictory or just plain silly that establishing a canon of heretical noir?! Perhaps I’ll offer the following suggestions just as personal preferences rather than recommendations, while noting that many of them have a heretical relation to noir; that is, they try to undercut, subvert, and resignify the ways in which noir itself can become an orthodoxy, especially as regards an area such as roles for men and women.

I very much like, therefore, the work of what the superbly talented Steve Fisher (seen here with William Faulkner and Howard Hawks) once described as the ‘tough/tender’ school of noir, distinguished by more emotionally vulnerable and complex male protagonists.

I’m a big fan of the Femmes Fatales series published by the Feminist Press, partly because how could you not love a press that brings a title like Women’s Barracks back into print?!:

http://www.feministpress.org/catalog/?category_id=71

This series’ reprints of the work of Dorothy Hughes (In a Lonely Place, and The Blackbirder), along with Vera Caspary’s Laura and Bedelia, not to mention Evelyn Piper’s astonishing Bunny Lake is Missing, make very clear just how profoundly women writers resignified the conventions of noir. As the Feminist Press publishers put it, “Women writers of pulp often outpaced their male counterparts in challenging received ideas about gender, race, and class, and in exploring those forbidden territories that were hidden from view off the typed page.”

Finally, I want to mention one writer who for me continues to tower above all others in the field. No, not Goodis, but Cornell Woolrich. Not because I want to install him as the father of noir, but simply because he is, to me, even after all this time, sui generis in the bleakness of his vision, a bleakness that stands out all the more intensely against the completely neglected F. Scott Fitzgerald imitation novels with which he began his publishing career.

I’d like to finish with a wonderfully forthright quote about noir from a website called “murderoutthere.com”: “The pencil-necks still can't decide if this is a genre, sub-genre, a style or what. Like anyone gives a shit. As Ellroy said, ‘Noir rules, other fiction drools.’” Goodness knows, I don’t want to be thought of as a pencil-neck, but I hope I’ve demonstrated that there is still some value in talking about what noir is, is not, and might become. As long as we remember to be heretical. Thank you.

http://www.english.buffalo.edu/faculty_staff/faculty/schmid/