4.5 Discussion Gender & Film Noir
4.5 Discussion Gender & Film Noir
in the frame of how the story functions
(visually, thematically, socially – politics, etc.).
My Post on 2-28-22
I thought this was this scene in Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945) would be prefect to show gender and power dynamics in film noir.
This shot is a two shot medium close up. The actors are set up in a car rear-screen projection studio, which I read was one of the most used special effects of the time. The staging is minimal, to let the strength of the two actors carry the story forward. It’s an unusual shot for a noir film as it’s in the middle of the day and it has the appearance of outdoors and overall bright lighting. Yet, the noir mood is in the picture with that one telling eye and a hapless man.
Right before Vera’s eyes open, we hear Al’s non-diegetic narration saying, “… she seemed harmless enough. Instead of disliking her I began to feel sorry for her. Poor kid. probably had had a tough time of it.”
Then we see that terrifying one eye crack open. It’s as scary as a half open Emmet Myers sleeping eye. It also seems as if she had access to these non-diegetic words and was insulted by what he was thinking. The next words out of her mouth forever change anyone’s idea of Vera being a ‘harmless enough …poor kid”
“Where did you leave his body? Where did you leave the owner of this car? You're not foolin’ anyone. This buggy belongs to a guy named Haskell, that's not you Mr.”
Within three more minutes of dialog the power has been established in this relationship with her explicitly saying.
“But just remember who's boss around here. If you shut up and don't give me any arguments, you’ll have nothing to worry about. But if you act wise, Mr. you'll pop in a jail cell so fast, it'll give you the Benz.”
In an interview with Ann Savage she gives some insights to her character and look. ““I was out on the road trying to hitch a ride. Women never hitchhiked rides it was unheard of. Only the hobos did that and men. She is mean, to a certain extent. She wants to be boss.” (Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen (Michael Palm, 2004).
“When we think of femme fatales… those are usually pretty dolled up femme fatales. They don't look at all like Ann Savage’s Vera. (Noah Isenberg on Detour, The Criterion Collection, 2018)
She also references in the Ulmer biography that coming out from the make-up trailer she looked beautiful and Edgar Ulmer saying no – you have to look like you fell off a freight train and the stylists ran cold cream through her hair.
The appearance of the actors in Detour is referenced in Naremore, “The flimsy sets reinforce the theme of impoverishment, and the actors seem as marginal as the characters they play” (Naremore pg. 71). In the first scene, protagonist Al Roberts, Tom Neal, wearing a rumpled suit and in need of a shave, drinks coffee alone at a roadside diner outside Reno, NV. (Naremore, pg. 69). I believe the look Ulmer gave his characters gave the film a Neorealist quality of the hardship of poverty that the characters were going through to get by during this time which was reflective of the times.
Another attribute noted in the Noah Isenberg documentary, as for Vera being a scarier femme fatale, it was due to her dialogue and the inflection that she used in delivering the lines of which Ulmer specifically coached her. “In rehearsing the lines with Ulmer, he had to go over these lines and increase the velocity, increase the speed with which she delivers them to the point where she gets hoarse (later in the picture).” (Noah Isenberg, 2018)
Wim Wenders was also interviewed in the Ulmer’s biography, which he would only do if he could wear a noir-type fedora. In the interview he said of Vera. “She was 30 years ahead of her time. She's a revolutionary female character. That's where half of Tarantino's casting ideas come from.” (Palm, 2004)
Thirty years ahead of her times, why?
Reinforce and/or challenge contemporary ideas about gender and power relationships?
Why does Wim Wenders say Vera is 30 years ahead of her time?
Let’s go back to Denah’s lecture of Jan. 31, 22. “the femme fatale on American movie screens to audiences during wartime, that were predominantly female, showed a way for women to walk into a room and have power that didn't really exist before.” The film noir films introduced the film fatale character who “was a new type of female character.”
Denah explains that in the 1940s a widow might be married off to a brother of the family or family friend “and one of the main reasons why that happened is because a woman could not go into a bank and start her own bank account.” I know this to be true from a friend of mine born in the 1950’s. When she got divorced, she had a hard time getting a credit card in her own name without her husband on the account and only one store gave one to her and that was Sears & Roebucks.
Matthew Sweet tells us, these are the type of men who populate film noir. “To me noir is about what’s inside the characters. Now it's inside the characters. Their sense of psychosis, their claustrophobia, their desire to escape this world gone wrong, that they that they find themselves in, particularly after World War Two.” The Rules of Film Noir (BBC Four, 2009)
There is the theme of fatalism with the noir antihero. The men are kind of losers and never succeed. The men in film noir are “doomed men like Walter Neff in Double Indemnity or Al Roberts in Detour”. (Film noir reader; Silver & Ursini, pg. 93)
“Look at any plot of almost any film noir and you become aware of the significant role played by blind chance.” Such as in Al’s example his picking up Vera as a hitch-hiker. A one in million chance that she’s the one person who knows the real owner of the car he is driving. There is a “randomness central to the noir world. The hero of Detour (Tom Neal) tells us: “Someday fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no reason at all.” (Film noir reader; Silver & Ursini, pg. 93)
How is this in/out of step with the time the film is made in?
The film was made in 1945, but it was based on the novel Detour of 1939 by Martin Goldsmith but re-written by Martin Mooney and Edgar G. Ulmer (Noah Isenberg, 2018). This was still a time of recovery from the Great Depression. The arts are always the first to suffer and I’m sure a brilliant classically trained pianist would be one of the first luxuries to be not needed compared to physical labor. There were dashed dreams for the anti-hero, who we find throughout noir. They are not wealthy or satisfied man. There were dashed dreams for a lot of men who, in this generation, were supposed to be the strong providers. Men who gravitated to this film genre who showed anti-heroes as themselves, who almost make it big.
2. What is Film Noir? Discuss your incoming knowledge of and exposure to Film Noir and your expectations about the course.
My knowledge and exposure have been little. In the class, Women in Film, I saw Double Indemnity (1944) and in 20B I saw Asphalt Jungle (1950). Just with that little exposure I wanted more. I loved the character of Phyllis especially that little smile when her husband is being strangled. Asphalt Jungle had beautiful black and white cinematography of a cement city, smoking and Marilyn Monroe. We had an assignment to analyze a scene where the men were reading a map under a lightbulb. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t the cinematic vocabulary, I wanted to have it so that was my course expectation. My other judgment of film noir prior to this class is that it would be kind of fun and campy. Well, I was wrong. There’s a lot more to it as I will explain.
1. Right away in module 1 of the class I saw that this wasn’t light-weight material with this phrase from Jonathan Crow’s article:
“Film Noir hit its zenith in the late ‘40s, a time when veterans were returning home in droves after having witnessed unimaginable horrors. Under the weight of war trauma, men felt the brittle veneer of traditional masculinity – strong, stoic and dominant — crack and crumble. Film Noir tapped into this anxiety. It’s no accident that film scholars have called Film Noir the male weepy.” (Jonathan Crow, Open Culture 2014).
He also had an interesting observation that he said, “Film Noir wasn’t a self-conscious movement in the way the French New Wave was.” (Jonathan Crow, Open Culture 2014)
The timing of this new film came as the German filmmakers were abandoning Europe and coming to Hollywood to escape the war. The film style and the angst from Europe met up with the writers and angst of the American people in a perfect fit in film noir picture.
For me this was best said by Matthew Sweet in the The Rules of Film Noir (BBC Four, 2009):
"These guys [German filmmakers and technicians] brought attitude as well as technical expertise. They knew there was some places in the world where paranoia was a rational response to life. There's a very dark idea lurking at the heart of their films. What if American cops and lawyers and officials were much the same as the ones who had made their lives a misery in Europe? What if, even though the right side? What if even though the right side and won the war, there was going to be no bright new door, just more darkness than amorality but with automatic cars and smoother cigarettes.”
- Women with Agency – even if we had to look at flawed examples.
I’ve studied Women in Film, but not women attending film. Film noir introduced the femme fatale character type. What this meant for the audience was that they weren’t seeing the stereotypical women they saw in all the other films who were only wives and mothers. There were seeing, “kind of the first emergent female figure in cinema that like has agency of any kind. Which is pretty phenomenal.” (Denah’s lecture 2-7-22)
In the BBC noir documentary, it notes that Barbara Stanwyck’s introduction in Double Indemnity is at the top of the stairs, wrapped in a robe (I thought it was a towel). Walter Neff is shot from below looking up at her. And even that in a very unconscious and basic way establishes a power relationship. There. She is, quite literally superior. (BBC Four, 2009).
Denah does point out that, “Because at certain points in time we have to coopt from popular images of bad girls in order to show women having power and agency”.
It would inspire me as a woman to see this kind of character. Just as I enjoy Charlize Theron as the over-the-top action MI6 agent in Atomic Blonde (David Leitch, 2017) who never loses a fight with any man and just kicks and kill them all. She’s our campy female James Bond.
Then Denah mentions, “So kind of ironic that you know when film history and representation give us a woman with some agency, that she's vilified for it”.
Conclude with a summary of your current ideas/thinking on “What is film noir."
My feelings:
I think I summed it up above when I said, The film style and the angst from Europe met up with the writers and angst of the American people in a perfect fit in film noir picture.
Filmmakers and writers catch the tone of the era as they are living it themselves and bring forth a work in which audience can relate. Sometimes that’s a funny fix and sometimes that’s not it at all.
Noir films don’t promise happy endings, and in spite of that, we’ve seen in class with the box office results, the film noirs were very popular films.
“It was a remarkably, pessimistic and bitter period for American cinema, which has in the course of its history, made money, making people feel good. Yet here we hit into this very fertile period where these kinds of gloomy and pessimistic films were actually very commercial, which is why it was a great period for artists because it opened up all kinds of venues for expression.” (BBC Four, 2009)
This phrase in Denah’s first lecture got me hooked on noir and the class. “One of the reasons why I think some of you guys are here, is because in film noir you are not promised he said everything is roses at the end, and in that kind of way it's the first execution of American cinema coming out of Hollywood that doesn't try a constantly sell that lie to an audience, which I think is philosophically culturally and conceptually interesting.” (Denah’s lecture of 1-24-22).
And can’t we see this today? That European World War angst translated into American angst in film noir we are now feeling something quite as life threatening. The most popular streaming film series when Covid first hit in 2020 was Tiger King (Rebecca Chaiklin & Eric Goode, 2020) Wasn’t that about a blonde female who may or may not have fed her rich husband to tigers and then became rich. The anti-hero, Joe Exotic, who seems like a good guy at first is trying to break the case on Carole murdering her husband. Then he turns out to be corrupt himself and ends up trying to have her killed out of greed and jealousy. In noir style, there’s no happy ending for Joe. The story is much more salacious than that. It came out at a perfect time it aired on March 20, 2020. It is what we needed at the time. We collectively wanted to get our mind off of what we were experiencing and being trapped in our homes with so much uncertainty and fear.
In year two of Covid we see the most popular streaming film series as Squid Game (Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2021). We’re still living in a pandemic; we still cannot go to school or work. Life seems a tad better with a vaccine, but people are still dying and we are afraid to travel and meet in groups. I have not seen Squid Game, but I do not that it is a film of treacherous characters, greed and extreme violence. This far surpasses the shock and adrenaline factor of Tiger King.
In the Covid era, we’re not an audience that can sit by and watch a Julian Fellowes’ Downton Abbey series (2010-2015) anymore. Perhaps that is why no one cares about his 2022 series The Gilded Age. It doesn't have the edge that we need for the times.
My response to a student:
Hello Kristian,
I appreciated your insight into the power dynamics of Sue and Al. I really hadn't thought of it but you are so right, we see him taking an agonizing journey to follow her. She is already there and just picks up the phone with ease.
She had it planned out ahead of time and was able to get there. While Al thought they were getting married on Sunday, which would be the best for them, Sue has the insight to know that is not for her, and she is a young independent woman who leaves her fiancé to seek her own fortune.
I also liked the tie-in to Annie in Gun Crazy of knowing that she wasn't settling for his Winchester salesman salary.
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