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Neo-Noir
By Douglas Keesey Oldcastle Books
Copyright © 2010 Douglas Keesey
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84243-412-3
CHAPTER 1
NEO-NOIR LANDMARKS
Chinatown 1974)
Directed by: Roman Polanski
Written by: Robert Towne
Produced by: Robert Evans
Edited by: Sam O'Steen
Cinematography: John A Alonzo
Cast: Jack Nicholson (JJ 'Jake' Gittes), Faye Dunaway (Evelyn Mulwray), John Huston (Noah Cross)
Plot
Los Angeles, 1937. Private eye Jake Gittes is hired by Evelyn Mulwray to get photographic evidence that her husband Hollis is being unfaithful. However, after these pictures of Hollis in the company of a younger woman are published in the newspaper, Jake realises that he has been duped: the woman who hired him was a fake, and Jake's photos were used to discredit Hollis who, as chief water engineer, was opposed to building a dam he felt would be unsafe. Then, when Hollis is found drowned, the real Evelyn Mulwray hires Jake to find out who did it and why. It turns out that Hollis may have been killed because he uncovered a conspiracy to dump fresh water into the ocean, buy up cheap land and then make a fortune when a dam is built and that land becomes water-rich. Jake suspects that Hollis's former business partner and Evelyn's father, Noah Cross, may be behind the conspiracy and Hollis's murder. However, Cross throws suspicion upon Evelyn, whom he describes as a dangerously jealous woman. Could she have killed Hollis, and what might she do to the younger woman Hollis was seen with? Cross hires Jake to find this younger woman. Jake wants to believe in Evelyn's innocence – the two of them even make love – but he is also afraid that she has seduced him so that he won't suspect her. When Jake finds the younger woman at Evelyn's house, he slaps Evelyn around to get her to talk, and she reveals that the younger woman (Katherine) is both her sister and her daughter – the product of incest between Cross and Evelyn. Jake confronts Cross with the fact that his glasses were found in the fish pond where Hollis drowned: Cross killed him because Hollis was trying to keep Cross from getting to Katherine. However, Cross forces Jake to give him back the incriminating glasses and to take him to Chinatown, where Jake has arranged to meet Evelyn and Katherine to help them escape. Police handcuff Jake to another cop, so he can do nothing but watch helplessly as events take their course. When Cross tries to take Katherine, Evelyn shoots him in the shoulder and attempts to drive off with Katherine in the car. But a warning shot from a policeman's gun accidentally kills Evelyn, and Cross claims Katherine in the end.
Comments
In this neo-noir, the detective solves the crime but fails to save the woman he had tried to protect. Moreover, the criminal goes unpunished, free to grab more land and more women, extending his illegal enterprise unchecked into the future. For Jake, this disastrous case seems like a repetition of a past time when he tried 'to keep someone from being hurt' and only 'ended up making sure that she was hurt'. Jake not only fails to prevent Evelyn from being hurt, he is complicit in what happens to her. Perhaps because Jake was fooled by the fake Evelyn, he is wary of being duped again. Cross feeds Jake's suspicion that Evelyn may be a femme fatale, and Jake even physically abuses her, making us wonder how different he really is from Cross. Jake's vanity as a detective leads him to persist in trying to solve Hollis's murder no matter what the consequences, and to foolishly confront Cross, enabling Cross to take back his glasses (the only evidence against him) and to locate the woman he wants to victimise (Jake takes Cross right to Katherine!). Like Oedipus, Jake discovers that he is complicit in the crime he has been investigating. According to writer Robert Towne, 'All detective stories are a re-telling of the Oedipus tale. I mean those ... movies where the detective is looking for the solution ... [and] finds he's part of the crime, that he's part of the problem.' It's tempting to argue that everyone might have benefited if this detective had never sought to find out the truth. As Jake himself warns a client early on, 'You're better off not knowing.' Evelyn is shot through the eye at the end. Is this a symbol of the disaster that can come from seeing too much? But note that it is the evil Cross who then tells Katherine not to look, for he desires nothing more than to cover up his past crimes so that he can commit more of them. Earlier, Jake had looked into Evelyn's eye, discovering 'a flaw in the iris ... a sort of birthmark' – a clue to the fact that her own father sexually abused her. If there's no one like Jake who will look for such clues, what chance is there of ever stopping this kind of abuse? The fact that Jake may share some of Cross's violent tendencies does not make him equivalent in evil, and the fact that Jake fails to prevent Cross from continuing his predation does not invalidate such attempts, which are, after all, the only hope.
Factoid
Director Roman Polanski and writer Robert Towne argued over the film's ending, which Towne considered too bleak, calling it 'the tunnel at the end of the light'. Towne had wanted Evelyn to kill Cross and then escape to Mexico with Katherine.
Taxi Driver](1976)
Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: Paul Schrader
Produced by: Michael and Julia Phillips
Edited by: Tom Rolf and Melvin Shapiro
Cinematography: Michael Chapman
Cast: Robert De Niro (Travis Bickle), Jodie Foster (Iris), Cybill Shepherd (Betsy), Harvey Keitel (Sport)
Plot
Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle drives a taxi in the urban jungle of New York City, where he sees 'all the animals come out at night': whores, pimps, drunks, drug addicts and the mentally deranged. Travis idealises a blonde campaign worker named Betsy, who appears to him 'like an angel out of this filthy mess'. However, when he takes her to a porno film on their first date, she rejects him. Betsy works for presidential candidate Palantine, a man once admired by Travis for his plan to clean up the city, but now Travis seems to see Palantine as part of the problem, a false saviour and a rival for Betsy's attentions. Meanwhile, Travis also takes an interest in Iris, a preteen prostitute who works for a pimp named Sport. Travis wants to save her from a life of exploitation and return her to her parents, even though Iris tells him how bad things were back home: 'She doesn't want to be rescued, but that doesn't matter to him.' Travis steels himself for his mission, exercising to make his body hard, holding his arm over a stove flame and firing guns at a practice range. Travis makes an attempt to assassinate Palantine at a campaign rally, but this fails when Travis is spotted by security guards and chased away before he can get close enough to his target to shoot. Travis then goes to the cheap hotel where Iris turns tricks. Travis shoots her pimp Sport in the stomach but is in turn shot by him in the neck. When a hulking assistant keeps coming at him, Travis shoots off three of the man's fingers, stabs him in the hand with a knife and puts a bullet through his head, spattering the wall with blood. Travis then tries to shoot himself in the head, but his gun is all out of bullets. Travis recovers. Iris's parents write him a thank-you letter for saving their daughter. The tabloids hail Travis as a hero. He goes back to driving a cab, as lonely and paranoid as ever, suggesting that it is only a matter of time before all this happens again.
Comments
When Travis wreaks bloody slaughter to 'save' Iris, she is terrified rather than grateful, as if unsure who is the bigger threat: the pimp who exploits her or this rampaging, righteous avenger. Earlier she had asked Travis, 'What makes you so high and mighty? ... Didn't you ever try looking at your own eyeballs in the mirror?' At the end of the film when Travis looks in the rear-view mirror of his cab, he does a paranoid double take as though he had caught some evil stranger's eyes staring back at him – eyes that are his own. In his apartment, Travis practises for his confrontation with the villain by standing in front of the mirror. 'I'm faster than you,' he says, quick-drawing his gun on himself. 'You talkin' to me?' he asks, as if confused about who is challenging whom, who is the hero and who the enemy. Sport first calls Travis a 'cowboy', but when Travis shaves his hair into a Mohawk and stands looking at Sport who wears beads and a headband, it is as though 'Indian' confronts 'Indian'; there is no clear 'good guy'. Sport pimps Iris out to johns, but Travis takes Betsy to an X-rated movie: 'He really wants to get this pure white girl into that dark porno theatre,' says writer Paul Schrader, 'to shove her face in the filth that he felt, to dirty her, to say, "Look at this: this is what I'm really like. How could you love someone like me?"' Travis fears that he himself is the scum he has to save the city from, which is why he is so violent in his self-righteousness and why he is so ready to turn the gun on himself, to take himself out with the rest of the trash. Betsy says that Travis reminds her of a song about 'a prophet and a pusher ... a walking contradiction'. Travis is sickened by the drug addicts, drunks and pimps he sees on the city streets, but he himself pops pills, pours liquor on his breakfast cereal and has a degrading view of women and sex. When Travis tries to pull himself together through military exercise and commit to 'total organisation', he becomes instead only more deranged, a hard body as aimless weapon – 'organis-ised'. Travis has lost all sense of where the evil lies. He ends up firing wildly at any target – Palantine the politician, Sport the pimp – and ultimately even at himself.
Body Heat(1981)
Directed by: Lawrence Kasdan
Written by: Lawrence Kasdan
Produced by: Fred T Gallo
Edited by: Carol Littleton
Cinematography: Richard H Kline
Cast: William Hurt (Ned Racine), Kathleen Turner (Matty Walker), Richard Crenna (Edmund Walker), Ted Danson (Peter Lowenstein), JA Preston (Oscar Grace), Mickey Rourke (Teddy Lewis)
Plot
During a Florida heat wave, lawyer Ned meets married woman Matty at a band concert. She drips cherry ice on her white dress and asks him if he wants to lick it off. Her husband Edmund is away on business, so Ned follows her home. She tempts him with the siren call of wind chimes, and he uses a chair to break through a front window, then climbs in and has sex with her on the floor. They begin an affair, alternating between rounds of steamy sex and attempts to cool off in a bathtub filled with ice cubes. They conspire to murder her husband: Ned kills him with a board in the house, then moves his body to a derelict restaurant where he makes it look as though Edmund was accidentally killed by a falling beam during an arson gone wrong. Later, Ned is dismayed to learn that Matty forged his signature on an improper change to Edmund's will, which not only makes Ned look incompetent but also rouses police suspicions of his complicity with her. (Since the will is ruled invalid, Edmund dies intestate and she now inherits all his wealth, despite a prenuptial agreement.) Moreover, because Edmund's glasses were not found at the arson site, the police suspect that he was actually murdered in another place and his body moved. Matty calls Ned to tell him that she has located the incriminating glasses and to ask him to retrieve them from a boathouse. But Ned believes that Matty has rigged the boathouse door with a bomb, and he accuses her of this when she arrives. Matty denies it and goes to the boathouse herself, at which point an explosion occurs. Ned is imprisoned for the murders of Edmund and Matty (her body is identified from dental records). However, though the police are not persuaded, a high-school yearbook leads Ned to believe that Matty has stolen the identity of a lookalike friend and that it was this woman's body that Matty used to fake her own death in the boathouse explosion. Matty is still alive, lounging on a tropical beach and enjoying her dead husband's money.
Comments
Body Heat is sometimes referred to as retro-noir because its plot (a wife and her lover scheme to murder her husband for the money) recalls that of such classic films as Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. But there are some innovative aspects to Matty that make her a new kind of femme fatale. Unlike her slyly seductive counterparts in classic noir, Matty is brazenly and voraciously sexual. 'My temperature runs a couple of degrees high, around 100,' she admits, and her insatiable demands prompt Ned to say, 'You are killing me.' Matty is also outspoken about her superior intelligence, telling Ned, 'You're not too smart, are you? I like that in a man.' It's as though she's taunting him to realise that she is manipulating him, having planned all this from the beginning. (It is Matty who arranges their first meeting at the band concert, having heard that Ned is a lawyer whose incompetence she can use to her advantage.) Finally, rather than being punished for her treachery like earlier femme fatales, Matty gets away with it in the end, showing a relentlessness and achieving a success that even Ned half-admires and envies. Indeed, some viewers have found it hard not to cheer for Matty, who out-sexes and outsmarts all the men to realise her dream 'to be rich and live in an exotic land'. But even as Matty stretches out on that tropical beach, her face does not look joyful, and she virtually ignores the man lying beside her as if she has already lost interest in manipulating her next male victim. Could it be that, in acting the part of Ned's lover, she actually came to care for him? 'I fell in love with you,' she has said earlier. 'I didn't plan that.' The fact is that in the end Matty is profoundly alone, in heat and in hell on that beach, imprisoned in her own ruthlessness. Ned compares her to her gangster husband, both of them willing to do 'whatever was necessary' to satisfy their greed. But the problem for black widows is that, while well fed, they end up without any mate.
Blade Runner](1982)(Director's Cut, 1992)
Directed by: Ridley Scott
Written by: Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, from the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick
Produced by: Michael Deeley
Edited by: Marsha Nakashima
Cinematography: Jordan Cronenweth
Cast: Harrison Ford (Rick Deckard), Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty), Sean Young (Rachael), Edward James Olmos (Gaff), M Emmet Walsh (Captain Bryant), Daryl Hannah (Pris), William Sanderson (JF Sebastian), Brion James (Leon), Joe Turkel (Doctor Tyrell), Joanna Cassidy (Zhora)
Plot
Los Angeles in the year 2019. In this techno-noir (combining film noir and science fiction), Deckard is a trench-coated detective and 'blade runner' who must track down and kill 'rogue replicants'. These are androids or humanoid robots that have turned against their human masters, demanding that they no longer be used as expendable warriors or as sex slaves and that they be allowed to live longer than their predetermined lifespan of four years. As Deckard follows the clues and uses his gun to 'retire' the replicants – including shooting one of the females in the back – he sees their suffering and the way they mourn for each other, and begins to wonder whether they are not more humane than he, their ruthless exterminator. Deckard begins to develop feelings for the replicants, especially one called Rachael, a femme fatale whom he 'interrogates' by giving her an empathy test which reveals that she is not human. However, Rachael turns the tables on her interrogator by asking him, 'Did you ever take that test yourself?' Rachael saves Deckard from being murdered by a replicant (Leon), even though shooting Leon means that she has killed one of her own kind. Deckard vows not to hunt Rachael, despite the fact that she has been placed on his hit list. Meanwhile, the replicant leader, 'combat model' Roy, has been doing some tracking and hunting of his own, and finally confronts Tyrell, head of the corporation that made and enslaved him. When Tyrell says he cannot extend Roy's life beyond its four-year expiration date, Roy violently unmakes his maker. Then, when Roy discovers that the female replicant he loved (Pris) has been killed by Deckard, Roy pursues and tortures him, making Deckard face his own inhumanity: 'I thought you were supposed to be good. Aren't you "the good man"?' But, just as Roy is about to take revenge on Deckard by letting him fall to his death, he pulls him to safety instead, thus displaying the kind of compassion the human Deckard should feel. Deckard then helps Rachael, the replicant with whom he has fallen in love, to escape. However, as they are leaving, he finds an origami unicorn, a sign that Deckard too may be a replicant doomed to early extinction. As Deckard and Rachael board an elevator, the door slams shut on them, as if sealing their fate. This is the way the Director's Cut of the film ends and, according to Ridley Scott, 'The elevator door was the perfect ending, but it also felt like a prison, it also felt like the end of the road. And that, I found, maybe just too oppressive for words.' The theatrical version of the film adds a more hopeful coda: Deckard and Rachael make it to the green countryside, and we are told that Rachael actually has an uncertain termination date – like the rest of us.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Neo-Noir by Douglas Keesey. Copyright © 2010 Douglas Keesey. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
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