Out of Sorrow Itself: What Film Noir Can Teach Us about Hope
“Many have tried in vain to speak joyously of greatest joy: Here at last it speaks to me, here out of sorrow itself.” — Friedrich Holderlin
It may seem odd to argue that Film Noir has anything at all to say about hope. Although the genre has proven notoriously difficult to define, most observers agree on a few key themes, one of which is a distinct lack of hope. Jean-Pierre Chartier, one of the French critics who helped define the term Film Noir in the 1940’s, described the wave of American crime films then flooding postwar France as horrific chronicles of “monsters, criminals and psychopaths without redemptive qualities.” The American screenwriter Paul Schrader, writing twenty-six years later, got even more to the point, noting that Noir dealt with “despair and disintegration” and an “all-enveloping hopelessness.”
Certainly, a sense of dread seems to pervade almost every film universally recognized as Noir. Happy endings are anathema — the very least a Noir protagonist (it wouldn’t do to call them “heroes”) can hope for is to leave a film alive, the best is to leave it a little wiser, albeit at the cost of heartache, bitterness, or a renewed cynicism. There is an inevitability to such defeats, a predestined dissolution which inexorably befalls the inhabitants of Noir’s shadowy worlds, and where no amount of toughness or wit is enough to stem the blood-dimmed tide. In typical Hollywood fare, these disasters would demand a dramatic, status-quo affirming reversal, a reassuring return to normality just before the credits roll and the lights come up. That this doesn’t happen in Noir is one source of its enduring hold: the viewer’s expectations are subverted, often to shocking effect.
Even for those well-versed in the genre’s fatalistic tropes, the experience of watching Noir is a startling narrative reversal — we are not watching to see how the Noir protagonist will win, but about how well he or she will fail. Noir’s primary concern is with this failure: moral, situational, or otherwise. The “dynamism of violent death” (to use Nino Frank’s memorable phrase) is an important component but a secondary one. Criminality merely provides the useful (and profitable) shortcut to perdition — the unsettling truth at the core of all Noir is that this dark coda awaits us all.
So, where’s the hope in all that? We might begin to answer this question by first challenging the premise that Films Noirs are only mere representations of crime, hopelessness and despair. As Film Scholar James Naremore has pointed out, if this were true, it would be odd that “such a cinema could have become the object of nostalgia,” to say nothing of adoration. That Film Noir continues to sustain a lively industry of parody, criticism, and outright imitation, more than half a century after the informal end of the genre’s “classic period,” seems to challenge the idea that these were works of simple nihilism. Even the darkest of Noir plays a paradoxical trick on its audience — it transmutes the worst aspects of the human condition into something that makes us feel better, more alive, more hopeful. Why?
French screenwriter Marcel Duhamel, in the preface to the ur-text of all Noir criticism, 1955’s A Panorama of American Film Noir, offers one possible reason, arguing that Film Noir is a “pleonasm” and that,
…the latent presence of the idea of death in a person’s mind, far from appearing symptomatic of a morbid condition, seems, on the contrary, to be eminently healthy and suited to engendering skepticism, therefore humor, therefore a certain optimism.
Death, that ultimate of inevitable failures, is, of course, ever-present in Noir. It strikes down the noble (Jeff Bailey’s conflicted gumshoe in Out of the Past) and the not-so-noble (star-crossed lovers Laurie and Bart in Gun Crazy) with equal indifference, a motif which serves to highlight the silent, pervasive unease which haunts both its world, and ours — a place where death is indiscriminate, where even ostensible heroes can’t escape their doom, where life itself makes no sense. Noir thus explodes the idea — that bedrock tenet of mainstream American film and television up until very recently — that no matter what senseless horrors may occur, life will always return to a comforting normalcy, a renewed order which emerges once the wicked and the just have been punished or rewarded in equal measure. While Hollywood censors often insisted on a version of such an order during the classic period — the bad guys could never ultimately prevail, for instance — they were never completely successful in whitewashing Noir’s subversive disquiet.
In what would seem to be yet another twist of the knife, the Noir protagonist is keenly aware of this encroaching ruin. This is because he or she exists — literally and figuratively — in darkness, far removed from the insulating comforts — whether wealth, naivete, or self-deception — of those who live by daylight. In the lawless abyss of Noir, society is stripped bare, down to its confusing, self-contradictory essence, and the Noir protagonist — inhabiting a liminal space between corruption and integrity, loyalty and dishonor, life and death — has no choice but to engage with it at this level. Noir’s use of criminality again throws this conflict into stark relief: within the dark underbelly of the modern city lurks a vast, antipodal society, whose denizens follow their own, murky sets of rules. Those who wish to prevail here — or at least survive — must abide by an unsatisfying, amoral code that is as irrational as it is inescapable. Hence the world of Noir is always teetering on the edge of collapse; its pervasive injustice a short step away from cosmic absurdity.
The knowledge of this absurdity, is, I think, the source of Noir’s strange sense of hope. It’s not so much that Noir presents us with positive, or optimistic, stories — it most decidedly does not — as it does with characters who react to the genre’s grim mise-en-scene with courage, wit, and determination, and who answer the clarion call of death not with resignation or despair, but with action. French philosopher Albert Camus held that the only valid response to the absurdity of existence was to embrace that absurdity, to accept it with courage and hope. The Noir protagonist, fully entrenched in an absurd universe, does just that.
The world of Noir then, is absurd, cruel, and perhaps meaningless, but the Noir protagonist’s reaction to it is anything but. One famous exemplar of this is the character of Philip Marlowe, that most venerable of Noir private eyes. Marlowe is usually portrayed as a sort of fallen White Knight (the Marlowe canon contains many allusions to Knights and codes of chivalry) — a rational, moral man who must operate in an oftentimes irrational, immoral world.
Marlowe is debased by doing so, but, crucially, he is not consumed by immorality, or even amorality — he does not become the thing he hates. What makes Marlowe a hero (or as close as one can get) is not that he’s especially heroic — it’s that he successfully navigates a world where heroism is impossible. This is a subtle but important distinction in Noir. Here, virtue and vice don’t just exist in “shades of gray” (to use a tired phrase) but as a confusing, inseparable mélange, swirling around each other, intermingling with each other, forcing each other into being.
In Noir, as in the real world, moral acts often aid and abet immoral actors, and vice versa. Choosing the correct course of action in such a storm-tossed sea requires, as Kasper Gutman remarks in The Maltese Falcon, “the most delicate judgement.” We are drawn to Marlowe because he is so adept in exercising that judgement, so skilled at charting Noir’s near-invisible line between virtue and depravity. We sense, too, that under his world-weary façade there is a desire for a return to order (real or imagined), mingled with a bitter abnegation of his place within that order. Marlowe’s hope is that his actions, in some small way, will set the world aright once more, even if he must engage in sometimes less-than-chivalrous behavior to bring this dream into being. What makes him a tragic figure is that this very behavior must — by his own moral code — forever deny him a place in the decent, principled world which he longs to return to.
Marlowe’s redeeming virtue, then, is self-sacrifice. He descends into the darkest reaches of the city, fighting the battles that others will not, or cannot, fight, traversing the winding, circuitous pathways of humanity’s literal and figurative underworld, and using its own irrationality as the weapon with which to keep it at bay. By doing so he frees us from the burden of encountering our own dark, muddled selves, of being confronted with the mocking absurdity that is so intimately, invisibly intertwined with the comforting noontime brightness of our everyday existence.
Characters like Marlowe do have one distinct advantage, however: they occupy privileged positions within Noir’s hierarchy. Though ensnared in the darkness as assuredly as everyone else, they are among the few who fail to become lost in that darkness, possessing a rare combination of insight and courage which is the closest thing Noir can offer to apotheosis. In an absurd universe whose only surety is death, these characters well know that they are destined to fail. It’s what they choose to do with that knowledge that elevates them. And what they do, inevitably, is respond to the absurdity of their worlds in the only way that preserves their agency and humanity: by choosing to fail well. In a sense they become almost alive, freed from the page or the screen — rejecting the very narrative structures which desire only to damn them for no good reason. They choose a fate which, while grim, is at least their own.
Others are not so lucky, or wise. 1945’s Detour — perhaps the gloomiest Noir ever put to film — tells the story of Al Roberts, a broke piano player forced to hitch-hike his way from New York to California. Through a series of events which can only be described as cosmically bad luck, Roberts is implicated in the death of one person, and accidentally kills another. As he himself puts it:
Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.
Here is the ne plus ultra of Noir’s philosophy, a matter-of-fact observation of life’s absurdity, by someone who has experienced it firsthand, and at its most extreme. Roberts, unlike Marlowe, did not choose to descend into the violent underworld of Noir, it rose up to meet him, with horrifying results. But Roberts is also not completely blameless, and by the end of the film he comes across as something of an anti-Marlowe — a leaf in the breeze, carried helplessly along by events, never exhibiting agency. In the end he is carried away by fate to his doom, as is everyone in Noir. But though he fails as surely as Marlowe does, his is a damnation, not a deliverance. Roberts provides the viewer with a cautionary tale of what can happen when the Noir protagonist lacks hope, when he fails poorly by failing to choose, when he resigns himself to fate, rather than merely accepting it and moving forward anyway. Again, subtle distinctions, but in Noir, every distinction is.
The works we call Film Noir are, like all art, a reflection of human concerns. True to its name, Noir is primarily occupied with the darkest of those concerns. But to understand Noir as only the cinema of cynicism, or crime, or human misery, is to give it short shrift. On the page — just as surely as on the screen — Noir is concerned not just with darkness, but with light too, and the eternal interplay between the two. It presents us with a world that is inherently absurd, where there are seldom right actions, only less wrong ones, where good people may not be so good and bad people may not be so bad, where hope is in short supply. But it also reminds us that, even if we don’t have control over our small, muddled corner of the universe, we still have control over ourselves. And that we can choose to light the darkness — if only for a moment — with courage, with hope, and with style.
