Noir Anxiety Kelly Oliver, Benigno Trigo

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.3.Straayer says that swaggering with a difference, Corky is a masculinepartner worth romantic coupling. She points out that Corky (unlike other Wlmnoir protagonists) shares the femme fatale s desire for money and doesn t getmoralistic about crime or murder.Straayer says that in contrast to male protag-onists who are sucked in by female sexuality, Corky knows Violet s desire.CorkyWnally admits that she and Violet are alike, something Violet has been telling herall along (1998, 158).4.Cf.Straayer 1998.5.For a discussion of the difference between femme, lesbian femme,and femme fatale, see Straayer 1998.266 NOTES TO CHAPTER 106.The second line The more attractive you are, the more believableit will be is in the screenplay but didn t make it into the Wlm.7.Bound, screenplay by Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski, Sce-nario: The Magazine of Screenwriting Art, fall 1996.8.In various texts, Freud describes the often convoluted operationsthrough which one s gender identity as male or female remains opposed to one ssexual desire for a partner of the opposite sex.Heterosexuality is dependent onidentity remaining opposed to desire we desire what we are not.If we identifyas women, then we must desire men and if we identify as men, then we mustdesire women.This is the essence of what Freud describes as normal hetero-sexual development (see, for example, Freud 1924, 1925, 1931).9.Throughout her work, Monique Wittig insists that a lesbian is not awoman because woman is deWned always and only in relation to men withinpatriarchy.Lesbians break out of this patriarchal economy and thereby begin tobreak out of the stereotype of woman. See Wittig 1992.10.Chris Straayer argues that classic femmes fatales wanted economicindependence and not sexual pleasure, but contemporary neo-noir femmesfatales want economic independence and sexual pleasure.Straayer gives BasicInstinct and The Last Seduction as providing examples of contemporary femmesfatales who take both money and sexual pleasure from men.11.Deconstruction is a method or strategy of interpretation introducedby Jacques Derrida.It is a form of critical reading that attempts to open the textto what is beyond it (Derrida 1976, 158).It shows how the text always says morethan it intends; that is, it shows how the text always also says the very thingthat it intends to prohibit.In this way, the deconstructive strategy analyzes theeffects produced by, and in spite of, the text.10.The Space of Noir1.Perhaps the best example of a title that captures noir s simultaneoussense of accuracy and disorientation is John Cromwell s 1947 Dead Reckoning.2.In the scene to which Silver refers, Scottie Ferguson describes backto Madeleine the dark corridor of her dreams, at the end of which is madness,death, and meaninglessness: There is so little that I know.It s as though I mwalking down a long corridor that once was mirrored.The fragments of thatmirror still hang there, and when I come to the end of the corridor there is noth-ing but darkness.And I knew that when I walked into the darkness that I ll die.NOTES TO CHAPTER 10 267Holding onto meaning, Scottie refers Madeleine back to the fragments. Youdidn t know what happened till you found yourself with me.You didn t knowwhere you were.The small seams, the fragments of a mirror.You rememberthose.The madness and meaninglessness at the end of noir s corridor is con-Wrmed by the title of several of its Wlms, many of which allude to an unintelligi-ble undiscovered country (The Asphalt Jungle, Behind Locked Doors, The Big Sleep,Lady in the Dark, Dark Passage, Private Hell, The Secret beyond the Door, Sleep, MyLove, So Dark the Night, Somewhere in the Night, They Won t Believe Me, TheUnseen, and The Unsuspected), and other titles that refer to its dynamic, unstable,changing, and sometimes even liquid nature (Dark Waters, Criss Cross, Lady in theLake, Niagara, Pitfall, On Dangerous Ground, The Spiral Staircase, Strange Illusion,Undercurrent, Vertigo, and Whirlpool).3.See Freud 1901, 147; Freud 1930, 36.4. The unadorned representation of human death, the well-nigh ana-tomical stripping of the corpse convey to viewers an unbearable anguish beforethe death of God, here blended with our own, since there is not the slightestsuggestion of transcendency.What is more, Hans Holbein has given up all archi-tectural or compositional fancy.The tomb-stone weighs down on the upperportion of the painting, which is merely twelve inches high, and intensiWes thefeeling of permanent death; this corpse shall never rise again.The very pall, lim-ited to a minimum of folds, emphasizes, through that economy of motion, thefeeling of stiffness and stone-felt cold (Kristeva 1989, 111).5.Eric Lott argues that what such Wlms appear to dread is the inWltra-tion into the white home or self of unsanctioned behaviors reminiscent of thedark Wgures exempliWed in the 1940 s and early 1950 s imaginary by zoot-suiters,pachucos, and Asian conspirators.What the Wlms apparently cannot do is com-pletely remove these Wgures from the picture, though noir may stave off theirmost fearsome shapes or place them safely elsewhere (Lott 1997, 95).In a fas-cinating attempt to focus on the combined coordinates of racial and sexual mark-ers, Ann Kaplan writes that the idea of the dark continent moves from literaltravelling to lands dubbed by the west dark because unknown and mysterious tothe West, into the dark continent of the psyche, and especially the female psy-che.The interest of certain Hollywood Wlms in psychoanalysis reXects studiodirectors unconscious knowledge of its psychic appeal (Kaplan 1998, 125).6.Georgette Straud (Maureen O Sullivan) raises a similar complaint268 NOTES TO CHAPTER 10with her husband, George Straud (Ray Milland), in The Big Clock (1948).Shelaments the loss of their family life since they ve moved to New York City: We re like two strangers sharing an apartment. Nostalgic for a simpler life,noir s patriotic Wrst family of George, Georgette, and little George (B.G.Norman) pine for a vacation in Wheeling, West Virginia, where they will livein a log cabin, and where the men do the hunting and gathering while thewomen stay home and cook dinner.7.The list includes The Big Steal s (1949) Duke Halliday (RobertMitchum), The Big Clock s George Straud, The Woman in the Window s (1944)Richard Wanley (Edward G.Robinson), and Gilda s Johnny Farrel (Glenn Ford),who at the end of the Wlm is asked by Gilda to take her back home.8.Other examples of noir as morality play are D.O.A., Scarlet Street, TheWoman in the Window, and The Big Clock.9.As Janey Place has pointed out, Ann is noir s nurturing woman, or thewoman as redeemer; and like other such noir women, she is part of a communityor a family and belongs to the pastoral environment of noir s heartland: smalltown, U.S.A.(Place 1998, 61).10.Neo-noir Wlms like Blue Velvet will extend the portal to suburbia.11.Janey Place is right to associate Jane Greer s Kathie Moffet to Aca-pulco s misty haze of late afternoon and to its tumultuous sea, sudden rain-storm, and the dark, rich textures created by low-key lighting (Place 1998, 61).But the facile opposition between Bridgeport s healthy whiteness and Acapulco sdiseased darkness is misleading and covers over the fact that water, nature, andfemale sexuality are the determining landmarks of both towns.12.Don Siegel s The Big Steal could very well have been titled Back to thePast [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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