A New Look at Noir

HEROICS OF THE FALSE: A NEW LOOK AT NOIR JENNIFER S. BREUKELAAR A Creative Work and Thesis submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. School of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales. July 2007. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks are due to my supervisors Lisa Trahair and Anne Brewster. I would also like to thank Paul Dawson for overseeing the practical aspects of the thesis at the final stage. Thank-you also to Dan Edwards for discussions about film making software. I am grateful to Renu Rajpal for help with the Hindi. I would also like to thank Bob Stern for copy-editing the dissertation. Thanks to my agent Sandy Wagner for multiple readings of Viper, for her helpful comments and good faith. Among other things I am ever grateful to my parents, Margaret Reichenberger and Bob Stern for taking me to India. Thank-you to John Breukelaar for paving the way. Thank-you for reading and discussing this project ad nauseam, and most of all for your insights into how to complete it and why. For support that infinitely exceeded the call of duty, I would also like to thank my children, Isabella and Jack. CONTENTS ABSTRACT 4 PART I: THE NOVEL VIPER 5 PART II: THE DISSERTATION I: INTRODUCTION 232 II: A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE 249 III: “IF THIS BE ART’S LIE” 296 IV: NOIR’S CHASMS 332 V: CONCLUSION 372 BIBLIOGRAPHY 377 4 THESIS ABSTRACT In this thesis I investigate the nature of noir subjectivity, and the degree to which it can be described as heroic. To investigate these issues, I have chosen to illustrate my argument by analysing my novel, Viper, and two films that renew the noir cycle at different socio-political crossroads in America: in 1958, Alfred Hitchcock’s late noir, Vertigo, and in 1974, Frances Ford Coppola’s neo-noir, The Conversation. Because these texts present an extreme theorisation of deception in terms of the assembling and erasure of subjective identity, they will serve as a basis to explore the question of noir heroics. In proceeding thus, I argue in the dissertation that film noir’s most innovative borrowing can be described as a monstrous stitching together of incompatible parts—the real and the imaginary, the past and the present, the living and the dead—which accounts for a cut both between, and within, the image. It is this prosthetic approach to representation that takes the noir mode beyond its existential, individualist limits, and accounts for the subjective wound in noir: the heroic conflict between the singular and the multiple. In my analytic procedure then, I extend the idea of monstrosity beyond its current boundaries in contemporary theory. I do this by fusing Marie Hélène Huet’s conception of the monstrous imagination, which is a theory of art, with Gilles Deleuze’s powers of the false, which belongs to a philosophy of time. I posit a dialogic exchange across these analyses and my novel to suggest that the cinematic cut not only accounts for what Deleuze has termed the time-image but also is symptomatic of the chronic wounding of the riven noir hero. These analyses suggest that, while sustaining the aura of authorship through technical innovation and stylistic mastery, film noir serves paradoxically to challenge the mastery of the model designated as masculine. In my novel I continue to deal with the issues raised in the dissertation, through a rearticulation of a subjectivity that irrevocably alters its relation to representation in its affinity with the image, its serial movement through interstitial space, and its novel powers of falsification. 5 PART I THE NOVEL VIPER 6 For practical purposes, however, Beavis and Butt-head are one personality, split into two so they will have someone to talk to. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, December 20, 1996 7 PART I A sudden gust blows in from Old Town, stirring up a stale smell of bald tyres and worn asphalt underneath the freeway, deals made in windblown alleys glimpsed as you pass: clustered boys in tank tops, baggy pants and elaborate footwear. Wordless glitter. It makes little difference to you. The venue is a narrow warehouse between the tracks and the freeway. Ordinary men who know what they are wait in nondescript cars for stragglers from the club. You speed up, not to hurry past but to accentuate the clack of jaunty sling-backs against the pavement, shaved thighs pleasurably confined by the sheath's classic lines. The wig’s frosted tips burn like dry ice in the beam of the streetlights. There’s a South of the Border tang in the air tonight. You can feel it in your eyes. There is nothing on the outside of the building to tell you where you are. Images of heavily postered doors just like these proliferate like scar tissue on the late twentieth century face of Sydney, Toronto, Guangzhou. It's all the same to you. At the bottom of the stairs the doorman nods you into the pulsating darkness where movement, freeze- framed in strobe-time, surrounds thought and drowns time. A severed six-pack and sculptured shoulders surface and melt back into the gloom, flesh as smooth as fresh wax and swaying body-parts cut and pasted in a sonic montage by DJ Koma, looking ripped tonight in sleeveless leatherette. High Priestess of bounce, of lip-gloss and neon. Queen of knee-high boots. It will happen tonight as it always does: the nameless exchange. You are not the thing, nor the thing that made it, but something left behind… a miracle. … 8 1 KILL NOIR Dean’s mother would tell her group that San Corolla had never been her final destination. She’d leave in a flash and be back in Brizzie before you could say Harvey Wallbanger. Leave Chalmers, she would tell her group, with nothing but memories of his sun-kissed trophy-bride from Down Under that he could choke on or wank on — take your pick. “Not to mention the old folks. He screwed them over good and prop-pah,” Mackenzie would say sounding, or trying to, like a British wide boy. Mackenzie with her physiotherapy certifications and degree in English lit. It could be true that Chalmers, Dean’s father, did screw over his own folks, Grandma Lily and Pop. Well, to start with he got them to leave Jersey where all their friends were buried or at least the ones not in Florida. Then he buried them alive in some deceptively sprawling SoCal retirement home close enough to the ocean to see it but not close enough to actually get there. Dean remembers little about Pop except that he was a natty little dresser who came to America from some slum in Europe only to end up scuttling around that peach-toned twilight home at the ends of the earth. Lost to the silent winding hallways and views out faux-bevelled picture windows onto the wrong crashing blue, crows rising out of the aspidistra. Dean used to hitch a ride on Pop’s Little Rascal, loving the way it glided silently to the dining room where the Mexican valet would reach for the keys and soberly park it in the lobby. Dean loves that bit. While the residents softly shuffle to window tables on the downy arms of blow-up nurses. Ah, Southern California. Aaaahhh…blow-up nurses. In the bathroom Dean goes to work on three glow-in- the-dark pimples, a volley of blood-pus to hurl onto his canvas — the volcanic red and seeping yellow of cave art. He is the remote hunter of the Kimberly’s painting prayers on the walls of his mirror cave. He brushes his teeth. Practices his smile: basic variations on a soul-train theme. 9 Dean has Mackenzie’s green eyes but definitely a little too close-set. In the centre of a narrow forehead above a single eyebrow, a scar where there was once a large mole that looked a little like a mouldy-looking eye until Mackenzie had it removed. Kinky alien hair inherited from Pop, and a wide nose scheduled for surgery. Bad hair like the grocer's nephew at the market who went to Dean’s last school, packing up the grapefruit and string beans every Saturday afternoon. A raft sailing darkly off to one side of his head. But here's a thought: Dreads. Heavy hair that looks good in a hood with lips soft and moist like a baby animal. Hung. He practices his stance: eyes half-closed, now open wide and stricken and now downcast in terminal sorrow. Dean flails his arms against the speed of pain. He bowed his head against the onslaught. Prepare to dive or is it die? The bathroom sink starts to overflow. Dean has shaved but not well. He drifts into his mother's room. He softly closes the door on a cool white space dominated by a vast Chinese rug and wall-to-wall Sony and Pacific glimpses out a humongous window framed in creamy waves of drapery. He sinks his hands into her panty drawer which, withdrawing, he doesn’t quite shut. He elbows a pile of bedside paperbacks onto the floor and finds her pills, one/two of which he ritually pops while listening now to the front door softly close. She’d approached it silently, an art on high heels, as if she hadn’t wanted him to hear her leave and try and stop her, not that he does that any more. The pointed patent leather toes on the wet path and then the Acura backing up too fast down the driveway because after all it’s Saturday night.

Load more