The Philosophy of Film Noir
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University of Kentucky UKnowledge American Popular Culture American Studies 1-27-2005 The Philosophy of Film Noir Mark T. Conard Marymount Manhattan College Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Conard, Mark T., "The Philosophy of Film Noir" (2005). American Popular Culture. 19. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_popular_culture/19 Conard The Philosophy of Film Noir Continued from front flap FILM/PHILOSOPHY The Philosophy Opening with an examination of what The constitutes noir cinema, the book of Film Noir interprets the philosophical elements Edited by Mark T. Conard consistently present in the films— “The Philosophy of Film Noir is an intellectually seductive, hard- Foreword by Robert Porfirio themes such as moral ambiguity, reason boiled romp through a world of moral murkiness, femme fatales, versus passion, and pessimism. The Philosophy contributors to the volume also argue and desperately lonely protagonists. The philosophers in this A drifter with no name and no past, that the essence and elements of noir easy-to-read collection provide us with a colorful backdrop for driven purely by desire, is convinced have fundamentally influenced movies seeing the dark films with clearer eyes.” of by a beautiful woman to murder her outside of the traditional noir period. husband. A hard-drinking detective Neo-noir films such as Pulp Fiction —Eric Bronson, editor of Baseball and Philosophy down on his luck becomes involved (1994), Fight Club (1999), and Memento Film Noir with a gang of criminals in pursuit of a (2000) have reintroduced the genre to a priceless artifact. The stories are at once contemporary audience. “An excellent book, giving readers a very good sense of the rich romantic, pessimistic, filled with anxiety philosophical resources in film noir.” and a sense of alienation, and they define As they assess the concepts present in the essence of film noir. individual films, the contributors also —Thomas Hibbs, Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture, illuminate and explore the philosophical and Dean of the Honors College, Baylor University Noir emerged as a prominent themes that surface in popular culture. American film genre in the early 1940s, A close examination of one of the most distinguishable by its use of unusual significant artistic movements of the lighting, sinister plots, mysterious twentieth century, The Philosophy of characters, and dark themes. From The Film Noir reinvigorates an intellectual Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil discussion at the intersection of popular (1958), films from this classic period culture and philosophy. reflect an atmosphere of corruption and social decay that attracted such accomplished directors as John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Orson Welles. The Philosophy of Film Noir is the first volume to focus exclusively on the philosophical underpinnings of these iconic films. Drawing on the work of diverse thinkers, from the French existentialist Albert Camus The University Press of Kentucky to the Frankurt school theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Mark T. Conard, assistant professor of Kentucky the volume connects film noir to the philosophy at Marymount Manhattan Edited by philosophical questions of a modern, College in New York City, is the coeditor often nihilistic world. of The Simpsons and Philosophy and Mark T. Conard Woody Allen and Philosophy. Cover image: Comstock Images/Getty Images Foreword by Robert Porfirio Continued on back flap Foreword i The Philosophy of Film Noir ii Robert Porfirio Foreword iii The Philosophy of Film Noir edited by Mark T. Conard Foreword by Robert Porfirio The University Press of Kentucky iv Robert Porfirio Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2006 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com 10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The philosophy of film noir / edited by Mark T. Conard with a foreword by Robert Porfirio. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8131-2377-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8131-2377-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Film noir—History and criticism. I. Conard, Mark T., 1965- PN1995.9.F54P55 2005 791.43’6552—dc22 2005030639 This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. Member of the Association of American University Presses Foreword v To Bill Irwin, Pepper Landis, John and Linda Pappas, Read Schuchardt, and Aeon Skoble—movie lovers all, and the best friends a guy could have vi Robert Porfirio Foreword vii Contents Foreword ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 Part 1: The Essence and Elements of Noir Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir 7 Mark T. Conard A Darker Shade: Realism in Neo-Noir 23 Jason Holt Moral Clarity and Practical Reason in Film Noir 41 Aeon J. Skoble Cherchez la Femme Fatale: The Mother of Film Noir 49 Read Mercer Schuchardt From Sherlock Holmes to the Hard-Boiled Detective in Film Noir 69 Jerold J. Abrams Part 2: Existentialism and Nihilism in Film Noir Film Noir and the Meaning of Life 91 Steven M. Sanders The Horizon of Disenchantment: Film Noir, Camus, and the Vicissitudes of Descent 107 Alan Woolfolk Symbolism, Meaning, and Nihilism in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction 125 Mark T. Conard viii RobertContents Porfirio Part 3: Six Classic Films Noirs Film Noir and the Frankfurt School: America as Wasteland in Edgar Ulmer’s Detour 139 Paul A. Cantor Knowledge, Morality, and Tragedy in The Killers and Out of the Past 163 Ian Jarvie Moral Man in the Dark City: Film Noir, the Postwar Religious Revival, and The Accused 187 R. Barton Palmer On Reason and Passion in The Maltese Falcon 207 Deborah Knight Ride the Pink Horse: Money, Mischance, Murder, and the Monads of Film Noir 223 Alain Silver Contributors 239 Index 243 Foreword ix Foreword In the fall of 1976, when I wrote the article “No Way Out: Existential Mo- tifs in the Film Noir” for Sight and Sound (vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 212–17), little would I have expected that some twenty-five years later a collection of es- says under the title The Philosophy of Film Noir would be published. Yet here it is, a welcome indication of how far we have traveled in terms of public awareness and scholarly respectability. Indeed, in 1976, the term film noir was little known beyond a coterie of French and American cineasts and derided by some as a specious classification created in a post hoc man- ner and not worthy of serious critical attention. By now, the ontology of film noir seems to be settled in its favor, although epistemological argu- mentation rages on. Anyone interested in tracing the course of this argu- mentation over the past quarter century would be well advised to consult the appendices in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (ed. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, with Carl Macek and Robert Porfirio, 3rd ed., rev. and expanded [Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1992]) as well as the Film Noir Readers (Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., Film Noir Reader [1996; New York: Limelight, 2001], Film Noir Reader 2 [New York: Lime- light, 1999], and Film Noir Reader 4 [New York: Limelight, 2004]; and Rob- ert Porfirio, Alain Silver, and James Ursini, eds., Film Noir Reader 3 [New York: Limelight, 2001]), which, taken together, cover virtually all the con- troversies surrounding the field of film noir scholarship and evidence the debt that such scholarship owes to Alain Silver. That the essence of film noir is yet to be distilled is implicit in the excellent essays contained in this volume, each of which sees film noir through a slightly different lens. The essays here go well beyond my earlier, somewhat simplistic effort to extract a “philosophy” of film noir in terms of an outlook on life that these diverse films seemed to share—an attitude toward existence that was akin to modern existentialism, particularly as it evolved in postwar France. Perhaps that is why it was the French cineasts who were the first to identify the cycle. But, if I may be allowed to indulge myself a bit here, I would like to take issue with their assertion (and that of other critics following in their wake, myself included) that what was sur- ix x Robert Porfirio prising in these early films noirs was the degree to which they went against the grain of that native-bred optimism that seemed to define the American character (so well articulated by Alexis de Tocqueville in the early nine- teenth century). If we take an extensive historical look at this American character, we can detect a dark side implicit in it from its very beginnings, one that predated those vaunted attributes of self-reliance and individual enterprise associated with “Yankee ingenuity” and those virtues inherent in the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal, the yeoman farmer.