Murder Out There Essays

Noir & Blue

2009-03-26T10:16:00.004-04:00

You could say the blues are the Black noir, if it wasn't redundant and didn't have things ass-backwards. The blues came first, in the rural south of the United States. Born in slavery and racial oppression, the blues and its related forms have been the African-American's means to express the pain and celebrate survival. Gospel has a lock on the romantic, transcendent side of the Black experience (praise Jesus that He will raise me up from my daily toil) but the blues are all about how to keep on keepin’ on.

Noir as a literary genre developed from the coincidence of mass literacy and the shared experiences of modern warfare. Not only did poorer Whites find reason to be disillusioned with institutional authorities, they had become a market for books about their own experiences.

About the same period, the blues hit the mean, gritty streets of America. The Viet Nam War put large numbers of Blacks on the front lines and literacy was sufficiently widespread to support a popular Black press, featuring authors such as Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. Whites saw some of these ideas in Blaxploitation films, which had their own musical representation. Outside of a few genre buffs however, this literary movement largely stayed within the Black community.

But the blues survived, thrived, diversified and crossed over, giving musical expression to themes found in noir. It is almost impossible to read or watch noir fiction without hearing a blues line, jazz riff, maybe a punk anthem waft between the lines like the smell of barbecue. Authors invoke the music deliberately as shorthand, the way film directors play it to set up scenes.

Here’s a few samples of themes common to noir and the blues. If you’ve got more, e-mail them to info@murderoutthere.com.

ALIENATION AND DISPLACEMENT
Blues-
Harry Thacker Burleigh's Motherless Child, though considered a gospel standard, manages to avoid the uplifting narrative that implies the possibility of transcendence (lyrics.)
Noir-
Johnathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn. Boys rescued from a New York orphanage find that their new family is not the grand criminal institution they imagined.

WORKING CLASS
Blues-
Stormy Monday by T-Bone Walker describes the week for the average working joe; five days of getting by with two days to celebrate life and repent (lyrics.) Work Song applies the chants of rural slaves to the prison chain gang (lyrics.)
Noir-
George V. Higgins' Friends of Eddie Coyle defines life for the stiff working his mob connections. Detectives, even cops with some power, are working men.

POLITICS FROM THE BOTTOM UP
Blues-
Paul Butterfield sang Born in Chicago, watching his buddies go down (lyrics.)
Noir-
Cops and politicians are corrupt. Through the Walter Mosely series, Easy Rawlins is often coerced by white cops to do their work in the black community, where white authority is not trusted. James Ellroy's work-a-day detectives are at the bottom of a corrupt and racist power structure.

THE MEAN STREETS (CRIME and DANGER)
Blues-
Stagger Lee shot Billy DeLyon in St. Louis (lyrics.)
Noir-
There is such a thing as "country noir" and many noir themes are transposed from the Western, but as Chandler said: "Down these mean streets a man must go…" Although similar themes and atmospherics appear in many forms of expression, noir is a comic sub-genre of crime fiction.

SEX FOR SALE
Blues-
Elmore James told that girl get out there and Shake Your Money Maker (lyrics.)
Noir-
Long before Iceberg Slim wrote openly about his life as a Pimp, Chandler sold the Colonel’s daughter to the local pornographer for cheap thrills (The Big Sleep.) Marlowe couldn’t do much about it but take her home and try to clean up the mess, knowing it was likely to happen again. Like the Sopranos' strippers, the sex is loveless and obsessive.

SPEAKING OF OBSESSION
Blues-
Screamin' Jay Hawkins put a spell on us, and we are his (lyrics.)
Noir-
The obsession may be sex, drugs, fame, power, wealth or obsession itself, a rare sculpture of a falcon with its history traced back to Malta. Usually it is what Hitchock called the McGuffin, setting in motion a story that reveals the depths of human corruption.

HUMOUR
Blues-
Ray Charles discovers life ain't what it seems, tells his woman I Got News for You (lyrics.)
Noir-
From Chandler's metaphors ("It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window,"--Farewell, My Lovely) to Elmore Leonard's off-beat criminals, humour has been used to thumb the nose at authority ("I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it." -- The Big Sleep), or just to survive on the mean streets.

EXISTENTIALISM
Blues-
Nina Simone sang Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood to no avail. A crew of English rockers made it a hit (lyrics.)
Noir-
"Forget it Jake. It’s Chinatown." Any attempt to make things better will only make them worse.

IDENTITY AND POWER
Blues-
Otis Redding wanted Respect (lyrics) as the man in the house, but it was Aretha Franklin who got it, turning the tune into a feminist anthem (lyrics.)
Noir-
Hammett’s Continental Op had no name. He was his job.

WAR
Blues-
Jimi Hendrix' Star Spangled Banner expresses the anger of being cannon fodder for the white man's war. Wealthy whites can get draft deferments by enrolling for college or university, then joining the National Guard, leaving blacks to fill the lower ranks in Viet Nam.
Noir-
As cannon fodder in two world wars, everyday GI Joes had stark evidence that their fate was in the hands of superiors that ranged from the incompetent to the confused to the heroic. Either way, the officers got the honours and Joe Average had to make his own way when the war ended. They wanted stories that reflected that, and they got them. Hammett rebeled from his past as a Pinkerton strikebreaker to give us Red Harvest. Marlowe was hired by the Colonel to sort out his corrupted children. But whose unquestioned values and status had corrupted them? Spillane no longer trusted civil authority in I the Jury.

Noir

2009-03-25T14:34:00.004-04:00

Grab some visionary German film directors on the lam from Nazi jackboots, throw them onto the mean streets of depression-era America, stir well and hey-presto: Film Noir.

Not Exactly
For starters, there was a little thing called World War II. Manpower shortages and a strike among studio carpenters may have been as responsible as German Expressionism for those minimalist sets and high-contrast, angular shots. There doesn't seem to have been any conscious effort to create a new genre. It wasn't until after the war that two French critics looked back at the works of such directors as John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, 1941), Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, 1942), Otto Preminger (Laura, 1944), Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, 1944), Fritz Lang (The Woman in the Window, 1944, Scarlet Street, 1945) and decided they were the seminal works of a movement they christened Film Noir.
Brilliant, calling the dark photography of darker subjects Black Film. If it weren't in French, who'd give a damn?

But it didn't start there. The French were originally hooked on eighteenth-century English gothic fiction, which they called Roman Noir. Black Novel. Deep. With the exception of Hitchcock's brilliant Psycho (1960), that vein has pretty much wimped into the twentieth century with blood-bucket derivations of Stoker's Dracula and an assortment of haunted-house yarns.

Noir Rules
The pencil-necks still can't decide if this is a genre, sub-genre, a style or what. Like anyone gives a shit. As Ellroy said, "Noir rules, other fiction drools." The brooding, stylized photographic techniques of Film Noir were perfect to present American pulp fiction on screen, with the cynical, paranoid themes of corruption, lust, obsession, violence, revenge and the difficulty of finding redemption in a far from perfect world. The technique was so effective the Noir label was back-applied in North America to the earlier hard-boiled detective literature of Hammett, Chandler and then Ross MacDonald. But what really had the French creaming were the works of a second generation of hard-boiled fiction writers such as Cain and Thompson, and then Westlake, Mosley and, of course, Ellroy himself. Protagonists may or may not be detectives, but they're as morally corrupt as the milieu in which they operate.

Though the classic Film Noir period may have ended in 1958 with Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, the movement has survived the shift to colour (Chinatown, Blue Velvet, Pulp Fiction, L.A. Confidential), defined an affinity for urban blues and jazz, and proved a rich resource in theme and voice for Gen-X punk poets and gangsta-rappers.

Why

The big question is, why would anyone read or watch this stuff. Theories casting the detective as a modern white knight slaying urban dragons don't go nearly deep enough. There's been more to us than sweetness and light all along. Noir themes extend at least back to Oedipus. The Greek didn't take out his eyes over some administrative slip-up on the matrimonial form. He must have really dug his mother in the sack.

Just the idea of mom getting it on with uncle Claudius had Hamlet obsessing all over Elsinore, hallucinating, scheming, soliloquizing and murdering. Remember how the street gangs took over fair Verona while city administrators supposedly focused on public works? And we know Shylock eventually went corporate to get by the petty prejudices of Venitians. He's still spreading money on the street where it does him the most good.

Why Not?
Why not emphasize the positive, smell the roses, consume stories of inspiration, hope and good deeds? Because that's movie-of-the-week, goody-two-shoes hypocrisy, that's why. We can't live up to these icons, not all the time, and we're suspicious of anyone who claims they do. We know enough about human nature to guess that if Arthur couldn't trust best pal Lancelot with Queen Guinevere in the first Camelot, it might be good to know who Jack and Bill diddled in the second and third, and how that affects the state of the nation.

Deep down, we know "family values" ain't all apple-pie. Mommy and daddy have hit the sheets at least once. Do you think they liked it hot and sweaty?

In Your Dreams

Freud figured we try to resolve, in our nightly dreams, conflicts between the world as various authorities would have us believe it is and the one that we experience daily. Social psychologist Mark Hagen of The International Institute for Dream Research has a theory that the arts and media are collective dreams where we present and discuss with the rest of society the ideas and concerns raised in our individual dreams. It's all one big circle, with the collective dreams coming back to influence each individual dream. Suspending disbelief, losing yourself in a book or movie, is a lot like entering a dream.

Noir is the closest form of literature and cinema to the dream. Other genres depict a single desire or wish fulfillment: for love, for the freedom of the frontier, for the solution to a mystery or the desire to know what will happen next. Noir deals with the everyday frustration of these ambitions. Life is a series of random events. Work your ass off to get ahead, or sit on it with a lottery ticket bought on the dole; the odds are lousy either way. But we still can't stop trying to figure it out.

Looking Out For Number One

The key to Noir is audience identification with the protagonist's petty efforts. This may be a detective trying to work through conflicting schemes encountered in the urban jungle while wrestling with his or her own problems, or the criminal obsessed with a woman, or money or drugs or recognition, all the protagonists' own demons. The protagonist could even be the victim, sideswiped by the criminal activities of others, or struggling to regain a lost or stolen identity. One thing's for sure, we know them and ourselves too well to accept the notion of innocence.

The importance of first-person point-of-view was emphasized in Robert Montgomery's version of Chandler's Lady in the Lake. The camera assumed the role of detective Philip Marlowe, who was seen only in carefully arranged mirror reflections. Like Chandler's Marlowe stories the identification with the hero or anti-hero in Noir literature is often accomplished through first person narration, sometimes with second. Even if written in the third person, the audience is meant to see the world through the eyes of a personally conflicted individual struggling to find some essential truth. This truth is not delivered by a mysterious stranger riding a white charger.

Straight And Hard

The Noir fan takes it straight and hard, or at best mixed with cynical, snappy one-liners. To whatever degree possible, the truth must explain the experienced world.

Other genres may dabble with Noir themes or styles, but the real stuff never tempers harsh realities with fantastic discoveries or happy endings. Noir searches for truth in familiar though slightly off-kilter landscapes, among people within the community, within the family or within the self. Noir knows who the real monsters are. It is the dark side of romanticism and the communal dream, providing a perspective by which individuals can observe the pathology of popular culture. For Hollywood, Noir is the American Dream gone wrong.