Residue

The wind leaves residues of autumn in my hair,
Like her smile left residues of loneliness.
When I walk and the leaves crunch beneath me,
They say, "Don't forget me! I was beautiful once!"
How does one forget if the weather never fails
To turn my knees and face cold this time of year?
The trees must be so lonely without their hair,
Indeed, how do they carry on, naked and empty?
They await the eternal spring which never comes.
I wait with them -- "I've been through this before."
Where did you go? Where have you gone? Alone?
The earth and the sun have conspired in absence,
My heart grows weary; or, weary grows on it.
For her smile showed me the summer once,
Which I will not forget when the snows come.

life and death

on the blackboard the Professor wrote
"life and death"
death + life
and we talked about vampyres
but i didn't see the point
as long as i am here and he is there
and you are where (?)

so i went looking for {you}
i put on your clothes
time time time = there's never enough
and time time time = it never runs out
you are there as i am here
as he is she and she is he
as you are we and woe is me

but where are we now, john?
where are we?

Unraveling the Detective Myth in Film Noir

This is the second post of a multi-post sequence in which I copy and paste old college papers so that my blog can claim to have more intelligent writing in it. Please revel in the genius. Please...

In earlier fiction, the detective has always been a near mythological character, possessing incredible powers of insight, profound ingenuity, and deductive reasoning. His brains are almost superhuman in the way they are fully able to grasp the universe completely. The classic example of this is Sherlock Holmes, the sure and able protector of the community, possessing a sense of calm confidence, even when things seem too confusing to make sense. His passion for proof and truth allows him to notice details as he reads signs objectively and from afar, decoding the cryptic situation until everything becomes obvious for the reader; yet, throughout, it seems that everything has been obvious to him all along. He goes through his job with aplomb because he just knows that everything in the world is knowable. However, as the upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century came to a head, with a depression and two world wars, this myth began to unravel into something much more complex and human, and is embodied in what has become known as film noir -- stories about detectives that are marked not by confidence in the world, but by the two major themes of the limits of the knowable and male paranoia/anxiety. As the upheaval of the second half of the century burst, with the Cold War and political and social strife, the detective myth unraveled even further, additionally expressing the limits of the doable. The classic film noir The Maltese Falcon and the neo-noir Chinatown illustrate this point perfectly. While they share these themes in a syntactic sense, however, they do differ semantically in the way these themes are addressed.

Critics often call The Maltese Falcon the first film noir. Written and directed by John Huston before World War II, it exists as one of the more optimistic examples of the genre, although I use that adjective in a completely relative sense. On the surface, the film is about tough, hard-boiled private detective Samuel Spade, who, after the murder of his partner Miles Archer, becomes embroiled in a convoluted plot involving all sorts of criminals, low-lifes, and antique dealers, to secure an extremely valuable and historically mystical and elusive statuette of a falcon. However, taken as a whole, the film is an expression of epistemological uncertainty and male paranoia.

When it comes to the first theme of what is knowable, Spade is no Holmes, nor is the world he moves through the world Holmes moves through. Spade does not -- can not -- solve the mystery by looking at solid clues and physical evidence, trusting in logic and deduction with the certainty of a classic detective, because the world around him is neither solid nor logical. Instead, he must delve right into the shady underworld of the criminal, nearly becoming one himself as he becomes at odds with both the police and the scoundrels in trying to dig up the truth (a true spade, indeed). In becoming so embroiled, rather than maintaining the clinically intellectual objectivity and distance of a Holmes, he in a way admits that everything he concludes can only be his own interpretation, and that this unavoidable subjectivity par involvement, this inability to observe objectively, leaves true holes of mystery that the detective can never be capable of filling in for the audience. Spade is not completely lost in such a world, of course, as he seems to wheel and deal separately with the police and the criminals Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo, Wilmer Cook, and Casper Gutman with a measure of capability. However, the now distinctive technique of low-key lighting almost constantly shrouds Spade’s world in shadow, hiding what truths we may never know. A colleague warns Spade, “You think you always know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good,” a warning highlighted by the numerous name changes, false identities, lies, and double-crosses he must try to navigate, and not always deftly. Spade is a detective vulnerable and human enough to be drugged by Gutman and to be duped, at least for a while, into falling for O’Shaughnessy. Something like that would never happen to Holmes; indeed, Spade’s world is much more chaotic, and thus difficult to discern. When Cairo and O’Shaughnessy discuss the falcon in front of Spade in his home, revealing their unforeseen familiarity and throwing Spade and the audience for a loop, there is a quick shot of Spade’s shocked face, with a completely dark and shadowed wall behind him -- the ominous and unknowable shadows of the world have even managed to creep into Spade’s own home! Later, Spade explains to Cairo that a “sensible story” told to the police would have landed them in jail; it is a ludicrous story that passes for truth in this world. When Gutman makes a toast to “clear understanding and plain speaking,” the double-crosses only increase. In trying to price the falcon, he says, “There’s no telling how high it could go. That’s the one and only truth about it.” It’s telling that the one and only truth is that nobody knows, and this is a theme in general, not just about the falcon’s worth. Throughout the film, a man named Floyd Thursby is talked about a lot, someone we never even meet or see. In the end, the statuette everyone was clambering for turns out to be fake, and the whereabouts of the real statue remain a mystery. He calls the fake one “the stuff that dreams are made of,” expressing the futility and ethereality of even a hard, solid, physical clue. All these things sum up to indicate an uncertain and unknowable world.

The second theme of male anxiety is also very prominent. The film is composed almost entirely of either interior shots, which create a claustrophobic feeling enhanced by the many shadows, or exterior nighttime shots, marked by ominous darkness -- both point to a certain level of anxiety. When the police accuse Spade of killing Thursby, there is a shot of him in the middle of the frame, an officer towering over him to his left, and another sitting lower than him to his right, thus threateningly trapping Spade in the middle. Of course, the ultimate symbol of male paranoia is his antithesis, the femme fatale, O’Shaughnessy in this film. Spade is constantly watchful of her as she changes names, lies, double-crosses, and eventually admits to killing Archer. Her presence establishes the tradition in film noir that women can’t be trusted, especially rich, beautiful, seductive, and/or helpless ones, and the many scenes with her highlight this point. She never quits what Spade calls her “school-girl act,” yet her affectation of helplessness is often undermined by the way she is filmed. One shot has her standing ominously over a sitting Spade as the window blinds behind her either pierce her with ill-omened lines of death or suggest her criminality as prison bars. Another shot shows the shadows created by the blinds slanting diagonally across the wall, right behind Spade, off-angle lines that destabilize the frame, and menace to destabilize Spade. Her whole hotel room, in fact, is marked by the blinds and striped chairs, a light-dark-light-dark pattern that certainly suggests her duality, and adds to Spade’s male paranoia. Spade, moreover, is constantly rolling his own cigarettes, in an almost ritualistic fashion, ritual being a common male answer to anxiety; additionally, if one sees the cigarette as a phallic symbol, this cigarette rolling can thus be understood as a way of affirming his maleness in the face of the femme fatale threat.

However, Spade is ultimately able to hand in all the criminals and save his own neck, an astonishing feat given all the uncertainty that surrounds him; and although he comes close to falling for O’Shaughnessy’s wiles, he is sensible enough to pragmatically weigh the pros and cons of running away with this dangerous woman, and decides to turn her in. Thus, initially, film noir as a genre dealt with conquerable limits of knowledge, and preventable anxiety. Unfortunately for the private detective, these themes spiraled out of control in revisionist neo-noir films like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown that reread the genre with an even more cynical attitude towards the world.

The plot of Chinatown is even more convoluted than The Maltese Falcon’s, with private detective Jake Gittes starting off spying on supposedly cheating husband Hollis Mulray for a woman who pretends to be suspicious wife Evelyn, and ending with a gigantic, fantastically lucrative water-diversion plot by her the real Evelyn’s father Noah Cross, in which a totally unforeseen incestuous relationship is revealed. In this brief description, one can already begin to see the two themes of epistemological limits and male paranoia emerging.

The structure of the narrative alone addresses the limits of the knowable simply by its convolution and sheer complexity. Every other scene seems to be a plot-point that twists the story in a new direction, and spins Gittes’ head around. He is not nearly as capable as Spade in navigating the labyrinth and discerning truth from falsehood, but it is also a more labyrinthine world Gittes must operate in. A woman pretending to be Mrs. Mulray easily dupes him into spying on Mr. Mulray, making Gittes look like quite a fool. It looks like Mr. Mulray is actually the bad guy at first, and Cross a good guy. Rather than get drugged like Spade, Gittes has his blackout spell when he gets knocked unconscious by angry farmers. When he snoops around enough to gather the key fact that water is mysteriously being diverted and dumped into the ocean in the middle of a big drought, he almost loses his nose (every bit of knowledge comes at a dear price in this world of uncertainty). Like Spade, Gittes, is told by Cross, “You may think you know what you’re dealing with -- but believe me, you don’t.” Just when Gittes and the audience think they have it all neatly figured out, that Evelyn drowned Hollis in the salt water pool in the backyard, based on salt water in his lungs and his glasses found in the pool, Gittes discovers the limits of what he thinks he knows, when the incestuous relationship of Evelyn and Cross is revealed, and that Mulray never wore bifocals -- but this information comes too late, and Gittes tries but fails to save the innocent and bring down the bad guy, instead helping to kill Evelyn and allowing Cross to escape with the big money-plot and the child of incest. (As an aside, the incest theme is interesting because Cross is played by John Huston, the aforementioned writer-director of the first film noir The Maltese Falcon, and so the “father” of film noir. The mere casting of him in Chinatown is thus a form of genre-incest.) Rather than create uncertainty through lighting and shadows, however, the film uses a different set of semantics, mainly ocular/vision/glass and water/drought motifs. Photos deceive the mind. The fish Cross serves Gittes has a glossed eye, representing a clouded vision that can never see the whole picture. Similarly, Evelyn has a flaw in her iris, another sign of flawed vision. Gittes finds broken bifocals at the bottom of the pool, shattered pieces of glass that reflect a duplicitous and fractured world. Evelyn in the end is shot through her eye, a powerful statement on the seen versus unseen. The dryness of the earth caused by the drought suggests a dried up world with little information to offer. When water/information does arrive, it comes in chaotic deluges that almost drown Gittes, not help him. Water is naturally a more destabilized form of matter that flows and crashes with sometimes unstoppable turmoil, and its presence dominates, perhaps even precludes, more “solid” matter. While Spade’s world of shadows could always be conquered by turning on the light, Gittes’ world of water is wilder, nearly drowning him, and never staying still. Thus, it is the imperfect vision and unmanageable water together that suggest, with different semantics, the same syntax as The Maltese Falcon, that the world is not just uncertain, but unknowable.

Male paranoia is also not only present, but severely heightened in the film. As a neo-noir, the audience must instantly suspect the rich, beautiful woman that walks into the office, the femme fatale that poses such a threat to the male psyche, and indeed, Ida Sessions was fooling Gittes. But the great trick that Polanski pulls on us film noir scholars is to set up Evelyn as the femme fatale, where she shows a willingness to play Gittes’ game against the police by lying to them (a similar event happens in The Maltese Falcon), where Gittes handles her lying during a dinner scene, and where he apparently establishes her guilt in a murder, only to knock us all back by revealing that she wasn’t a femme fatale at all, but an innocent victim of incest trying to protect her sister-daughter. He thus toys with the idea of the femme fatale in such a way that it only increases any male paranoia towards women. Whereas before, we could have counted on the woman being evil, now, after Chinatown, who knows? The uncertainty merely aggravates the anxiety. Gittes also can’t affirm his maleness by rolling his own cigarettes; he smokes pre-rolled ones from a case. In fact, the most prominent phallic symbol in this film isn’t an affirmation à la Spade, but something that literally goes under the knife. Gittes walks around half the movie with an awkwardly large white bandage on his nose, because of a knife-cut he gets from a hotheaded gangster. It is interesting that just when he begins to start snooping around and sticking his nose into the darkness, he gets it cut, a sign that the world is so dangerous that it will unman you, even castrate you, if one reads the nose as a phallic symbol. No doubt such a threat would unnerve any man; since castration is a reality, male anxiety and paranoia are brought to their highest possible intensity. Nobody ever went around chopping Spade’s cigarettes with a knife.

The element of castration also adds to a third additional theme of the limits of the doable. Not only can Gittes not really know anything, he can’t really do anything either, as exemplified by the ending of the film and the symbol of Chinatown; in other words, Gittes is impotent, his actions meaningless. He was advised to do “as little as possible” as a cop in Chinatown, and he mutters this phrase as he realizes that his earnest but bungling efforts to save Evelyn only led to her death. As if that wasn’t dark enough, the film suggests that the events are part of an inescapable cycle of karma-like fate. It is revealed that in the shadows of his past, Gittes was somehow responsible for the death of a woman he perhaps loved while he was a cop in Chinatown, which was why he left to become a private detective. At the end of the film, things somehow devolve for Gittes back to Chinatown where another woman that he perhaps loves is killed because of him. It seems that he simply cannot escape this terrible destiny, and it is this point that gives the film its nihilistic drive. As the movie ends, his partner tells him, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” underscoring the inefficacy and impotence in trying to do anything in this world. There is simply nothing Gittes can do; he is powerless against the chaos. To further hammer home this cynicism, Cross is not condemned to a futile pursuit of the dubious “stuff dreams are made of,” as is implied for his counterpart Gutman at the end of The Maltese Falcon. Rather, Cross’ desire is for something else that shares a similar intangible and ethereal quality: the future. And he gets it. A simple glance at a modern map of southern California shows that his plan of bringing L.A. to the valley worked, earning him untold millions. Nobody stops him; he owns the police. Indeed, it seems that in this world of meaningless actions and unknowable uncertainties, money and power are the only things that mean anything -- and so, they mean everything -- in this world. There is nothing like honor that survives here, the way it does in Spade’s world when he is able to avenge his partner’s death, because it’s what you’re “supposed to do.” Instead, you’re supposed to do nothing. With that kind of message, Sherlock Holmes becomes in effect dead.

Thus, film noir, expressing epistemological uncertainty and male paranoia, is a genre that reflects a twentieth-century take on the old detective myth, unraveling it at first with The Maltese Falcon, and eventually killing it completely in Chinatown. Black film, indeed.