1 of 5

"I don't want to die."

"Neither do I, baby, but if I have to, I'm gonna die last."

That's a bit of romantic dialogue between two characters from Out of the Past, one of the films featured in the Film Noir Classics Collection. The fifteen films in these three box sets were originally released between the mid-1940s and the early 1950s. (A fourth volume, featuring ten films, is promised later this year.) They thus bypass the early period of noir, defined by such classics as Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, films whose viewing by French critics in the middle of the decade gave rise to the noir tag in the first place, but they include such gems as The Asphalt Jungle, The Set-Up, Murder My Sweet, Dillinger, On Dangerous Ground, and Narrow Margin. Clearly there's a growing contemporary interest, both popular and critical, in film noir. Book-length analyses of the historical, cultural, and philosophical roots and implications of film noir continue to multiply—including two noteworthy recent examples, Mark Conard's edited volume, The Philosophy of Film Noir, and John Irwin's Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them. Even this limited sample of films and books gives evidence of the rich philosophical resources in noir; its penchant for subversive, anti-Enlightenment themes; and its revival of a peculiar kind of quest.

As the discussion of the essence or nature of film noir in the books from Conard and Irwin indicates, critics seeking a unifying definition of noir as a genre have failed to achieve consensus. Still, the films grouped under the noir label exhibit what philosophers call family resemblances, including recurring themes (criminality, infidelity, get-rich-quick schemes, and seemingly doomed quests), dominant moods (anxiety, dread, and oppressive entrapment), typical settings (cities at night and in the rain), and peculiar styles of filming (sharp contrasts between light and dark and tight, off-center camera angles). Noir is certainly a counter to the optimistic, progressive vision of postwar America; subverting the rationality of the pursuit of happiness, noir turns the American dream into a nightmare. Noir also counters the Enlightenment vision of the city as the locus of human bliss, wherein human autonomy and rational economics could combine to bring about the satisfaction of human desire. Instead of Enlightenment progress, with its lucid sense of where we are and where we are going, noir gives us disconcerting shadows and a present tense that is incapable of moving forward because it is overwhelmed by the past. In the noir universe, progress and autonomy are debilitating illusions. The title Out of the Past is a synecdoche for much of the noir genre.

Noir films regularly focus on characters who manage, at least for a period of time, to lead decent, peaceful, domestic lives—until some chance event pulls them back into their past, and the history of violence repeats itself and engulfs the protagonist. One of the original models for this motif is Out of the Past, which scholar James Ursini in his commentary track calls a "perfect noir." The film opens with Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) living near an idyllic lake in the Sierras with Ann, his devoted girlfriend. Soon a stranger arrives and demands that Jeff come with him to see a gangster for whom Bailey had once worked in New York. On his way to the meeting, a long drive from the country to the city, Jeff confesses to Ann the details of his past. His current plan, it seems, is to return to the world of his past in the hope of re-emerging unscathed to continue his peaceful life with Ann. But when he visits his former employer, he also runs into Kathie (Jane Greer), an archetypal noir femme fatale, with whom Jeff has also had dealings. The plot is deliberately baroque in structure and requires multiple viewings to figure out its implications. What is clear up front is how acutely aware Jeff is of his own entrapment. "I think I'm a frame," he admits at one point, but he continues to submit himself to the manipulations of others, particularly the magnetic and deadly Kathie. The question hinted at in the lines quoted at the outset of this essay—who dies last?—is subordinate in the viewer's mind to a more fundamental question: can Jeff make it out of the past? Yet, since Jeff's quest never fully transcends self-interested curiosity, the film thwarts viewers' desire for intelligibility even as it manages to provide some negative satisfaction of the desire for justice—no one wins.

next page... |  1 of 5