on 12/24/2024, 6:18 pm
Such essays would get longer (and more profusely illustrated) but things like this don't appear in the NC e-zine any more. Single subjects are far more prevalent these days. Jake still writes for the e-zine occasionally, and he's just about the only one who develops essays that cross noir sub-genres: it seems to be a dying breed. Carry on, Jake!
THE LORD OF GODLESS TOWN
by Jake Hinkson
Special to the Sentinel
Does god exist in film noir?
At first glance, the answer might seem to be an emphatic “No.” After all, noir is a world of constant night, of cigarettes and whiskey, of sex and murder. It’s difficult to imagine the bleary-eyed denizens of dark city trudging out of bed on Sunday morning to go to church, and it’s even more difficult to imagine a god who would listen to all those sinner’s prayers. To the casual observer, these movies seem to reflect a godless universe.
Yet even a casual observer will notice a strain of morality running through the genre. Noirs may take place in a kind of eternal Saturday night, but there’s also a constant feeling of an impending judgment coming for the characters. Indeed, it’s interesting to note how often we talk about noir in religious terms. Just look at the titles: Black Angel, Fallen Angel, Angel Face, The Devil Thumbs A Ride, Devil’s Doorway, The Damned Don’t Cry, Blonde Sinner, Portrait Of A Sinner, The Great Sinner, Hell Bound, Hell’s Half Acre, Hell’s Island, Private Hell 36, The Unholy Wife, The Unholy Four, Touch Of Evil, Force Of Evil.
Is noir just aping the terminology of religion or is there something more at work here?
“The Story of Good and Evil”
Certainly, there are very few actual representations of religion onscreen in film noir. Satan shows up in Alias Nick Beal, but that’s it for him. God himself never makes an appearance, and his representatives don’t come around very often, either. When they do, they tend to make their professions look bad.
One notable exception occurs in Mark Robson’s Edge Of Doom. In the film, Dana Andrews plays Father Thomas, a priest trying to save a troubledyoung man Martin Lynn (Farley Granger) after Martin has murdered another, older priest in the heat of a rage. Father Thomas tries to help him, telling him at one point, “You may have given up on God, but he won’t give up on you.” That’s about as pious a line as was ever uttered in a film noir, but the overall feel of Edge Of Doom is actually quite critical of religion. Father Thomas is a good man, but the elderly priest murdered by Granger is a self-righteous old fool. We’re shocked to see him murdered, but we’re more shocked to see him portrayed as a flawed human being hiding behind his collar.
That old priest doesn’t have anything on Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), the woman-murdering preacher who occupies the center of Charles Laughton’s The Night Of The Hunter. With HATE tattooed on one hand and LOVE on the other, Powell is like a Flannery O’Connor character wandering in a weird landscape of bucolic Expressionism. His tattooed knuckles and his parable of the “story of good and evil” are symbols foreshadowing his ultimate showdown with a shotgun-and-Bible wielding old lady named Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish). It says something about noir’s view of organized religion that Harry Powell is its most notable representative.
While Catholic priests and Protestant preachers are the only religious leaders allowed on display in most noirs (you don’t find many rabbis or imams in Dark City...), you can still find a great deal of fly-by-night conmen posing as spiritualists. Films like The Amazing Mr. X, Fallen Angel, Night Has A Thousand Eyes, and Nightmare Alley reveal a distinctly American obsession with occultist hucksters and trendy spiritualism. Nightmare Alley in particular observes how ready Americans seem to be to find new ways of contacting the Great Beyond. America is the land of new religion, of course, and beneath the calm Protestant face of officialdom, the country has always harbored a bubbling sense of spiritual curiosity. From Mormonism to Scientology, America has always been fertile ground for new religious thinkers and/or charlatans, and Nightmare Alley demonstrates how easily parlor tricks and intuition can be passed off as the newest revelation from on high.
While noir paints a critical picture of American religion, it does lend some weight to the spiritual searching of ordinary people. One thing all these religious authorities—from the good priest to the sham spiritualists—have in common is that they provide desperate people an answer to life’s most vexing problem: death.
“The Cold Black Silence”
While theologians and philosophers have debated death and the possibility of an afterlife for millennia without coming to a definitive conclusion, the sprawling corpus of film noir seems to deliver a firm rejection of the hereafter. While it’s true that many of the talents behind noir were believers, you don’t have to be an existentialist to hit upon the genre’s cumulative response to the issue of the afterlife: there’s nothing after the end.
You can see this idea work itself out in film after film. In Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, John Garfield sits on death row talking to a priest. Is he talking about god? The great beyond? No, he’s talking about Lana Turner. In Rudolph Mate’s D.O.A., when Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien)discovers he has been fatally poisoned, he sets out to find his killer. Since he has no chance of being cured, the natural denial of death is wiped out, and yet with the sober reality of his death fast approaching, Bigelow doesn’t give a moment’s thought to the possibility of anything after it. D.O.A. is often a goofy movie, but its worldview is purely fatalistic.
It is surpassed in this regard only by Allen Baron’s Blast Of Silence, a film which follows the final days of a hit man named Frank Bono. The film is told in an odd second person narration (which might be the pulp equivalent of the voice of god). When Bono is gunned down at the end, the narration closes things out for him, “You’re alone now, all alone. The scream is dead. There’s no pain. You’re home again, back in the cold black silence.”
So much for heaven and hell. When a noir ends with the words The End, it’s not kidding.
“Fate or some mysterious force”
For noir’s remaining theological implications, one must look to its view of life. Doing this, one can argue that noir alternates between two theological ideas: predestination and free-will.
In essence, the idea of predestination is the idea that God intends some people to go to heaven and some to go to hell. In this view, there’s nothing the individual can do to change his destiny. This idea may get its clearest expression in John Farrow’s Night Has A Thousand Eyes. Edward G. Robinson plays a sham spiritualist who discovers to his horror one day that he can actually see the future. He finds this power more a curse than a gift when he begins to foresee the deaths of those around him. When he receives a vision of his own death, he tries to use his few remaining days to save the life of a young woman (played by Gail Russell). He succeeds and the film, ending with his death, is wearily optimistic that some meaning can be found even in death’s creeping shadow.
That meaning can’t always be found in a predestination noir, however. Perhaps the most famous line in all film noir is Al Roberts’s resignation at the end of the ultimate predestination film, Detour: “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.” (It’s worth noting that Martin Goldsmith’s original novel read, “God or fate”.) Roberts’s predicament is usually described as a kind of existential fall representing the randomness of violence and doom. Interestingly enough, however, if we view it through the lens of predestination we don’t come to a radically different conclusion. Does this indicate some point of contact between existentialist nihilism and Calvinist predestination? Perhaps. After all, for the characters experiencing an unearned destruction, there’s not much difference between being destroyed for no reason at all and being destroyed because of God’s unexplained whim.
Of course, poor Al Roberts is a born loser--perhaps the biggest born loser in all of Dark City, but many characters in noir aren’t just victims of God or fate. Some people deserve what they get. For them, character is destiny.
Hell on Earth
Which brings us to the idea of free-will. In theological terms, free-will refers to the idea that the sinner can accept God’s forgiveness and turn away from his or her sin. This, to say the least, does not happen very often in Dark City.
Perhaps the only literal example of this choice occurs in John Farrow’s supernatural Alias Nick Beal, in which Satan (Ray Milland) comes to earth to tempt a politician (Thomas Mitchell) toward destruction. The ending of the film finds a way to reconfirm Farrow’s belief in forgiveness and redemption (the director was a devout Catholic who wrote books of religious history and was honored by Pope Pius XI for his service to the Church). The film, however, is a dark piece of work and gives Nick Beal some parting words that sound like catechism in the Noir Book of Prayers: “You saved yourself just in time, didn’t you? But there’ll be others who won’t. A lot of others. And I’ll tell you why. In everyone there’s a seed of destruction, a fatal weakness.”
The movie critic Roger Ebert once described noir as “a movie where an ordinary guy indulges the weak side of his character, and hell opens up beneath his feet.” The important word there is indulges, implying as it does the contravention of some established moral law. In this view, hell on earth is a punishment for sin.
Hell is a popular concept in noir. The idea of an afterlife may not seem to count for much in Dark City, but “hell on earth” is the closest thing to a theological doctrine the town ever developed. This is because the twin obsessions of noir--transgression and ruination--are inextricably linked. If the First Church of Dark City has one guiding precept it is this: you pay for your sins.
One can clearly see this at work in Cy Endfield’s The Sound Of Fury aka Try and Get Me. Beginning with a blind street preacher warning passersby that “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”, the film tells the story of a down on his luck everyman named Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy). One day Tyler meets a hood named Jerry Slocum (Lloyd Bridges) who offers him a job as a getaway driver in a string of robberies. At first Howard says no, but when he thinks it over and finally accepts Jerry’s offer, you can smell the sulfur starting to burn.
After Jerry upgrades their criminal enterprise to kidnapping and murder, the film becomes a slow boiling nightmare fueled by Howard’s deepening guilt. “I keep thinking God is coming after me,” he tells his wife. The Sound Of Fury, inspired by true events, was written by Jo Pagano as an indictment of lynch mobs and journalistic cravenness, but the power of its narrative comes from the way it weaves these themes in with Howard’s choice and its terrible consequences.
That overarching sense of dread--the sense that a character’s transgressions will be followed by his or her subsequent ruination--is at the heart of noir. Is there some lingering religious notion at the heart of that guilt-ridden fear? Or to put it another way, is god still watching and passing judgment? Noir provides about as clear an answer to that question as life does. In his essay “Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir” scholar Mark T. Conard suggests that noir’s sense of doom comes from a post-Nietzschean anxiety over the death of God. That’s certainly possible, but even if God is dead, the people of Dark City still fear his judgment.
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