1. Matt Hanson, Building Sci-Fi Moviescapes: The Science Behind the Fiction, RotoVision, Hove, 2005, reviewed for audacity here
Hollywood's Noir Detours: Unease in the Mental Megalopolis
Sin City (2005) combined technical brilliance with emotional emptiness. The "Basin City" setting was created in post-production, as a fake location added in around the actors, who performed in front of a green screen. Sin City is a city of the mind, built up through cinematic perceptions of urban life.
Matt Hanson explains such technical advances in his Building Sci-Fi Moviescapes. (1) However, despite the technical breakthroughs, there is as much continuity as change in the stylised film noir of Rodriguez and Miller's comic-book caper. It is in the artificial tradition of cities made on cleverly lit Hollywood sound stages since the early 1940s.
Where urban life
began, urban fictions followed on. Modern public spaces begot modern
entertainment. As new entertainments were born, cinema came to the fore. The
novelty of projected moving images - the "cinema of attractions" - was
sidelined content. Narrative and plot, while seldom sophisticated, helped
ensure the transition from passing fad to permanent institution. Cinema bedded
in well and later saw off the challenges posed by developments of television
and video.
Over time, films set in urban localities - even fake ones - acquired a global reach. Hollywood entertained urban audiences while encapsulating their experiences. It did so in a paradoxical way, often creating a negative counterpoint to modern life. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the cycle of film noir that characterised a fair slice of US production in the years 1941 to 1958. If film noir is seen as a sensibility - the "genre" label came later via France - then it established an empire of the imagination, throughout cinema and beyond.
Film noir is nothing if not a mental megalopolis. Made on Hollywood's poverty row, a picture like Detour (1945) embodies noir in microcosm. Director Edgar G. Ulmer used miniscule resources, rationed to an estimated 4,500 metres (15,000 feet) of film and six days, to come up with the picture. Ann Savage does the business as an alcoholic femme fatale, in a performance matching that of her unsavoury co-star Tom Neal. Neal opens Detour claiming that ' ...fate or some mysterious force has put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all'. This expresses the sentiment that modern life represents a loss of control, at the heart of the noir sensibility.
Is this outlook uniquely "noir"? Admittedly, the alienating megalopolis was portrayed brilliantly on the screen in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926) and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). Yet after 1940, the connection between cinemas and cities was articulated as a troubled one as a matter of routine.
This is not to advocate Hollywood production of uplifting tributes to the metropolis, in the manner of Soviet comedies rhapsodising over tractor factories. Moreover, one should not forget that a noir movie was often a B-movie too, the downbeat support act in a double bill shared with such glossy celebrations of urban life as Kelly and Donen's On the Town (1949). Whereas big budget Hollywood celebrated the American way, a morbid melodrama playing support could remind audiences of the dark side of prosperity.
US hard-boiled fiction is noir's literary antecedent. It was as concerned with urban life as with its staple topic - crime - and developed roughly in tandem with Hollywood, hard-boiled mixed pulp publishing, staccato prose and low-life characters. Maturing stylistically with Dashiell Hammett and thematically with a broad range of left-leaning crime writers, hard-boiled was as distinctively American as it was socially critical. Consequently it became a rich vein of material for Hollywood, from cheap productions like Raw Deal (1948) to A-list pictures starring Bogart and Bacall (The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, Key Largo, To Have and Have Not). Young adults saw these movies at a time of social dislocation: returning from the war, on shore leave, on a date with a man who could be dead the next week.
Noir's grasp of the cultural moment was reinforced by an explosion in pulp publishing. Reading paperback originals bought at drugstores and malt stands was like seeing the movies all over again. That Sin City owes much to Mickey Spillane shows the persistence of this tradition.
Over time, these nightmare themes spread to the suburbs. Movies like Too Late for Tears (1949) were part of a cycle of anti-materialist noir, spelling out the message that money couldn't buy you happiness. Don Siegel's Private Hell 36 (1954) transmuted trailer parks into purgatory long before Eminem. Suburban malaise more than matched its urban counterpart. Noir titles - Caged, Caught, Cornered, Detour, Quicksand, Roadblock, Trapped - speak to a sense of geographical terminus. The human spirit, constricting within individual characters, finds no salvation in mobility, only new outlets for destructive impulses.
The urban/suburban distinction, a source of symbolic mortal combat drawing in US town planners and residents' associations, does not constrain noir cinema. Instead malaise and exhaustion become the B-movie norm, even as prospects were improving for white-collar white suburbanites, in federally subsidised housing and G.I. Bill educations. For baby boom parents, noir reminded them of their misspent youth, the dark side of membership of the "Greatest Generation". Increasingly, noir flickered on suburban TV screens late into the night, at odds with new realities, yet still unsettling. As the US noir cycle ground to a halt, brilliantly, with Orson Welles' classic Touch of Evil (1958), it appeared that the film industry had left its wayward child behind.
Ultimately, this was not a mood restricted exclusively to noir. In tandem with literary portrayals of suburbia, suburbs became an equivalent site of cinematic alienation, from The Stepford Wives (1975, 2005) through Assault on Precinct 13 (1976, 2005) to The Truman Show (1998). Sprawl becomes soulless, if not a threat to nature itself. Seen as yet another false utopia, suburbia ducks brickbats from a downbeat sensibility. This is most apparent with the cinematic treatment of Los Angeles, where noir nightmares unfold along an urban-suburban continuum with impunity.
It was not until the mid-1970s that a "neo-noir" revival was under way, starting with John Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and ending in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). Astute observers noted the similarities between Dogs and Ringo Lam's City on Fire (1987), in which Hong Kong is rendered as a threatening megalopolis. More broadly, sci-fi spectaculars such as Blade Runner (1982) and The Fifth Element (1997) routinely, often inventively, projected traces of the genre into the future.
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