INTRODUCTION
[1] When we think about "film noir" in the present, it is
well to remember the categorical instability that has dogged
its tracks from the moment French critics coined the term in
the mid-1950s as a retrospective tag for a bunch of
previously withheld American films which now, upon their
foreign release, all looked and felt sort of alike. Ever
since, critics and theorists have been arguing over what
noir is and which films are examples of it, over what
social processes and psychic processes it speaks of and to,
and what might constitute its own social effects. Does
film noir constitute its own genre; a style which can be
deployed across generic boundaries; a movement within
Hollywood cinema, limited to its place in space and time?
These, the intrinsic questions and debates, have their own
momentum and energy, but derive extra charge from an
associated set of extrinsic questions regarding noir's
relationships to other, non-cinematic social trans-
formations, especially shifts in gender identities and
relationships in the post-WWII U.S. Did the spider-women of
so many films noir, despite their emphatically evil coding
and self-destructive defeats, nonetheless constitute a
challenge to the restoration and extension of a patriarchal-
capitalist gender economy under whose terms men controlled
and ran the public sphere while women, desexualized and
maternalized, were relegated to hearth and home? Does the
aggressive sexuality, power and plot controlling/generating/
deranging force, of, say, a Barbara Stanwyck in "Double
Indemnity", Jane Greer in "Out of the Past", Gloria Grahame
in "The Big Heat", together with noir's characteristically
deviant visualityits cramped asymmetrical framings, its
expressionistically harsh lighting contrasts and lurid
shadows, the whole twisted and uncertain spatiality of it
matching the male protagonist's lack of control over the
breakneck deviousness of its plotconstitute a real and
potentially effective subversion of the dominant order, as
Christine Gledhill suggests?1 Or is it simply, as
neoformalist film historian David Bordwell asserts, that
"These films blend causal unity with a new realistic and
generic motivation, and the result no more subverts the
classical film noir, we may presume, anything else"than
crime fiction undercuts the orthodox novel" (77)?
[2] noir, then, as coded alternative or as alternate
flavor of the month, something to put alongside vanilla,
chocolate, strawberry and "The Best Years of Our Lives"?
The debate smolders on unresolved, and perhaps irresolvably,
depending as it does on some broader knowledge or agreement
as to what indeed constitutes subversive or progressive work
within a pre- or non-revolutionary cultural moment and
social formation. More directly, the question is how any
capital-intensive work, such as film or mainstream
television production, which is produced for a mass
audience, can be progressive, and how we can tell insofar as
it is. How (and how well) would such work *work*? What
(and how much) would it *do*? More crudely still, how far
can a work go and still get made and distributed within a
system whose various structures are all overdetermined by
capitalism and patriarchy (not to mention racism and
homophobia)? What's the most, and the best, we can demand
and/or expect?
[3] It is, as Marxists used to say perhaps too often, no
accident that such messy questions press themselves on us
today so insistently and distinctly that a whole new
interdisciplinary protodiscipline, "cultural studies," now
constitutes itself just to deal with them. Their emergence
and urgency for us is, after all, inevitably consequent upon
the dimming of the revolutionary horizon, and the loss or
confusion of revolutionary faith, not only within the
socialist Left but throughout all the other feminist and
"minority" movements in the '70s and '80s, condemned as each
has been to its own version of the excruciating declension
from essentialist-nationalist unity to division Fanon
outlined in "The Wretched of the Earth" for a post-colonial
subject on the other side of a war of national liberation
for which there was finally, in the U.S. anyway, never a
credible or even distinct equivalent anyway. Here the
revolution, if there was anything like one, came from the
RightNew Right maven Paul Weyrich proudly proclaiming in
the wake of the first Reagan election in the early '80s, "We
are radicals seeking to overthrow the power structure"
against the liberal-corporatist State and the sociopolitical
good sense that flowed from and supported it, both of which
had to be, and have been, dismantled and rearticulated in
quite different ways. Given this combination, then, of dis-
integration below and regressive hegemonic re-integration
from on high, the whole notion of what Gramsci called "war
of movement," of deep structural and institutional change,
has come to seem to many once-insurrectionary spirits to be
inconceivably crackpot or even worse, a grisly ruse of the
very Power (a la Foucault) it pretends to oppose; so that a
permanent "war of position," the ever partial and
provisional detournement of otherwise intractable
institutional arrangements and practices, becomes literally
the only game in town.
[4] I describe this situation here not to deplore or
criticize it, no more than I would claim to know how to
resolve the questions of cultural politics that flow from it
in some new transcendent synthesis of What Is To Be Done; it
is, for better and for worse, the set of circumstances we in
the developed West, and the U.S. in particular, are *in*.
So it will be both the context from which we must think
about the meaning and direction of the so-called "return" of
noir during the '70s and '80s just past, and some of the
newest mutations in the noir sensibility today.
[5] For starters, moreover, we would do well to resist the
very notion of straightforward repetition or "return" to
explain such films as "Body Heat" (1981) and the remakes of
"Farewell My Lovely" (1975) and "The Postman Always Rings
Twice" (1981).2 For whatever noir was in the '40s
and '50s, it will not be again three decades or more later
by dint of sheer straightforward imitation, if only because
the meanings and effects of the original %films noir% even
today must still be experienced and understood in their
relation to a whole system of film production, distribution,
and consumptionthe Hollywood studio system, in effect
which was in its last hour even then and is now gone. As
Thomas Schatz has recently reminded us, it was that system
which most fully standardized and customized the look and
feel and plotlines of film genres, from MGM classics and
costume dramas to Warner's gangster pics and Universal's
specialty in horror: some of them genres from which noir
had something to steal (e.g., the deep shadows and
expressionistic framings of the horror film), but each and
all of them together a system of techniques, conventions
*and*, not least, audience expectations (e.g., the romantic
happy ending and/or the satisfying restoration of law and
order) that noirs first defined themselves by violating.
[6] Accordingly, when the studio system breaks up into the
present "package-unit" system in which individual producers
assemble production groups and materials on a film-by-film
basis, employing what is left of the studios primarily as a
distribution arm, and generic production atomizes too as the
specialized constellations of talents and resources once
fixed in position to produce it are dispersed, we may expect
that the working parts of the noir machine of effects and
responses will also break apart into so many free agents,
capable of being drafted onto any number of new, provisional
combinatory teams, all according to the same recombinant
aesthetic economy which, for example, a decade ago brought
us the TV series "Hill Street Blues" out of a directive to
its original writers to knock out a combination of sit-com
"Barney Miller" and the action-adventure series "Starsky and
Hutch".3 In this newer Hollywood, quintessential site
of the intersection between the flexible specialization of
post-Fordist production and the free-floating ideologemes-
turned-syntax of postmodernism, the transgressive energies
and subversive formal practices that first animated and
defined noir may be most alive and well where they have
migrated from the now-conventionalized site of their first
appearance towards some new and even perverse combination
with other formal and thematic elements in similar drift
from other ex-genres of film.
[7] Such, at any rate, is the general hypothesis of the
present essay, whose specific claim will be that %film noir%
in particular, homeless now as a genre (or aesthetic
reaction-formation to genre), nonetheless currently finds
itself most alive where its former elements and energies
form part of a new chronotope whose chief difference from
that non- or even anti-domestic one of "classic" noir lies
in the extent to which the newer one includes, and indeed is
centered on, home and family, even as it decenters and
problematizes both. Through a look at two successful recent
films, "Blue Velvet" and "Terminator 2", I mean to show how
home and family are being destabilized, "noir-ized," in
both: in which case, the large differences between our two
films in terms of aesthetic strategies and audiences should
only make the similarities in the end results of each film's
processing of the elements of noir it takes up that much
more striking and significant. Striking in what way,
though, how significant and for whom? Connected to what
other transformations and praxes, underway or to come?
Those questions will raise their heads again on the other
side of the following readings, forcing us again to hedge
and answer them as best we can in the absence of any clear
or shared utopian goal.
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