Meet My Hyperfixation: Film Noir
It happens every year. Dependable as the tax man. November dawns cool and dark and I find myself drawn to the silver-y seduction of film noir.
It’s not just the glorious broads or the way I start to think a long, slow drag on a cigarette could solve all of my problems. Me, a never-even-smoked-a-Swisher-Sweet square. Imagine that.
Come to think of it, it’s not even the way I start thinking in hardboiled voiceover. It’s the big, beating heart it wears on its sleeve. The complicated characters, smashing into each other, on some kind of collision course that feels like fate but usually boils down to chemistry.
I love that it’s a genre defined by rules and conventions, tropes and twists. And that it defies them as readily as it lives and dies by them. It’s never and forever all at once and never again.
I’d argue (and I’m not the only one) that noir is the most distinctly American genre — popular logic says that Westerns are the nitrate equivalent of apple pie, but Westerns, so often characterized by the black hats versus the white hats miss out on the messiness and the ambiguity. Everyone is either a hero or a villain, a damsel or a harlot. Noir is more paranoid, darker, infinitely more complex. It trades the cavalry for the kind of guy who operates only according to his own code, he’s smart, compromised and maybe even outside the law, but moral in his own way. And in that, he can be bamboozled. Head turned by beautiful women (more on them later), wild schemes, big scores that somehow bring about justice. It’s the perfect formula for heady stories steeped in whisky, saturated in smoke, cloaked in shadow. Where the Western is about the notions of America, even the dream of America, noir is about what it takes to make it in America.
For the uninitiated, here’s what you need to know:
It’s Subversive
Like most great art, film noir is a product of its time and context. If you go way back in film history, before 1934, you’ll find some absolutely wild things. This is the pre-code era. And when it ended, things got a whole lot more buttoned up. Introduced in 1930, but not enforced until 1934, the Hays Production Code was a rigid set of rules designed to clean up Hollywood’s act. Much like the Oscars were invented in 1929 as a PR maneuver to rehab the industry’s image, the Hays Code aimed to make movies behave. Meanwhile, Hitler was on the march in Europe, and in the years leading up to and following World War II, the world experienced a collective loss of innocence and disillusionment that meant bubbly musicals with happy endings and squeaky-clean leads just didn’t land like they used to.
Noir then, is a reaction to all of that. The code said crime and sex had to be punished. The genre used this forced inevitability to create tension and stakes. The schemes and the romance might have felt fantastical, but the motivations were as real as the grit under your nails after a day at the factory. Enter characters like Phillip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity) — unforgettable forces propelled by simple truths. As Bogey’s Frank McCloud puts it in Key Largo, “When your head says one thing and your whole life says another, your head always loses.”
It’s Stylized
All that light and shadow, the smoke framing the screen, the trench coats and the fedoras, it’s all part of a visual composition that defined the style even as the tropes and conventions were forming and breaking and mending and evolving. The high contrast of deep shadow and soft light is achieved from low-key lighting that is now synonymous with dramatic intensity. Even what’s on screen has a look: unbalanced compositions with tilt, dutch angle and tricks of shadow are used to heighten the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, flashbacks allow for the slow unwinding of narratives and plots, often transforming the characters on screen into something more than meets the eye. This is especially true of femme fatales, those gorgeous gals who tend to pull our antiheros in, seduce them, charm them, and ultimately, disarm them. One day, they’re all wide-eyed need and by a turn, they go cold, calculated, deadly. It’s a high-wire balancing act that made legends of Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Rita Hayworth and Jane Greer.
And Yes, It’s Sexy
Speaking of which, that rat-a-tat banter, the all-or-nothing declarations, the swift romance, the less-than-subtle entendre, the montage and the well-timed cutaways… it all works. Not because it breaks the Code, but because it uses the restraint of the Code to build tension toward an inevitable doom. The lovers become the proverbial moths to the flame. Unable to stay away from each other, certainly unable to live with each other.
Just look at this first exchange between Phyllis and Jeff in Double Indemnity.
Dammmmmmn.
We all know there is no happy ending for them. Even if it doesn’t end in the gallows or in the jailhouse, rainbows and butterflies are simply not in the cards. Still, the impermanence and the fire of it all — these are the mistakes an audience understands and would also make.
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“Okay,” I hear you saying, “I get it. But is it really a hyperfixation if you’re just leaning into Noirvember like every other film dork out there?”
Here’s the thing. Yes, I am leaning in, and yes, it is really a hyperfixation. Let me present to you, dear reader, the facts.
1. I Didn’t Write the Book On It, But I Sure Have Read Them
As an undergrad, I decided one degree wasn’t enough for me. I liked my journalism classes and they felt practical, if a bit delusional — print media in 2008, anybody? But I craved the deep dives and specificity I always imagined in college courses. I wanted to know way too much about something I loved with my whole heart. So, I said, two degrees in four years, why not?
Tacking on a film degree was perhaps the first time I ever did anything purely for me, because I wanted it and it felt like an investment in myself, if not a practical skill for the future. In the end, the academics of that program felt to me, more rigorous than my journalism program, and it certainly made me a better writer. It was also a time-intensive undertaking, film class meant lectures, yes, but also screenings. My schedule bloated with megasized sessions. In fact, one semester, I spent so much of the week watching torturously depressing subject matter that I started watching Jersey Shore with a religious fervor. It was a palate cleanser for the sad musings of Yasujirō Ozu and Robert Bresson. Sure, the stories they told were beautiful, but one can only navigate so much catharsis before they need to watch a kid with spiky hair yell, “cabs are here!”
But I digress. This more-or-less constant schedule turmoil turned me into a habitual summer session student. And I LOVED it. I would glut myself on this genre or that for 3 weeks, inhaling it all like some kind of bizarre Kirby. The best of these, by far, was a course on my beloved film noir. I watched the expected: The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard. And the deeper cuts: The Night of the Hunter, In A Lonely Place, Peeping Tom.
I couldn’t stop quoting them. I saw their DNA in so many of the contemporary films that most excited me. I babbled to everyone about how incredible Barbara Stanwyck (OG Hollywood Celesbian) was and how obsessed I was with the Bogart and Bacall love story. When I realized the ways film noir bled into melodrama, I took the class on that too. You can’t tell me Leave Her to Heaven and Mildred Pierce didn’t pluck the same strings for most women that The Third Man and The Killers did for most men. Similarly, I am prepared to make a lengthy speech tracing the links from film noir to not just The Dark Knight and Sin City, but also to Gone Girl, Breaking Bad and early Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco. It’s not the hottest take, but it’s one I will be happy to explain in way too much detail.
2. What’s In A Name
To know me is to know Bogart. But if you thought the star quality belonged exclusively to my prince of a pup, you missed the reference. I absolutely named Bogart as an homage to the one and only, Humphrey Bogart. Even before I met my boy, I knew the dog for me would be a Bogey. Imagine how the stars aligned when I saw his wee concerned brow all knotted up with wrinkles.
Bogart met the world (or at least my small corner of the internet) paired with an image of the man himself.
If you’ve been taking notes, you might be wondering if there will ever be a pup named Bacall. Well there just might be, my girlfriend enthusasically agrees that a little girl named Bacall belongs in our future. She will be a Basset Hound, obviously.
3. I’ll See Your Sad Boi Songs and Raise You A Sad Girl Tat
Speaking of ever-present Humphrey Bogart references in my life. There’s also my In A Lonely Place-inspired tattoo. After years of mulling over how to capture the feeling of film grain or projection in a tattoo, I went through an experience that finally shed light on a quote I’d always loved. “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”
In A Lonely Place is a straight up BANGER and Bogart is never better than walking the line between besotted romantic and sinister figure. What exactly unfolds in the narrative is the kind of love story you hope no one ever has, but the feeling of it captures the heightened emotions of love lost and reflected upon so well. The first lines are what-you-see-is-what-you-get takes on heartbreak. “I was born when she kissed me.” My gods, the sun really does shine brighter when you’re falling in love, doesn’t it? “I died when she left me.” And then when that love is gone. Misery. The kind of price you pay knowing that something beautiful is over. But that last line, “I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” When I first saw this movie as a film student, I didn’t get it. The beauty of it hit me with so much force, I never forgot it. But it played like melodrama to me, a doubling down on the pain.
Then, a love I believed in was gone as quickly and completely as you can imagine, and I understood. “I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” It wasn’t about mourning the person or the relationship, but the person you allow yourself to be when everything feels possible and ahead of you. When I knew that, I knew what my tattoo had to be. A triptych. Three panels, one for each line. Each evoking the sentiment of what I now understood. Not a memorial to the relationship, but a reminder of hard earned wisdom.
My talented friend, and frequent tattoo artist, Megan, understood the assignment. I said simply, I need you to take this film noir quote and make it into a sapphic film strip. And wow, did she ever. I rarely take pictures of the stencil, but I was blown away how much the elements of the genre stood out even in that format, never mind the finish product. And in the interest of bringing the story full circle and allaying any fears that I feel sad when I see this. I don’t, I love how emotive and beautiful it is. And I’m not the only one this tattoo is my current girlfriend’s favorite of all my tats, and as she is responsible for several of them, that really says something.
And that, dear reader, is my story. A decades long love affair of a moody medium that makes me happy as a clam to watch. And somehow has brought the most persistent oy into my life, even if such happiness is so fleeting in its narratives.