Neo Noir
I've wanted to write about neo noir films for a while now. They have a something about them that goes directly to the male psyche of my generation. Not all of them do this but the ones I like best do.
These movies play on male sexuality in a way not unlike the way 1950s schlock horror movies did. You know the schlock horror movies I mean, where the monster represents adolescent sexuality. There is a disturbing monster just below the surface who has it in for the really nice girl and this perfectly mirrors the conflicts of boys who love and respect these girls but also want to rip their tops off so they can see and touch their breasts.
The neo noir I like does something similar for adult men. We want love but for us love means a sexual relationship. It's pointless turning to men, as women sometimes do, and saying, "I want love not sex". To us separating sex from love is like wanting to separate getting wet from going swimming. You can get wet without going swimming but you can't go swimming and not get wet; you can have sex without love but you cannot have love without sex.
And there lies the problem because a lot of women refuse to see it that way and so do many moralists. So we run around feeling guilty about it. Guys don't say, "For me, love means a relationship with lots of good sex in it and nothing else will do." Instead we run around feeling guilty for wanting what we want.
But, at the same time, we maintain an odd relationship with the women who do offer us what we want. We can't bring ourselves to believe she is real or trustworthy. We worry most of all that the sex being offered is meant to hide another agenda and the fear we men have that the relationship that starts off with great sex will evaporate leaving a man trapped in a different agenda that was never his: trapped in a sexless marriage, divorced, paying support for children he never sees ....
One of the primary differences between neo noir and classic noir is the degree to which neo noir plays on these fears by blowing them up, not into a monster, but some heinous crime the woman leads the man into.The supreme model here is Double Indemnity.
These movies are also self-consciously nostalgic. They yearn for another era and they yearn for the male fashion, technology and mores of another era. Not necessarily to recreate it but rather to linger lovingly on it. One of the big challenges for these movies is always fedora or no fedora.
I saw one of these lately. It wasn't a very good movie but the point of these movies isn't necessarily to be good. The point certainly isn't to be art. They are rather shameless and direct about titillating us.
Anyway, the movie was Palmetto and it is definitely miss-able on the one hand but not a complete waste of time on the other hand and they just don't make enough of these movies. Just as Jane Austen only wrote a handful of novels, so did Raymond Chandler. Noir and neo noir looks like an easy trick to pull off but there are a lot fewer good examples than you might guess just as there are surprisingly few good novels in the Austen tradition. As a consequence, liking neo noir means having to settle for a lot of not good as they might have been books and movies.
The manliness lesson
It does have a great premise though. A man who has spent two years in prison falsely accused has been released and now he is back outside and driven by a sense of entitlement. You could do a lot with that. This movie never does. It sort of forgets that is the premise and meanders off in fourteen other directions. (It's such a good premise, I think someone ought to steal the premise and make a better one. And there is nothing to stop anyone from doing this as a premise can't be copyrighted.)
Anyway, the thing about a sense of entitlement is that it is driven by self loathing. The person who can earn a living, does so. The person who comes to believe others owe him a living has no faith in their own ability to do things. In love, the pathetic result is the guy who thinks he has nothing to offer women but still feels he deserves to be loved. Like a lot of men, Harry Barber is like that and I suspect the original novel on which the film is based on a novel by James Hadley Chase (that's a pseudonym used by some Brit) connected the dots. The movie has the dots but leaves out the connections.
Harry Barber's problem, he is our hero and narrator, is that he believes he is reprehensible and so he can't believe that anything he does is justifiable. He himself is loathsome like the Palmetto bug that gives the picture its title. All he has is this sense of entitlement driven by his anger at what others have done to him. And things are complicated because others really have done horrible things to him.
Because he has no sense of genuine self worth, he cannot turn down offers of sex from women who have high status. The teenage girl on the make he can refuse with no difficulty but the woman he believes to be rich he cannot turn down.
As I say, it could have been a brilliant movie if the director, Volker Schlöndorff, was actually interested in making movies.
The aesthetics of manliness
It almost has a great opening. Unfortunately this opening takes place a whole eight minutes into the move. The film wastes 8 minutes on a lot of set up it doesn't need. It should have started here.
That's not original. It's the opposite of original. But it's perfect. A guy is sitting in a bar and he's not content. We don't need to know why he isn't content. That can be backfilled as the story goes along. The period is indistinct. He isn't wearing the fedora but it's there.
And then he hears the high heels on the floor:
And now the story has started and we want to follow. The next shot is the shoes themselves and then the woman. That is how it should have gone.
Ah, well, there is lots of other good stuff in a movie that is less than the sum of its parts.
One of the best things about it is the way it treats technology. We constantly get references to technology that is gone or going. And that is important because technology plays a role in male life not unlike what art and fashion do in female life. If you are a real man, this is a thing of beauty and deep cultural significance:
Here is the cabin. Note the typewriter and the glass-louvered door and the bar.
Oh yeah, there is woman here too. Played by Elizabeth Shue in a stunning bit of miscasting. This is galling given that the perfect woman to play the part, Gina Gershon, is also miscast in the same movie! Or did our director think he was being clever casting against type? Perhaps, on her first appearance, Gershon seems to be playing the femme fatale but she turns out to be the loyal and trusting girlfriend.
Anyway, back to the technology. What is so great here is that all this technology was still around in the 1990s when the movie came out. It was already old and it's time had come and gone but it was around as a reminder of another world. And that works magnificently because it creates the nostalgia the movie needs without being anachronistic.
By the way, the other perfect touch is that Woody Harrelson in lead role of Harry Barber wears suspenders. They were being worn in the 1990s and had just gone out of style.
Here is an old car but, again, a car that might plausibly still have been on the road in the 1990s.
That's got a Vinyl roof. One of those insane ideas that seemed to make sense at the time. They called these cars "personal luxury cars" when they were new in the 1970s and were once a much aspired to by men. As a symbol of failed masculinity, having our hero still driving one in the 1990s is perfect, especially as Harry Barber doesn't even own this car but has to borrow it from his girlfriend.
(And that, if I may go back to my introductory point, is the thing that makes neo noir really neo: in the era of classic noir, a detail like this would have made Barber a laughable wimp, not even a man. In our era, we can understand the weak feeling a man may feel when his girlfriend earns more than him because lots and lost of men experience it.)
This is a great shot and part of what makes it that is the old phone and lamp.
Again, both these things were status symbols in the 1970s and something else by the 1990s and yet any man will see that they have lasting aesthetic glory.
I could go on but won't. Suffice to say that the art direction is a lot better than the actual direction. (The unsung hero here seems to be Jane B Johnson, who also worked on Ace Ventura, a few episodes of The Sopranos and a few episodes of CSI; Miami along with a lot of pretty sleazy sounding movies.)
Here is an odd directorial decision. It's one of the final scenes and Harry's hopes are collapsing when the movie suddenly shifts all its weight to the woman who has led him into this mess. They are both arrested in an industrial setting. She is arrested at the top of the stairs. Why at the top of the stairs? So they can make this pointless homage.
It makes a certain sense. This is a woman who lived a series of fantasies now having to face reality only she never will. You can see that here in her wild look as she heads down the stairs.
Only problem, nothing at all has been done to set up this moment so it comes out of the blue for no reason other than to show us the filmmaker respects Hollywood history.
Oh yeah, I'm sorry, I'm assuming you spotted the homage but perhaps you missed it. We're supposed to think of this famous ending from Sunset Boulevard.
She's ready for her close up.
And there is some more semi-stupid pomo crap that reminds us that it's all just a movie. In case we forgot or something.
It could have been great.
I'd love to sit down a writing class with this still from the movie and tell them to write the screenplay that goes with it. They'd know they were supposed to write a neo-noir.
More neo noir next Thursday.
I've wanted to write about neo noir films for a while now. They have a something about them that goes directly to the male psyche of my generation. Not all of them do this but the ones I like best do.
These movies play on male sexuality in a way not unlike the way 1950s schlock horror movies did. You know the schlock horror movies I mean, where the monster represents adolescent sexuality. There is a disturbing monster just below the surface who has it in for the really nice girl and this perfectly mirrors the conflicts of boys who love and respect these girls but also want to rip their tops off so they can see and touch their breasts.
The neo noir I like does something similar for adult men. We want love but for us love means a sexual relationship. It's pointless turning to men, as women sometimes do, and saying, "I want love not sex". To us separating sex from love is like wanting to separate getting wet from going swimming. You can get wet without going swimming but you can't go swimming and not get wet; you can have sex without love but you cannot have love without sex.
And there lies the problem because a lot of women refuse to see it that way and so do many moralists. So we run around feeling guilty about it. Guys don't say, "For me, love means a relationship with lots of good sex in it and nothing else will do." Instead we run around feeling guilty for wanting what we want.
But, at the same time, we maintain an odd relationship with the women who do offer us what we want. We can't bring ourselves to believe she is real or trustworthy. We worry most of all that the sex being offered is meant to hide another agenda and the fear we men have that the relationship that starts off with great sex will evaporate leaving a man trapped in a different agenda that was never his: trapped in a sexless marriage, divorced, paying support for children he never sees ....
One of the primary differences between neo noir and classic noir is the degree to which neo noir plays on these fears by blowing them up, not into a monster, but some heinous crime the woman leads the man into.The supreme model here is Double Indemnity.
These movies are also self-consciously nostalgic. They yearn for another era and they yearn for the male fashion, technology and mores of another era. Not necessarily to recreate it but rather to linger lovingly on it. One of the big challenges for these movies is always fedora or no fedora.
I saw one of these lately. It wasn't a very good movie but the point of these movies isn't necessarily to be good. The point certainly isn't to be art. They are rather shameless and direct about titillating us.
Anyway, the movie was Palmetto and it is definitely miss-able on the one hand but not a complete waste of time on the other hand and they just don't make enough of these movies. Just as Jane Austen only wrote a handful of novels, so did Raymond Chandler. Noir and neo noir looks like an easy trick to pull off but there are a lot fewer good examples than you might guess just as there are surprisingly few good novels in the Austen tradition. As a consequence, liking neo noir means having to settle for a lot of not good as they might have been books and movies.
The manliness lesson
It does have a great premise though. A man who has spent two years in prison falsely accused has been released and now he is back outside and driven by a sense of entitlement. You could do a lot with that. This movie never does. It sort of forgets that is the premise and meanders off in fourteen other directions. (It's such a good premise, I think someone ought to steal the premise and make a better one. And there is nothing to stop anyone from doing this as a premise can't be copyrighted.)
Anyway, the thing about a sense of entitlement is that it is driven by self loathing. The person who can earn a living, does so. The person who comes to believe others owe him a living has no faith in their own ability to do things. In love, the pathetic result is the guy who thinks he has nothing to offer women but still feels he deserves to be loved. Like a lot of men, Harry Barber is like that and I suspect the original novel on which the film is based on a novel by James Hadley Chase (that's a pseudonym used by some Brit) connected the dots. The movie has the dots but leaves out the connections.
Harry Barber's problem, he is our hero and narrator, is that he believes he is reprehensible and so he can't believe that anything he does is justifiable. He himself is loathsome like the Palmetto bug that gives the picture its title. All he has is this sense of entitlement driven by his anger at what others have done to him. And things are complicated because others really have done horrible things to him.
Because he has no sense of genuine self worth, he cannot turn down offers of sex from women who have high status. The teenage girl on the make he can refuse with no difficulty but the woman he believes to be rich he cannot turn down.
As I say, it could have been a brilliant movie if the director, Volker Schlöndorff, was actually interested in making movies.
The aesthetics of manliness
It almost has a great opening. Unfortunately this opening takes place a whole eight minutes into the move. The film wastes 8 minutes on a lot of set up it doesn't need. It should have started here.
That's not original. It's the opposite of original. But it's perfect. A guy is sitting in a bar and he's not content. We don't need to know why he isn't content. That can be backfilled as the story goes along. The period is indistinct. He isn't wearing the fedora but it's there.
And then he hears the high heels on the floor:
And now the story has started and we want to follow. The next shot is the shoes themselves and then the woman. That is how it should have gone.
Ah, well, there is lots of other good stuff in a movie that is less than the sum of its parts.
One of the best things about it is the way it treats technology. We constantly get references to technology that is gone or going. And that is important because technology plays a role in male life not unlike what art and fashion do in female life. If you are a real man, this is a thing of beauty and deep cultural significance:
Here is the cabin. Note the typewriter and the glass-louvered door and the bar.
Oh yeah, there is woman here too. Played by Elizabeth Shue in a stunning bit of miscasting. This is galling given that the perfect woman to play the part, Gina Gershon, is also miscast in the same movie! Or did our director think he was being clever casting against type? Perhaps, on her first appearance, Gershon seems to be playing the femme fatale but she turns out to be the loyal and trusting girlfriend.
Anyway, back to the technology. What is so great here is that all this technology was still around in the 1990s when the movie came out. It was already old and it's time had come and gone but it was around as a reminder of another world. And that works magnificently because it creates the nostalgia the movie needs without being anachronistic.
By the way, the other perfect touch is that Woody Harrelson in lead role of Harry Barber wears suspenders. They were being worn in the 1990s and had just gone out of style.
Here is an old car but, again, a car that might plausibly still have been on the road in the 1990s.
That's got a Vinyl roof. One of those insane ideas that seemed to make sense at the time. They called these cars "personal luxury cars" when they were new in the 1970s and were once a much aspired to by men. As a symbol of failed masculinity, having our hero still driving one in the 1990s is perfect, especially as Harry Barber doesn't even own this car but has to borrow it from his girlfriend.
(And that, if I may go back to my introductory point, is the thing that makes neo noir really neo: in the era of classic noir, a detail like this would have made Barber a laughable wimp, not even a man. In our era, we can understand the weak feeling a man may feel when his girlfriend earns more than him because lots and lost of men experience it.)
This is a great shot and part of what makes it that is the old phone and lamp.
Again, both these things were status symbols in the 1970s and something else by the 1990s and yet any man will see that they have lasting aesthetic glory.
I could go on but won't. Suffice to say that the art direction is a lot better than the actual direction. (The unsung hero here seems to be Jane B Johnson, who also worked on Ace Ventura, a few episodes of The Sopranos and a few episodes of CSI; Miami along with a lot of pretty sleazy sounding movies.)
Here is an odd directorial decision. It's one of the final scenes and Harry's hopes are collapsing when the movie suddenly shifts all its weight to the woman who has led him into this mess. They are both arrested in an industrial setting. She is arrested at the top of the stairs. Why at the top of the stairs? So they can make this pointless homage.
It makes a certain sense. This is a woman who lived a series of fantasies now having to face reality only she never will. You can see that here in her wild look as she heads down the stairs.
Only problem, nothing at all has been done to set up this moment so it comes out of the blue for no reason other than to show us the filmmaker respects Hollywood history.
Oh yeah, I'm sorry, I'm assuming you spotted the homage but perhaps you missed it. We're supposed to think of this famous ending from Sunset Boulevard.
She's ready for her close up.
And there is some more semi-stupid pomo crap that reminds us that it's all just a movie. In case we forgot or something.
It could have been great.
I'd love to sit down a writing class with this still from the movie and tell them to write the screenplay that goes with it. They'd know they were supposed to write a neo-noir.
More neo noir next Thursday.
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