The politics of noir and how they differ from neo noir
The original round of noir films had a politics and, as usual, Raymond Chandler was the guy who set it out best.
This passage of Chandler's is so well written it pains me a bit to point out that it is all a giant delusion. A delusion dreamed up by progressives desperate to pretend to themselves and others that progressivism had nothing to do with the gangster era at home of with fascism abroad.
The cynicism of the original noir era is only the flip side of the idealism of progressivism. Think of Elliot Ness and you have the whole ethos. Only the incorruptible knight working for the feds could stand up to the mob. We see an odd tension between the government Ness works for and the individualism he embodies. People did not want to put their faith in the federal government as an institution. They wanted to believe in a grand romantic hero who worked for the federal government. This guy was trustworthy because he still believed in the dream.
By now the Ness-as-hero story has been pretty thoroughly debunked. The only thing I might repeat is a reminder that the crack down on the mob was only necessary because the feds had made the mob profitable with the Volstead Act, which put prohibition into practice.
Of course the notion of banning alcohol and thereby freeing people from this corrupting force so they could thrive was a progressive idea. And there you have the rub for the progressives of the 1930s and 1940s. The gangster era was really the fault of the progressive politics they loved and they needed to shift the blame elsewhere.
Sometimes the shifts are quite comical. One of the great films of the 1940s is Key Largo. But it's greatness today depends absolutely on our not taking its politics seriously. These politics are represented in the movie through Humphrey Bogart who plays a soldier just back from the war who only wants to earn an honest living only to run into a bunch of gangsters who represent the same sort of corrupting force he has just come back from helping defeat in Europe. And the gangsters are keen to bring back prohibition and somehow the movie leaves us with the impression that it was people like the gangsters and not good progressives responsible for it in the first place.
And so we had noir. In these movies the hero is still a romantic figure engaged in an unequal struggle with human corruption and corruption will often win. Even if he dies, however, there is something untainted about the hero. And somewhere there is a suggestion that if government could somehow be cleaned up, everything would be good again.
That world view is still there in Chinatown even though that movie suggests that the bad guys always win but something has changed by the time we get to Body Heat, Palmetto, the various Coen brothers movies and even Mad Men. Now the problem has become not just endless human corruption but especially the corruption in the soul of the hero. Harry Palmer and Ned Racine live in a world of corruption but there ultimate failure is their fault alone.
That is a big shift from the story of ordinary citizens with faults to be sure but also with a pure dream (the American Dream) that is corrupted by forces from outside them whether those forces be demon alcohol, corrupt local government or capitalist fat cats.
Except for Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, author of the book upon which LA Confidential is based. They didn't get the memo. They still write about a dark world wherein little people struggle against huge odds and massive corruption to succeed.
And this older conception runs through movies based on their work, such as LA Confidential, and gives them an old-fashioned feel. It is noir but it isn't neo noir. And it doesn't quite fit into our world where people have it much easier and where the evil that most threatens us is our own dark desires.
The problems that we see in movies based on Leonard and Ellroy novels such as LA Confidential is how to reset society and the solution these movies provide is Platonic. They say that society can be set right only by embracing the noble lie. A small group pf people have to do something outside the law that makes the law possible. Sometimes these people are base criminals but they arrive at an exceptional moment when exceptional men are called for and they do the modern equivalent of shooting Liberty Valance. It can make for good entertainment but it doesn't connect with our world. It connects with a set of political fantasies.
The original round of noir films had a politics and, as usual, Raymond Chandler was the guy who set it out best.
Possibly it was the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with a moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and character, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them.Notice that the Tommy gun is not feared for its own ability to do significant damage but for what it symbolizes, a "civilization that had created the machinery for its own destruction". A world gone wrong is a world that is in search of a better politics. And we see this a few lines later that the problem is not the Tommy gun and the criminal wielding it but rather a political problem caused by a political culture that had come to see the law as "something to be manipulated for profit and power".
This passage of Chandler's is so well written it pains me a bit to point out that it is all a giant delusion. A delusion dreamed up by progressives desperate to pretend to themselves and others that progressivism had nothing to do with the gangster era at home of with fascism abroad.
The cynicism of the original noir era is only the flip side of the idealism of progressivism. Think of Elliot Ness and you have the whole ethos. Only the incorruptible knight working for the feds could stand up to the mob. We see an odd tension between the government Ness works for and the individualism he embodies. People did not want to put their faith in the federal government as an institution. They wanted to believe in a grand romantic hero who worked for the federal government. This guy was trustworthy because he still believed in the dream.
By now the Ness-as-hero story has been pretty thoroughly debunked. The only thing I might repeat is a reminder that the crack down on the mob was only necessary because the feds had made the mob profitable with the Volstead Act, which put prohibition into practice.
Of course the notion of banning alcohol and thereby freeing people from this corrupting force so they could thrive was a progressive idea. And there you have the rub for the progressives of the 1930s and 1940s. The gangster era was really the fault of the progressive politics they loved and they needed to shift the blame elsewhere.
Sometimes the shifts are quite comical. One of the great films of the 1940s is Key Largo. But it's greatness today depends absolutely on our not taking its politics seriously. These politics are represented in the movie through Humphrey Bogart who plays a soldier just back from the war who only wants to earn an honest living only to run into a bunch of gangsters who represent the same sort of corrupting force he has just come back from helping defeat in Europe. And the gangsters are keen to bring back prohibition and somehow the movie leaves us with the impression that it was people like the gangsters and not good progressives responsible for it in the first place.
And so we had noir. In these movies the hero is still a romantic figure engaged in an unequal struggle with human corruption and corruption will often win. Even if he dies, however, there is something untainted about the hero. And somewhere there is a suggestion that if government could somehow be cleaned up, everything would be good again.
That world view is still there in Chinatown even though that movie suggests that the bad guys always win but something has changed by the time we get to Body Heat, Palmetto, the various Coen brothers movies and even Mad Men. Now the problem has become not just endless human corruption but especially the corruption in the soul of the hero. Harry Palmer and Ned Racine live in a world of corruption but there ultimate failure is their fault alone.
That is a big shift from the story of ordinary citizens with faults to be sure but also with a pure dream (the American Dream) that is corrupted by forces from outside them whether those forces be demon alcohol, corrupt local government or capitalist fat cats.
Except for Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, author of the book upon which LA Confidential is based. They didn't get the memo. They still write about a dark world wherein little people struggle against huge odds and massive corruption to succeed.
And this older conception runs through movies based on their work, such as LA Confidential, and gives them an old-fashioned feel. It is noir but it isn't neo noir. And it doesn't quite fit into our world where people have it much easier and where the evil that most threatens us is our own dark desires.
The problems that we see in movies based on Leonard and Ellroy novels such as LA Confidential is how to reset society and the solution these movies provide is Platonic. They say that society can be set right only by embracing the noble lie. A small group pf people have to do something outside the law that makes the law possible. Sometimes these people are base criminals but they arrive at an exceptional moment when exceptional men are called for and they do the modern equivalent of shooting Liberty Valance. It can make for good entertainment but it doesn't connect with our world. It connects with a set of political fantasies.
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