Body Heat: Which Film Noir antihero are you?

The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and always has been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passagework. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes.

Introduction to Trouble is My Business by Raymond Chandler

Chandler goes on to say that this is a perspective Black Mask writers shared with film makers. That's true, although we should recognize that what makes a good scene in a book and what makes a good scene in a movie are often not the same thing. The point is a good one, though, and we can see it well exemplified in Body Heat. If the video file were damaged such that you couldn't see the ending, you could still enjoy it. If aliens brainwashed everyone who had seen the movie and destroyed every existing copy so the end was unavailable, you could still enjoy it.

That's largely because it is a movie about the past. Ned's past, he tells us, "is burning up out there". He's surrounded by it, not as Jameson thinks, because he is unable to face the present, but because he is unable to face the past and it, like a ghost in a movie, will continue to haunt him until he listens.

We are all surrounded by the past. We aren't surrounded by history because history is a story about someone else. The past is something we own and the past is something that owns us.

A key moment in the opening stages of the movie is when Ned first sees Matty. He's wandering along the shore front on a very hot summer's night. It's a resort town and it's full of past. He comes to a bandstand and listens to the band. They are a shade too good to be honest, sounding a lot more like Count Basie's band than any actual community band ever could. And the song they are playing is "That Old Feeling"!

It's a tune that everyone knows so we hear the lyrics in our head:

I saw you last night and got that old feeling
When you came in sight, I got that old feeling

And, just at that moment he sees Matty. For the first time. The song is not about seeing someone for the first time. It's about seeing an old lover and realizing that you are still in love with them. That doesn't matter because we, and Ned, think we know what the old feeling is. He is in love with this new woman and must have her.

It's erotic love in the Greek sense. It unbidden and it hits him like a sickness and seems to drive him to his fate.

But what old feeling is it really? And who is it for? Because who is Matty? She isn't who he/we thinks she is.

Initially, she reminds us of Lana Turner playing Cora Smith in The Postman Always Rings Twice because of the white dress she is wearing. Soon, however, she will seem more like Phyllis Dietrichson from Double Indemnity. (Both these are based on James M. Cain novels and there is probably something worth noting about that but I don't know much about Cain.)

Originally, the script called for two murder attempts just as happens in Postman but they scrubbed one when reviewing the dailies. It slowed down the action too much. My point in mentioning it is to show that the confusion was intentional. Contrary to what is often said of it, Body Heat is not a remake of anything. The movie, like Matty Walker, is deliberately hiding what it is really up to by pretending to be something it isn't; the movie deliberately trades on mistaken identity. We see it, we get "that old feeling", meaning we think we know this story already, and so we think we know how it has to go.

The effect is a little like those quizzes that we see all over the Internet that invite us to find out which character from a show or movie you are. The trick is that anyone who sat down to do a Which character from a particular film noir are you? quiz already knows who these characters are and the temptation is to fill out the answers so you get to be Sam Spade rather than Miles Archer. Who, after all, wants to be the chump? But the trick the movie is playing on us is that it keeps shifting ground so we don't know which film noir we're in and, consequently, we don't know how to play our part; what Matty does to Ned Racine, the movie does to us.

Only one of the classic film noir is called Out of the Past but that title would work on many others in the genre. A recurring theme in film noir is the guy who is trying to shake off, forget or hide his past and that past gets him every time. But what is Ned's past? What is it that's "burning up out there"?

Well, it's his sense of being not good enough. That's the thing that keeps haunting him—he can't admit he has needs because he thinks that will lead others to abandon him. When Ned reveals his needs to Matty early on he immediately has to undercut himself:

Ned: I need someone to take care of me, someone to rub my tired muscles, smooth out my sheets.

Matty: Get married.

Ned: I just need it for tonight.

Actually admitting he wants love is too dangerous.

Robert Glover, in a brilliant book, says that nice guys are guys who don't think it's okay to be just as they are. They believe they have to hide their failings because they believe they are bad. They assume that anyone who really gets to know them will reach the same conclusion. You may think Ned isn't terribly good at hiding his inner shame above but he's seeking approval through self deprecation. Lots of people do this.

Glover identifies two strategies nice guys use to hide their inner shame. One, obviously, is to suppress it. Another is to exaggerate how bad we are and essentially defy others to prove us wrong. That's Ned.

Poor Ned, he has to live with constant reminders that he isn't good enough and he hides it with a lot of acting out bad-boy behaviour. The point of all this behaviour is to get approval from women and the most important kind of approval is sex.

One of the most revealing moments is the anal sex scene. We see Matt's face in pain and her hands gripping the satin sheets (a lovely touch that) as she just barely endures what she is going through and it is very clear to us that she isn't enjoying it. Ned senses this too but, when he asks if she is okay, he mixes up the message: she says, "Don't" and "stop" and these are two separate statements but Ned hears them as a single sentence and starts driving harder. Why can't he see it? Because what really matters to him is the approval; what matters to him is that a woman has granted her approval by agreeing not just to sex but to anal sex. This external agreement "confirms" that he is the nice guy that his internal sense of self perpetually denies him.

Glover reminds us that nice guys aren't really very nice at all and Ned confirms this over and over again in the movie.

The scene that separates Body Heat from all the pale imitations that it inspired is the restaurant scene where Edmund unwittingly talks Ned into murdering him. Edmund accomplishes this by tapping into Ned's weakness. He does so because he has seen Matty playing with Ned's lighter and Edmund's possessiveness obliges him to drive it home that Ned can never have Matty. Edmund thinks he is winning because Ned confesses that he is just the sort of weakling that Edmund took Matty away from in the first place. But those of us who know the nice guy modus operandi, know that this confession is really just a way of hiding inner shame; Ned's joking about himself masks a violent rage at his not being able to get what he wants. And then they both laugh and we are chilled to the bone.

Ned is so firm in his conviction that he is a nice guy that he insists that he and Matty not "pretend" that Edmund deserves to be killed. That's a beautiful example of the lengths we can go to when doing really monstrous things but needing to believe we are nice guys. The odd thing is that it is sort of true: it is self-hatred that drives Ned to kill Edmund.

Okay, I could just keep going but I have to stop somewhere. If we go back to Raymond Chandler, we see that he has a solution to the problem he describes most crime fiction suffers from.

As to the emotional basis of the hard-boiled story, obviously it does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done—unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done. The stories were about the men who made it happen. They were apt to be hard men, and what they did, whether they were called police officers, private detectives or newspaper men, was hard, dangerous work.

Well, that's a nice little fantasy but it hardly matches what actually happens in a typical Raymond Chandler story where, more often than not, the detective is more concerned with a distorted personal standards that had little to do with, as Chandler himself put it, with any scruples or ethics.

When Ned digs the truth out about Mary Ann, he isn't pursuing justice. He isn't likely to get it as, best case scenario, the only way to prove he wasn't responsibly for one murder would be to implicate himself more deeply for the other. The very most he can hope for in digging out the truth about Mary Ann is a little self knowledge. That, however, is something.

Body Heat and the uses of nostalgia

Let's stick with Jameson a while (see Part 1 if this doesn't make sense to you). He singles out Body Heat for discussion in his essay because it is a nostalgic film. That's important because, as he correctly notes, it isn't self-evidently a nostalgic film. On the surface it looked like anything but when it came out (it is now necessarily nostalgic because it is an old film).

Here is a nostalgic memory of my own. They used to sell a lighter that looked like a revolver. You'd pull the trigger and a flame would ignite at the tip of the barrel. It looked like a gun but it was something else. Jameson's point is that a lot of movies produced in the 1970s were nostalgic even though they look like they are something else.

All by itself, that's a good point but not a terribly original one; lots of people made it at the time. Nor do I think it is terribly difficult to see; as proof, I offer the fact that I saw it and discussed it in previous posts on Body Heat. What makes Jameson interesting is that he claims that the nostalgia is a form of pastiche and that this resorting to pastiche says something about the era that produced such films.

... in a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is is to imitate dead styles, to speak through masks and with the voices of the styles in an imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past. (p 18)

And you can see how this will tie to Jameson's Marxism. This sort of argument suggests that the ideology of what Jameson sincerely hopes is "late capitalism" is no longer up to justifying the existence of consumer society.

It seems to me exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though we were unable unable today to focus on our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself—or, at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history. (p 20)

The key phrase here is, "as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience". If that is true—which is to say, that we have ended up in nostalgia not willfully but because of failure to be able to do anything else—then this is indeed and indictment of our culture.

One powerful hint that this might not be the case is Jameson's hesitancy in making the point. He has so hedged his argument so with the use of various conditional claims that it is easy to suspect that he doesn't believe what he is saying. Let's analyze that argument a little. The key point here, it seems to me, is that this nostalgia is just a delusion; that the sort of take it offers on the past has no rational use. If we can demonstrate that there is a willful rational activity in this sort of nostalgia, we will have an answer to his argument.

First a caveat: we cannot destroy Jameson's position. If a century of economic, cultural and political failure, to say nothing of the greatest mass murder in history, are not enough to make Jameson and others see the futility of Marxism and related types of command and control politics, nothing we can say will. The most we can hope to do is to show that there is a way to read a film like Body Heat as a achieving a meaningful "aesthetic representation of our own current experience".

Next a reminder: Jameson is not making a new point for a Marxist. If anything, his argument is a cliché of Marxist thought that can be traced back to Marx himself:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

We might say that Marxism begot modernism. What I mean by that is that modernism tries to deal with the past in an objective way just as Marx did. (This is another essay for another time, but I would argue that what Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner and modernism have in part is that they are all attempts to reform and restate the Enlightenment project in an efforts to revive it.)

Historians sometimes make a distinction between history, which can be documented, and "the past", which can only be told, that can help us here. For example, in late antiquity we find tribes in the Balkans who claim to be descended from a mighty warrior who came south from what is today Sweden. Now there is some truth embedded here and there in this sort of story. The people of the north were mighty warriors who were feared and respected by those on the European mainland. It is even possible that some might warriors did come south and establish communities. It is even possible, although extremely unlikely, that a tribal group we find moving into the Roman empire from the Balkans in the late fifth century actually is descended from a community founded by a mighty northern warrior. But, and this is the important thing, even if this extremely improbable thing were true, there is absolutely no way of tracing it in history.

In any case, it wasn't true. The story of being descended from a mighty northern warrior was a story whose value was in the telling. The telling of stories like this allowed these people to bond as a people (a process historians call ethnogenesis) and the measure of the its worth for the people who used this story was not its historical accuracy but its effectiveness; if the story inspires people to bond together and to work effectively as a people, then it is a good story, a good use of the past.

Modernists rejected the possibility that the past could have any use independent of what could be done with it objectively. Think of how James Joyce, in moving through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man rejects all the mythologies of Ireland. After doing this, he returns in Ulysses with a mythology from Ancient Greece that is picked and applied in a way that is artificial. Joyce doesn't expect that you will see Leopold Bloom as Ulysses. Quite the contrary, he expects you to be jarred by the contrast and so see how little Bloom has in common with a Greek hero. He is using the mythology in an objective way; it is only because you can see it from the outside that it is of any use.

We might imagine another version of the story where a cousin named David Bloom reads Homer and chooses to embrace the manly ideal in Homer and try to become like Ulysses. A modernist would only tell that story to demonstrate how pathetically the old cuckold would fail. His purpose would be to be objective, that is outside the myth; for the modernist, the person who tries to internalize the values of the old story can only be deluded. At the very most, the modernist might admit that these stories tell us something about human psychology because they exist as archetypes in our subconscious.

What the modernist cannot admit is that these stories might serve valuable moral ends. That they can inspire and guide us to be better men. And that, I will argue next week, is exactly what the story of Body Heat proposes to do.

A little light culture: postmodernism , nostalgia and Body Heat

I've been reading what is apparently a classic essay on postmodernism by Fredric Jameson. It caught my attention because Jameson says some fascinating things about my favourite movie, Body Heat, in the course of the essay. I kept reading because what he says strikes me as typical of so much of modern academic thought. This is the first of what will be at least two blog posts on the subject.

Jameson claims to be engaged in a purely descriptive process—that is to say, he claims he isn't judging. The ostensible point being that an objective assessment of postmodernism would provide data that would be useful for analyzing the society that produced this art form. Trouble is, he's lying.

We can tell he is lying because he keeps using terms such as "late capitalism" which tend to give away the game: which is that he's already prejudged the era and is only looking for further evidence to back up the conclusions he has already reached. There is, as I've said before, nothing wrong with that. Ultimately, what matters is how well his arguments do or don't hold together. That said, the self-deception at work here—his charming (in more than one sense of the meaning) belief that he is doing some sort of neutral analysis—is worth keeping in mind as we go ahead.

Where to start? How about here:

The second feature of this list of postmodernisms is the effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture. This is perhaps the most distressing development of all from an academic stand point, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture, and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening and seeing to initiates.

That's hardly neutral language and it isn't difficult to guess where Jameson's sympathies lie. Which isn't to say that his interest is simple. As a good Marxist, he has to write "so-called mass or popular culture" because he can't really allow himself to believe that this stuff actually is popular in any profound sense. At the same time, his use of words like "schlock" and "kitsch" and the sneering reference to "Reader's Digest culture" are clearly elitist.

This is hardly new. Except that the attack would have been on middle-brow rather than mass culture, it's not hard to imagine one of the Bloomsburies writing the above in 1910!

The list of postmodernisms he refers back to includes the following: the poet John Ashbery; the architect Robert Venturi; pop artist Andy Warhol, serious composers John Cage, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley, pop artists the Clash, Talking Heads, and the Gang of Four. the film maker Jean Luc Godard as well "a whole new style of commercial or fiction films; and the novelists William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon and Ishmael Reed as well as the French Nouveau roman.

This essay was written more than 30 years ago now and the thing that is most likely to strike us now is how some of the people and types of art listed turned out to be just passing trends. I don't think anyone seriously imagines that Philip Glass, while interesting as an individual, represents any sort of long-term trend in music. The Gang of Four, a now-forgotten new wave band, seem to have made the cut because of the chicom reference in their name and the Clash because they were Marxists as neither was particularly postmodern. Others listed seem, from the longer perspective, to belong more to modernism than postmodernism; John Cage and the Nouveau roman fit into that class.

In the end, we will find that this matters less than we might guess for the only things in the list that Jameson has any profound points to make are the new style of "commercial or fiction films" (a rather broad category) and not so much postmodern architecture as one building, the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles.

If we read what he has to say about the commercial and fiction film, we find that his primary claim is that these movies operate in what he calls "the nostalgia mode". I think he is on to something there and I'll come back to that next time. Part 2 is here.

Manly Thor's Day Special

Neo noir: Wild Things
Well it is neo noir. We may as well give them that. Otherwise you get into one of those stupid arguments like whether something really is art or really is poetry. But bad? I can't begin to tell you how bad this movie is. But, you know, it's bad in a sorta good-trashy way—if you were up at two AM and you couldn't sleep and your brain was so dead that only non-challenging trash would satisfy, you'd probably watch it wall the way to the end.

There is no narration but we do get the camera flâneur ...

Actually, let me start this another way. It isn't worth the deep analysis. I picked it for the series for two reasons: I'd never seen before (whereas I had seen all the other movies in this series so far) and it is number 4 on the Box Office Mojo list of top-grossing, neo-noir films. That, as we shall see, is a little less impressive than it might initially seem.

Back in 1981, Lawrence Kasdan surprised everyone by making a hit out of a movie called Body Heat. Wild Things made $30 million in 1998 but it cost $20 million to make. Body Heat, which comes in at #7 on the Box Office Mojo list, made $24 million in 1981. In constant dollars, that is about $42 million in 1998 dollars, the year Wild Things was released. And Body Heat was made for a lot less money; it didn't have a single big name star in it. (Although it had four actors who later became big-name stars: William Hurt, Kathleen Turner, Ted Danson and Mickey Rourke.)

So the things is, Hollywood, as it often does, has tried to duplicate the Body Heat phenomenon ever since. Look up erotic thrillers and you'll see literally hundreds of mediocre imitations of which Wild Things is probably the best known.

One of the cool bits of trivia about Body Heat—it must be cool 'cause everyone mentions it—is that it was supposed to be set in New Jersey but had to be moved because of a strike. I mention that because if it hadn't been moved, Miami Vice probably would have been New Jersey Vice. Why? Because Hollywood has raided Body Heat for television and movie concepts ever since the movie was made. Let me give you an example:

1. Body Heat is set in a hot and steamy Florida town.
2. There is a very rich community right beside a poorer community.
3. It features a guy who wants to make it to the top but meanwhile is lazy and spends all his time seducing a series of women. 
4. He gets involved in a murder plot with a woman that involves them taking someone for a lot of money and running away to a hot and exotic land. 
5. There is a hot steamy scene in which the camera lingers on our hero removing a woman's sexy white panties.
6. The movie makes repeated homage to Double Indemnity including, among other things, a moment which a detective says that having more people in the plot makes the crime harder to conceal. (The line is derived from one delivered by Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity.)
7. After the murder there is some double crossing as one of the plotters tries to eliminate everyone who could incriminate him or her and suddenly, no one knows who can they trust anymore.
8. It ends up with one person in a hot and exotic land with all the money.

Meanwhile, Wild Things features:
I'm not going to type the list twice: everything from 1 to 8 above is also in this movie.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I plan to swipe all or most of those elements myself someday. But it ain't enough to just put them all in the movie. There has to be some art about it and there isn't in Wild Things.

After Body Heat, Hollywood got in the habit of taking the elements from movie putting them into jar and shaking them up. Both Palmetto and this movie work like that. In typical Hollywood fashion, though, this one has been made on the theory that if one pill is good for you, the whole bottle will make you immortal. So if Ned Racine has sex with one hot woman whom he plans murder with in Body Heat, Sam Lombardo in Wild Things has sex with three hot partners (two women and one man) with whom he plans the murder. And if Body Heat has two surprise twists, well this movie has ... actually, there are so many I lost count. Far too many in any case. You stop caring long before the end.

Otherwise, they have all the elements right down to the white panties. These are worn by Denise Richards who spends a shocking amount of time in her underwear. And she does topless, which is a mistake because her breasts look real when she is wearing a bra but decidedly fake when she takes it off. She also does a scene in a bathing suit that is see through when it's wet.

That scene is at the high school pool because her character is supposed to be seventeen years old. Yeah, it's that kind of movie. You will be as relieved as I was to know she was actually 27 so that makes it alright.

I mean, it's not like they intentionally evoke Lolita or anything.

Uh oh.

They do evoke Lolita.

Oh well, at least they don't have any shots that really play up the notion of an adult male having sex with schoolgirls because that would be kinda like, what's the word, cheap exploitation of underage sex for gratuitous titillation.

They wouldn't for example, dress the underage girl up in little-girl shoes and socks.

Uh oh.

Oh well, at least they don't put one of the seventeen-year-old girls in a white shirt and pleated skirt that suggests a Catholic school uniform even though she goes to a public school that doesn't have uniforms and then have her have sex with an adult male.

Of course they do; they can't help themselves. (This film pulled this cheap exploitation trick one year before Britney Spears did it in case you are wondering. Maybe this is where her producers got the idea?)

Pedophiles must have loved this flick. If there is a way that this movie could have stooped any further, I can't think of it. It's a shockingly non-erotic experience for all that. It's no more erotic than any random episode of The OC.

The acting is television-show quality throughout. David Caruso's acting is lively and animated compared to what you see in this movie. The camera work and the art direction, however, are brilliant and I'll get to that later today with an "aesthetics of manliness" post.

Manliness lesson
Now, one of the themes I've been hitting on all these movies is that there usually is some insight into modern male sexuality embodied in neo noir. Well, there isn't much to say about this movie but I've come up with something appropriate to the film. (There is no limit to what I will do for you dear readers.)

At one point there was a shot of the two male leads in the shower together. The director cut it because the scene was "gratuitous". He did not feel the same way about several scenes in which the two female leads kiss and make out. Girl on girl action is essential to the plot, boy on boy action is gratuitous. That is our lesson for today.


An aside related to the above: I just found out that search engines that counts certain elements and if you have enough of them on your blog, and rate your blog as a "gay site". Google finds ten pages of likely posts for this site. (UPDATE January 28, 2012, I'm now up to 27 pages.) Who knew? I only know because one of my readers did the research before me and it showed up in my stats file. Someone out there, is trying to figure out if I'm gay.  Thank you; it's an honour just to be nominated.

Body Heat Part 3

The convention that wasn't used
Every neo noir film tends to use the conventions of classic noir: the fedora, venetian blinds, Gothic camera angles, the femme fatale and so forth. It's telling then when a movie skips over one of the obvious choices.

Body Heat does not feature a narrator. That is quite telling because Phillip-Marlowe-style narration is used by the vast majority of neo noir films. And it is used for a very simple reason, it's the first thing you hear and therefore plays an important first impression role. That voice instantly tells you "This is noir". And there lies the problem for if the movie has to tell you what it is then maybe it isn't really.

Instead of a narrator, Kasdan uses a realist convention some times called the flâneur. A flâneur is sort of loiterer. The story teller—in this case, the camera—seems to simply record what is in front of them as they float through life and we try and assemble some sort of narrative in our heads as we follow them. I say seems to float along because the details they and therefore we see are all carefully selected by the writer to create a sense of character, place and time. Kasdan is particularly interesting in that he uses this stylistic convention of realism to deceive rather than to be realistic.

The "time" in that trio is particularly interesting because the time he seeks to create is a nostalgic time. Thus the first things we hear Ned Racine say is this

It's the Seawater Inn. My family used to eat dinner there twenty-five years ago. Now somebody's torched it to clear the lot.

And there we are. And it helps that the scene is set in a room that gives us a very indistinct notion of time. (As I've said before, it's a brilliant touch that the sense of the nostalgia is not for the specific period of the classic noir but for a past for which there was still lots of evidence at the time the film is set in.)

A moment later, Ned ruefully adds that it was probably one of his clients who torched the Seawater Inn. Character, place and time in four sentences. And in four sentences that do nothing to call attention to themselves. That's writing.

But consider how much more authoritative this would have sounded if delivered by voice over narration. We'd still have time place and character but it would be a different character with more distance on the story and therefore more authority. Even when that narrator was later revealed to be Ned it would still be stuck in our heads as something that had been narrated.

By simply giving us Ned (and what a perfect name, it sounds like the name of a guy who always wanted to be Nancy Drew's boyfriend) and loitering along with him the camera forces us to either like the guy or stop watching. You have to want to be Ned for the movie to work and you do want to be him.

His "family" is also an interesting choice. Most heroes don't have families. They don't have fathers or mothers. This one mention changes everything about this guy. He isn't going to be Mike Hammer.

The camera flaneur goes on for a full eight minutes before we start to get anything like a story when he tries to pick up Matty Walker. Everything we have seen up until that moment is stuff that happens to Ned. This is the first thing he tries to do. We know he'll fail of course because of what we have already seen. What is different is that we have effortlessly slid into a story—a very deliberately constructed story—with no sense of having done so.

By the way, in a brilliant musical choice, the orchestra plays "That Old Feeling" as he first sees Matty. Nostalgia and the woman blend into one. And away we go for a wild ride.

I've written before of the unrealistic moment. The touch where the writer goes too far as if by accident and forces us to take their side. In this movie it is a scene in the Pinehaven Tavern when Ned and Matty shake hands and he comments that her hand is hot and she says her temperature runs a couple of degrees above normal. This too is a noir convention; think of Phillip Marlowe describing a woman as a blonde to make a Bishop put his foot through a stained glass window.

But, again, it isn't narrated but acted out and our reaction is to think, "O come on". It's just too too much. But, like Charlotte Haze getting run over, if we choose to accept it and go along we embroil ourselves just a little too far to back out of we decide to let it go. If we go beyond this point, we have to go all the way.

The first Body Heat post is here. This is the last as I will move on to another neo noir (I haven't decided which yet) next week.

Womanly virtues Friday ...

Body Heat Pt2: Some thoughts about women in noir and neo noir films
Most criminals are brutally stupid people who do stupidly brutal things. They don't make for good subjects for fiction. That is why there is so little really realistic crime fiction. Realism is always a series of stylistic conventions rather than actually realistic.

Dashiell Hammett's brilliant innovation was to realize that the only way you could make a story about the irrational people who actually commit crimes interesting was to write a story in which normal people end up interacting with them. In Hammett the normal person is usually the detective. Sam Spade was sleeping with his partner's wife and now his partner has been murdered. That is an interesting moral story. The three nuts pursuing the black bird would not be interesting  all by themselves. If you took characters such as Spade and the genuinely human moral tension out of them, most noir fiction would lose all its appeal.

Thus it is Ned Racine and his moral weaknesses that makes Body Heat interesting. But what about Matty Walker, the femme fatale. What is there for women in a character like this? And to ask that question honestly, we need to take seriously the possibility that the answer might be nothing at all. Obviously I am going to make the case that there is something.

An unreal person living a real life?
It seems to me that the first thing to note about Matty Walker is that the rough outline of her life is actually quite plausible. This is not a life that most people live but a depressing number of people do live lives not unlike it. Here it is in outline:

• She is the most beautiful girl in her high school and dreams of "being rich and living in an exotic land".
• Her unrealistic dreams lead her into bad choices including drugs.
• A guy bails her out, no doubt for less than idealistic reasons.
• Cleaned up and attractive again, she finds a better deal and trades up.
• Initially happy to be married to this wealthy guy, she starts to chafe at the restrictions and to tire of having sex with this "small, mean and weak" man.
• She finds another lover and soon begins plotting how to extract herself from this marriage taking the maximum amount of money with her.
• This new guy soon finds that he too is being used.

All of that is believable enough. What is hard to believe is that the woman who would do all these things could be anywhere near as intelligent, interesting and alive as Matty Walker as played by Kathleen Turner. I don't mean just that she looks better the way even bellboys in movies tend to look a lot better than they do in real life. I mean that she is far too human a person to have that biography. People who slide in and out of drugs and then commit murder are hollow vessels.

If you crave realism, this will disappoint you.

de-Baroquing the story
The key to making any sort of morale for real women out of a story like this is to smooth out the Baroque details and see the real life pattern that has been blown up into something fantastic. Make her,

•  A girl who had exotic dreams whose real life didn't match those dreams and is now in a relationship that she entered into for reasons that may have once felt like love but now feel purely pragmatic. She has lost all attraction for the man she is with and now is repulsed by him during sex. 
• She begins an affair with another man, swearing him to absolute secrecy, but slowly begins to wonder if there isn't some way to escape.
• All the time this is going on, it isn't clear whether she is really in love with this new man or just using him.

If you haven't known someone who did just that, then you haven't been paying attention. Most of us, if we are honest, will admit that, even if we haven't done quite that, we would be capable of falling into such a pattern if we just let things slide.

One of the really great things about a movie such as Body Heat is that it rewards repeated watchings. The first time, you can watch his story. The second time, you can watch hers. The merit is not the realism. This is fiction and never pretends to be anything but fiction. But it is fiction in which we can exercise our moral imagination. We can put ourselves inside her just feel like what it would be like.

For example, the sex. Why does she do it? Does she enjoy it? I think yes, but does she enjoy it because it feels good or does she enjoy it for the feeling of erotic power it gives her? Because you can imagine that. You could—if the idea appeals to you—fantasize about it. But what conditions would it take for you to actually enjoy doing something like that?

The answer to these questions are nobody's business but yours of course.

By the way, one of the fascinating things about fiction that doesn't pretend to be anything but fiction is the craft involved. Fans of Jane Austen will appreciate the way the story arc here is structured. The murder takes place in exactly the middle of the movie. There is a perfect story arc just like in an Austen novel. If we started drawing up a list of similarities with an Austen novel, we would find quite a few.


Part 3 is here.

Manly Thor's Day Special

Neo noir: Body Heat Pt1
For my money, this is the first real neo noir film. Yes, there were films such as Chinatown but they were too busy being homages to something. This is the first neo noir where the people making it were willing to get a little Gothic about it. They got right inside the conventions and had fun with them. I'll say more about why I think it works so well tomorrow.

(General note: This movie also comes with a heavy does dose* of eroticism. If you really don't like that sort of thing, you really won't like this movie. Your loss.)

* I hate auto-correct.

The manliness lesson
Ned Racine is a familiar type. Here he is:

And here is his car:

This is a guy we all dream of being and all feel some shame at the thought that we might become him. He was an undistinguished student who became an undistinguished lawyer. He just floats through life vaguely hoping that some big break will just land in his lap.

Ned's friend Lowenstein sums him up nicely when Ned asks why a judge he and Lowenstein have just argued a case before dislikes him.

He's an unhappy man, Thinks he should be Circuit Court by now. Here he is in a state with really top-notch corruption and he's stuck with the county toilets.

I'm surprised you weren't in on that toilet caper. Could have been that quick score you've always been searching for.

Except he doesn't really want the big score because he doesn't do anything to get it; he simple feels he deserves it. And this attitude prevails in his approach to women. When he first meets with Matty he has this conversation.

Ned: Me? I need tending. I need someone to take care of me. Rub my tired muscles. Smooth out my sheets.

Matty: Get married.

Ned: I just need it for tonight.

And here is where Body Heat does something that is really profound and perverse at the same time. Matty is the woman who inspires Ned to marry. And she inspires him to give up on feeling entitled and to work to really earn that big break he has always wanted. She also inspires him to be discreet about his love life and to really respect a woman for the first time in his life. And, in doing so, she lures him straight into an unholy travesty of everything that love and life are supposed to be.

In this movie it is Ned's willingness to overcome what he sees as weakness in himself that brings disaster on him.

I don't want to say more because I don't want to spoil what is a a perfect little movie. And I do mean perfect in the same way that The Third Man is perfect. Someone, I can't remember who, once said that that The Third Man is perfect because it doesn't aim too high. That is true here too. But such perfection.

One teaser for those who haven't seen it, there is a magnificent scene where the murder victim inadvertently inspires his murderer into killing him.

The aesthetics of manliness
The movie comes with the same heavy dose of nostalgia for the recent technological past I noted in Palmetto. Note the car above. That is the Corvette Sting Ray from the mid 1960s and not the 1970s model (simply called the "Corvette" because "Sting Ray" was no longer cool) that was apparently designed to resemble a penis. That earlier (non penis-like) Sting Ray used in the film is something only a man, and probably only a certain kind of man, would get but those of us who do get it instantly. The Sting Rays weren't painted but had a gel coat on the fiberglass body that faded in the sun just the way this one has. That is a dream car not a museum piece.

(Lawrence Kasdan brings this motif back in The Big Chill where William Hurt's character shows up in a bondo-grey coloured Porsche. As Ned might say, "It was just, perfect".)

The thing about all this technology is that it was all still around when this movie was made in 1981. None of it was collectable yet but there was a nostalgie de la boue that attached to this stuff for men.

Some of it was quite simple. If you went to a rundown movie theatre in 1981, you would have quite likely seen this popcorn machine.

That is perhaps confusing for some now because if you go to the very newest movie theatres, you will quite likely see a machine that is modeled on that one. In 1981, however, this machine was a sign of a world fast disappearing.

And if you go to a hip lunch place where all the trendy types go to today, it just might look like this.

But in 1981, this sort of place was rapidly disappearing. To find one, you had to go the parts of town trendy people wouldn't get caught dead in.

Again, some hip young executive would probably spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to recreate this office today. In 1981, you'd find an office like this upstairs from a hardware store downtown where no one wanted to have their business located.

People forget how utterly horrible the 1970s were. Here is a simple background shot from the movie and nothing in it was meant to have special significance.

But note that car. That ugly red piece of crap was what the Ford Mustang had become by 1980. And ugly is as ugly does, no matter how appalling it may look, that is nothing compared to driving one of them. No wonder men rebelled. And movies like this embodied that feeling of rebellion.

Part 2.

My 1980s

American Catholic has a post up about a movie about the 1980s. Being a 1980s kid myself, that got me nostalgic so I went on a long cruise around You Tube last night looking for great 1980s tunes.

And the sad truth is that there aren't many. I remember the tunes fondly but that was because we danced to them not because they had much merit. The 1980s, my 1980s, were all about clubs and dancing and nostalgia.

Before I go on, an important qualification. Ten years is a long time. The Serpentine One also came of age in the 1980s but her 1980s are the last half and mine are the first half. I'm sure a good argument can be made for the second half but I'm not the one to make it.

So let's go back to the early 1980s. Let em set the scene. You are in a trendy dance club. This club had three to six months trendiness before the hungry men found it like they found all the trendy clubs and ruined it. That happened over and over again in the early 1980s. For you see, and this is really important if you are going to understand the early 1980s, the people who made it in the early 1980s didn't need to pursue sex. That was what set them apart. They danced to songs about sex but they didn't ever strain themselves in pursuit of it. They didn't have to be interested in love because love was interested in them.

The song that follows, you may not want to listen to more than a short bit of it, ought to be raunchy but it isn't. It's called "Pull up to the Bumper" and the double entendre is obvious to the point of being self parody but the delivery is so cool you might never clue into what the lyrics are about. So let's read some of them before we listen.

Pull up to my bumper baby,
In your long black limousine,
Pull up to my bumper baby,
And drive it in between.

Pull up, to it, don't drive, through it,
Back it, up twice, now that, fit's nice.

I don't have to explain that do I?

But watch the video past the jump and you'll be amazed at how antiseptic it is. This is no raunchy blues song with hints and winks. This delivery is so cool you might think it really is about driving in traffic.