Can Private Investigators Drink Synthetic Rye?
The Relationship Between Film Noir and Science Fiction
By Dr David Butler
It’s standard practice for most books about film noir to spend at least several paragraphs discussing the vexed question of genre and whether noir qualifies as one or not. It’s a discussion that is not exclusive to film noir, of course, and most genres can expect to have their purity challenged, whether that’s from the industry, academia or beyond. Hybrid and in-bred genres are inevitable. Mixing and matching, tampering with the forces of creation, is an essential part of human nature – and it’s also one of the recurring narratives of science fiction.
In this paper then, I want to blur the boundaries of film noir even further by exploring its fusion with science fiction. On the face of it, the two idioms seem uneasy partners. When we think of film noir we tend to focus on the iconography – and that almost inevitably means thinking about the past: the hats, coats, buildings and terrain of the 40s and 50s. When we think of science fiction we tend to think of a much vaster terrain – and one that is about the future, even when a caption tells us it takes place a “long time ago.” In short, where film noir is claustrophobic and urban, the popular impression of science fiction is that it is boundless and intergalactic.
But there is much more to science fiction than the dominant trend of space opera, as exemplified by Star Wars (1977). Science fiction as a cinematic genre can include such varied fare as the thoughtful The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and the deliriously brainless Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), taking in Metropolis (1927), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and The Matrix (1999) along the way. What kind of generic qualities can cover such a seemingly disparate range of films and what might there be in science fiction that makes it a rich breeding ground for film noir?
To answer those questions I want to begin with three snap shots. The first takes place in the inky blackness of deep space. A group of rebels in a souped-up spaceship are being pursued by a fleet of Imperial star destroyers and fighter craft. Attempting to outwit their pursuers, the rebel captain, Han Solo, activates the hyper-drive to propel the ship out of reach from the Imperial vessels. But nothing happens. The hyper-drive is broken and the rebel ship continues to be pounded by enemy fire.
Elsewhere, two schoolteachers have wandered into a junkyard on a dark winter’s night, concerned about the safety of one of their pupils who they have followed into the yard. There is no sign of the girl but a strange humming sound emanates from a battered police telephone box. When they hear the girl’s voice inside the box and step through the doors they find themselves in an impossibly large control room filled with strange machinery and a somewhat sinister old man.
Meanwhile, in a bland suburban bungalow, a married couple settle down to watch the evening’s entertainment on their giant wall-screen. The woman, Linda, is ecstatic to discover that she has been selected to participate in the play being broadcast by responding to the “questions” being addressed to her by the on-screen characters. No matter what she says, she is guaranteed the enthusiastic response: “she’s right!” “Linda you’re absolutely fantastic!”
You probably recognise some if not all of the clips I’ve just described (The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the first episode of Doctor Who (1963) and Francois Truffaut’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1966)). Each clip seems wildly different from the other: big-budget space opera, low-budget mystery and imagination or five minutes into the future with something only slightly out of synch with the world that we think we know. Yet there is a generic dominant on display in each of those clips and one that links it to the generic dominant of film noir (which I would summarise as the sense of vulnerability and alienation experienced by the, typically male, protagonist). Each clip becomes science fiction through the unusual technology on display. Yet that technology is not always as unusual as it might first appear. As Adam Roberts has observed, in The Empire Strikes Back, the space-ships and laser blasts could easily be replaced by fighter jets and rocket missiles, or spitfires and machine guns. Indeed, much of Star Wars has more in common with other genres, such as the Western and the fairy tale, than it does with hard science fiction. What marks science fiction out from other imaginative fiction then is its interest in what the critic Darko Suvin calls the SF novum.
For Suvin, the novum is a device that indicates that the world of the text in question (be it a book, film or television programme) is different from our own – it is a distancing strategy. The word novum stems from Latin, where it means “new” or “new thing.” Although it does not necessarily have to be technological in nature, it is in technological nova that we can most readily identify a text as being science fiction. In the clips I described above, the nova would include the Millenium Falcon and Imperial Star Destroyers, the laser cannons that they are equipped with and the faulty hyper-drive; then there is the audacious nova of Doctor Who – that a seemingly innocuous police telephone box can act as the outer shell and gateway to a dimensionally transcendental time machine; or the more low-key novum of Fahrenheit 451: an interactive television programme watched through a giant wall-screen. Of the three, the last example is the most prophetic and least extraordinary.
Yet the personality-draining effect of the interactive TV show, a concept that is essentially with us today through the wave of reality TV, is also the most disturbing and most akin to the themes of film noir. And it is here that we can find the common ground between time-machines, phasers and an all-controlling matrix as well as the fedoras, trench-coats and coiling smoke of noir.
How, then, is the SF novum applicable to film noir? The connection is not as unlikely as it first seems. As Suvin outlines, the novum is a device that estranges us from the world we know – and it is this sense of estrangement that provides fertile ground for film noir. In his definition of SF, Suvin notes that the genre is one “whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” Effectively, the SF novum alienates us – or the characters – from their surroundings. In many ways, film noir was already dealing with the alienating effects of urban life in a modernist city and society back in the 1940s and 50s. The loss and crisis of identity generated by an unfulfilled existence in the asphalt jungle is a recurrent theme of classic noir. In fact, there is one classic film noir that clearly crosses the boundary into science fiction through the novum of the “great whatsit.” The famous climax to Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is triggered by the opening of a mysterious box that unleashes a terrifying force, laying waste to (depending on how apocalyptic you feel) a beach house in California, the entire state or the whole world.
Of course, we know that the novum in this instance is a quantity of nuclear material – although the film transforms it into something more than that through the unsettling sound design, implying that this material is alive. The novum here is not just some fantastical gadget – it is relevant, and disturbingly so, to the real world i.e. the atom bomb. And this is how the best science-fiction works – it is both different to our known world but also comments on or challenges it. Kiss Me Deadly is, in part, a commentary on the materialism of modern society – Mike Hammer enjoys all the latest gadgets and fastest cars at the expense of his humanity. So obsessed is he with having the next big thing that he fatally ignores the warnings about the box and its contents. Science fiction would take such a critical stance and extrapolate it even further. The Cybermen or Daleks of Doctor Who or the Borg of Star Trek, for example, project the dehumanising effect of indulging in too much technology to a nightmarish conclusion. In the 1985 Doctor Who story, “Revelation of the Daleks,” a disembodied head wired into the casing of a Dalek machine pleads with his daughter to kill him before his conversion into a Dalek is complete.
In that example (and there are many others, ranging from the body horror of David Cronenberg to Denis Potter’s Cold Lazarus (1996)), you get the ultimate noir “no way out” – we are alienated not just from the world we live in, as is the case in classic noir, but we are alienated from our own family and our very self. The same scenario is played out, although less starkly, in Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. And, arguably the most famous example of future noir, Blade Runner (1982), deals with exactly the same anxiety. The “Blade Runners” are special operatives (and in Harrison Ford’s central character, Rick Deckard, effectively a private investigator, complete with trench coat, hard-boiled exterior and deadpan voice-over), employed to hunt down rogue replicants – androids who to all intents and purposes look like humans. The replicants of the film have a built-in four-year lifespan, yet the apparently villainous rogue replicant, Roy Batty, begins to question the nature of his existence by comparing his lived experience with that of Deckard’s life. The replicants have been gifted memories, programmed experiences to give them a sense of their own past and prevent them from questioning their status as artificial beings. Blade Runner suggests (even more so in the 1991 “director’s cut” released by Ridley Scott) that its protagonist, Rick Deckard, might also be a replicant, that his most treasured memories and dreams might not be his own.
By exploring this territory and hinting at characters’ existential angst, the film is thus rooted in a classic noir theme. The film also employs the traditional noir narrative of the investigation, has a female lead styled on a 1940s femme fatale and incorporates numerous examples of noir cinematography (including the ubiquitous use of Venetian blinds). But the most obvious link between Blade Runner and classic noir is its vision of the dark city. The decaying city of The Asphalt Jungle or the stygian decadence of Sweet Smell of Success is given a breathtaking revision in the dystopian view of Los Angeles in 2019. Blade Runner established a blueprint for cinematic portrayals of the city of the future and it is one steeped in a noir ethos. In fact, science fiction cinema had already considered the dehumanising effects of the city and technology before film noir appeared in the 1940s. The German expressionist masterpiece, Metropolis (1927), directed by Fritz Lang, who went on to make several classic noirs, anticipates the dark reality of the film noir city and the equally dark vision of Blade Runner, although it is worth noting that Gottfried Huppertz’s original orchestral score for the film’s premiere actually celebrates the future city by using a triumphant fanfare motif for the shots of the cityscape from the technocrat’s office tower and it is only in later scores (such as Peter Osborne’s synthesised score for a 1998 video release) that the city of Metropolis has been accompanied by sombre, brooding music, shifting the mood to a dystopic interpretation.
Blade Runner is also very much a product of its era and thus, unlike its predecessors from the 40s and 50s, it is also a film with a postmodernist sensibility. On the surface, postmodernism does not seem that different from modernism. But the phrase I’ve just used, “on the surface,” is crucial because postmodernism is all about surface impressions as opposed to there being any deeper truthful or meaningful substance. As with modernism, postmodernism also has a love for mixing up genres and destroying the distinctions between low and high culture. The difference is that postmodernism delights in what it perceives as the meaningless of texts or relativism. Modernism, however, attempts to cling onto the possibility that there is a meaning and explanation to be found in art that life in the twentieth century has largely lost sight of. So whereas modernism favours epic narratives, in terms of charting society’s development and looks for a sense of order, postmodernism favours smaller, local narratives that cannot claim to reveal a universal truth.
There is a clear postmodernist aesthetic in films such as Blade Runner, Brazil (1985) or any number of David Lynch’s films. The connection is the focus on surface appearances – postmodernism argues that there are no definite meanings, only signifiers as to what something might mean. Meaning is not immutable. An excellent example of this reasoning can be found in Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and the introduction of Sandy, Jeffrey’s girlfriend. All the signifiers in the build-up to Sandy’s appearance point to her being a mysterious and dangerous femme fatale. The ominous music, the anticipation of the body emerging out of the darkness, the initial dialogue and the suggestion of a white dress – these are all signifiers that encourage us to expect a certain type of character that does not materialise, particularly if we are familiar with the initial appearance of classic femmes fatale such as Kathie Moffatt in Out of the Past (1947) (clad in white, stepping out of the shadows into the light).
Yet Sandy is soon revealed to be anything but a femme fatale. Lynch’s film is all about surface impressions and the unstable nature of signs and signifiers that we take for granted. As Fred Pfeil observes, the film is concerned with the “fragility of the symbolic.” What we take to be true about the world is revealed as being flawed and self-deluding. Pfeil draws on the work of Michael Moon and applies it to Blue Velvet, stating that the film addresses “the fearful knowledge that what most of us consider our deepest and strongest desires are not our own, that our dreams and fantasies are only copies, audio and videotapes, of the desires of others and our utterances of them lip-synching of these circulating, endlessly reproduced and reproducible desires.”
Where do we get our dreams and desires from? Are they our own or are we just repeating the lines uttered by characters in films and books that are being uttered all around the world and will continue to be so for years to come? What makes us individuals, what makes us human? The nightmare or fear expressed by Michael Moon is that of the replicants and Deckard in Blade Runner – how can Deckard be certain that he is whom he thinks he is, that he has not just been programmed? The science fiction novum of the replicant or android, the programmed being, is often a means of commenting on our own humanity and relationship with the world we live in. Do the media and the modern world programme us as if we were machines? Blade Runner is postmodernist in its addressing of the surface nature of our contemporary lives but also critiques this existence rather than subscribe to it.
Long before postmodernism had become a fashionable buzzword, however, the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard directed a bizarre fusion of comic-strip heroes, science fiction and film noir, titled Alphaville (1965). Although the film claims to be science fiction, it is completely devoid of special effects and futuristic sets. Godard sets his future metropolis, the city being called Alphaville, in contemporary Paris. A caption tells us that the hero has made an intergalactic journey across inter-sidereal space – but Godard shows him driving a Ford Galaxy along the motorway! The film is full of references to classic film noir, either in its stark black and white cinematography or the often disorienting shot compositions – but the most blatant reference comes in the form of the central character and the actor who portrays him. As his investigator hero, Godard simply transplants an already established character from a series of 1950s French noirs, as well as the actor who played him, and drops them incongruously into his nonsensical sci-fi plot. The character in question is Lemmy Caution, played by Eddie Constantine, an American-born actor who made a career in France as a singer and actor in private eye films as Lemmy Caution. In Alphaville, Caution is sent across galactic space to the city of Alphaville, which is now ruled by a super-computer called Alpha 60. The intricacies of the plot are the least of Godard’s concerns, what is of more interest to him is whether an old-style hero figure like Lemmy Caution can still function in a dehumanised technocracy. Alphaville’s society is one where irrational thoughts and emotions are forbidden – words such as “love” “conscience” and “tenderness” have been removed from the dictionary and citizens’ vocabularies, and the penalty for expressing such thoughts and emotions is death.
The basic theme here is pretty conventional stuff as far as science fiction goes – the totalitarian regime where emotion and feelings are suppressed has perhaps been most famously explored in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 (1949) and is the basic setting for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), which will be discussed toward the end of the paper. But Godard throws all kinds of other oddities into the mix. The film is full of a number of pop culture references – Caution has been sent to reclaim a renegade scientist called Leonard Vonbraun who also goes by the name of Dr Nosferatu and is played by the veteran B-movie actor Howard Vernon. As the creator of the super-computer that reduces the citizens to lifeless automata, Dr Nosferatu’s name is particularly apt. During the course of the film we also discover that Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon have been killed.
What does all this mean? The film’s original title provides us with a clue – Godard initially called the film Tarzan vs IBM but was advised against it on legal grounds. Informed by Marxist concepts, the film is a rather blunt attack on capitalism and the way Western technological societies have alienated their citizens and stripped them of their identities. Godard asks where have all the old heroes gone – and can they still win? Caution, a real hero from French cinema, is sent in as an amalgamation of previous models of heroism and masculinity (Tarzan, Flash Gordon and Humphrey Bogart) – and, perhaps sentimentally, he overthrows the computer, escapes the city and teaches the scientist’s daughter how to say “love.” To defeat the computer, Caution meets it for an interrogation and destroys its logic cells with poetic answers and an irrational riddle. Alpha 60, the computer in the film, anticipates HAL 9000, the psychotic computer of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Again, Kubrick’s science fiction (which includes Dr Strangelove from 1964) is concerned with our alienation and loss of humanity through our over-reliance on technology.
The same is also true of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), which veers between film noir, science fiction and fantasy (amongst other genres) in a visual tour-de-force. Categorising Brazil is not straightforward. Although there are elements of science fiction in the film it is never made clear where or when it actually takes place (the opening caption states that it is “somewhere in the twentieth century”). Even more so than Alphaville, Brazil is littered with reference after reference to pop culture and film history. On the surface, the characters dress in pseudo-1940s costumes giving the film a look of classic noir fashion. A number of sequences are shot as if they were straight out of a 40s noir, complete with a decaying city and sinister figure watching the protagonist from a shadowy corridor. Characters watch classic films from the 1930s and 40s and listen to pop songs of the same era, yet there are also robots and surveillance devices as well as SAS style stormtroopers and contemporary chemical factories. Brazil exemplifies the patchwork quilt or bricolage approach of postmodernism.
The film also contains actual shot and mise-en-scene references to other films, most notably toward the end of the film where the iconic Odessa steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925) is recreated in the thick of a battle between guerrilla plumbers and guards from the Ministry of Information, with innocent cleaners caught in the fray. It’s a complete steal from Eisenstein’s film but I would suggest that Gilliam can be forgiven that piece of cinematic pilfering because by this point in the film the central character has fallen into a series of dream sequences and fantasies. Brazil is essentially a reworking of Orwell’s 1984 in its tale of a totalitarian regime in a dystopian city. The film follows the efforts of Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) to break out of the dreary confines of his job with the Ministry of Information. Lowry finds his respite from the oppressive society in his dreams – but these fantasies also result in his downfall. As in classic noirs such as Gilda (1946) and neo-noirs such as Taxi Driver (1976) and Chinatown (1974), the male protagonist believes the clichés about fatal women so much that he brings about violence and disaster. When Sam’s woman of his dreams actually appears in his life, he jeopardises his career and the security of the state by trying to find out who she is and where she lives. Yet again, the male protagonist constructs a fantasy around the woman and, in imagining her to be a terrorist, transforms her into the femme fatale.
Brazil is full of the themes of film noir – alienation in the city, urban paranoia and the desperate attempt to escape your surroundings. Gilliam has stated in an interview that he has no respect for Sam Lowry, that he “screws everything up.” By the end of the film he does offer Sam a way out from the noir city to a place where he can no longer be reached – yet it is a freedom that can only be achieved by the loss of his sanity. If we accept that alienation and anxiety form the generic dominant of film noir and that the essential feature of science fiction is the presence of the novum, triggering a sense of cognitive alienation, then we should not be too surprised to find weary private investigators in hover cars and glamorous spider women who do indeed transform into spiders and attempt to consume the vulnerable male, as is the case with the Japanese anime film, Wicked City (1989). With recent examples of the noir/SF fusion including The X-Files (1998), The Matrix (1999) and Cypher (2002), to say nothing of the literary cyberpunk movement of the 1980s, it is clear that noir has long been released from its post-war time-warp of the 1940s and 50s. The future’s dark. The future’s noir.
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