Noir

I told myself that I wasn’t slacking off senior year when four out of my six classes were some variant of English, that I was just studying what I loved. It probably didn’t help my case that one of those classes, Film and Literature I, was just sitting in a dark classroom watching movies while guys in the row behind me workshopped explicit texts to send to their girlfriends. It’s sad that no one but me seemed to really give a damn about it, because the teacher prepared a course load of great films from two often-forgotten and essentially American genres: Western and noir. Western was okay, though the iconography didn’t get to me (I’d had my fill of cowboys and outlaws, going to elementary school in Texas and all). But film noir became a minor obsession of mine for more than a year after that. After getting down the basic classics in that class, I explored the classic crime novels of the 20’s, the modern deconstructions and re-imaginings, and even the weird sci-fi hybrids spawned in the cyberpunk genre. My first year in college I played a D&D character who was some fantasy-world parallel to the early American shamus. I wrote my own crime novella, even, and then found out from my workshop at the New York State Summer Writer’s Workshop that the archaic slang I’d used was unintelligible to anyone in this century. In short, I was in deep with the genre.

And you know what? I’m not embarrassed of that. Noir gets a bad rap in pop culture for being too cynical and too poorly lit and too attached to the generic alcoholic who has to be a total jerk to everyone before he can actually get out and solve a crime. But, for all the charges of being too solemn, classic crime has a real sense of fun. My dad has a theory that musicians are best when they take themselves “just the right amount of serious,” and I’d argue that applies to all art. If so, then noir is some of the best out there: even as the characters are faced with a constant stream of murders (the highest body-count I’ve ever seen is around forty in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest), there’s always a bounce to the language, a light beat of pun and poetry threaded through just about everything. 

Also, as convoluted as the plots get, it’s satisfying to see them click at the end. Some crime writers say that the plots are meant to get so complicated that you lose track of them, they become a vague story-static that fades out as the real heart of the narrative comes into focus. That’s true sometimes, not others, but even when the author clearly doesn’t care much about the drama-puzzle that supposedly started all this off, you can’t help but get invested in it. There was some quote I read somewhere, though it was so long ago that I don’t know if it was a scientific study or random observation, that said hardly anyone ever walks out of a theater when a mystery film was playing. It could suck, but everyone still needs to know how it will end.

But I think the way I fell hard for it means more than noir simply being a good genre. The stories always centered their action on the sort of guy who would go to parties alone and chat without really talking. In short, the kind of guy I was in high school and early college. I’d gone through middle and high school promised a gang of quirky sidekicks and romantic fulfillment by young adult literature, possibly with magic or superpowers somewhere in the mix. Since one genre had sold me short, it only made sense to move on to another. They gave the kind of loner-aimlessness I felt a purpose, and in the process they gave me an aura of cool too, even if I was the only one who could see it. No wonder that I spent the summer after high school writing a novel about an Edina-analogue where an occult conspiracy had grown among the honor students, and only one ennui-ridden boy could hope to take them down. (It was terrible, by the way.)

So maybe crime fiction doesn’t take itself too seriously, but its readers and viewers do. Or at least one reader and viewer in particular. And maybe that’s okay. I actually think it was better to focalize that angst in the foggy streets of some unnamed 1920's boom town where a gunshot just rang out around the corner than let it all keep buzzing in my head. The catharsis that the first noir films offered their 1950's audiences, still shell-shocked from the second world war, is probably much the same that I felt, though my problems feel a whole lot smaller in comparison. I don’t read much crime fiction anymore (though that novella is a full novel now, and about to start its fourth round of revisions). But I've still got a fondness for what I used to see in it.