The secret kept behind a locked door is the second attribute that leads to the woman’s paranoia. In Jane Eyre there is, of course, the secret locked in the tower room, which is concealed from Jane. In Gaslight, the locked room is the attic where 4 Film genres: defining the typical film 135
the husband searches for his dead aunt’s jewels. It is precisely the husband’s searching, which creates strange sounds and which dims the gaslight in the wife’s room, that helps drive her paranoia. In Rebecca, both the boathouse cottage and Rebecca’s bedroom are barred to the new Mrs de Winter. And in The Two Mrs Carrolls, it is the husband’s painting studio that is kept locked. In the studio, Mr Carroll has painted a portrait of Sally, which he keeps out of Sally’s view (for it is the custom of Mr Carroll to paint a ‘death’ portrait of his wife after he has decided to murder her). Mr Carroll inadvertently leaves the key to the studio with his daughter (the daughter of the first Mrs Carroll) and so Sally and the daughter (called Bea) decide to enter the studio when Mr Carroll is in London. It is entering the forbidden room in order to satisfy her curiosity that drives Sally paranoid, for she is confronted with her husband’s unflattering
‘death’ image of her.
The main motivation that drives the narrative in the paranoid woman’s film is for the second wife (the second Mrs Carroll, the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca, Celia Lamphere, the second wife of Mark Lamphere in Secret Beyond the Door) to distinguish herself from the first wife in order to gain her own identity and avoid suffering the same fate as the first wife. Many commentators have noted that the gothic narrative emphasizes the closeness of mother and daughter and, also, emphasizes the daughter’s fear of being like her mother. This is therefore one of the fears the paranoid woman’s film represents. Perhaps we could argue that the function of the paranoid woman’s film is very specific: to represent a woman’s fear of being like her mother. And because the narrative of the paranoid woman’s film is motivated by the second wife’s attempts to distinguish herself from the first wife, we can argue that the function of the paranoid woman’s film, as with gothic narratives in general, is to convince women that they are not their mothers.
Doane therefore defines the paranoid woman’s film, not only in terms of its common attributes, but also according to its function, the way it addresses the fears and anxieties of the female audience.
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film noir
For many film critics film noir does not refer to a genre, but to a style within the thriller or gangster film. However, I think that film noir does have a sufficient number of attributes and a cultural function that can identify it as a legitimate genre. Here I shall review the common stylistic and narrative attributes of film noir and then, briefly, look at its social function.
In terms of mise-en-scène and mise-en-shot (the traditional way of identifying film noir), the film noir has the following attributes:
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expressionist devices, such as chiaroscuro lighting and
skewed framing, creating a high contrast image made up of dense shadows, silhouettes, oblique lines and unbalanced compositions
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subjective techniques such as voice-overs and flashbacks 3
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equal emphasis given to actors and setting.
The film noir style uses the formalist techniques of image distortion discussed in Chapter 1. The film noir’s use of these techniques is usually attributed to the influence of German expressionist films (such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 1920) and partly to the fact that many films noirs were directed by European expatriate directors such as Edward Dmytryk, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder.
In terms of narrative and themes, the film noir has the following attributes:
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in terms of major characters, a femme fatale and an alienated hero, who is usually a private detective living on the edge of the law
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a network of minor characters (who nonetheless play a
prominent role), most of whom are morally ambivalent and somehow interrelated
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convoluted and incoherent narratives, created by ambiguous character motivation, the detective following false leads and sudden reversals of action
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the foregrounding of a narrator or a commentator motivates the use of voice-over and flashbacks
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the representation of crime and its investigation
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an emphasis on realistic urban settings (which give some films noirs a semi-documentary look)
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the loss of hope, leading to despair, isolation and paranoia.
Spotlight
The femme fatale is the dominant attribute of the film noir. She is presented as a desirable but dangerous woman, who challenges patriarchal values and the authority of male characters. In fact, the film noir can be described as a struggle between the transgressive femme fatale and the alienated hero. Sometimes the hero is destroyed but, more often, he overcomes the desirability of the femme fatale and destroys her.
The alienated hero is usually a detective. Films noirs are based on the detective fiction of writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and James M Cain.
What is significant about the film noir detective is that he is sharply distinguished from both the gentleman mastermind, such as Sherlock Holmes, and the compliant detective working for the professional police force. The private detective is a lone individual who embodies his own moral law. The emphases in the film noir are on the independent male fighting the criminals, the femmes fatales and the inefficient, corrupt and inhuman government organizations.
These two figures, the femme fatale and the alienated detective hero, are a symptom of the upheavals witnessed during the 1940s in North American society. Feminist film critics point out that the femme fatale is a ‘masculine construct’, since she reflects male concern and insecurity over women’s changing roles during the Second World War, particularly women’s entry into the traditionally male workplace. This signifies women’s economic independence, the fact that many women no longer believed setting up a family to be their top priority and that there were fewer jobs available to the men who returned from war.
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But the film noir is not simply a reaction to its immediate historical context. It is traditionally thought to reign from 1941
(beginning with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon) to 1958
(with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil). Yet the film noir emerged again in contemporary Hollywood, with films such as The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973), Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), Blood Simple (Coen Brothers, 1985), The Grifters (Stephen Frears, 1990), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), L A Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997), Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) and the films of John Dahl, including Kill Me Again (1989), Red Rock West (1993) and The Last Seduction (1994). To end this section on film noir, we shall look at the way Dahl’s neo- noir films develop and transform traditional attributes of film noir.
the NEo-filMS NoiRSofJohnDahl
In Dahl’s debut film Kill Me Again, Fay Forrester (Joanne Whalley-Kilmer) and Vince Miller (Michael Madsen) steal
money from the Mafia. Fay double-crosses Vince and steals the money from him. To escape from both the Mafia and Vince, Fay hires a private detective, Jack Andrews (Val Kilmer), to pretend to kill her so that she can have a new identity. Jack is down on his luck and owes money to loan sharks. Yet he is shown to have an honest and integral character. Due to his debts, Jack takes the job, places himself on the margins of the law and becomes caught up in the web of evil spun by Fay, the femme fatale. Fay pays Jack $5,000 before faking her murder and will pay him another $5,000 afterwar
ds (she says to Jack, ‘I’ll pay you $10,000, half now and the other half after I’m dead’, which echoes a similar line uttered in Orson Welles’s film noir, The Lady From Shanghai).
After the fake murder, Fay escapes from Jack without paying him the second instalment. He eventually tracks her down in Vegas and they become romantically involved. They decide to run away together, so they plan to fake their own deaths (Fay asks Jack to ‘kill me again’), which involves drowning in a lake.
Jack hides the money near the lake, to be retrieved in their getaway. But upon retrieving the money, Fay double-crosses Jack, shoots him and takes the bag of money. She escapes, with 4 Film genres: defining the typical film 139
Vince, who has caught up with her. However, Vince and Fay are killed in a car crash. Jack survives the shooting and we see him carrying a different bag, which contains the money. He had obviously learnt not to trust Fay completely, so he switched the money to another bag. The film ends with him driving off with the money.
Kill Me Again contrasts the clear, bright, wide open spaces of the desert with the hazy, dark claustrophobic interiors. Unlike traditional films noirs, Dahl’s neo- noirs are set away from the city in small towns, a location which irritates the femmes fatales, who want to live in the city. The film’s credit sequence consists entirely of shots of the open desert landscape, an unconventional way to begin a film noir.
Fay is the typical femme fatale – she is desirable but dangerous and leads the luckless hero, the private detective Jack, into trouble. She clearly identifies his weaknesses and uses her knowledge of these weaknesses to manipulate him. Fay is
relentless in her pursuit of money, doing almost anything to obtain it, switching her allegiance from Vince to Jack and back again when it suits her. She is even willing to shoot Jack when he has served his function.
Finally, it may be worthwhile noting that Dahl makes brief references to the work of Hitchcock throughout his films. In Kill Me Again, Jack stages the fake murder of Fay in a motel that looks remarkably like the Bates’s motel in Psycho. Furthermore, when Jack dumps the car in a lake, it sinks only halfway. The scene is staged in the same way in Psycho when Norman sinks Marion’s car in the swamp.
Like Kill Me Again, Dahl’s second film, Red Rock West, focuses on the lone male, in this instance an injured war veteran Michael Williams (Nicolas Cage). The film begins in the same way as Kill Me Again, in a bright, clear, wide open landscape.
Michael applies for a job with an oil drilling team, but his leg injury makes him unemployable. The fact that he refused to lie about his injury shows that, like Jack in Kill Me Again, he has an honest and integral character. But also like Jack, he gets himself into trouble. Out of work and with no money, Michael 140
ends up in a bar in the small town of Red Rock. Here he is mistaken by the bar’s owner, Wayne (J T Walsh) for Lyle, a hired killer. Wayne has hired Lyle to kill his wife, Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle) for $10,000 ($5,000 before and $5,000 after the murder). Due to his circumstances, Michael takes the money.
When he meets Suzanne, Michael warns her of her husband’s plan. She offers Michael double the money to kill her husband.
As the plot becomes increasingly complicated, Lyle, the real hired killer (played by Dennis Hopper) turns up and Michael discovers that Wayne and Suzanne stole $2 million and are being sought by the FBI. But by this time, Michael has become romantically involved with Suzanne. At first, she is presented as the victim, but once Michael finds out about the money, he realizes that she is duplicitous.
The film comes to an end with Michael, Suzanne, Wayne and Lyle in a graveyard at night, where the money is hidden. When the money is dug up, Wayne is fatally injured and Suzanne shoots Lyle. Suzanne and Michael escape on a freight train with the money, but Suzanne turns her gun on Michael. Luckily for Michael, it is empty. The film ends with Michael throwing both Suzanne and the money off the train; police cars are shown heading towards Suzanne.
In terms of visual motifs, Red Rock West is similar to Kill Me Again. It contrasts the wide open landscapes and small town community with the city. Moreover, when it is not focusing on the landscape, most of Red Rock West takes place at night in dark claustrophobic rooms. In terms of narrative, Red Rock West is almost identical to Kill Me Again. Fay is transformed into Suzanne, Vince into Wayne and Jack into Michael. The films mainly focus on the couple (Fay and Vince/Suzanne and Wayne) stealing money and then double-crossing one another.
The honest hero (Jack/Michael), down on luck and money,
momentarily transgresses and becomes involved in the couple’s conflict, or more accurately, becomes romantically involved with the femme fatale, who eventually double-crosses him once she has used him. But like most femmes fatales, she is punished in the end (in Kill Me Again, Fay dies in a car crash and in Red Rock West, Suzanne is arrested). In both films, the hero escapes.
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But in Kill Me Again, Jack gets to keep all the money, whereas in Red Rock West, the money is lost (except for one batch of notes, which Michael keeps).
Finally, there are a few Hitchcockian moments in Red Rock West. Firstly, Michael is set up as ‘the wrong man’ and, secondly, in a scene on the road, Michael is almost run over, which is filmed in the same way that Roger Thornhill is almost run over in North by Northwest (after he escapes from the crop-dusting plane).
The Last Seduction, Dahl’s third film, contains many of the noir attributes found in his first two films, but this time there is a change in the film’s narrative focus, since The Last Seduction follows the femme fatale. The femme fatale is Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino), who persuades her husband Clay, a doctor (Bill Pullman), to sell medicinal cocaine to a drugs gang for $700,000. In characteristic Dahl style, Bridget double-crosses Clay and leaves the big city with the money for the small town, in this instance, Beston. Here she is picked up in a bar by Mike (Peter Berg), the naive, weak and luckless hero. She decides to become romantically involved with Mike in order to hide from Clay. She also gets a job in Beston together with a new identity (shades of Kill Me Again). But Clay, who owes money to loan sharks (more references to Kill Me Again), hires a private detective to track down Bridget. She manages to kill the detective and make it look like an accident. She then manipulates Mike in a plan to kill Clay in his apartment (and she achieves this not just by means of her desirability, but also by knowing Mike’s weaknesses, particularly about his previous marriage). Just as Michael is unwilling to kill Suzanne in her home in Red Rock West, Mike is unwilling to kill Clay.
However, Bridget murders Clay and double-crosses Mike by framing him for the murder. The film ends with Mike in jail and Bridget escaping with the money.
The differences between The Last Seduction and Dahl’s previous two films are just as important as their similarities.
The Last Seduction opens on the New York skyline, rather than the small town or countryside. Nonetheless, the small town plays a prominent role later in the film. As well as focusing on 142
the femme fatale, The Last Seduction shows her succeeding, for this time there is no attempt to make the film conform to the prescriptive system of compensating moral values. Bridget is not punished for stealing the $700,000, for killing her husband, or for framing Mike.
There is a Hitchcockian moment near the beginning of the film. Bridget escapes with the money while Clay is having a shower. She leaves him a note, which she writes backwards, in mirror writing. This echoes a scene in North by Northwest, when Eve Kendall ‘escapes’ from Thornhill. As he pretends to have a shower, Eve answers a telephone call, makes a note of an address and leaves. Thornhill then reads the imprint of the note on the writing pad and follows Eve to the address.
The continuity of style and themes across John Dahl’s first three films clearly identifies him as an auteur, but one who is making (or re-inventing) the genre of the film noir. Dahl makes smart, understated and unpretentious, independently produced films.
They are mod
estly made, but are technically superb and, unlike most films today, they are based on strong scripts. Kill Me Again was written by Dahl and David Warfield, Red Rock West was written by Dahl and his brother Rick Dahl and The Last Seduction was written by Steve Barancik.
After The Last Seduction, Dahl expanded into other genres. In 1996 he directed Unforgettable, a science fiction thriller about a husband tracking down his wife’s killer using an ingenious method of detection. He injects himself with his dead wife’s brain fluid to experience her memory of her murder. The film never escapes this implausible, convoluted premise. Unforgettable seems to be imitating the Mad Scientist B-Movies (popular in the 1930s and the 1950s), but it lacks their ironic tone.
Dahl’s next film was Rounders (1998), a drama focused on a clean-cut law student Mike (Matt Damon) who is also a gifted poker player. He helps out his restless loser friend ‘Worm’
(Edward Norton), who has just been released from jail, to pay off his debtors by playing and trying to win a large number of poker games in a short period of time. The film succeeds in creating the seedy atmosphere and texture of backroom poker 4 Film genres: defining the typical film 143
games, and occasionally reproduces the atmosphere of film noir. However, its main focus is on the psychology of his main character, Mike, and his search for his true vocation (a lawyer or a professional gambler). This is not an action film with numerous plot twists and turns. Most of the action takes place at the card table, and Dahl is occasionally successful at creating moments of great tension in these scenes.
Dahl’s Joy Ride (aka Road Kill) (2001) is a hybrid thriller- noir-
horror film consisting of three protagonists on a road trip across the United States who incite, and who are then relentlessly pursued by, an unseen truck driver. In every scene, Dahl uses an abundance of conventional clichés from the thriller- noir-horror genres, but to good effect: he creates well-paced, tense action scenes, updating other well-known films about the perils of cross-country driving, especially Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971), but also less accomplished films such as Kalifornia (1993) and Breakdown (1997).
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