Neo-noir, modern films (since 1981) that use the techniques of film noir, can be defined very simply, by analogy. Let’s say you’re working on a piece of art. You throw some mud at a fan, splattering brown gobs all over your walls. You rev the fan (it’s industrial sized) to 30,000 rpm and empty a can of blue paint mixed with honey in front of it. Instantly, everything in the room is mottled with the sticky blue substance punctuated by your brown blobs. Now comes the beauty part: you release 100,000 ants into the room, install a video camera and leave, locking the door. Inside, your three-dimensional Jackson Pollack-esque installation seems to move, to creep, to change second by second, as the ants crawl all over, seeking honey. You call your work “Living in a Factory” and ask the government for a grant to do more. Critics come. They dub your style: Bio-Modernism. You are famous.
When you were doing it, though, you didn’t know it was Bio-Modernism. You thought you were just flinging mud and paint and honey at the walls and freeing the denizens of your friends’ ant farms. But now you’re famous and critics are defining you, your work, and other artists whose work is like yours. There’s the guy, for instance, who built a replica of the interior of a store, all the shelves painted the same color red, filled it with white dishes, and let a bull go inside, smashing stuff. He calls it, unoriginally, “Bull in a China Shop.” Bio-Modernism is all the rage.
Time passes. Bio-Modernism and its unveiled comment on the conflict between the human and natural worlds (with the added ironic comment that this contretemps will be viewed on video) cease to interest the art-lover. Something called Primitive Formalism takes its place, only to be replaced later by Ironic Realism, then Chewed Art.
Then, one day, someone rediscovers your work, its use of constructed living spaces, and fundamental art media, and animals. Using your theories, the ones you didn’t know you had until some critics pointed it out for you, they adapt Bio-Modernism to their own narratives. They keep the randomness, the blobs, the animals, but they apply these traits, intentionally, as embellishments to their own commentary on a world they see freeing itself from the laws of gravity and bioethics. One artist suspends three elephants from the top of the dome in the capitol building in St. Paul, Minnesota, while three Tibetan monks circle below them, chanting for peace. The work is called “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The critics, ever the reductionists, are more impressed with the new artists use of the earlier theory than the new ideas it enhances. They dub the new stuff Neo-Bio-Modernism.
Et voilà! Now you understand how we get to Neo-noir film. Essentially, it’s films like John Dahl’s Red Rock West, which features an intinerant oil worker (Nicolas Cage), out of work, sucked into a corrupt little Wyoming town and an even dirtier relationship between a husband (J. T. Walsh) who’s trying to kill his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle) and the wife who’s not all that she appears. So why isn’t this just film noir, like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or Touch of Evil is film noir?
Because those films weren’t part of a genre; they included a mood, a mood that reflected the dissatisfaction, alienation, psychological disorientation, and moral relativism that pervaded American during and after World War II. That mood seemed to dissipate after 1959 (although in some ways it was replaced by much darker things). You can’t come back in 1981 (Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat), and just make a film noir. Your awareness of it as a style, the different time in which you make your film, the evolved culture that the film reflects, all mean that you can imitate or adapt the style, but you are creating something new: Neo-noir. At minimum you are making an homage to an older film style, sure. But more significantly you’re making a film that both comments on its own time by associating it with the past and comments on the style itself.
Watching Dahl’s Red Rock West, you’ll recognize a lot of elements from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity or John Farrow’s His Kind of Woman. A femme fatale. A man whose moral compass is just a bit bent by difficult circumstances. Light streaming through slats. A lot of action at night. A sense of corruption. An urban-ness despite the rural setting. But this is still a very modern film. There is something new about it, something that separates it clearly from the original film noir movies. You have to figure out what it is.
Or, to paraphrase a man named Morbius: I can only show you the door marked “Neo”: you have to walk through it.
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
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