Why Now's A Good Time To Watch Noir

Assisted by my Criterion Channel subscription, I have been on a big noir binge recently. It's a genre of film I have always had an appreciation for, but I have started to think the times we are living in have a lot to do with my current obsession. It's a good time to be watching noir.

The best noir is about the cruelty of fate. Someone goes through life, minding their own business, then gets sucked into a web of circumstances and decisions leading down the road to doom. The best executed in this sense are two Billy Wilder films, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. In the first an insurance agent pays a house call to a client when he meets his wife, who incites in him a wild, deadly, passion. In the second a down on his luck screenwriter ducks into the driveway of a washed up silent movie queen. He gets entangled and eventually dies in her swimming pool.

The original wave of noir was the product of World War II, a time when death stalked the earth in an unpredictable fashion. While our current world is a different place, the deadly potential of fate has never been more apparent in my lifetime.

Noir also exists in a universe where the authorities are often corrupt and capricious. Chinatown and LA Confidential are probably the starkest examples, but there are plenty of others. The noir universe is one without justice or moral order, where the good suffer and the bad prosper. In the current environment, where the president brags about his success while tens of thousands die, it's ridiculous to watch films where the "good guys" win. How can that even be believed?

The best noirs are set in Southern California, which is a place that I love and am also somewhat repulsed by. Its certainly the least rooted place I've been to. The feeling of transience there can be exciting, since it makes one feel as if all possibilities are open. However, that feeling carries with it a certain horror. There is also perhaps no place that more viscerally expresses the contradictions of the American Dream.

I've mentioned some of the most famous noirs, but here are a few I've been enjoying recently.

In A Lonely Place

This was the film that started by recent noir binge. I was amazed I hadn't seen it already. Bogart started his career as a heavy, became a leading man, and in this film he becomes a leading man as heavy. It was really something to see a star of his caliber play someone so dislikable.

The Limey

I loved this one back when I first saw it in 1999. Usually revenge plots in noir are lame, but here the protagonist is complex and his claims to moral righteousness both are justified and illegitimate. This film is also an effective takedown of the bullshit Boomer narratives of the late 60s. Peter Fonda, quite appropriately, plays a sleazo who even admits in one key scene that it was all hype.

The Grifters

This was a movie I'd been meaning to watch for almost thirty years and it did not disappoint. It's great for a lot of reasons, but it earns maximum noir points for its portrayal of workaday LA and for one of those cruelty of fate endings that has to be seen to be believed. Bonus noir points for making the kindly Pat Hingle into a menacing heavy.