Why I soured on "film noir"

Then why limit your souring to only film noir?  Wouldn't your analysis encompass all tragedy, beginning with the ancient Greeks right through to today? 

Dr Johnson said "When a man has soured of Film Noir, he has soured of life."

It remains true, however, that audiences have always been drawn in large numbers to stories about terrible things happening to people that those viewers wouldn't want happening to themselves. It holds even for comedy, which more often than not bases humor on the misfortunes of others.

In spite of "larger forces," be they wars or shipwrecks, and the "vast field of characters clashing in different ways" along with the "epic" mountings cited by Penn Guinn , Gone With the Wind and Titanic both relate their tales in straightforward fashion, with clear-cut characters and motivations of which viewers are sure at each point in the story. Only in passing, it's perhaps coincidence that these two of the three top-grossing films of all time revolve around headstrong young women from privileged backgrounds discovering survival skills and inner strength amid calamity. Or perhaps not.

Film noir rejects the vast field of characters, epic mounting and clearcut narratives and motivations, and portrays the "larger forces that swamp the main characters" as corruption, greed, duplicity, uncertainty and betrayal, and finds moral ambiguity, cynicism, disillusionment, futility and fatalism - rather than triumph over adversity - as its vehicle: the "oddly compelling primal quality" to which you've referred. In place of the multiple causes, components and effects of epic events like wars or shipwrecks, film noir candidly looks inward at the nature of humanity and renders the "complex battlefield" over which characters clash in different ways as the unvarnished human condition itself, warts and all.      

It's no surprise that film noir reached its zenith during the ten years following WWII. The character of Samuels (Sam Levene) in Crossfire puts it as well as anyone might:

"Maybe it's because, for four years now, we've been focusing our minds on...one little peanut: the win-the-war peanut. That was all: get it over; eat that peanut. All at once, no peanut. Now we start looking at each other again. We don't know what we're supposed to do, we don't know what's supposed to happen. We're too used to fighting...but we just don't know what to fight. You can feel the tension in the air: a whole lot of fight and hate that doesn't know where to go."

For tens of millions overseas and on the home front, every aspect of life as they knew it was suddenly and brutally disrupted for the duration, as they used to say. Beyond daily survival, what did every one of them think and dream about? Returning to life as they knew it. And when those who survived did return, they found life was no longer as they knew it. They'd seen too much, done too much, and everyone - including those on the home front - had learned too much. About the world; about the people in it and of what they were capable. 

The three top-grossing films of 1948 were Easter Parade (color, music, song & dance and the romance of an earlier, simpler time), The Red Shoes (more color and more dance, but with the dark edge of conflicting obsessions) and The Snake Pit (the bleakness of mental breakdown and its treatment). Escapism was fine, but many were ready for some honest examination of just what the hell was wrong with people. Film noir offered that honesty, packaged as grown-up cautionary tales without any preachy moralizing, and many viewers find examinations of that sort stimulating on a deeper level.

As you say, there's a primal aspect to it, and that's hard for most to resist. Whether it's vast epics, serial killers, gunplay and explosions or the basest human failings, it seems to me the same primal compulsions drive attractions to calamity on grand or intimate scales. But we all have our individual areas of disengagement. Westerns, prison movies, latter-day mobster films and swords-and-sandals or mythical kingdoms/worlds/creatures have never much appealed to me. And perhaps in your case, going sour on noir came about through a concentration of the pessimism it often offers as an effect of your decade-by-decade approach to films undertaken in the last year. That's just a guess.         

  

  

 

 

It was good of you to wade through one of my unintended mini-essays, and it case it didn't come through amid the verbiage, it's easy enough to understand how anyone could go cold, even temporarily, on a particular type of film, especially those exploring the darker sides of humanity. It's something revered poster spiderwort has lamented of late. 

Such a tone is perhaps a reason that terse, snappy and often tartly humorous dialogue, saying so much with so little, became a signature element of the form, within which I've found many that make those explorations with the zip and zing those touches of colorful flair create. And I'd best sign off before launching into another mini-essay.

That's something you'd have to ask the original IMDB. When I signed up there in '99, every "Doghouse" up through 5 was taken. 

And if you do ask, don't be surprised if they clam up like a palooka with a busted jaw. 

  

Same with me. The old boards that gave me the 6. I kept it here just for continuity. In the 17 years or so on the old boards I never ran across another MikeF of any number.