Far Country by Franco Moretti

Author:Franco Moretti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Figure 5.

Figure 6.

Magic Mirror Maze . Though just as haunted by death and killing as the Western, the linear geometry of the duel is unthinkable in film noir. The Lady from Shanghai places Hayworth and Welles face to face, looking straight into each other’s eyes; a few seconds, and a third person emerges from his words (“I thought it was your husband you wanted to kill”), to be immediately multiplied by hers (“George was supposed to take care of Arthur, but he lost his silly head and shot Broome”). They are alone—but they are not; someone else is always between them. A few more seconds, and “Arthur” (Hayworth’s husband, played by Everett Sloane) shows up in person. Now it is he and Hayworth who face each other, guns in their hands; but in the “Magic Mirror Maze” where the scene is set, optics are deceptive: in a particularly baroque moment, Hayworth is aiming straight at the audience, Sloane diagonally, in the same general direction, but also—reflected as he is from several different angles—seemingly at himself (Figure 7): “You’d be foolish to fire that gun. With these mirrors it’s difficult to tell. You are aiming at me, aren’t you? I’m aiming at you, lover.” As they start firing, and glass shatters everywhere, it’s impossible to say what is happening to whom (at a certain point, it even looks as if Welles is the one being hit); and even after Hayworth and Sloane die, we are left with the baffling memory of a shootout that adds a third person to the usual two. (The unlikeliness of this situation is the secret behind The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962.) But in fact, triangulation is as essential to the structure of the noir as the binary logic was to the Western. It’s the triangle of adultery, of course, as indeed in The Lady from Shanghai, or in George Macready’s toast “to the three of us”—himself; his wife, Hayworth (always her); and her secret ex-lover, Glenn Ford—in Gilda (1946).20 But beyond adultery, what emerges here is the fundamental figure of the social universe of the film noir: the Third.

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