From Berlin to Sin City by Mark Bould

Author:Mark Bould
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: PER004000, PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video / History & Criticism, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Published: 2005-11-29T21:00:00+00:00

Investigation

From Stranger on the Third Floor to The Naked Kiss, the investigation was a staple film noir plot, albeit often obscured, distorted, derailed. While the underlying logic of this plot is that the world can be known, the film noir investigator frequently struggles to reconstruct and tell an order of events that make any kind of sense. Coincidences, hidden interrelations, unclear and confused motives abound. Consequently, the film noir investigator repeatedly uncovers the order embedded deep within chaos, witnesses order emerging from chaos; he or she then, typically, has to construct plausible cause-and-effect chains to tell what has happened, to map a particular – and partial – trajectory. In doing so, the film noir investigator offers a model of the complexly-determined ‘fuzzy’ subject (see Bould 2002). This section will focus in particular on the linguistic determination of the masculine subject in six investigative and two heist film noirs. It will begin, however, with a consideration of hard-boiled prose.

According to Frank Krutnik, 1940s Hollywood turned to hard-boiled crime fiction for two related reasons. With many leading writers, directors and stars drafted, and with externally-imposed budgetary restrictions, the studios needed ‘alternative production values’, such as ‘story source’ (1991: 37), with which to appeal to audiences. Wartime paper-rationing meant less fiction was being published, so they turned to pre-war pulps like Black Mask and their professional writers, who were used to producing serviceable prose to deadlines.

In Murder, My Sweet patrician con-man Amthor (Otto Kruger) criticises Marlowe’s ‘unpleasant tendency toward abrupt transitions, a characteristic of your generation’ – an observation equally applicable to ‘the Black Mask type of story’, in which ‘the scene outranked the plot in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes’ (Chandler 1980: 10). (This description of plot strongly resonates with the notion of cause-and-effect as a partial and retrospective telling of a trajectory abstracted from a total system which changes from moment to moment.) Chandler continues:

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