Somehow, this has been New Republic week for me, but this essay on The Town (the Ben Affleck movie) and Dennis Lehane’s Moonlight Mile by venerated (and unpredictable) film critic really intrigued me. He writes,
… the alluvial bond between the new book and the new movie is the current American taste for noir, and the hope that the warm mud of violence and criminality will pass for verities about life on the street. There are many things corroding America, and this endless cultivation of noir must be on the list.
Of course he’s really not talking about noir but what passes for it these days. And who’s giving it that free pass: the “large, sedentary, middle-class, and crime-free audience (people alarmed by parking tickets or tax audits)” who get a taste of the semi-rough stuff in very palatable, safe form, with an ending we can all feel okay about it. It’s “feel good noir,” he says. A fantasy that “we” (re: middle class audiences) indulge in as we increasingly detach ourselves from what we’d rather not face, such as poverty. We can enjoy a movie about bank robbers with their heart in the right place as a way of turning a blind eye to the larger terror about what banks do, and get away with.
I’m not sure how this argument lines up the initial rise of the gangster movie during the depths of the Great Depression, nor the glorification of public enemies–bank robbers, in particular. (And since when wasn’t there a whole strand of noir that wasn’t glamorous escapism? Cue Gilda, Out of the Past). Further, without getting too deeply into the semantics of “noir,” I don’t think either The Town or Lehane’s Patrick and Angie books qualify. “Hardboiled,” perhaps (Thomson seems to make no distinction)–but classic hardboiled fiction nearly always leads us to partial redemption in the end. The streets are mean, but we have our battered knight, at least. We can count on him.
Maybe instead, with Thomson’s example, we’re working far more closely in the palette of On the Waterfront; individual conscience can in fact make a dent; heart does matter.
(Not for nothing, Thomson, in his “Have You Seen …?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Movies, enjoys On the Waterfront but notes its “tidiness” and, perhaps correctly, refers to it as a “a boys’ melodrama.” To which I say, what’s wrong with that? And Thomson would likely say “Nothing.” Maybe that’s what we’re seeing with The Town and its ilk.)
But it’s hard for me to argue with what Thomson says about his premiere example of true noir, Dashiell Hammett. In contrast to what he sees in Affleck or Lehane, who want their protagonists to be seen as “tough beholders of an ugly world,” Hammett was far rougher on his “heroes.” Thomson writes,
Dashiell Hammett knew enough about criminals to loathe and distrust them, and to insist on his detectives as hard, shabby, remorseless men. So in The Maltese Falcon, Spade sends Brigid to Tehachapi with a distinct relish. He takes women, but he doesn’t have to like them. And Hammett doesn’t want to make us admire him.
I have gripes with about five things in this short paragraph (beginning with Hammett’s clear delight in several of his “criminals”), but there certainly is something here that matters. One of the great gifts of Hammett is the hazard and dubiousness he bestows upon his protagonists. When we read Falcon today, Spade seems just as dangerous and self-serving as any of the criminals and occasionally more so. It crackles.
But I leave the article wondering about Thomson’s big claims about the culture and what they mean. Even if we accept Thomson’s view of The Town and Moonlight Mile, what does he do with a story that does revel in the thorniness and pathos of much contemporary life? What does he do with the novels of Daniel Woodrell? With The Wire?
The Abbott Gran Medicine Show 