Film, Censorship and Historic Research

The relations between film and culture, or film and ideology, have been found in various ways. One of these is to view film as mirrors of the dominant culture in which they are made. In this aspect movies are attributed documentary qualities, and a reflectionary relationship is created between movies and society. Applying this theory a problem occurs; i.e. both optimistic musicals and film noirs were made in America in the forties. Which of these are the accurate reflection of American society? The conclusion must be that the use of this mirror term or reflection metaphor is just not good enough. It is unsatisfactory because it overlooks the many variables that movie making consists of. To make a movie one has to deal with a system of selection and combination, both different and competing cultural aspects, and industrial and institutional factors have influence on a movie production. A feature film does not reflect the truth; it shows a constructed and narrated world. In order to create this world, it has to regard the conventions, rules, myths and ideologies of the society from which it was born. In addition the medium itself has restrictions.

There are more satisfactory methods to use in the analysis of film and culture. The use of methods from other fields of research have added valuable tools to the field of film research. In general there are two ways of approaching the relation between film and culture; textual and contextual. The textual approach to the film medium concentrates on the film text to read the cultural function of film. This method tends to focus on similarities and typical texts rather then the opposite, and this gives the method structuralist tendencies. It also tends to work by tracing the mythologies and ideologies in the film back to sources within the culture; it is based on the assumption that the film text consists of certain determined rules, and that the culture author this text. An example of this approach is the work of Paul Schrader on film noir, and the way the subject of women in noir has been treated. A contextual approach on the other hand is more interested in the analysis of outside determinants in the film industry, such as cultural, political, institutional and industrial factors. All of these factors are elements that have influence on the production of a movie, and a movie text. In the study of film and culture the best result would perhaps come from combining these two techniques since both deal with themes relevant to these studies.

Film institutions have political interests that determine which films are made, and which films are seen by an audience. One of the reasons for this is found in peoples identification with the nation. Nationalism functions as a tool to value the nation over the individual, so that if one accepts this nationalism one subordinates oneself to the nation. The idea of the nation sets a set of rules of ethics and moral, and thus defines what is American (in this case). If one possesses this identification one can gain political power. In this aspect it becomes important to control the arts, (because art are representations of the nation), so that it have coherence with this idea. Art--in this case movies--can represent different viewpoints on the desirable homogeneous image of the nation state. This multiplicity is of course not wanted, and thus there are tried methods of controlling this.

In America in the forties and fifties, measures taken to prevent un-national activities. Within movie production there was the Production Code and a bit later, HUAC. The Production Code was a set of censorship regulations governing the Hollywood productions. It laid down rules for what the movies were permitted to show. It labeled issues like nudity, the use of drugs, homo sexuality and so on taboo. Still film noir deals with several of these subjects, its messages are hidden within the movies. Sometimes this prohibited material is showed off screen, cast in another form with the message barely concealed, or in other ways disguised. In this manner there existed a Hollywood self censorship. In 1947 the House of Un-American Activities Committee started their investigation of the film industry. This committee won political influence, and the questioning of the status quo was labeled un-American. This was a subject dealt with by the film noirs.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir09.htm

The male protagonist

In film noir the male protagonist is often a detective or an otherwise social alienated individual. Sometimes the male heroes are featured as amnesiacs, a situation that absolutely creates a feeling of social estrangement and disillusionment. These hard-boiled heroes are anti-social loners that are subject to existential angst. The environments they live and work in are dark and scary metropolises, often red-light districts, or otherwise dehumanizing environments, like large desolate office buildings. They are experiencing anonymity through their large scale surroundings. The tough guy is often marked by an excellent gift of verbal wit, even if they are not always given the strongest intellect; this is a heritage from the hard-boiled novels. Their worlds are dominated by crime, corruption and cruelty. The protagonist often gets tangled up in some of these activities himself, in addition to his interest in the erotic. Thus, he lives in a distorting world.

The men are, as well as the women, portrayed as stereotypes. As a result of this they are not allowed to live their lives in alternative ways anymore than women. The patriarchal order that is surrounding them, and that they in addition to women are trying to upheave, represents a certain set of rules they have to follow and live up to. As it seems, the patriarchy is asking for quite a bit. The struggle to keeping women in their place also keeps the men in their places. The men can not show much emotion in order to upheaval their masculinity, (to be emotional is regarded a female virtue), and they have to work alone and be successful in what they do (something Oedipal). They have to seek meaning in activity, not in contemplation which also is regarded a female virtue. Their position within the patriarchal system provides them with purpose in life; to work, provide, protect and serve and protect the patriarchy. The first three virtues must be seen in the context of the family and the masculine.

The existence led by men in film noir is one of toil and loneliness. The actual choices men have in life are either to become a family man, which is the accepted thing to do, or not. Because of the way women are defined in these films, life as a married man would doom him to a domestic life, with a dull domestic woman. There would never be excitement or individual thought. So, the male must do all the thinking, and becomes surrounded by a deading conformity. For the film noir men and women are all the same: they are nobody. This must produce a non-interesting heterosexual relationship. So the reason is clear why the male protagonists becomes obsessed and fascinated with the femme fatale. A life outside this patriarchal determined role is a life of destruction in a closed and claustrophobic world. He is victimized by society, and perhaps also by a woman, and expresses the awareness of the loss of the fixed ties that bind a man to a community. The similarities between different male protagonists in different films are underlined by the mere fact that most noir heroes/actors were cast against type.

The sexuality of the hard-boiled hero is a question often brought up in film noir research. A consequence of the noir females masculine characteristics is that feminine characteristics are attributed to the male. This is why the noir male is humiliated and reduced. Because of an underlying misogynous attitude, females are not suitable objects, except for the women that make the noir male dull, and who offers an existence without emotional and sexual commitment. At the same time as women do not represent a tempting alternative, patriarchy has made homo sexuality taboo. What remains for the male hero is male friendship. (In America male bonding intensified during the war). It's a tough world.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir07.htm

Women in film noir

Generally in art there are two archetypal female characters; the whore and the Madonna. In film noir we are introduced to both of these women: the dark, sexual and active spider woman and the maternal virgin. To give a meaningful presentation of the women's role in film noir I will first give you a short reminder of how the traditional family was viewed, and which values it represented in the world of movies in the forties and fifties.

The institution of the family reveals significant social values and beliefs. It functions as an ideological cornerstone of our society with its embodiment of traditional values. It represents the framework for reproduction, because marriage is the only institution that legitimates reproduction. Marriage at the same time both legitimates and conceals sexuality. Married couples are the only ones that are allowed to enjoy the erotic, but they are rarely presented as sexual partners or in any other ways erotisized. With breeding follows the upbringing of children which responsibility traditionally is lain on women. From a feminist point of view these practices of oppressing women are seen to be legitimated by this representation of the family institution. This image of the family, where the man is the family's head and ruler, is also a legitimizing model of a hierarchical and authoritarian society. Here the family can be seen as a metaphor of society on a larger scale. Thus the representation of the family institution in movies contributes to legitimize different social values, among other things the value of the family institution as a social unit, the ruler role of the man, the domestic role of women, and the total dependence of children.

In film noir the family relations are not normal. In some ways the noirs are based on the absence of the family. If a family, or more likely family relations are represented they are often broken up, filled with mutual hatred or in other ways perverted. The movies often concern themselves with what the loss of these family values and satisfactions can lead to. Marriages in film noir are often described as boring and sterile or non sexual. Because of this twisted family life, both men and women seek satisfaction outside marriage in film noir. This satisfaction is not only sexual, but also an attempt to reassure and find themselves in this confused and threatening society, an escape from the frustrating routine in an alienated existence. The violation of the marriages and traditional family values often results in destruction for the violators. In this manner both pleasure and death await outside the family institution. The family represents an antithesis to the femme fatale. I think that instead of showing and offering women an alternative to the traditional family life, film noir shows what happens if one chooses to stand outside the traditional values of the patriarchal system.

The dark, strong femme fatale of noir is the main female character in these movies. These women are given not only sexual powers, but also ambitions. They are longing or looking for independence, often economic, and freedom, often from relationships with men. These women that are masters and possessors of their own sexuality represent a danger to the males. She is--because of her ambitions and independence--a threat to the patriarchal system. On account of this she gives the males a feeling of alienation from his environment, and she must be punished for this to restore the patriarchal balance. The femme fatale is promiscuous, exiting, intelligent and narcissist while her opposite is the boring, but stable wife and mother. The virgin is capable of total devotion to the male, something that the sexual woman is not. The former is thus described as the ideal role for women, and it fits in well with patriarchy.

The sexual women's power and strength are visually expressed in the films, both through the iconography of the image, and through the visual style. It is often the woman that dominates and controls the camera, both because of her own strength and because of the male heroes attraction to her. Thus other participants become static within the image. But in the end when she is destroyed, she also loses her physical motion in the picture.
The dress code is also applied as her appearance defines her moral transformation. In Mildred Pierce for instance, she is dressed up in more manly clothes during the film and her own development. These women also use for example cigarettes and guns for phallic symbols, something I view as an extension of their bid for masculine powers. Filmaticly, the woman that represents an alternative to the dark world of film noir is often placed outside this world.

The spider woman uses her sexual powers in the quest for reaching her own ambitions. The mere possession of such ambitions is unheard of for a woman, and represents a danger to the male. She is a dangerous woman and the males own sexuality along with the patriarchal system are threatened. The only way to control her is to destroy her, something that happens in most noirs. Even though she is destroyed, it is her vital, deadly strength we remember.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir06.htm

The Noir Aesthetics

Even though the "noir style" did not represent something completely new within Hollywood film making I find it necessary to give an introduction to the noir aesthetics, because this is something that the noirs have in common. Even if the stylistics had been used in earlier movies, the combinations of these expressions and techniques was to some extent new in american movies and to the american audience.

One of the techniques used was the low-key lighting which causes the effect of obscuring the action, and deglamourizing the star so that the composition becomes more important than the actor. Earlier American movies had focused on the star. The use of night and shadows emphasizes the cold and the darkness in the noirs. The change of focus from the actors and movement in the image to the compository excitement underline a fatalistic and hopeless mood. This mood is also fortified through a complex narration, often disjuncted and fragmented. To do this flashbacks are often used, which emphasizes the feeling of lost time and despair. According to Paul Schrader time is manipulated because the form stands above the content. In the narration voice-over is also often used , and in connection we sometimes get to see the end of the film in its beginning. This is also an unconventional use of the time notion that call forth a feeling of predestination and irrevocable past.

The wide-angle cinematography participated in making the space distorted and the audience disoriented. In film noir we also find a repeated use of an image composition where the lines no longer are horizontal, but vertical and sloping. This gives an unsettling impression. In the noirs the world often seems like a prison, something that these images along with the use of image metaphors like sun blinds help to underline. We also find an extended use of extreme low and high-angle perspectives.

All of these stylistic elements served to disorient the spectators and create a mood of uneasiness, alienation and loneliness in the movies. Thus, the dark and uneasy visual expression of the film noirs emphasize the themes.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir05.htm

The origins of film noir

The noir films occurred in America during the war, and continued to be made during the forties and fifties, but it did not come out of nothing. The noirs were inspired both by literature and previous film history along with the sociohistory of the period it grew out of. In America in the thirties there was a literary tradition called hard-boiled novels. These were crime novels and so called pulp fiction, and very popular. The American hard-boiled fictions represented a completely different world and a different kind of detective than those found in english and earlier detective stories; both content and style were differentiated. This kind of fiction added a new tradition of realism to the detective fiction. The hero was as much an anti-hero, the action was taken down on the streets, it was violent, and the language was cut short and it was often marked by verbal wit. Instead of upper-class "detectives", we are now introduced to the proletarian tough guy detective that are walking the mean streets, and often he finds himself on the edge of law and crime. Contemporary America is described as an urban and industrialized area where people are in the hands of naturalistic drives. Many of these works were adapted to the screen, such as the works of Hammet, Chandler, Cain and McCoy to mention some, and many of the authors were hired by Hollywood as screenwriters. Obviously this hard-boiled fiction had a considerable influence on the film noirs.

Another thing that influenced the noir was the film traditions of German expressionism of the twenties and French poetic realism of the thirties. The German expressionism was a expressionistic and conventionalized film style, where the aesthetics were marked by distortions and exaggerations. It had a world wide influence and the filmmakers of America sought to integrate this popular stylistic style in their own movies.
The French poetic realism was a film style where poetic conventionalization were combined with realistic topics and milieus. Also the american gangster movies were an inspiration for the film noir. All of these movie styles have in common the description of a dark and fatalistic image of the world. This is something we find in the film noir as well. From these movements the film noir could gather inspiration, and alongside this, Hollywood received quite a lot of �migr�s with roots in these movie milieus in Europe during the prewar years. The �migr�s took jobs in different parts of the american movie industry, both as technicians and as directors. Thus they also made a contribution to the society and heritage that film noir emerged from.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir04.htm

The problem of film noir

"Film Noir" is a french label on an american film phenomenon. In postwar France they got the opportunity to watch a large amount of american movies made in the forties, at the same time, and thus it became easier for them to discover similarities among these pictures. The french noticed the divergence between this film load and prewar american movies and the connection between these films and the literature called roman noir. This was dark literature, and film noir means black film. The knowledge of this term did not get to be used in the production or among the contemporary american spectators, in fact only french critics used the term in their work until the era of noir was over. Film noir is now a more familiar term and its use is widespread, but still there are ongoing debates concerning its status. Both film critics and historians participate in the discussion on the definition of this film category, and I will give a presentation of various views on the subject.

There are some critics that view film noir as a genre; thus it will rely upon a system of well defined conventions and expectations like other genre defined movies; for instance the Western or the musical. If film noir is referred to as a genre, like Higham and Greeenberg and Paul Kerr do, there is a number of problems that arises. First, genres tend to cross periods instead of being bounded by them and the film noir is generally very closely connected with the 1940s Hollywood. This particular criticism of noir as a genre relies upon whether one regards the more recent films as a continuation of the noir tradition or not. Obviously I do not. Furthermore film noir tends to cross traditional genre boundaries; there are both noir westerns, gangster films and comedies to mention some. The fact that the term film noir was not familiar to the film industry and audience of the 40s and 50s does not necessarily work as an argument against the genre definition of noir, because it is possible to argue that the defining characters of the noir constituted a set of conventions and expectations. Still, apparently the makers of noir did not deliberately set out to actually make noirs. A critique against regarding film noir as a genre is that it will not include all the films that have been seen as noirs. But this may also be a reflection of problems within the methodology of film criticism.

Other critics, like Durgnat and Schrader, avoid these problems by viewing film noir not as a genre, but by emphasizing the stylistic elements. Here, tone and mood are given considerable weight. With this focus on visual style one also runs into problems. This `noir style� is actually not what it seems. Instead of being subversive of the traditional or classical norms of Hollywood style film making, as many critics values it to be, the noir style was a part of the systemization of Hollywood's narrational regulation during the 1940s.

Film noir has also been regarded as a series. In this case the noir is seen as a cycle, and viewed as an aesthetic movement. Here the cycle has been seen as lying within the boundaries of the crime film, but this creates a problem since these borders themselves are difficult to determine.

All of these different views on film noir try to define and capture the essence of noir, and still I find that none of these are sufficient. But at the same time every one of them touches something important or essential about this film term. Maybe it would be best to simply state that all of the above describe some aspects of what one can call the film noir phenomenon. A film phenomenon with both generic, stylistic and cyclic parts.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir03.htm

Historical main currents

In the 30s America was struggling with Depression. This era of depression led to a widespread unemployment, and was in general a difficult time for the American people. Roosevelt had his New Deal, but the problems would not go away. Furthermore the country led an isolationist politic, had beliefs of lasting world peace and pledged neutrality. Thus they had among other things a very small standing army. Their entrance to the battlefields of World War 2 was about to change the United States forever.

The U.S.A emerged from the war as the one great victor. The war actions had left behind a devastated Europe and a shattered Asia which had led major economic an military losses. America on the other hand had not had warfare on its own territory, and during the war it had managed to leap out of the depression and reach almost full employment for its inhabitants. It was also in possession of the worlds largest military force and the worlds most threatening weapon. In addition the country now had interests and responsibilities all around the world, but especially in democratic Europe. Thus, as the americans emerged from war they were elated and proud, happy with their victory and proud of their military and industrial might. The postwar era presented an unprecedented prosperity to the american people, at a time where the last fifteen years had been filled with deprivation and sacrifice.

The 40s and 50s were an era of economic boom, mainly upheld by military demands during and after WW2, and partly by the American peoples new consumer demands. The earlier fifteen years of saving and sacrifice naturally gave way for increasing consumer demands when the population now lived in increasing prosperity. Most people now wanted new and better things, which they also could afford. The federal government participated in this development by sustaining the military demands to some level, and by the creation of the G.I.Bill of Rights. The government also had campaigns directed to increase and sustain the consume of the people. Among other things advertising was a phenomenon that came to show its full potential during the postwar years. The government was interested in making the public believe that the affluent times were there to stay, and all of the things earlier mentioned along with the successful remains of the New Deals social program helped supporting this belief.

The G.I.Bill was a veteran funding system that led to an increase in both college education and the founding of the suburban homes of the 50s. This was kind of a social revolution with consequences like democratization of the education system and the mere fact that more people got higher educated. The veterans also returned to create a baby boom. After the war there were a high increase in marriages and new house owners, and alongside this the new baby boom came. These new babies contributed to the expanding society and consumers culture with their massive demands for things such as diapers, baby food and schools.

Another new phenomenon in postwar America was the explosion of suburban communities. All in all there was a metropolitan increase and a population decrease in the agrarian areas. For one thing the new affluent populations cry for their own homes created a need for building new houses. The easy answer for the place to build and the way to do it was lying in the suburbs. Alongside this came a demand for cars and highways which went trough an increase. People had a number of reasons for wanting to live in suburbs. They were longing for more spacious homes, greater security, and better education for their children. Some also moved to suburbs because of racial issues. (The suburbs were mainly segregated) All of this could these minor societies provide. The suburban lives encouraged uniformity; all the surroundings were similar, there was a need of a sense of belonging. There were created a conforming culture where social life had a homogenized character. The conformity of suburban lives gave way to a drastic increase in memberships in social institutions, the religious participation was especially renewed. Religion was set in bloom partly because of the Cold War where Communists were seen as anti God. Hence became religion an expression for patriotism. This was underlined by president Eisenhower among others. The American people wished that their own comfortable way of life could be reassured through religion, and so came an upbeat and soothing religious tone to be for sale; the gospel.

In corporate life big business grew bigger, and this had an effect on the working man. He went from being a hard-working individual, advancing by means of his own creativity and ability, to becoming a person within a collective cooperation and achievement.These things had consequences at home. The women were led back to the roles they played before the war. Campaigns were led to lead the women back to the kitchen. They were considered obliged to leave their jobs in the workforce so that the veterans could get "their jobs" back. The most honorable thing women could do were considered to be fostering a family at home.

As shown there existed a conforming culture consisting of affluent, consuming and content american people. These people were satisfied with what the new America had to offer, and at ease with their lives such as they were.
But at the same time there were people questioning this contentment. These were americans that expressed a growing sense of unease. They felt that maybe the american society was becoming too conformist and too materialistic. The battle between idealism and materialism had begun.

The same events that had created the earlier mentioned cultural expression, had also created a reaction upon it self. The new situation in which America was placed did not always give people a feeling of ease. The fact that The States now had global influence and responsibilities was reason enough to give some of the american people a scare. Also in postwar America a paranoid feeling developed. As mentioned earlier, the americans view of communists was not very pleasant.Presumably they felt their new interests threatened and as a guardian of democracy there developed what Churchill called "the iron curtain" between east and west. I do not intend to discuss the outbreak of the Cold War, but merely point out that it existed. With McCarthy this Red Scare developed to a countrywide plague. This of course could as easily result in a feeling of suspicion and anxiety as in neglect (as in the cultural expression above). In addition the mere fact that much of the american might and welfare were build on military power contributed to an uneasy feeling amongst a people known to be isolationistic in a country which in prewar times did not go for a big military force, but for lasting peace. Only a short time after World War II America got involved in the Korean war. But the two biggest consequences of The War were that the american people were given insight in the cruel capabilities of humans (i.e. concentration camps) and were given the knowledge of the annihilation powers of their new weapon--the nuclear war heads--at the same time.
All of the above contributed to giving some of the americans a feeling of unease. This is mostly expressed in art works of the time, often as a feeling of alienation and disillusionment. A result of these feelings could easily end with nihilism.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir02.htm

"High Heels on Web Pavement: Film Noir"

Femme fatale—is defined as “an irresistibly attractive woman, especially one who leads men into danger or disaster”. To me the most engaging semblance of a “femme fatale” is the stunning image of Lana Turner, as the camera pans from her ankles upward in that breathtaking shot from The Postman Always Rings Twice 1946.

Extremes

The most consistent aspect of film noir, apart from its visual style, is its protagonists. If a usable definition of the noir protagonist is to be formulated, it must encompass its most intrinsic character motif—alienation. The undercurrent that flows through most high noir films is the failure on the part of the male leads to recognize the dishonesty inherent in many of noir’s principal women. This tragic flaw destroys the central male characters in films as diverse as Scarlet Street 1945, The Locket 1947, and Angle Face 1953. It's embodied in the John Dall character in Gun Crazy 1949, whose youthful fascination with fire arms eventually leads him into a relationship with a woman who not only shares his gun craziness but who also introduces him to the parallel worlds of eroticism and violence. A more extreme example of this confusion is exemplified with Dana Andrews in Laura 1944, and Edward G. Robinson in Women in the Window 1944. Robinson and Andrews are fascinated initially not by the flesh and blood women, but merely by paintings—images of them.

The overtly Freudian aspects of such relationships function as a foundation on which to construct a sequence of narrative events that typify the noir vision. Many of these male “victims” are not trapped exclusively by sexual obsessions. Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity 1944, initially considers whether he is capable of committing murder for a woman. Then he thinks about effecting the perfect crime (his entanglement with Phyllis’ phony insurance claim), “It’s beating the house”, he thinks “sort of like the croupier that bets on the turn of the roulette wheel, when he knows the numbers to play”.

Detour

Edgar Ulmer’s Poverty Row cult-classic, Detour, 1945, is fraught with outrageous coincidences that in most accounts would be far too absurd to confront, but in Ulmer’s skilled hands are accepted as legitimate premises. Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, a disgruntled piano player in a New York night club. When his fiancée walks out on him for stardom in Hollywood, he decides to fellow her, and sets out to hitch hike west to join her. He gets picked up by a oddball character played by Edmond MacDonald who is carrying a large sum of money and happens to be driving all the way to California. MacDonald relates a story to Robert’s about a female hitch hiker he picked up earlier. In a blundering attempt to ravish her, she viciously attacked him, her finger nail marks clearly discernible on his face. As Roberts takes a turn driving, the MacDonald character mysteriously dies. Roberts thinking that the police will not believe his innocence in MacDonald’s bizarre death, hides the body and drives on alone. The next day Roberts picks up Vera, played with absolute aplomb by the very underrated Ann Savage.

Ultimate Femme Fatale

Out of the Past, 1947, while not a perfect example of the best of the noir cycle, contains many of the elements of the genre. It is best remembered as the film that introduced the erotic and lethal Jane Greer. The beautiful dark-haired Bettejane Greer came to Hollywood in 1945, a B player, she appeared in such obscure notables as Dick Tracy 1945, and The Falcon’s Alibi 1946. Out of the Past was one of only three noir films in which she appeared, the others being, They Won’t Believe Me 1947, and again opposite Robert Mitchum in the Big Steal 1949. Greer appeared in nine additional films through 1957. She took a brief hiatus until the mid-1960s, and has appeared off and on since.

Jane Greer was the “real deal”, unlike many of the frivolous noir semi-goddesses (Lauren Becall, Martha Vickers, Jane Russell, or Laraine Day), her sexiness was derived from sheer cunning. She did not rely on the parodistic flirtations so common to the counterfeits of the genre—while entertaining actresses, they lacked the appeal and darkness of the authentic femme fatale. A fine actress, I’ve always wondered why Greer did not become an icon of the genre in the mold of Gloria Grahame or Lizabeth Scott. She possessed the perfect on-screen persona of a post-war desolation angle. When Robert Mitchum firsts encounters her in the Mexican café, in an early scene from Out of the Past, she describes the complete night spot where he might feel more at home, and as she turns to walk away she tells him, “I sometimes go there”. At that moment we sense the hero’s ultimate calamity. Later we witness her brutally kill two men, and as Mitchum watches in terror, we cannot be confident that in the end he will not wind with her, such is the power of her sexuality.

Later Femme Fatales

Robert Siodmak’s, The Killer’s 1946 and Criss Cross 1949 are fine examples of Universal’s contribution to the noir cycle. In both films it’s the deadly female who topples the hero. Another Siodmak offering is the much downplayed, The File on Thelma Jordon 1950. Barbara Stanwyck portrays a different type of femme fatale than her Phyllis Dietrichson character in Double Indemnity, whom Thelma resembles in method and motivation. This time she ensnares Wendell Cory, playing assistant district attorney Cleve Marshall. Marshall is much more innocent that Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff, who admits trying to beat the house, well before he meets Phyllis. From the beginning Thelma loves her victim, whereas Phyllis was not smitten until the very end in Double Indemnity. Where Phyllis and Walter are chillingly logical in their scheme, Thelma and Cleve are guilt-ridden, and clumsily romantic. In the end Cleve is not completely ostracized, or dead as was his counterpart Walter Neff. He is however, scarred immeasurably—an emotional Sisyphus, he must now forever bear the weight of his misdeeds.

What Happened

The archetypal model of film noir had run its course by the mid-1950s. The requisite entry of that period, at least among most film critics of the day, was Robert Aldrich’s take on Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly 1955, by then though Spillane had moved from the hard boiled pulp hero of the post-war years to the new antagonists of cold-war America, the new great fear of the moment—the “Commies”. Kiss Me Deadly was a greater influence on the French “New Wave” movement, than a further definition of film noir.

By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, strong, tough, independent women were being replaced by coadjutors and consorts. “Leading Ladies” who, though portrayed as capable and self-reliant had, however, moved well into the background. A prime example is Doris Day in Pillow Talk 1959. And so to the male protagonists, who were now being portrayed as gallant Don Juan’s or attentive Casanova’s, a fashion that was to reach it zenith with the James Bond films.

To me, the “classic noir period”, spanned the interval just after World War II, until the early 1950s. The central figures portrayed in these films, were too often caught in their double binds, filled with existential bitterness. They were drowning outside of the social mainstream. They came to represent America’s stylized vision of itself, a cultural reflection of the mental dysfunction of a nation in uncertain transition. And often these characters were women, the femme fatales of a film style distinctly original, and wholly American.

¹Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, “Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style”

http://www.moderntimes.com/palace/film_noir/index.html

Conclusion: What Good Are Crime Films?

Now that this survey of crime subgenres has ended, it is time to
return to the question that haunted its opening chapter: What
is illuminated by considering a given film like The Godfather
(1972) or Murder on the Orient Express (1974) or Fargo (1996) as a
crime film rather than a gangster film or a detective story or a black
comedy? More generally, what is gained by defining the crime film as
a strong genre that not only incorporates but logically underpins such
better-known genres as the gangster film, the private-eye film, the film
noir, and the police film? Discussing crime comedies like Fargo as
crime films that happen to be humorous rather than comedies that
happen to involve crime seeks to expand the range and resonance of
the crime genre at the risk of choosing examples many viewers might
dismiss – and indeed of diluting the genre as a whole. Many viewers,
perhaps most, do experience The Thin Man (1934) or Charade (1963)
or Fargo as crime films with comic relief, but how many viewers, after
all, would categorize Arsenicand Old Lace (1944) or The Trouble with
Harry (1955) or Some Like It Hot (1959) as crime films rather than comedies?
The point of discussing such films as crime films is not to inflate the
importance of one genre at the expense of another but to indicate the
ways in which previous definitions of crime films may have been unwisely
parochial. No extant definition of crime films prescribes solemnity
as a criterion of the genre, yet historians of crime films regularly
ignore crime comedies, presumably on the grounds that they are not
really crime films.1 Such distinctions between more and less real members
of a given genre, however, are as futile as they are inevitable, not
because genre films cannot be consensually categorized, but because
these distinctions ignore the nature and purpose of generic classification
in the first place.

Whatever grounds they take as their basis, all attempts to distinguish
real crime films fromthe less real, like all attempts to distinguish
crime films categorically from members of other genres, assume that
genres are essential and logical, parallel and mutually exclusive, like
Platonic norms. But because generic categories are as culturally constructed
as the works they are intended to categorize, they are always
historically situated, ad hoc, subjective, and inflected by (indeed rooted
in) a particular agenda. This is the real point of Rick Altman’s distinction
between semantic and syntactic genre markers, as he notes
in proposing that “the relationship between the semantic and the syntactic
constitutes the very site of negotiation between Hollywood and
its audience, and thus between ritual and ideological uses of genre.”2
Although Steve Neale aptly notes that many accounts of Hollywood
genres “have been driven by critical and theoretical agendas rather
than by a commitment to detailed empirical analysis and thorough industrial
and historical research,”3 the whole project of genre theory,
from the construction of films as members of a genre to the attempt
to synthesize genres or their rationales in the service of a more general
theory of communications, remains by its very nature agendadriven.
It seems clear, then, that the question of what good is the conceptual
category of crime films is really another, and more illuminating,
way of posing an apparently simpler question: What good are crime
films? The business of this final chapter is to indicate briefly what sort
of cultural work crime films as a genre do for the corporations that
produce them, the viewers that consume them, and the society that
authorizes their currency, and how the answers to those questions are
connected to the questions of what counts as a crime film and why –
why the category might be useful in revealing some of the films’ leading
family connections and motives, which depend on what Altman
has called “the uses to which members of the family are put.”4
The most obvious features crime films of different subgenres share
are a grammar of typological situations and a cast of stock characters.
Whatever their subgenre, most crime films present events, twists, and
revelations that are so formulaic not only in themselves but in their
interrelations that they can truly be called a grammar (or, in Altman’s
terms, a syntax). Part of this consistency, of course, stems from Holly-
wood’s injunction that crime does not pay. Thus gangsters rise only
to fall; an ambitious, well-planned robbery involving a gang of thieves
working closely together will invariably go wrong sooner or later; the
most mysterious crime, whether or not it is presented as a mystery
to the audience, will always be resolved by a close examination of the
evidence, even when that evidence is inconclusive, as in the Claus von
Bülow case; and crooked policemen are inevitably brought down by
the institutional power of the police force, even though that same
force, once it is corrupted, is no match for a single crusading officer.
Crime films are equally consistent in the opportunities they offer criminals:
Unstealable jewels like the Pink Panther, protected by state-ofthe-
art security systems, are nothing more than a trope, an invitation
to theft; informers and undercover police officers are sure to have
their lives threatened, even if they elude these threats; and nervous,
secretive characters who beg for official protection are marked for
death whatever their subgenre.

None of this is surprising or especially illuminating; it is merely an
indication of the extent to which the subject of crime, bracketed by
Hollywood’s official morality and its imperative to sensationalism,
generates a formula that transcends specific subgenres. What is more
revealing is the changing role the stock characters of crime films play
in different subgenres. The no-nonsense cop who plays by the book,
for example, is a staple of the crime film; but he (or, very occasionally,
she) has radically different roles in different subgenres. In private-eye
films like Lady in the Lake (1947) and Chinatown (1974) he is the hero’s
antagonist; in victim films like Fury (1936) and Suspicion (1941) he is
either a menace or a failed protector to the beleaguered hero. In some
police films, like Touch of Evil (1958) and The Untouchables (1987), he
is the hero; in erotic thrillers whose heroes happen to be police officers,
like BasicInstinc t (1992), he is the loose-cannon hero’s conscience
or his nemesis. Lawyers are the heroes as well as the villains
of lawyer films, but in police films and private-eye films their penchant
for legalism always makes them untrustworthy. A Perfect World (1993)
even manages to create an evil victim who is much more dangerous
than the good-hearted fellow-convict who kills him [Fig. 75]. To a remarkable
extent, the subgenres of the crime film are distinguished
from each other not by the stories they tell but by the attitudes they
adopt toward those stories.

A stock question gangster films raise, for example, is why people become
criminals. These films suggest that the reasons are specifically
Conclusion: What Good Are Crime Films? 291
sociopathic: an alienation from a remote or uncaring society combined
with an overreaching vanity or megalomania. But just as different
westerns adopt very different attitudes to the conflict they all
share between the frontier and the coming of civilization (so that, for
instance, the civilizing rancher heroes of Red River [1948], become the
anticivilizing outlaws of Shane [1953]), police films and lawyer films
tend to peg criminal behavior much more narrowly to greed, films
noirs to sexual victimization by a predatory woman, erotic thrillers
to masculine hysteria. Hence police heroes pursue criminals who deserve
to be caught or killed because they have chosen to be criminals,
but films noirs and erotic thrillers present criminals who cannot help
but kill. Caper films like The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and nihilist neonoirs
like The Grifters (1990) bring the question full circle by suggesting
that the question is beside the point, since there is no reason to
look for an explanation for any particular criminal behavior when society
itself is necessarily criminal.5

Criminal behavior, then, is the fault of a cruelly alienating society,
or of ethnic self-identification, or vaulting personal ambition, conscious
avarice, sexual beguilement, male hysteria, the fatal need for
the company of others – not just a warped society, but the social impulse
as such. In every case, the subject of criminality is used to focus
the problematic relationship between individual and social power and
justice, but each adopts a different point of view that restricts it to telling
only part of the story. To tell the full story, even if it were possible,
would far exceed Hollywood’s recipe for mass entertainment.
The full story, however, continues to haunt the partial story each
subgenre presents, for every film in every crime subgenre is marked
by numberless traces of the alternative crime story it could have
been. A crime comedy like Arsenicand Old Lace, which sets its batty
maiden aunts against their dangerously sociopathic nephew, is filled
with intimations of the serious crime film it could have been, and may
still (but probably will not) turn into. Fargo, going still further, is a
crime comedy whose every sequence toys with the possibility of consequential
terror, even at its most disturbingly amusing. The kidnappers’
trip to Brainerd is filled with jokes that break the tension but
do not prevent them from kidnapping and eventually killing Jean Lundegaard.
What’s more, if every crime comedy is potentially a crime
melodrama, the reverse is equally true. The Godfather, for all its tragic
pretensions, could have been a comedy – a possibility explored intermittently
by GoodFellas (1990) and released full throttle by Jane
Austen’s Mafia! (1998). Indeed, if parodies in general, from Dead Men
Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) to the three Naked Gun films (1988–94) are
considered to release the comedy repressed by their progenitor texts’
self-seriousness, then it is no wonder that crime films have so often
been parodied, since cultural repression is as central to their agenda
as cultural analysis.

In the same way, crime films are haunted by the visual traces and
tones of other crime subgenres. Just as the gold lighting used to invoke
the nostalgic past in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II
(1974) is invoked by the ubiquitous wood-paneled train interiors in
Murder on the Orient Express, the low-key lighting characteristic of
films noirs haunts private-eye films and police films as well, sometimes
by its presence (Experiment in Terror, 1962), sometimes by its
absence (Chinatown), and the expressionistically cluttered spaces of
Fritz Lang are echoed by Double Indemnity (1944), modulated by Kiss
Me Deadly (1955), or resolutely refused by Fargo. Moreover, Fargo’s
vertiginous comedy serves as a reminder that every crime film is
shadowed by the farce it might have been if the criminals’ petty obses-
Conclusion: What Good Are Crime Films? 293
75. A Perfect World: Escaped convict Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner), a killer
whose rapport with lonely Phillip Perry (T. J. Lowther) brings out his gentler
side.
sions had been considered from a different angle. Every crime film is
informed by an enriching awareness of the alternative subgenres it
invokes, if only by contrast. The crucial importance of the crime-film
genre is that it foregrounds the ambivalence that makes these alternative
ways of seeing bad cops or the past or petty obsession essential
to each subgenre’s and each individual film’s presentation of its stock
elements.

Although each crime subgenre is haunted by implicit possibilities
explicitly realized by other subgenres, these possibilities, helpful as
they are for ad hoc classification, cannot be used to distinguish different
crime subgenres categorically from each other. Even within a
given subgenre, typological figures will assume ambiguities based on
their affinities to other subgenres. In L.A. Confidential (1997) it is obvious
that Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) is the loner cop familiar from hundreds
of earlier movies; but will he turn out to be a vigilante cop like Frank
Bullitt, a crooked cop like Capt. McCluskey in The Godfather, or a suspicious
cop like Det.Williams in Blue Velvet? For most of the film’s running
time, the answer is ambiguous. Even after L.A. Confidential has
run its course, its police hero remains indelibly marked, as each of
his progenitor heroes is marked, by the possibilities of what he might
have been.

Grouping well-established crime genres like the gangster film and
the film noir together under the more comprehensive, albeit synthetic,
genre of the crime film illuminates many of their formulaic family
resemblances; but reversing the procedure and defining these genres
as subsets of a more global crime genre goes further to explain the
abiding source of their power. It is only the crime genre itself, and not
any single subgenre, that accounts for the enabling ambiguity at the
heart of all crime subgenres and every film within them: the easy recognition
of the genre’s formulas coupled with a lingering uncertainty
about their import.

Even films that are not normally considered crime films can benefit
from this enrichment if they are considered hypothetically as crime
films. It is clear from the beginning of Unforgiven (1992) that the retired
gunslinger William Munny (Clint Eastwood) will overcome his reservations
about returning to violent ways and ride out to Big Whiskey
to claim the bounty the local whores have offered for killing the two
cowboys who disfigured one of their number and were let off by Sheriff
Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) with a fine payable to the saloonkeeper
whose place was disturbed. It is equally obvious that the film
will end with a confrontation between Munny and Little Bill that Little
Bill can hardly survive. What remains in doubt until the film’s unsettling
ending, and perhaps beyond, is how viewers will feel about the
climax they have been awaiting for two hours, when an eerily selfcontained
ex-killer who insists that all that is behind him goes up
against a genially crooked sheriff who represents, along with Munny’s
dead wife and the whores’ thirst for vengeance, the closest thing to
moral authority in the film. Unforgiven has rightly been considered
a meditation on the Hollywood western; but like Rancho Notorious
(1952) and The Naked Spur (1953), it is also haunted by its affinities
with contract-killer films like Murder, Inc. (1960), avenger films like
D.O.A. (1950), and vigilante police films like those featuring Clint Eastwood’s
most recognizable hero, Dirty Harry Callahan.

Such exercises reveal not only the elastic boundaries of the crime
film but the ways in which the genre’s cultural work is linked to the
recognition of individual gangster films and police films and crime
comedies as first and foremost crime films; and they help to explain
the rise and fall of the different subgenres within the constant popularity
of the crime genre. Crime films are always likely to be popular in
liberal democracies because such cultures place the debate between
individual liberty and institutional power at the heart of their constitutional
agenda. Indeed, the very idea of a constitution is already a
privileged site for such a debate. Unlike utopian cultures, which would
have no need of crime films, or repressive regimes, which would not
tolerate the antisocial fantasies they license, liberal democracies renegotiate
the relations between individual liberty and institutional
power ceaselessly, in every new political campaign and election, every
law and trial and arrest. Most of these actions, of course, involve competing
institutions – corporations, aspiring beneficiaries of government
funding, ethnic and racial groups, governments – rather than
individuals; but crime films, like elections, personalize this process by
focusing it on a small number of individuals, even (or especially) if
they are set against faceless groups like the police, the law, or the
Mob. The constant ferment liberal democracies prescribe over private
rights and the public weal explains the success of crime stories in
such cultures as England, whose abiding fascination with crime-story
heroes from Richard III to Magwitch, from Sherlock Holmes to Jack the
Ripper, far outpaces the occurrence of actual crimes.
Within this context, however, different crime subgenres flourish or
recede depending on a multitude of factors: studios’ economic imper-
atives; institutional censorship; the power of their nonfictional forbears
(the decline of the Hollywood gangster is mandated by a moratorium
that corresponds to both the enforcement of the Production
Code and the repeal of Prohibition); viewers’ changing attitudes toward
the government and their own majoritarian culture (as the social
conformism of The Desperate Hours [1955] gives way to the antiauthoritarianism
of Bonnie and Clyde [1967] and the brooding nostalgia of
the Godfather films); the shifting attraction to or revulsion from the
power of the law (from the righteous social engineering of To Kill a
Mockingbird [1962] to the cynical distrust of lawyers and all their
works in films based on John Grisham novels); the will to social belonging
or estrangement (from the yearning for trust and acceptance
by the hero of “G” Men [1935] to the impatience with the system in
The French Connection [1971] and the disillusionment with the system
in Serpico [1973]); and disruptions in the social order too deep for government
to cure (the wartime threat of working women in films noirs,
the backlash against women’s broader claims to empowerment in
erotic thrillers). It is no mystery why so many of the staple crime subgenres
often flourish at the same time, as they have during the 1990s,
since their partial, apparently inconsistent views of the conflict are as
logically compatible as the assumption in individual films like Reversal
of Fortune (1990) and A Few Good Men (1992) that lawyers are both
crusading heroes and the scum of the earth.

Still, the crime genre, like all popular genres, is not simply parasitic
on political or social history; it has a history of its own that acts as
another engine of change. Each genre has a logic of its own that is constantly
subject to retrospective change by three closely related kinds
of development. The arrival of a new work, if it is accepted as part of
the genre, encourages viewers to reconsider previous members of the
genre in its light, as The Godfather and Chinatown not only extended
the gangster and private-eye genres but spearheaded a critical reassessment
of them, and Psycho (1960) inaugurated a revival of the
horror film by setting a new standard for onscreen violence that was
in turn rapidly outmoded. New developments in contemporary social
history may awaken viewers to a new sense of the parallels or contrasts
between their time and that represented in earlier films, as Bonnie
and Clyde’s use of the Depression as a mirror to the social and institutional
estrangement of America’s youth in the sixties provoked
debates about both the sixties and the thirties, even to a new interest
in the heroes’ Depression chic fashions. In addition, contemporary

arguments by film theorists and analysts can function, as effectively
as new additions to a film genre, as intertexts that cast new light on
old genres, often in unintended ways. Laura Mulvey’s influential “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” for example, ends its argument
about the exclusion of female viewers from the movies by expressing
the wish that demystifying this exclusion will lead to a decline in such
sexist commercial cinema that female viewers will greet with no more
than “sentimental regret.”6 In the twenty-five years since Mulvey
wrote, commercial cinema has certainly not changed in the directions
she hoped; but critics seeking to theorize a place for female viewers
and to liberate the repressed female voices of older films have revolutionized
the ways contemporary viewers watch films noirs, reordering
the genre and making it central to an understanding of American
film.

One result of this constant change from different sources is that although
genres like the crime film look stable both from a distance and
at any given moment, they are constantly subject to revisionist debate,
and one viewer’s revisionist update (e.g., Reservoir Dogs, 1992;
Pulp Fiction, 1994) is another viewer’s rejected offense against the
genre, and a third viewer’s classic against which to measure even
more contemporary updates like 2 Days in the Valley (1996) and Suicide
Kings (1998). So it might seem that the crime-film genre is nothing
but a mirage that dissolves on close examination. What all this historical
jostling really indicates, however, is simply that the crime genre,
though as real as each viewer’s opinion and as predictable as viewers’
broad consensus, cannot be defined categorically or ahistorically. It
is whatever studios, filmmakers, and viewers think it is, and over the
years they have felt free to think it was many different things – usually
several things at once.

Such a broad critical categorymight well be further expanded to include
all movies in which crime plays however minor a role. On the
other hand, if crime films are those that use crimes to figure problems
of social justice or institutional power or moral guilt in specifically
legal terms, the crime genre might become more illuminating, as it
would certainly become more powerful, if it were reconfigured as the
injustice genre, the social-disorder genre, the power genre, even the
action genre. Although to do so would risk stretching it to its breaking
point, there would be gains as well as losses in such a procedure.
Alternatively, the crime film could well be organized around different
subgenres this book has neglected. The most obvious of these, the
man-on-the-run story, has been analyzed at length not only by Charles
Derry and Martin Rubin7 but by forty years’ work of commentary on
Alfred Hitchcock. To emphasize the importance of such films fromThe
39 Steps (1935) to The Fugitive (1993) to the crime genre would foreground
questions not only about the fugitive’s and the pursuing system’s
moral complicity but about the range of tactics fugitives employ
to keep one step ahead of the law. To emphasize films about white-
collar criminals, which invert the world of The Asphalt Jungle, would
raise questions about the relation between normal business practices
and criminal practices, and ultimately about the fetishizing of workspace
and the work ethic, whether the heroes are innocents caught in
unethical situations that skirt illegality to a greater or lesser extent (All
My Sons, 1948; Executive Suite, 1954; Patterns, 1956; The Apartment,
1960;Wall Street, 1987 [Fig. 76]; The Hudsucker Proxy, 1993; Disclosure,
1994) or businesspeople whose turn toward literal criminality indicts
their professional milieu metaphorically (The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951;
The Bad Sleep Well, 1960; A Shock to the System, 1990; Glengarry Glen
Ross, 1992; American Psycho, 2000). Films about outlaws – sympathetic
lawbreakers like Robin Hood, Jesse James, and the protagonists of
Thelma & Louise (1991) – provoke debates about the morality of the
established order. Films about prisons like those in The Big House
(1930), 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), and Brute Force (1947) present
them as social microcosms from which escape, the convicts’ one obsession,
is no more possible than from life itself; even when Tom Connors
(Spencer Tracy) does escape from Sing Sing, he is obviously fated
to return. The doomed capers in The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing
(1956), whose gangs are assembled, like pickup ball teams, for the purpose
of pulling off one big job, exchange the romantic fatalism of the
gangster film’s promethean, system-defying individual hero for a cynical
fatalism about social organizations themselves.

All these subgenres focus on contradictions within the social order
the heroes are constrained to serve, imitate, or flee. Linking M (1931),
Gun Crazy (1949), Psycho, Cape Fear (1962/1991) [Fig. 77], Repulsion
300 Crime Films
77. Cape Fear (1991): Robert De Niro’s downscale sociopathology. (De Niro,
Nick Nolte)
(1965), Badlands (1973), The Killer Inside Me (1976), The Shining
(1980), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), The Silence of the Lambs
(1991), Single White Female (1992), Natural Born Killers (1994), Speed
(1994), and To Die For (1995) [Fig. 78] – customarily parceled out
among diverse subgenres – as films about sociopathic or psychopathic
criminals would raise questions about the psychopathology of
crime, its status as a mark of social alienation or of internalized conflicts
typical of an alienating society itself. Finally, giving pride of place
to the subgenre of superheroes and supercriminals from Dr. Mabuse
to Superman, Batman, and Darkman would recast what have most often
been considered action fantasies as allegories that examine the
relations between institutional and physical laws and the limits of the
humanity constructed by earthly powers.
One could go still further by exploring the complementary genres
of espionage and international intrigue, which are clearly related to
crime films.8 Most of the early James Bond films, for instance, involve
some form of international blackmail by terrorists who have stolen
something dangerous or irreplaceably valuable, and much of Bond’s
time in Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), and Diamonds Are Forever
(1971) is spent in detective work as he tries to figure out just
what SPECTRE or its allies are up to this time. These affinities become
even more pronounced in films like The Parallax View (1974) and Betrayed
(1988), which meld domestic terrorism with undercover detective
work.

Alternative theories of the crime film, then, could readily be constructed
by postulating the primacy of any of these genres. Any film
in which a crime occurs can fairly be considered a crime film; the test
of the classification, as of the resulting definition of the genre, depends
on its usefulness in illuminating individual examples and the relations
among them. More generally, crime films could certainly, as noted earlier,
be redefined as injustice films or social-disorder films or power
films or action films. The best reason to resist any of these labels is
suggested by the last one: Action films all involve the attempt to right
some perceived wrong through physical action, and therefore have a
great deal in common with crime films; but assimilating one category
to the other would achieve only a single purpose – underlining these
similarities, in order, for example, to explore the morality of power exchanges
in mass culture – at the cost of putting one of two enormously
popular genre labels out of business. Studies of the relations between
the two genres, perhaps overlaying one of them hypothetically on the
other, are therefore far more likely, because more useful, than a consensual
redefinition of either one in terms of the other.

In the same way, redefining the crime genre as the injustice genre,
the social-disorder genre, or the power genre would make it virtually
coextensive with what David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin
Thompson have called “classical Hollywood cinema” – fictional narratives
in which an individual or group of people struggle to overcome
obstacles toward a clearly defined goal whose decisive success or failure
marks the end of the story. Hence Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson
argue that the narrative and stylistic deviance of film noir, which
“no more subverts the classical film than crime fiction undercuts the
orthodox novel,” can readily be recuperated within the Hollywood
paradigm.9 Several years earlier, Steve Neale had already argued that
the leading Hollywood genres are all “modes of . . . [a] narrative system”
that “mainstream cinema produces as its commodity.”10 Broadening
the crime genre to the extent of identifying it with this entire
narrative system would indicate the degree to which Hollywood narrative
is rooted in social problems that have specifically illegal manifestations,
but at the cost of erasing the crime film’s distinctiveness
from other Hollywood narratives.

What is the point in maintaining this distinctiveness if the crime
film’s frontiers are so ragged? The answer is that the genre is not defined
by its borders but by its center, its core appeal to different viewers.
Not everyone laughs at the same things, but nearly everyone recognizes
the importance of laughter in defining comedy.11 In the same
way, though not everyone will agree what counts as a crime film, this
volume’s survey of crime subgenres suggests that most viewers for
any popular genre are responding to an appeal most economically encapsulated
by Poe’s representation of the criminal and the detective
as mirror images of each other: to turn cultural anxiety into mass entertainment.
Although this imperative may sound peculiar, it is behind
all the great Hollywood genres, which gain their power not by ignoring
or escaping from viewers’ problems but by exploring, and usually
attempting to resolve, social and psychological problems that are far
more intransigent outside the movies. The western and the war movie
romanticize problems of masculinity, violence, and national identity
by transplanting them to a mythic past or projecting them onto a geopolitical
canvas that makes them necessary for survival. The domestic
melodrama, like its television cousin, the soap opera, heroically inflates
the problems of family life and the domestic sphere in order to
make the corresponding problems of its homebound target audience
more palatable, even glamorous. Romantic comedies mine the uncertainties
of courtship for laughs; musical comedies show the triumph
of self-created performers over their doubts and inhibitions.
In each case the basic recipe for manufacturing entertainment is the
same. First, anxieties about violence or personal identity or the dignity
of home life are projected onto a typological, and thus reassuringly
familiar, generic canvas, preferably one whose mise-en-scène is comfortably
remote from the audience’s own – as in the western, which
takes place long ago and (for many) far away; or the animated cartoon,
in which unendingly homicidal conflicts are played out against
a drawn background whose two-dimensional unreality and promise of
magical transformations render it doubly reassuring; or the film noir,
which follows the mean streets of a stylishly seedy modern city.
Next, the anxieties that give the genre its cultural currency are simplified
from multifaceted dilemmas into conflictual dualities. Having
transported Dorothy Gale from the intractable problems of the Depression
to the magical land of Oz, her film transforms the sorts of
questions that bedeviled her at home (How can she keep Miss Gulch
from taking Toto away? How can she get the adults in her world to take
her seriously? Where can she find her heart’s desire?) into simpler
choices she can use to define her direction and her goal under the
guidance of the good witch Glinda and the yellow brick road that leads
her to adult surrogates who do take her seriously because she has rescued
them of her own accord. More generally, popular genres reduce
the anxieties they engage by redefining them in terms of dualities that
can be more simply resolved. The passengers in Stagecoach (1939)
cannot defeat the Indians, but the cavalry can; the problems of how
to domesticate romance without killing it are resolved in Hollywood
romantic comedies either by treating marriage as a conclusion that resolves
all problems, preferably by rescuing one of the lovers from an
unsuitable alternative match (It Happened One Night, 1934) or by giving
married couples a chance at a second courtship (The Awful Truth,
1937; The Palm Beach Story, 1942). Musicals from Top Hat (1935) to
The Band Wagon (1953) allow their singing and dancing principals to
overcome their inhibitions and express the emotions that would otherwise
leave them painfully vulnerable through performance. Action
films reduce the complexities of geopolitics to a series of showdowns
between Us and Them.

The genius of these dualities is that they not only give viewers a
strong rooting interest in a radically simplified moral conflict but also
can easily vindicate either party to the conflict by demonizing the other,
and present an unqualified triumph through decisive action. The
hero’s triumph or heroic defeat is a vindication not only of the social
order but also of the audience’s psychic health, a wish-fulfillment fantasy
that manages to celebrate both individualism and social action
even as it valorizes the movies’ tendency to convert social or psychological
stalemates, like Frank Bullitt’s conflicts with politician Walter
Chalmers, into Bullitt’smore thrilling, visually arresting, and easily resolved
car chase through the streets of San Francisco.
All the genres of popular entertainment are celebrations of individual
heroic action as a way of cutting through the complexities of moral
dilemmas; but all genres also acknowledge the limits of this heroic
stance by somehow criticizing or undermining their enabling dualities
as simplistic and individual heroism as an all-purpose recipe for problem
solving. Since, as American classics from The Gold Rush (1925) to
Citizen Kane (1941) to Do the Right Thing (1989) show, the dialectic between
the celebration and the critique of heroism is Hollywood’smost
enduring subject, it is hardly surprising that this dialectic animates
so many Hollywood genres and provides the impetus behind their historical
evolution.

In the case of the crime film, this complication is joined by another
one constitutive of the genre. Although all crime films focus on a heroic
individual, they vary widely not only in their attitudes toward that
individual (as in the criminal heroes of gangster films or the antiheroes
of film noir) but in the character positions they choose to anoint as
heroes. It is rare to see self-professed enemies of love as the heroes
of romantic comedies, or Native Americans cast as the heroes of westerns
like Cheyenne Autumn (1964) or Dances with Wolves (1990) that
question the heroism of ethnic European settlers; yet criminals are as
likely to be the heroes of crime films as detectives or avengers, and
far more likely than victims. The active heroic role is more important
than the nature of the character who fills that role.
This point is driven home with particular emphasis by Traffic
(2000), Steven Soderbergh’s film about the Mexican–American drug
trade, which dramatizes the costs of heroin addiction by following
three separate stories whose characters, though unaware of each other,
repeatedly act out the slippery relationship among the roles of
criminal, victim, and avenger. The Mexican cop (Benicio del Toro) who
goes undercover in the attempt to exploit the rivalry between two
drug cartels relies on his criminal-looking behavior to preserve his life,
and sees his best friend killed when his criminal mask slips; the California
druglord’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose husband is arrested
turns into a criminal herself in order to survive [Fig. 79]; and
the American judge (Michael Douglas) who is named to head the Drug
Enforcement Agency has to confront his own daughter’s drug use,
which ends up turning the nation’s top drug cop into a victim and a
would-be avenger himself. Once it has established the importance of
each of these leading characters, the film is able to maintain considerable
sympathy for them through several truly distorting transformations.
In both its synoptic view of the drug trade and its awareness of the
ways the trade changes the behavior and even the moral role of everyone
it touches, Traffic might be nominated as the complete crime film.
But although its view of the heroin trade is more comprehensive than
that of most crime films – though considerably less nuanced than that
of Traffik (1989), Alistair Reid’s BBC miniseries on which it is based –
it is no more complete than that of Scarface (1932) or Fury or The Godfather.
Crime films of every stripe present what might seem to be pat
social conflicts, moral questions sharpened by their parties’ alliance
with legal right and wrong; but their attitude toward that conflict is
sharply ambivalent, if only because they function on behalf of both the
socially repressive agendas of their capitalist distributors and the escapist
fantasies of the mass audience whose patronage they seek. In
their quest to make entertainment out of taboo behavior, they treat
crime as both realistic and ritualistic, a shocking aberration and business
as usual, a vehicle of social idealism and of social critique. But
although the nature of the character who embodies the heroic role the
genre prescribes can vary from one crime film to the next even in the
same multiplex, the genre itself is best defined in terms of a single constitutive
theme: the romance of criminal behavior. This behavior is
most often incarnated in a criminal, of course, whether that criminal
is an outsized gangster like Tony Camonte in Scarface, an unwilling
killer like Al Roberts (Tom Neal) in Detour (1945), or a tragically ailing
paterfamilias like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III (1990).
Even when the crime film focuses on a victim or detective or avenger,
however, those heroes become interesting, admirable, and heroic
precisely to the extent that they begin to act like criminals – unlike
the criminals themselves, who may well end up acting like victims or
moral avengers but who need only act like criminals to hold viewers’
interest. Hence the criminal, more than the victim or the avenger, illustrates
the central function of the crime film: to allow viewers to experience
the vicarious thrills of criminal behavior while leaving them
free to condemn this behavior, whoever is practicing it, as immoral.
The continued fascination of the genre is not that it tirelessly inculcates
either or both of these positions for viewers that already understand
them to a fault, but that it encourages them to experience the
contradictions among these positions and their corollaries in a way
no analysis can capture.

The crime film is therefore well named, because of its three leading
figures – the victim, the criminal, and the avenger – it is the criminal
and the kind of behavior he or she represents that are primary, and
it is only to the extent that other characters are tempted by the criminal’s
example that their films become crime films: films whose specific
cultural task is to examine the price of social repression as imposed
by the institutions of the justice system. Joe Wilson struggles
with himself over whether he should emulate the mob that tried to kill
him in Fury. Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff and BasicInstinc t’s Det.
Nick Curran are drawn into criminal behavior through their involvement
in forbidden romance. J. J. Gittes confronts his own pettiness
and greed in Chinatown, and Jeffrey Beaumont his outlaw sexuality in
Blue Velvet, through their battles with monstrous antagonists; Det. Lt.
Frank Bullitt and Alan Dershowitz confront endless criticisms of their
work; Marge Gunderson restores law and order to Fargo by her failure
to understand the dark humor her story embodies; even Hercule
Poirot, in Murder on the Orient Express, ends by covering up a crime
committed by a group of vigilantes whose cause he feels is just. Each
of these films, like the subgenres they represent, appeals to the audience’s
own antisocial tendencies by cloaking them in the glamour and
mystery of the criminal, reassuring the audience that this fantasy is
only a waking dream, and leaving behind a lingering suggestion that
the duality of right and wrong that supported it may be due for a closer
look next week.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org

Fargo and the Crime Comedy

Despite their popularity, very little has been written on crime
comedies. Crime comedies are more often classified as comedies
(films people laugh at) that happen to be about crime
than as crime films (films about crime) that happen to be comical because
comedy is a stronger, more broadly recognized genre than the
crime film. This is despite the fact that comedy has been notoriously
difficult to define without circularity (comedies are movies that make
people laugh; movies make people laugh because they’re funny; people
feel free to laugh at things that might not otherwise seem funny
because they know they’re watching a comedy) ever since Aristotle’s
theory of comedy, a companion piece to his Poetics, was lost.1
No one complains that Hamlet is not a tragedy if it does not produce
tears, but most audiences define comedy in terms of their own laughter,
and not every audience laughs at the same things. Philosophies of
humor dating back to Aristotle have been dominated by three models
proposing variously that people laugh because they appreciate some
incongruity in a joke, or because of their sense of superiority to the
butts of comedy, or because they enjoy a sense of relief after being
wound up by the tension that is released by a punch line.2 But none
of these models – incongruity, superiority, release – has succeeded in
explaining all comedy. Literary and dramatic theorists have attempted
to circumvent this problem by proposing theories of comedy based
on structural models, but the arguments of comedy they propose, to
use Northrop Frye’s phrase, do little to explain why audiences laugh
at comedies.3 Hence comic theory continues to be divided between
two groups of analysts – literary theorists, who focus on what comedy
is, and philosophers of humor, who focus on why people laugh – who
often resemble blind men talking about elephants.
Although crime comedy is more widely considered a subgenre of
comedy than of the crime film, it depends on the conventions of the
crime film in one inescapable way. Comedy lacks its own distinctive
subject matter because there is no subject that is intrinsically funny.
So comedies of any sort are parasitic on the conventions of other
genres like the action film, the romance, and the crime film. Crime
comedies in particular tend to recycle the plots and characters of apparently
straightforward crime films, not only in parodies like High
Anxiety (1977), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), and Jane Austen’s
Mafia! (1998), but in films like Throw Momma from the Train (1987), a
virtual remake of Strangers on a Train (1951) turned into a comedy
largely by casting Danny DeVito as the importunate killer, Billy Crystal
as the man he begs to murder his overbearing mother, and Anne Ramsey
as the imperishable victim. Innumerable crime comedies begin
with potentially dramatic situations and then add one element that
turns them comical: the crooks’ need to steal an entire bank in Bank
Shot (1974), the ineffectuality of both the embattled Mafia widow’s
suitors in Married to the Mob (1988) [Fig. 67], the choice of a hit man’s
high-school reunion as the place for a murderous showdown in Grosse
Pointe Blank (1997).

However different their primary impulses might seem, comedies
and crime films both depend on outraging the establishment within
the film and viewers’ expectations about the film. Assuming that viewers
wish to laugh at criminal outrages that fulfill their own dark fantasies,
and will do so if they can be released from the moral decorum
that demands they condemn criminal behavior, many crime films
work to establish a decorum of acceptable outrage, just as noncomic
crime films might rely on a decorum that accepts mob killings or vigilante
cops as normal.4

The obvious way to establish a decorum of acceptable comic outrage
is to present victims who are comical because they are inconsequential,
despicable, or incapable of suffering serious harm, like the
eight murdered relatives all played by Alec Guinness in the Ealing
comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and the blustering criminals
who end up dying instead of their innocent intended victims in The
Ladykillers (1955) and Charade (1963). Audiences will laugh even at serious
crimes, however, if they are investigated by comical detectives
like Buster Keaton’s daydreaming amateur sleuth in Sherlock Jr. (1924),
the incompetent detectives played by W. C. Fields in The Bank Dick
(1940) and Groucho Marx in The Big Store (1941) and Love Happy
(1950), Inspector Jacques Clouseau of the Pink Panther movies (1964–
93), and Axel Foley in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise (1984–94). Finally,
criminal threats can be defused and rendered comical if the criminals
themselves are played for laughs, like the maiden-aunt killers of Arsenic
and Old Lace (1944); the oblivious couple who commit the murders
in Eating Raoul (1982) in hopes of financing a restaurant; the aspiring
standup comic of The King of Comedy (1982) who kidnaps a
talk-show host in order to break into show biz; and the mob boss in
Analyze This (1999) who consults an unwilling psychiatrist when he
unaccountably loses his appetite for killing [Fig. 68].

Although it might therefore seem that crime comedies are simply
crime films with comic relief added, like whipped cream on a sundae,
it would be a mistake to conclude that comical victims, avengers, and
villains are simply extraneous to the plots whose melodramatic force
they deflect. Instead, comic caper films, mysteries, and parodies display
the same thematic contradictions as their allegedly more serious
counterparts but use these contradictions to provoke laughter rather
than perturbation. In The Pilgrim (1923), Charlie Chaplin, as an es-
67. Married to the Mob: The embattled Mafia widow (Michelle Pfeiffer) and
her ineffectual police suitor (Matthew Modine).
caped convict masquerading as a country parson, plays not only a
comic villain whose plans to fleece his new congregation keep going
astray, but also a comic victim and a comic avenger. The opening
scenes explore the relation between apparent innocence and criminal
guilt by dramatizing how uncomfortable Chaplin is in his assumed role
as he keeps reverting to criminal habits, holding onto the grate at a
ticket window as if it were the bars of his prison cell and stowing away
on the train even though he has bought a ticket. But when he meets
an old lag (Charles Riesner) who worms his way into the same household,
Chaplin’s imposter is forced to find increasingly ingenious ways
to thwart Riesner’s plan to steal the mortgage money from their kindly
hostess (Kitty Bradbury) and the daughter (Edna Purviance) for
whom Chaplin has fallen. From beginning to end, the film is organized
around a series of provocative jokes about the contradiction between
the title character’s criminal habits and his ever more noble instincts.
It is not sufficient, therefore, to say that films like The Pilgrim take what
would normally be a straightforward dramatic problem typical of
crime films and present it with a twist that makes it comical – the victims
are eminently dispensable, the detective clumsy and incompetent,
the criminals a pair of harmless maiden aunts – because comedy
itself is a mode of dramatizing these problems, not an escape from
them. The peculiar paradox of crime comedy is that the decorum its
twists undermine prescribes a normal, predictable round of violent
lawbreaking and summary justice. Crime comedies, which present a
world whose decorum is broken both by crime and by laughter, therefore
interrogate in a particularly pointed way the very possibility of
social and perceptual normality. Just as gangster films and private-eye
films present not so much a breakdown of social logic as its displacement
onto a world in which criminal behavior is a given, comedy interrogates
the fallacies of normality through a logic of its own.

This logic operates at its simplest in animated films, many of which
would be readily classified as crime films if they were not classified
as cartoons. The submerged generic affiliation of Walt Disney’s first
animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), for instance,
as a period crime film with musical interludes emerges clearly
in Howard Hawks’s two updated, nonanimated retellings of the Snow
White story, Ball of Fire (1941) and A Song Is Born (1948).
A still more straightforward model of the crime cartoon comedy is
provided by Warner Bros.’ Road Runner animated shorts. The sevenminute
stories, each of them presenting several of Wile E. Coyote’s
unsuccessful traps for Road Runner, are so repetitious, both individually
and as a series, and feature such a small cast of characters and
so few possibilities for motivation and incident that their violent plots
become reassuringly ritualized. Audiences who know that the coyote
will never catch his innocent prey can relax and enjoy the complexity
of his traps and the certainty that he will be caught in them himself,
usually in ways unique to the drawn universe of cartoons. When the
coyote steps over the edge of a cliff in his enthusiastic pursuit of Road
Runner, for instance, he will never fall until he notices that he is in
danger; he will have plenty of time for a farewell to the audience; and
he will never suffer lasting damage from his well-deserved misadventures.
The violence of the series, as the cliché “cartoon violence” suggests,
is inconsequential. The ritual repetitions of highly predictable
plots, spiced by the playful physical inventions, transformations, and
impossibilities proper to the logic of the cartoon universe, at the
hands of a villainous agent who will never grow out of his obsession
or develop anything but a drolly ad hoc self-consciousness, all work
in the service of a comically selective imitation of the real life of criminals,
natural predators, and physical reality.

68. Analyze This: The iconic mob boss (Robert De Niro) and his unwilling
psychiatrist (Billy Crystal).
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) extends and complicates this cartoon
logic by crossing it with the logic of a carefully calibrated homage
to 1947 film noir. The combination of live-action and animated
characters in the same scenes produces a universe that combines features
of both genres. In physical terms, Roger casts cartoon shadows
that look drawn, but can have apparently photographed shadows cast
over him; he drinks real liquor and reacts to it by bouncing around the
room in antic cartoon fashion or spitting a live-action stream; yet he
can be knocked unconscious with a frying pan, and threatened with
total annihilation by the evil green “dip” of Judge Doom (Christopher
Lloyd). In moral terms, Roger is an irrepressibly madcap hero, the
only rabbit among the protagonists, but also a devoted husband distracted
and depressed by jealousy of his wife, Jessica, who is playing
pat-a-cake (literally, as it turns out) with live-action entrepreneur Marvin
Acme (Stubby Kaye). The film repeatedly plays for laughs the conflicts
between the mock-noir logic of its live-action world, from its
moody lighting to its period costumes, and its cartoon world, jammed
with puns, pratfalls, and cameos of Disney and Warners cartoon characters
– as when Jessica (voiced by Kathleen Turner), in the film’s
most famous line, tells private eye Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), “I’m
not bad. I’m just drawn that way.” The implication is not only that cartoon
logic can be adapted to live-action situations, but that live-action
logic itself is less monolithic, more multifarious, and in its different
versions more parochial and generic and subject to transformation
than it might appear.

The logic developed for cartoons can be readily be projected onto
live-action comedies like Blake Edwards’s five Pink Panther films. The
animated credit sequence for A Shot in the Dark (1964), for example,
shows a fireplug Clouseau, shining a flashlight on a succession of dark
screens and disclosing, along with the cast and production credits, a
series of guns and bombs that shoot him or blow up in his face, leaving
him annihilated until the next shot, when he returns intact. This
cartoon logic governs the film’s live action as well. No matter how often
Clouseau (Peter Sellers) is threatened with similar dangers, he survives
unharmed, leaving his audience free to enjoy his inventively geometric
pratfalls, his ritualistic incompetence, his failure to notice the
effects of his clumsiness on himself or others, and his laughable non
sequiturs.

Cartoons provide only the most obvious model for the logic of
crime comedies. The leading characters in A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
are each assigned a different place in the film’s more capacious comic
logic. Otto (Kevin Kline) is a cartoon villain, precise and mechanical
in his movements, implacable in his enmity, comical in his obsession
with Nietzsche and his two refrains, “Asshole!” (to the drivers he repeatedly
sideswipes) and “Don’t call me stupid” (to the romantic
trysters he interrupts in more and more incongruous ways). Ken (Michael
Palin) is a cartoon hero, the bemused innocent whose love for
both Wanda the woman (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Wanda the fish is so
pure that when he tries to kill Mrs. Coady (Patricia Hayes), the imperious
witness to the robbery (another quasi-cartoon figure) and succeeds
in his first two attempts only in killing her dogs, viewers can
readily sympathize with his frustration and heartbreak at the animals’
deaths instead of condemning him as a killer. Wanda is the film’s object
of universal desire, the bringer of fertility and sexual healing who
promises a comic resolution to whoever is lucky enough to possess
her at the fade-out. The barrister Archie (John Cleese), whom Wanda
tries to seduce in the hope of extracting information about where her
accomplice George (Tom Georgeson) stashed the crucial safe-deposit
key, is the unlikely romantic hero most in need of Wanda if he is to
escape the stultifying life represented by his legal profession and his
killjoy wife Wendy (Maria Aitkin) and survive Otto’s jealous death
threats to blossom in the light of Wanda’s sexual promise. Once these
characters establish the comic tone of the film, the noncomical George
emerges as the straight man whose function in hiding the key from the
other gang members is to set up their schemes, remind them by example
of how much they have to lose, and attack Wanda in court when
she declines to testify on his behalf. Because George has been set up
as a straight man who never does anything funny, his rage when he
trashes the courtroom (in an inversion of Witness for the Prosecution)
becomes a comic release, undercutting both his dignity and the majesty
of the law. A Fish Called Wanda suspends Archie between two staples
of comedy: the improbable cartoon threats represented by Otto
(and ultimately visited on Ken) and the improbable romantic rewards
represented by Wanda, in order to supplant the potentially pathetic
story of the criminal gang’s breakdown with the comical story of the
virtuous hero’s rescue from his life and inhibitions.
As the core cast of A Fish Called Wanda attest, there are as many
ways of integrating comic and criminal conflicts as there are crime
comedies. Woody Allen, for example, has returned to the genre repeatedly
in films united only by their affection for the crime melodramas
they parody. In Take the Money and Run (1969) and Small Time Crooks
(2000), he casts himself as an robber. In the earlier film, a parody of
crime films from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) to Bonnie
and Clyde (1967) that marked Allen’s directorial debut, he is fated to
fail at even the simplest robberies; in the later film, he is rescued from
a life of equally inept crime by the runaway success of the cookies his
wife is baking as a cover for his criminal activities. In Manhattan Murder
Mystery (1993), a valentine to The Thin Man (1934), the crime he
and his wife are nominally investigating is little more than a backdrop
to their trademark connubial bickering. In Bullets over Broadway
(1994), he casts John Cusack as a younger version of himself, a naïve
playwright whose first Broadway production is invaded and rewritten
by a gangster with an unexpectedly literary bent. Most recently, The
Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001) internalizes the conflict between
cops and robbers in a farcical version of Wilkie Collins’s Victorian
whodunit The Moonstone (1868) by casting Allen as a private eye who
is hypnotized into carrying out a series of robberies.

Despite their different strategies, all these films work by defusing
the intractable problems crime films tackle through laughter. Billy Wilder’s
Prohibition transvestite comedy Some Like It Hot (1959) shows
the range of ways strategic displacements can make crime comical.
Although the film’s comic tone is established early on by numerous
dialogue jokes and the banter between its two heroes, sax player Joe
(Tony Curtis) and bass player Jerry (Jack Lemmon), they begin the
film by losing their jobs, their coats, and their safety when they witness
the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and are pursued by the killer,
Spats Columbo (George Raft), and every gangster in Chicago. The film
displaces this serious threat at the hands of murderous criminals onto
a series of increasingly comical threats that will maintain the energy
of the initial conflict while defusing its consequences. Joe’s and
Jerry’s exhilaratingly unlikely masquerade as female musicians Josephine
and Daphne does not so much decrease the story’s tensions
as turn them comic, especially when Joe, on their band’s arrival at the
Seminole–Ritz in Palm Beach, takes the nubile Sugar Kane (Marilyn
Monroe) away from Jerry by dressing as Sugar’s beau ideal, a bespectacled
oil heir who talks just like Cary Grant. The melodramatic threat
of Spats Columbo is eclipsed by the friends’ comic threats against
each other and by Jerry’s danger from another quarter: Osgood Fielding
(Joe E. Brown), the much-married old roué who has taken a fancy
to Daphne.


Just when the film seems to have wandered furthest from the criminal
threat that got it started, Spats and his gang, arriving at the Seminole–
Ritz for a gangsters’ convention, reaffirm the death threats that
had been displaced onto successively more innocuous threats. Although
the criminals take themselves as seriously as ever, the film’s
prevailing comic mode sweeps them up in a series of visual parodies
of Scarface (1932), The Public Enemy (1931), and Citizen Kane (1941)
before killing off Spats and delivering Joe and Jerry and their lovers
from the surviving gangsters. As Joe protests that he is not worthy
of Sugar, and she rapturously responds, “Go ahead, talk me out of it,”
Jerry brings up one obstacle after another to his marriage to Fielding,
all to no avail. When he finally tells reveals himself as a man, the unflappable
suitor replies, “Nobody’s perfect.”

Some Like It Hot displaces its criminal threats so completely that
many viewers do not consider it a crime comedy at all. Yet the film
consistently uses comedy to explore problems its criminal plot first
raises – problems of power, social role-playing, injustice, and victimization
– by projecting the conventions of crime melodrama onto the
comical but far more volatile territory of gender politics. Joe’s unlikely
romance gradually transforms him from a user of women, a sexual
criminal, to a suitably empathetic mate for Sugar, and Jerry turns into
a victim of the same sort of predatory male he and Joe have been. Just
as the decorum of criminal outrage in crime films reminds viewers
how naïve they are if they assume that the normal world is noncriminal,
or that criminals, victims, and avengers represent mutually exclusive
categories, the decorum of comic outrage in crime comedies
like Some Like It Hot represents not a swerve from the authentically
serious tone proper to the crime film but a dramatic mode that shows
the fallacies of assuming that the normal world is not comical.
The intimacy between criminal outrage and comical outrage is even
clearer in films like Heathers (1989) that reverse Some Like It Hot’s trajectory
by beginning as comedies and gradually darkening to melodrama.
Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder), a student who aspires to
membership in the coveted clique of Westerburg High’s three Heathers
(Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk, Kim Walker), nonetheless believes
that since they are responsible for setting the school’s bitchy,
cruel, remorselessly competitive tone, “killing Heather would be like
killing the Wicked Witch of the West.” Veronica’s dark but nonserious
fantasies come true when her friend J. D. (Christian Slater) encourages
her to play a prank on the lead Heather that turns lethal when he
secretly spikes Heather’s hangover remedy with drain cleaner. From
that moment on, Veronica struggles to reconcile her continuing hatred
of that Heather, who becomes more iconically powerful than ever in
death, with her remorse for killing her and her implication in the murders
of two football players that follow. At the players’ joint funeral,
where they are laid to rest in their football helmets, Veronica’s giggles
at the mourners’ vacuity and hypocrisy are cut short by her look at
one of the dead boys’ little sisters, quietly weeping in his team jacket.
The rest of the film makes Veronica pay for her comically murderous
fantasies by forcing her to recognize her kinship with the genuinely
sociopathic J. D. so that she can withdraw not only from his plot to
murder the entire population of Westerburg High (in an eerie prefiguration
of the massacre at Columbine High) but from her own flippancy.
Instead of moving toward comedy in order to explore the broader implications
of social aggression, like Some Like It Hot, Heathers begins
by taking the universality of that aggression, and the comic response
to it, as a given and then gradually retreats from its implications by
confronting its heroine with consequences that are more authentic
than her comic attitudinizing. Comedy is presented as one more antisocial
response the heroine needs to outgrow if she is to distinguish
herself from a criminal.

Heathers’s drift away from comedy might suggest that crime comedies
must decide in the end between comic outrage and criminal outrage,
laughing at crimes or putting aside the impulse to laugh in order
to take them seriously. In a world in which purportedly serious action
is ineffectual, however, laughter may be the most serious response of
all, as war comedies from To Be or Not to Be (1942) to Love and Death
(1975) suggest. Stanley Kubrick, the director and cowriter of the blackest
of all war comedies, Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb (1964), told film critic Joseph Gelmis that he
had bought Peter George’s 1958 thriller Red Alert intending to make a
serious film of it, presumably along the lines of the contemporaneous
Fail-Safe (1964), but that after a month of discarding ideas “because
they were so ludicrous,” he realized that “all the things I was throwing
out were the things which were the most truthful,”5 and brought
ribald comic novelist Terry Southern onto the project to heighten the
comic elements he had been downplaying.
Why would a film about nuclear annihilation keep veering toward
comedy? An early scene suggests why by showing the pained response
of Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) to the news
of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) that the country
is now in a shooting war: “Oh, hell.” For not only is Mandrake’s response
comically inadequate to the threat of nuclear annihilation; the
scene suggests that any conceivable response would be inadequate,
however heroically films like Fail-Safe might struggle to dignify the alternatives.
Because it threatens not merely particular people or nations
or cultures or ideologies but the whole future of humankind, allout
nuclear war, which in Kubrick’s nihilistic account spares no one
from utter defeat, makes every possible reaction into the stuff of black
comedy. Kubrick’s audience ends up laughing, not at the enemy or the
service or war itself, but at the ironic denial of human power and freedom
by the magnitude of the dehumanizing, but all-too-human, drive
toward self-destruction. Kubrick’s comedy emerges as the engine of
horror and perception. As Pauline Kael has remarked in opposing
Brian De Palma’s telekinetic thriller The Fury (1978) to Steven Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977): “With Spielberg, what
happens is so much better than you dared hope that you have to
laugh; with De Palma, it’s so much worse than you feared that you
have to laugh.”6

Of course, you don’t really have to laugh, and not everyone does.
Few viewers laugh out loud at Dr. Strangelove, and even fewer at The
Fury. But Kubrick and Kael help explain why so many viewers have
laughed uproariously at the most unlikely moments in Pulp Fiction
(1994): when Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) literally springs back to life
after her terrified date Vincent Vega (John Travolta) injects a shot of
adrenaline into her heart; when prizefighter Butch Coolidge (Bruce
Willis) returns with a samurai sword to the pawnshop basement to
rescue his enemy, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), from the redneck
rapists who had taken them both prisoner; and when Vincent, turning
around in his car seat to ask Marsellus’s underling Marvin (Phil La-
Marr) whether he believes it was a divine miracle that protected Vincent
and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) from a hail of bullets,
accidentally shoots Marvin in the face. They laugh because they are
witnessing a miracle of resurrection, because Butch’s nightmarish ordeal
has won him a heady dose of freedom and power they are eager
to share, because Marvin’s gratuitous death is the perfect punch line
to a discussion of the role of miracles in the modern world, and because
they realize that the violent, unpredictable world around them
is always potentially, explosively funny.

The leading practitioners of this mode of crime comedy – whose comic
elements do not follow Arsenic and Old Lace and Some Like It Hot
in displacing the threatening aspects of the criminal plot but, rather,
intensify them – are Joel and Ethan Coen. No two of their eight films
to date are quite alike, but virtually all of them are crime comedies
ranging from light gray to pitch black. The Coen brothers borrow a
central paradox from animated cartoons: The banality of criminal impulses
as inescapable as Wile E. Coyote’s is recorded by a spectacularly
baroque audiovisual style and an equally baroque use of crimegenre
conventions.

The Coens established their trademark sensibility with their first
film, Blood Simple (1984), a noir update tracing the murderous doublecrosses
that ensue when suspicious Texas husband Julian Marty (Dan
Hedaya) hires shady private eye Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill
his wife, Abby (Frances McDormand), and her lover, Ray (John Getz).
The cross-plotting gains a darkly comic edge from the lovers’ ignorance
of Visser’s existence, and their panicked belief, right up to the
film’s last line, that the husband they thought they had killed and buried
is still dogging them. Raising Arizona (1987), a knockabout comedy
about the efforts of inept bank robber H. I. “Hi” McDonnough (Nicolas
Cage) and his childless cop wife Ed (Holly Hunter) to kidnap one
of the quintuplets of furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson)
[Fig. 69], covers similar material in a more humorous tone established
by Hi’s deadpan narration and the film’s frantic camera work. The
Coens’ third film, Miller’s Crossing (1990) is a bleak fantasia on themes
from Dashiell Hammett’s 1931 novel The Glass Key, and one of only
two of their films to date with no important comic elements (the other
being The Man Who Wasn’t There [2001]).7 These films established
not only the Coens’ fondness for convoluted crime plots, ironic reversals,
and a wildly inventive visual style, but also their working methods.
All three were produced by Ethan Coen, directed by Joel Coen,
and cowritten by both brothers. All three were photographed by Barry
Sonnenfeld and scored by Carter Burwell with an emphasis on systematically
distancing effects. After Miller’s Crossing, Sonnenfeld left
the Coens to direct his own series of loopy dark comedies, from The
Addams Family (1991) to Men in Black (1997) and Men in Black 2
(2002), and the brothers replaced him with Roger Deakins, who has
shot all their films since. Given the stability of the Coens’ core personnel
– their works have been written, photographed, scored, produced,
and directed by a total of five technicians, and they have returned repeatedly
to cast such favorite actors as John Goodman, Steve Buscemi,
John Turturro, and Joel Coen’s wife, Frances McDormand – it is
no wonder that their films have been so distinctive.

Barton Fink (1991) marked the brothers’ critical breakthrough [Fig.
70]. The film, reportedly begun when the Coens were stuck on the
screenplay of Miller’s Crossing, is a horrifying comedy about politically
committed Broadway playwright Barton Fink (John Turturro), who,
bound for Hollywood “to make a difference” by writing films about the
little people nobody notices, checks into a nightmarish art-deco hotel
that is the center of a net of mediocrity, depravity, and homicide at the
hands of one of the little people he has presumed to patronize. The
film’s hallucinatory intensity won it an unprecedented three prizes at
the 1991 Cannes Film Festival for best film, best director, and best actor.
Buoyed by their success at home and abroad, the Coens turned
to a big-budget project, The Hudsucker Proxy (1993), which larded the
rise-of-company-mailboy story recycled in models from Horatio Alger
to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967) with hundreds
of allusions to earlier movies and an all-star cast (Tim Robbins,
Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Newman, Charles Durning) that edged out
all their regulars except for Buscemi, and disappointed both their core
audience and the wider audience they had aimed for.
It was at this point that the Coens began work on Fargo (1996), their
signature black comedy about hapless car dealer Jerry Lundegaard
(William H. Macy), who, desperate to cover the money he has embez-
69. Raising Arizona: The inept kidnappers (Holly Hunter, Nicolas Cage) welcome
home the baby (T. J. Kuhn) they have snatched.

zled from his father-in-law’s dealership, hatches the idea of hiring two
thugs to kidnap his wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrüd), so that her father,
Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell), can pay a ransom Jerry will split
with the kidnappers. So far, the story could easily have served as the
basis for a madcap crime comedy worthy of Wilder or Preston Sturges,
but Jerry’s plot spins rapidly out of control when the kidnappers, with
70. Barton Fink: The writer hero (John Turturro) is blocked, but not the Coen
brothers, in their breakthrough film.

their victim tied up in the back seat, are pulled over for driving with
an expired registration, and taciturn Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare)
brutally kills the police officer, then chases down two witnesses who
saw the corpse as they were driving past and murders them as well.
Four more victims will follow, dispatched in increasingly hair-raising
ways, until Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand,
in her Oscar-winning role), investigating the murders, surprises
Gaear as he is feeding the leg of his late partner, Carl Showalter (Steve
Buscemi), into a wood chipper, producing instead of chips a haze of
bright blood.

What could possibly make such a festival of carnage funny? Far
more than the Pink Panther movies or Some Like It Hot, Fargo depends
for its humor on its ruthlessly stylized visuals. The film’s opening sequence,
which picks up Jerry’s car as it is heading down a snowy road
to the Fargo bar where he is meeting the kidnappers, sets up the conventional
expectation that the film will move from generally expository
shots of an inhospitable outdoor environment to warmer, more
intimate and comforting interiors; but this expectation is repeatedly
undermined [Fig. 71]. Except for the home of Marge and her husband,
71. Fargo: Indoors, the emotional temperature of the opening scene between
Jerry and the thugs (Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare) he wants to hire is no
warmer.

Norm (John Carroll Lynch), none of the film’s interiors is warmly lit.
Its bars are dim but not monochromatic, its other public spaces – hotel
lobbies, restaurants, Wade’s office, Jerry’s car dealership – neutrally
blue-gray with prominent picture windows showing the snowscaped
outdoors. When the characters do roost indoors, the object
most likely to capture their attention is the blue-white light of a television
set. Moreover, a surprising number of the film’s key scenes – a
fatal roadside stop after the kidnapping, Marge’s initial investigation
of the resulting three murders, the parking lot where Wade brings the
payoff money to Carl and the two of them trade shots, the cabin exterior
when Gaear shoots Carl and is feeding his body into a wood
chipper when Marge captures him – take place outdoors. Most of
these exterior scenes are extravagantly bleak, showing cars’ headlights
approaching from a seamless whiteout or their taillights threatening
to vanish into undifferentiated darkness. Even in its interiors,
however, the film persistently withholds facial close-ups that would
encourage intimacy with the characters. It is as if the Coens had sat
repeatedly through Basic Instinct and determined to make a film whose
visual style was precisely antithetical, since the film gives off exactly
the opposite aura – chilly, detached, and composed within an inch of
its life – in order to root its characters more fully in a self-enclosed
physical world and abstract them from an audience free to laugh
heartlessly at their misfortunes.

Many viewers, of course, declined to laugh anyway. The film polarized
citizens of the North Dakota locations where parts of it were shot.
Many of them complained that the Coens were casting their birthplace
as a Grand Guignol house of horrors and the natives as yahoos whose
laconic response to almost every utterance – the flat midwestern
“Yah” – made them look like idiots. But many other viewers, whether
or not they lived in North Dakota, found the film’s exaggerated regionalism
a hilariously matter-of-fact counterpoint to its tale of kidnapping,
fraud, and homicide. Certainly the innocuousness of so much of
the dialogue, in which repetition is so persistent that the speeches
gravitate toward the condition of music, emphasizes the ironic contrast
of the gruesome plot even as it increases both suspense and
comedy by forcing impatient audiences to wait for the placid witnesses
to come to the point. In one of the film’s best-known sequences,
Marge questions a pair of teenaged hookers (Larissa Kokernot, Melissa
Peterman) who spent the night before the kidnapping with Carl and
Gaear, hoping to get descriptions of the pair. After establishing that
one of them is a graduate of White Bear Lake High School (“Go Bears,”
she helpfully volunteers), Marge asks what the two suspects looked
like, provoking the following exchange:
HOOKER: Well, the little guy, he was kinda funny-lookin’.
MARGE: In what way?
HOOKER: I don’t know. Just funny-lookin’.
MARGE: Can you be any more specific?
HOOKER: I couldn’t really say. He wasn’t circumcised.
MARGE: Was he funny-lookin’ apart from that?
HOOKER: Yah. . . .
MARGE: Is there anything else you can tell me about him?
HOOKER: No. Like I say, he was funny-lookin’ – more ’n most people, even.
Still another effect of the heavy overlay of regional dialect is to emphasize
the static nature of the characters, locked into unchanging humors
as completely as Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Jerry never
realizes that his early hope of averting the kidnapping by persuading
Wade to put up the money for a land investment is doomed to failure
because Wade is such an incorrigible shark and Jerry such a hopeless
loser [Fig. 72]. Having offered an Olds Cutlass Ciera as the down pay-
Fargo and the Crime Comedy 281
72. Fargo: The incorrigible shark (Harve Presnell) and the hopeless loser
(William H. Macy).
ment to his wife’s kidnappers, Jerry, the eternal car salesman, naturally
begins their first conversation, just after they have abducted his
wife and killed three people, “How’s that Ciera working out for you?
. . . How’s Jean?” Much later, during Wade and Carl’s confrontation
over the ransom drop at a snowy parking lot, they shout at each other
with no hope of changing each other’s minds; only shooting each other
can make much of an impression on either one, and Carl, who kicks
Wade’s supine body after he has killed him and been wounded himself,
clearly believes in some way that their discussion is just warming
up. En route to the Lundegaard house in Minneapolis, the exasperated
Carl begs Gaear, who has said nothing but “Nope” all the way from
Brainerd, to make some conversation, and when Gaear does not reply,
says, “I don’t have to talk to you either, man. See how you like it. Just
total fuckin’ silence. Two can play at that game, smart guy. We’ll just
see how you like it. Total silence.” Carl is no more capable of shutting
up than Gaear is of making small talk.

All these scenes are carried off in the same deadpan style by characters
obsessed with the Coyotean question of how to carry out their
individual plans yet trapped in a universe utterly indifferent to their
cares. Because they are so oblivious to their own limitations or the
plans of others, both the violence and the comedy of the film erupt
with shocking suddenness. When Jean fights the menacing Gaear by
biting his hand, the hitherto inarticulate Gaear abandons his pursuit
of her to look in the bathroom cabinet for “unguent,” leaving viewers
wondering where he learned the word. Moments before Gaear attacks
and kills him with an axe, Carl, who has hidden away practically all
the unexpectedly large ransom from his unsuspecting partner, cannot
resist haggling with him over the Ciera (unwittingly echoing Jerry’s
earlier decision to ask Wade for a much larger ransom than he intends
to pay the kidnappers), climaxing his diatribe with the incredible announcement:
“I’ve been listening to your fuckin’ bullshit all week!”
In the most gratuitous and ambiguous of the film’s many comically
obsessive tangents, the hugely pregnant Marge, in Minneapolis to
interview Jerry, has dinner with her old school friend Mike Yanagita
(Steve Park), a Japanese-American midwesterner whose “yahs” are as
broad as hers. After she briskly turns away his attempt to sit on her
side of the dinner table, he suddenly breaks down in tears and pours
out the heartrending tale of his wife’s death from leukemia as Marge
stares stricken at him. Not until a later phone conversation in which
a friend tells Marge that Mike’s wife is alive and well does the film raise
the question of why the episode was ever included, and the corre-
sponding suspicion that perhaps Marge consoled Mike with sex and
is now finding out why she shouldn’t have; but this can be only a theory,
for the film never returns to resolve the question.

In fact, ambiguity and irresolution are at the heart of Fargo’s comedy,
which, unlike that of cartoons like Road Runner or comedies of
displacement like Some Like It Hot, works by systematically depriving
viewers of any single privileged perspective from which to interpret
its outrageous events. Hence the film’s wide-open spaces and motivic
long shots provide a theater that imposes no particular meaning on
any action except to reduce it to insignificance. The statue of the legendary
logger Paul Bunyan that welcomes visitors to Brainerd, Minnesota,
is shown three times, in different lighting conditions that make
it look by turns comical, menacing, and familiar, though always grotesque.
The statue is a representation of a mythic figure, an attempt
to visualize someone who exists only as a point on which to project
iconic significances that can shift with each new context. When Carl
and Gaear arrive in Brainerd, they resolve their disagreement about
the evening’s entertainment by going out for pancakes, then picking
up the hookers with whom they are shown coupling, with a placid unconcern
for privacy, in a single hilariously disengaged long shot of adjacent
double beds. A fade to black is followed by a straight cut to the
same camera setup showing them snuggled down like a pair of suburban
married couples to watch Johnny Carson, with only the flickering
light from the television indicating that the tableau of four stationary
bodies is not a freeze-frame.

Later, Marge, examining the starkly dramatic scene of Gaear’s third
murder, bends over in the snow, and Lou, an officer at the scene, asks
if she sees something. “No, I just think I’m going to barf,” answers
Marge, then, after straightening up: “Well, that passed.” The gesture
whose meaning is so obvious from the generic context could mean
something completely different, like Mike’s fictional tale of love and
loss. It could be simply a black-comic confession of inadequacy, like
Carl’s Strangelove-like underreaction to the tableau of his partner
blowing a hole in a police officer’s head only inches from Carl’s face:
“Oh . . . whoa, daddy . . . oh, daddy.” In fact, it could mean anything at
all, like the statue of Paul Bunyan or the hooker’s description of her
“funny-lookin’” client, or nothing at all, like Gaear’s silences or the
film’s ubiquitous “yahs.” Nonetheless, the interlocked genres of crime
film and comedy the film invokes encourage the audience to mine its
hardscrabble surface for meaning, though it does not always reward
them for doing so.

Burwell’s otherworldly music, plaintive and balladic, suggests an
epic, legendary dimension to what the film’s opening credits insist is
a true story, and the film’s outrageous bursts of violence and comedy
together indicate how arbitrary and fragile is the zone of normalcy
they take as their point of departure. The criminals and their victims
are destroyed by their comical, yet thoroughly logical, inability to surrender
their grasp of normalcy in the interests of what must seem to
most viewers blindingly obvious generic cues. Jean, watching a man
in a black ski mask who stands outside her sliding window with a
crowbar, does not react to the menace he patently represents until
he releases her from her assumption that the moment will pass by
smashing the glass. The long moment of suspension between her apprehension
and her reaction to the threat is an echo of the corresponding
moment in Pulp Fiction when the Pop-Tart that Butch Coolidge
has put in his toaster pops up, jolting him out of his stasis by
giving him permission to shoot Vincent Vega.8 In both cases, the percussive
sound gives viewers permission as well to expel their breath
and react, as many of them do by laughing. The scene continues to
wobble between terror and slapstick comedy, as Jean’s eminently sensible
reactions to the intruders – she locks herself in an upstairs bathroom,
attempts to phone the police, then hides in the bathtub after
opening a window to make them think she has climbed out – are repeatedly
undermined by Gaear’s ferocity and her own realistic panic,
which sends her hurtling out of the tub tangled in the shower curtain
to fall down the stairs.

Even after Carl and Gaear bring her to the isolated house where she
will die off-camera for no particular reason, Jean cannot bring herself
to give up hope: bound and hooded, she darts around the snowy yard
aimlessly, even though she cannot see where she is going and has no
chance of escape. Is the hope to which she clings a sign of her unquenchable
spirit, or of her witlessly mechanical behavior? Or does
it simply attest – like Carl’s comically futile attempt to mark the burial
spot of the ransom money alongside a fence that stretches for mile upon
identical mile by sticking a tiny snow scraper into the snow above
it – to the universal impetus, however vain, to set one’s activities apart
from the bleakly uncaring world figured by the film’s elemental miseen-
scène of blandly anonymous interiors surrounded by acres of
trackless snow?

Fargo might be read as the Dr. Strangelove of crime comedy, a film
that mocks its witless characters’ banal responses to their peril as
hopelessly inadequate while darkly suggesting that their peril is so ir-
284 Crime Films
rational and extreme that any response whatever would be equally,
comically inadequate. The film’s deepest outrage is neither its outbursts
of violence nor its cruel laughter but the air of normalcy it
establishes, for example, by the casting of affable William H. Macy as
Jerry Lundegaard, the casual extortionist who seems to think that
none of the problems arising from the disastrous kidnapping he has
masterminded is proof against a really nice smile. It is not the snowballing
errors, comic or melodramatic, that represent a deflection
from the normal state of affairs, but Jerry’s own laboriously composed
facade of normalcy, which hides the monstrous egoism that allows
him to announce wearily to his shocked, grief-stricken son, “I’m goin’
ta bed now,” instead of returning the call from Wade’s office that would
tell him Wade has been shot dead. The film’s eruptions of crime and
comedy mark a return to the normal state of chaos vain human attempts
at social normalcy have simply obscured.
Against this reading of the film stands the good-natured normalcy
of Marge herself, the earth mother whose loving marriage to unglamorous
Norm offers such a reproach to Jerry Lundegaard. Returning to
interview the desperate Jerry a second time, Marge cuts through his
doubletalk by calmly repeating her questions about a missing vehicle
until his voice rises, and then telling him, “You have no call to get snippy
with me. I’m just doin’ my job here,” her gravity so unnerving Jerry
that he announces his intent to check the inventory immediately, then
drives off as Marge murmurs to herself, “For Pete’s sake. He’s fleein’
the interview. He’s fleein’ the interview.” Jerry’s smiling hypocrisy,
Carl’s snakelike scheming, and Gaear’s dull brutality are no match for
Marge’s adherence to police routine, her impervious good humor, and
the moral certitude she displays in her climactic lecture to Gaear after
she arrests him and takes him to task over the matter of “your accomplice
in the wood chipper”: “There’s more to life than a little money,
ya know. Doncha know that? And here you are. And it’s a beautiful day.
Well. . . . I just don’t understand it” [Fig. 73]. But Marge is literally correct:
Having far too little imagination to understand Gaear or Carl or
Jerry, she can only cuff the survivors and lay down the law to them,
then retreat to her own connubial bed. There, before the ubiquitous
television, she congratulates her husband on having had his painting
chosen to illustrate the three-cent duck-hunting stamp, and echoes his
incantatory closing reference to her pregnancy: “Two more months.”
Marge represents Fargo’s moral center, but the film refuses to put
her and the unexceptionable moral values she stands for at its formal
center. Instead it merely suggests that the normal world Marge repre-
sents poses as direct an affront to the criminal outrages perpetrated
by the kidnappers as their outrages do to the ideas of normalcy represented
by Jerry’s smile, Paul Bunyan’s statue, and the film’s endless
wastes of snow. Nor does the film show either side able to comprehend
the other, either in individual collisions or at the fadeout; it mere-
73. Fargo: Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) – good-humored earthmother
or unimaginative dolt?
ly shows that each exists in the other, like yin and yang, so that the
criminal world is as comically normal as the normal world is comically
outrageous.

In the end, Fargo, however differently than Some Like It Hot, works
by consistently displacing viewers’ expectations. Despite its title, only
its opening scene takes place in Fargo, even though the exterior shooting,
originally planned for Minnesota, had to be moved to North Dakota
when Minnesota was struck by its most snow-free winter in a hundred
years. The assurance with which the film begins – “THIS IS A TRUE
STORY” – is even more misleading than its title, since the Coens later
admitted that it was false.9 The most subversive aspect of the film,
however, and the one that links its crime most closely to its comedy,
is its refusal to establish the sort of unmarked governing tone that
makes Arsenic and Old Lace so reassuring, A Shot in the Dark so antic,
Trouble in Paradise (1932) so cynically sentimental about its world of
thieves and their equally corrupt victims, the Coens’ succeeding films
The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and The
Man Who Wasn’t There so surrealistically laid back in presenting the
adventures (respectively) of a naïf sucked into a world of kidnapping,
bowling, and impossible dreams come true [Fig. 74], or of a trio of
Fargo and the Crime Comedy 287
74. The Big Lebowski: A naïf sucked into a world of kidnapping, bowling, and
impossible dreams come true. (Jeff Bridges, John Goodman)
escaped convicts unwittingly reenacting the Odyssey, or of a smalltown
barber observing, as if from another planet, the nightmarish impact
of the murder that has come to define his life. Instead of establishing
a leading tone from which the film’s episodes can diverge in
order to shock the audience into laughter or pathos or fear, Fargo is
nothing but a collection of tangents. Everything in the film, especially
its most banal details, is off kilter – a reminder that the outrageousness
of crime comedy, as of comedy and crime films themselves, is as
normal as any alternative genres and the ways of seeing they provoke.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org