"Does your super sleuth kit come with a decoder ring?": Finding noir in the most obvious places

If you’ve ever watched a cheesy sitcom (and come on, you have), you know that there’s some unwritten law that each one has to have a film noir episode. It begins with canned chuckles as the lead sits behind a desk in a darkened PI office while he simultaneously voices over a flat-toned narration. Inevitably, a woman walks in, his wife or girlfriend from the show, dressed up 40s style and acting like she doesn’t know him. The joke, of course, is to have the sitcom characters enact every film noir cliché possible while at the same time remaining themselves and dishing forth whatever shtick they’ve established for the characters. Though these exercises in ‘hilarity’ draw on the elements of film noir and evoke the aesthetic blatantly, no one would for a minute confuse them with the real thing.

The Singing Detective, starring Robert Downey Jr., functions on the same principle. Dan Dark (Downey) spends the movie in a hospital bed recovering from a debilitating skin disease. As he does so, he imagines himself and those around him into a parodic and undeveloped film noir story. Just as the sitcom, The Singing Detective relies on the audience’s ability to immediately recognize the noir aesthetic being so obviously employed.

The Singing Detective is one of several movies I’ve seen in recent years that use a film noir aesthetic as a device to achieve other ends, the latest being another Robert Downey Jr. film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. These movies are not actually trying to be film noir or neo-noir, but call upon audience recognition of film noir tropes to speed their way into expressionism or metaphor.

In doing so, they must push the noir to an extreme that would have been impossible during the 1940s and 50s when film noir originated. They therefore call on the grittier model of the pulp fiction novels of the same time period. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, the corpse of a girl that Val Kilmer’s character fishes out of a pond has no panties on, as evidenced by an unglamorous close-up. The Singing Detective revels in harsh sex scenes and shows Robin Wright Penn’s character being drowned in a bathtub in one of the opening scenes. In Sin City, Elijah Wood plays a sadistic cannibal while Nick Stahl embodies a deformed child molester. One of the most (unfortunately) memorable scenes in Mulholland Drive involves a rather close look at a corpse rotting in a dark apartment.

The most obvious attributes of film noir cinema are chiaroscuro lighting and the voice-over. The Singing Detective, Mulholland Drive, Veronica Mars (a TV show, but of the same tone), and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang all employ this lighting to different degrees, but it is Sin City that pushes it further. Instead of just using harsh light to obscure parts of faces and create long shadows, Sin City is filmed as a live action comic book--mostly in black and white, but with splashes of solid color. These emulate the light/shadow effect of chiaroscuro lighting while at the same time washing the movie in hyperreality.

Veronica Mars, The Singing Detective and Sin City all favor their audiences with terse voice-over narrations, from Veronica, Dan Dark and various characters in Sin City's vignettes. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, however, features Harry Lockhart's neurotic, self-conscious narration and revels in his meta-narrative awareness. Harry tells his story in stops and starts, at one point rewinding the movie to add in something he forgot and noting, at another, things that will be important later.

Every noir film focuses around an urban landscape of corruption and shady characters in shady alleys. These recent films seem much more likely to choose Los Angeles as that landscape than the original films of the 40s and 50s, which often favored New York or Chicago. The high contrast between the bright sunny California days and the dark corrupt dealings of the Hollywood studios are particularly suited to the film noir genre. Recognizing darkness inherent in Hollywood’s beauty market, Mulholland Drive’s noir dream centers around an overly complicated and mysterious farce of mob control over film casting. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Harry’s character is drawn to L.A. to participate in a casting fake-out to snare a big star. Dan Dark adds to his other dark fantasies in The Singing Detective when he imagines that his wife and her (fictional) lover are stealing his screenplay. And in Veronica Mars, it is the large disparity between the rich (including Hollywood elite) and poor that causes the town’s noir tensions.

It is on these landscapes that the gritty horrors of noir play out. The true hallmarks of the genre are the jaded characters that people it. These are bruised and hardened denizens, haunted by pasts. For Veronica Mars, it is the brutal murder of her best friend, Lily Kane. For Dan Dark, it is his childhood memories of his mother’s infidelity, forced flight to the city, prostitution and murder. In Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Harry’s paramour Harmony is propelled by the fact that her sister was victim of a child molestation that Harmony was unable to prevent. Mulholland Drive is a deceptive layer cake of pasts. The first two-thirds of the move are constructed around Diane Selwyn’s turbulent failed relationship. It is a dream, a fantasy collage created to gratify and comfort her. Within it, the object of her desire, Camilla, is transformed into the amnesiac Rita, helpless and haunted by an irrational remembered fear.

With pasts as tragic and painful as these, noir characters act out against the absurdity of existence and are driven by the need to resolve them. The past and the present become inextricably linked, from the way in which Veronica is treated at her high school after her father’s disgrace as sheriff to Dan Dark’s inability to see his wife as anything other than a cheating whore because of his mother’s indiscretions. The pulp detective stories that Harry and Harmony idolize as children play an important part in their adult noir drama. In Sin City, Hartigan plays out a drama over the span of a decade, saving a little girl from a molester and later protecting her as a young woman from that molester turned into a monster.

Unable to free themselves of the past, noir characters operate in a deterministic universe. Their fatalism is complete with the knowledge that bad things will continue to happen regardless of their actions. In Veronica Mars, this presents itself as Veronica’s detachment and jaded awareness of the class warfare between haves and have-nots in Neptune. In Mulholland Drive and The Singing Detective, Diane Selwyn and Dan Dark construct their noir worlds for precisely this aspect. The exaggerated determinisms of their alternate über-noir worlds, the dark networks of shady men, indicate Diane and Dan’s desires to believe that there are external causes for their miseries.

Having captured both the more and less obvious aspects of noir, these films use them for varied purposes. As mentioned above, Mulholland Drive and The Singing Detective use noir as an expression of their main characters’ disillusion and pain. In the same way, Sin City is an exaggeration of the noir aesthetic to such a degree that it becomes expressionism, completing the circle and taking the genre back to its German expressionism roots. For Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Veronica Mars, however, noir is used as a tool to emphasize the harsh realities inherent in growing up or old. The distinction between these modern films and those they emulate is subtle but apparent. In these, the film noir worldview is not soaked through, but is instead slipped on over other things. In sitcom versions, noir is caricatured. These films are not that far from a similar action, though they use noir for more sober and complicated purposes.