Film Noir and the Cruelty of Hope
Starting next Thursday, Unexpected Productions begins its Film Noir show, “Black Eyed Blonde”. (The name is actually an unused Raymond Chandler title) To prepare for it, I’ve been watching a lot of film noir, and I’m really fascinated by how each hopeful moment contributes to the defeat at the end of the story.
Because long-form Improv lends itself to being funny, we do a lot more comedies than tragedies (in the dramatic sense of the two words). When we’re improvising a comedy, we work to throw obstacle after obstacle into the path of the hero, so that his or her final victory is all the more triumphant.* In film noir tragedies, though, this is almost inverted. Each moment where the hero has moment of hope makes his or her defeat all the crueler.
In “Double Indemnity”, the protagonist and the femme fatale have a moment where, having just dumped the body, the car refuses to start. Everything has gone perfectly until now, but suddenly everything is almost over. The hero reaches over, and suddenly, the car starts. Its this great moment of hope, except that we, as the viewer, know that they’re not going to get away with it. (In fact, the code that movies abided by in the 40s required that nobody get away with murder). After the moment of elation, for me, there’s this sudden realization that there was some relief in the resolution of, “Oh, this is how they get caught”, and then I experience the opposite of relief: suddenly, I realize this is going to go ever further before everything is undone.
In “Detour”, the protagonist is traveling across the country to join the woman he loves when everything goes horribly wrong. The man he’s hitchhiking with dies, and he realizes he’ll be accused of murder. He gets rid of the body, and it seems he’ll get away with it until he picks up a hitchhiker, our femme fatale, who knew the driver, and immediately blackmails him into getting into ever bigger trouble. Several times he calls the girl, or imagines her singing somewhere, and each time, even though he’s physically closer, we’re more and more aware that he’s never going to be with her–or even see her again. In fact, in the narrative frame, the hero is being driven mad by hearing a song they used to sing on the jukebox: the reminder of her turned into an instrument of cruelty.
It’s interesting to tell stories tell like this. In many film noir and pulp stories, the whole plan goes off perfectly (albeit with a lot of close calls) until the very end (or after the plan has ended), when some unexpected event or unknown fact derails the whole thing. All the past successes make the final failure seem all the more cruel (deserved or not). Most supporting characters in film noir spend a lot of time either raising the negative stakes (you make one misstep and it’ll be the gas chamber for you) or raising the positive stakes by giving false hope (you do one more job, and you’re free–you can go back to that girl of yours and you’ll have enough jack to keep you both comfortable for life!)
* One of the joys of improvisational storytelling is playing the villain–playing the character based on his or her desires, but, as the puppeteer, recognizing that you’re really helping the hero by presenting something for them to overcome. A big part of playing the villain is to pursue their interests for as long as possible, and then to lose to the hero at the last moment.