Film noir is the genre du jour. Don’t worry, Francophobes, that will soon change. But for now, with the one-two release of Hollywoodland and The Black Dahlia, noir is the new black. Ever since the Parisian critics at Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s noticed that there was something shadowy and nervous going on in 1940s Hollywood product, noir has gone in and out of vogue. Of course, in the 1940s and ‘50s, as far as the Hollywood studios were concerned, they were just making darkly lit crime melodramas that may or may not have had anything to do with post-World War II anxieties—fancy French terms be damned. When filmmakers started revisiting those mean streets from the 1970s onward, however, they knew that they weren’t just making crime dramas. They were making film noir crime dramas, complete with canted angles, chiaroscuro lighting, hardboiled yet weak men, and seductively lethal women. Two of the best neo-noirs (there’s nothing like re-jargoning the jargon) are even set during the period from which film noir emerged. What makes Chinatown and L.A. Confidential more than simply stylized exercises in period style, though, is that they also evoke the mood of creeping unease that is the original reason for noir’s being. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? Only the shadows know.
Hollywoodland and The Black Dahlia are also noirs set in the noir sweet spot (in fact, their time frames of, respectively, 1949-1959 and 1946-47 encompass noir’s “classical period”). And with their tortured heroes, mysterious murders, dangerous dames, and sepia-tinged dark-light compositions complete with Venetian blinds, they make no bones about what they are trying to evoke. So the question must be asked: why so tense? What do “we” have to be so anxious about that filmmakers—and those who back them—think another visit to the noir well may be fruitful? Granted, it’s impossible to ever assume a one-to-one reflection between the cultural mood and the movies produced. It just takes too long to get them made, and an untold number of factors play into the process of what actually gets on screen. Nevertheless, it must be noted that noir tends to erupt to the surface during times of dis-ease (i.e. Vietnam and Watergate in the 1970s). So again, I have to ask, why so tense?
I could round up the usual suspects and talk about how systemic corruption, authority figures who strike bogus macho poses, dysfunctional families, the ongoing battle to send women back to the Victorian age—or at least the kitchen—permeate the here and now as well as the universes of Hollywoodland and The Black Dahlia. But that would be missing the greatest source of anguish in these stories. These aren’t simply film noirs. They are film noirs set in Los Angeles. Set in H-o-l-l-y-w-o-o-d (land). Fame is the Big Bad. Now this could be interesting and timely. Why is fame so bad? Or rather, why is the desire for it and pursuit of it so wretched? Turns out to be the usual reason for why anything is insidious in the film noir universe: it somehow gets in the way of men functioning effectively as men.
It should come as no surprise that Hollywoodland does a better job of explicating this notion than The Black Dahlia, but that has as much to do with Brian De Palma and screenwriter Josh Friedman’s inability to just pick a story out of James Ellroy’s novel and run with it as it does the tragedy of George Reeves. In De Palma and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s assured hands, The Black Dahlia does look great. The Lady in the Lake/ Big Sleep mash-up in the delirious dinner party scene at a shady rich family’s home is a hoot for movie geeks. But, oh, the plot. At first I kept thinking, “it’s okay that it’s incoherent. The Big Sleep’s mystery is incoherent. L.A. Confidential’s mystery is incoherent. The relationships, mood, and characters are the point….” Unfortunately, when two of those major characters are played as inert blocks of pretty by the equally inert Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson, that mantra fails. In fact, the moments before Hartnett has to say his lines are the only cause of creeping unease. Hilary Swank and Aaron Eckhart do their damnedest to keep us awake, but that just winds up highlighting the story’s failures. Hartnett’s blah Bucky disapproves of his partner Lee’s taste for news cameras and his speed-fueled obsession with the highly publicized Black Dahlia murder victim Elizabeth Short because it makes Lee corrupt and prevents him from doing his job as a detective. Okay. Now, why should we care? I’m not sure. De Palma seems a lot more interested in exploring the Black Dahlia kink than in developing the Bucky-Lee friendship so that this would all mean something.
Then again, De Palma keeps returning to images of Mia Kirshner’s Elizabeth looking desperate and needy in screen tests. Also, Swank’s Dahlia look-alike Madeleine is the nightmare version of the Madonna wannabe, so clearly there’s something rotten in the state of celebrity. And Madeleine is quite the fatale femme for Bucky (she sums up the femme fatale quandary marvelously when she says to Bucky, “You’d rather fuck me than kill me”), as is Elizabeth-on-film, soooo that also threatens his ability to get the job done and solve the mystery. But then Madeleine’s drunken mother starts making all kinds of confessions in a scene that seems airlifted in from a Mel Brooks comedy, and…where were we? At this point, I don’t think even De Palma knows. No wonder I was more fascinated by the hairstyles and costumes. Girl. Hollywoodland can’t match The Black Dahlia’s visual flair—and even De Palma’s detractors have to admit that he shoots some fine looking pictures. Feature film newbie Allen Coulter, though, does get the kind of effective performances Dahlia so severely lacks, and thus the male anguish at its core is palpable and even, gosh, moving. Who knew Ben Affleck had it in him? Now, if he had played Bucky…oh, never mind. Anyway, to review for those of you not looking to win pop trivia quiz games, a couple of decades before Christopher Reeve donned the red cape, George Reeves (with an “s” at the end, people) became famous playing Superman on a cheesy, low-paying TV series. Unfortunately, the image stuck and he couldn’t really get work after the series ended. Broke and despondent, he allegedly shot himself in 1959. Or, (dramatic pause) did he? Dunh dunh duunh.
Enter Adrien Brody’s fictional, headline-seeking private dick Louis (and yes, there is an ex-wife, mopey son, and young girlfriend in the picture to show that in private, he can be a dick). Again, that quest for news cameras muddies the proverbial waters. And he gets pissed when he realizes that Reeves’s mother hired him so she could strong-arm MGM into funding a statue of her boy. But try as hard as Brody and the filmmakers might, Louis is never much more than a plot device. The real juice is the Reeves story. It has not escaped critical notice that in playing a man whose career was circumscribed, nay, deformed by his very celebrity, Affleck could be Method acting. Indeed, with her taste for fancy jewels and cars, and ability to make Affleck look slick, Jennifer Lopez was cast as the dominant figure/femme fatale in their yearlong theater of the romantic absurd. Whether that was true in their “private” life, we’ll never know. But when Affleck as Reeves lashes out in anger over his waning career at Diane Lane’s sugar mama Toni Mannix, his heartfelt rage is astonishing. He also finds the right tinge of sadness that comes from knowing that he did it to himself.
How did he do it? By looking for that camera. Unemployed former contract player Reeves slips into a paparazzi shot of Rita Hayworth at Ciro’s, and meets Hollywood mogul’s wife Toni. He wants the well-heeled life of the rich and famous, so he becomes Toni’s kept man-boy. Oh, George. Such a masculine no-no. Anxious for work to justify his existence, he agrees to play Superman, complete with a padded suit to create Man of Steel muscles he doesn’t have. Before Reeves makes a live appearance at a kids’ show, he jokingly asks the stagehands if they can see his penis through the suit. No, George. We can’t. And that’s the problem: you’ve given it up in pursuit of Hollywood fame and fortune. Louis never solves the mystery (and the filmmakers don’t come up with a fictional solution à la Ellroy). Instead, we see three versions of the death play out before his eyes, ending with the suicide. That seems to be the most compelling explanation, if only for the look Affleck’s imagined Reeves gives to Louis: the look of a man who knows he’s broken, who knows he’s traded his manhood for a moment of stardom as an image of hyper-masculinity he knew was ridiculous.
Why should any of this matter to us in the here and now? Well, for one thing, it isn’t just masculine effectiveness that gets lost in the fame race. There’s also that small matter of the truth. What really happened, who really did what to whom and why: that all gets lost in the lurid headlines and the flash of photographs and flickering celluloid. And for another, when certain men in power have fallen back on distracting images of masculine hyperbole about bringing it on and strong-arming bad guys at the expense of truth, it's lead to one stunning display of ineffectiveness after another over the past several years. You want to earn your stripes, guys? Stop looking at the cameras to bullshit us. Then again, it is rather ironic that it’s Hollywood delivering this message via its reflexive fictions. Talk about the pot calling the kettle, um, black.
Guy Movies is a biweekly analysis of machismo cinema from the perspective of a woman.
