The Noircast Blog | Noircast.net: All Things Noir | Clute and Edwards

Noircast Special 5: L.A. Noire The Collected Stories: A Conversation with Jonathan Santlofer

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:25:27 -0500

In our latest podcast, Clute and Edwards are joined by L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories editor Jonathan Santlofer, a hard-boiled writer and artist extraordinaire. Santlofer discusses the particular challenges and rewards of bringing together a short story collection for a video game production company from tight deadlines to restrictions on spoilers and the need for publishers of all media to put story first in this brave new era when the medium and the target audience grow ever harder to define. A fascinating conversation for all fans of videogames, hard-boiled fiction and things noir.

Click here to listen to the podcast: LISTEN NOW

Click here to get a copy of L.A. Noire The Collected Stories for the Kindle for $0.99: http://www.amazon.com/L-Noire-Collected-Stories-ebook/dp/B004YYWHAY

Click here to visit Jonathan Santlofer's website: http://jonathansantlofer.com/

(and if you visit Jonathan's website, don't forget to check out his marvelous art, including new drawings inspired by the noir classic, Out of the Past!)

Episode 53: Out of the Past Act II (with Jonathan Santlofer, author of Anatomy of Fear)

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:03:37 -0500

OUT OF THE PAST is perhaps the most carefully structured of all films noir—a narrative divided (like protagonist Jeff Markum/Bailey) between an inescapable past and an impossible future, teetering on the slimmest hope for the present such that any action taken by its poor players tips them down into the abyss. Director Jacques Tourneur, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring perfectly synchronized their efforts on this film, creating a narrative masterpiece where every image perfectly accompanies or contrasts every line of dialogue, where the whole is so self-conscious that it forces us to view each moment through every other, creating a true mise-en-abyme. It would be as impossible for the viewer to enter into such a story as it is for the characters to escape it, if it weren't for the decision to create a "Meta" narration at exactly the halfway point of the film, allowing the viewer to sort past from present in a film that constantly blurs that distinction in order to show how lives are always lived in servitude to what comes out of the past. For all of these reasons, the film is a constant source of inspiration, and a constant obsession, for those who watch it carefully. Artist and novelist Jonathan Santlofer joins Clute and Edwards to discuss how the film has repeatedly inspired his work, and Clute and Edwards consider how the case they would make for this movie is reframed each time they reopen their investigation into its means and motives. Click here to listen to this episode

Episode 52: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (with Scott McGee of Turner Classic Movies)

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 23:47:59 -0500

Appearances can be deceiving. On the surface, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS is pure science fiction, the tale of seed pods from outer space that produce emotionless body doubles of each citizen in the small town of Santa Mira. Often read as an allegory of either Communism or McCarthyism, where every person who becomes "one of them" loses autonomy by willingly buying into the unthinking collective, the film in fact plumbs questions of humanity in the modern era with subtlety and nuance more common to films noir than to science fiction movies. As Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) and Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) fight to remain human, they question the mass hysteria of the era, recognize that all appearances are misleading in a mass media culture, and discuss how we lose our humanity in times of social dislocation. Director Don Siegal, screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring and producer Walter Wanger draw on their extensive experience in creating iconic films noir to craft a movie that self-consciously adopts a noir style and noir thematics whenever the stakes are high, demonstrating in the process that noir is ideally suited to addressing human questions in the years following WWII, when retaining our humanity in spite of technological progress is precisely what is in question. Click here to listen to the episode.

Noircast Special 4 Podcast: Q&A with Shannon Clute and Jared Case

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:13:38 -0400

Jared Case and Shannon Clute, at George Eastman House (1/20/11)

On January 20, 2011 Clute introduced the film Mildred Pierce at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, as part of their Noir Series. His talk was preceded by a Q&A with Jared Case (Head of Cataloguing and Research Center) on several noir topics: the origins of the Out of the Past podcast; certain underappreciated aspects of noir; how scholarly approaches to noir have limited what we see; a new film studies paradigm he and Richard Edwards worked out in their forthcoming book The Maltese Touch of Evil: Film Noir and Potential Criticism, which allows them unleash and understand other narrative potentials lurking in noir. Special thanks to Jared Case for letting us repost these audio and video files.

To listen to that conversation, please visit Out of the Past website

To see that conversation, please visit these YouTube links.

The Adjustment Bureau (2011) and a Kinder, Gentler Alt-Noir Universe

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:21:39 -0400

*Spoiler Alert – I discuss key plot elements.

RE here:

The Adjustment Bureau (George Nolfi, 2011) is the latest Philip K. Dick "alt-noir universe" to be made into a major motion picture. Even before the film appeared in theaters, The Adjustment Bureau trailer was drenched in noir iconography (these filmmakers clearly love fedoras) and filled with noir-tinged dialogue like "you can't outrun fate." Audiences are already familiar with "universes" derived from the imagination of Philip K. Dick. His alt-noir universes have been vividly imagined in such films as Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, and Minority Report. An alt-noir universe blends and bends the conventions, iconography, and myths of science fiction with noir, creating a satisfying hybrid world. Moreover, there's a direct connection to noir's postwar period: Dick wrote the short story "The Adjustment Team" in 1954. The original story shares much in common with frequent noir themes such as the limits of free will and the capricious nature of fate, mixed with Red Scare-induced paranoia and xenophobia. Finally, Matt Damon is not playing a variant of his Bourne persona in The Adjustment Bureau. Indeed, Damon is a good choice for the lead character in an alt-noir film, having established his noir bona fides in The Talented Mr. Ripley (Minghella, 1999).

Watching the film, I was surprised how little in common it shared with other alt-noir films. Director George Nolfi maintains a careful and controlled distance from the darker aspects of the noir tradition—keeping his noir touches safely on the surface. This leads me to ask a larger question about big budget noir films in the second decade of the 21^st century. Since 9/11, noir-influenced films have been a hot Hollywood commodity (think Christopher Nolan and his embrace of noir as "art blockbuster" as just one example). But I'm wondering whether or not we are seeing the most hard-boiled elements of recent noir storytelling cooling off, being displaced, or dissipating. There might even be a chronological similarity between the "ending" of the classic noir period and today's post-9/11 films noir. We are currently approaching a full decade since 9/11/01. By a similar accounting, 2011 may be considered equivalent to 1955/1956 in the classic period of film noir. All cycles eventually come to an end.

There is much I like about The Adjustment Bureau: its visual design, its acting, the supra-naturalism of its premise. But even before its final dénouement, I found myself more enamored of its style than its substance. After watching the film, I found myself in agreement with several reviewers who commented that director Nolfi didn't push the film's premise into "deep" or "daring" areas. New York Times film reviewer Manohla Dargis wrote: "If Mr. Nolfi doesn’t go deep in “The Adjustment Bureau,” drilling down to where it hurts (he would rather entertain than pain you), he skates on the gray-blue surfaces of his film with confidence."[1] Roger Ebert similarly opines: ""The Adjustment Bureau" is a smart and good movie that could have been a great one if it had a little more daring. I suspect the filmmakers were reluctant to follow its implications too far."[2] What accounts for Nolfi's "reluctance" to push his movie farther? What might this film have been had he drilled "down to where it hurts?"

The film is based on a 1954 Philip K. Dick short story. In the original story, adjustment teams have the ability to stop time, though what actually occurs during an "adjustment" is fairly vague. It's never really explained in detail what power the adjusters have, though Dick lets the reader know they can manipulate time, even reversing it by making people younger. But when the main character of Ed accidentally stumbles upon the adjusters doing their secretive work, his presence and actions have much more ominous implications than in the movie version. When Ed comes across a seller in the cigar stand in the building where he works and reaches to touch him, Dick writes: "The seller's arm came loose. It fell to the lobby floor, disintegrating into fragments. Bits of gray fibre. Like dust. Ed's senses reeled." Dick's descriptions of the period of adjustment are compact and consistent: "clouds of ash," "gray statue," "gray clouds," and "clouds of gray ash." "Gray" and "ash" are the words that dominate this part of this story and combine to create a harrowing feeling of cosmic dissolutionment, akin to a sole survivor walking in the apocalyptic wake of an atomic bomb blast. By contrast, in the film adaptation, Matt Damon's character of David Norris encounters the adjusters and merely witnesses a cinematic tableaux vivant—the only oddity being the fixity of time, with no additional "clouds of gray ash." While Norris' (Damon) presence is disruptive to these mysterious agents, there is none of the visceral pain or mortal terror suggested by Dick's "gray" and "ash" descriptions. Everyone maintains their normal outward appearances in the film. There are no "gray statues." The stakes of an "adjustment"—the physical jeopardy, the inherent risks, any sense of "gray" areas—are less dangerous and less pronounced in the film. For me, this is a missed opportunity to plunge into the depths of noir. Fate in the film is a tidy little problem, more or less the predictable outcome of good (or bad) accounting standards. The adjusters' handheld "books" offer real-time actuarial insight into their manipulations, so the adjustment teams seem more like arbitrage experts than anything else. The film favors a tone that soothes and offsets our fears about information overload--the all-too-real situation that we have all this data about us potentially swirling around in massive databases beyond our control. It also means that what the adjusters are doing becomes simply a game (a chase swirling around a romance, or a romance wrapped around a chase—take your pick) and the stakes of the game don't seem terribly high or particularly risky.

In terms of alt-noir universes, the adjusters of The Adjustment Bureau would seem to have more than a few passing affinities to The Strangers of Alex Proyas' Dark City (1998). Dark City embraced its noir-ness fully and generated a unique alt-noir universe, including elements of the detective thriller. However in The Adjustment Bureau, a similar idea involving unseen and secret forces manipulating our destinies seems remarkably un-sinister. As my wife commented to me, the difference probably lies in that The Adjustment Bureau has more in common with Heaven Can Wait than Dark City. There seems to be an interesting parallel to the supernatural and religious-inflected narratives of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Heaven Can Wait, and It's a Wonderful Life. These films all involve main characters who have their destinies changed by some quirk of fate, and they are aided in their journey back to their "normal" or "intended" life by various versions of Christian-styled guardian angels, nudging them back towards a desired, if not utterly predictable, path. Isn't this what Nofli's adjusters are really doing? In other words, is The Adjustment Bureau just the secular humanist version of Heaven Can Wait? Is Richardson (John Slattery) basically an update of Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains)?

In a similar way, I keep thinking that The Adjustment Bureau works hard to avoid any direct address to the War on Terror and the realities of a post-9/11 US society. Perhaps Dick's original imagery hits too close to home after 9/11. As I was reading the short story "The Adjustment Team," I definitely thought Dick was trying to capture a very basic human notion about essence (e.g., ashes to ashes, dust to dust) and a postwar fear of atomic and nuclear annihilation (i.e. the "dust clouds" of atomic explosions). But today, images of "gray ash" are also resonant with the tragic aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York City. We all witnessed the horrific images of New Yorkers covered in gray ash on that terrible day as they fled the falling Towers. All of our senses reeled at those images. For director Nolfi to use Dick's original imagery would bring his film uncomfortably close to the visual and visceral realities of 9/11: the "adjusters" would be read as terrorists more than as members of a hip, retro Mad Men-style cabal. It would undoubtedly complicate our feelings about the "adjusters'" plans and their secret missions to alter the course of human history. But wasn't such fear and angst about "adjustments" Dick's main point? Hasn't noir always been a collective mirror mediating the darker realities of everyday life and modern society? While it would have been a very different film in tone and mood to have shown the "adjustment" period as Dick wrote it, such a film would have retained a powerful critique, one that would be resonant today with our ongoing fears and anxieties about "world orders," new and otherwise. Of course, that is probably why Nolfi was reluctant to go there: this ominous critique is fairly incompatible with the romance thriller he actually made.

In the end, The Adjustment Bureau strokes our fascination, but not necessarily our fears, about postmodern existence inside virtual labyrinths. The film can be read as a beautiful but inchoate travelogue of 21st century New York City, a dizzying mash-up version of a city symphony. But unlike Inception (Nolan, 2010), we are not meant to ponder the mazes and mysteries we create through our endless manipulations of the Real. The Adjustment Bureau does not want to go there. It focuses instead on confirming a classic nostalgic myth: love conquers all. We might be too cynical to really believe that, but that's the ending Nolfi gives us, in a tip of his fedora to classic Hollywood storytelling.

Therefore, this film ends up presenting a kindler, gentler alt-noir universe. Even the film's tagline "your future has been adjusted" is a euphemism, lacking any real menace or bite. It's as if we finally glimpse the machinery running Oz and shrug our collective shoulders—sure, there are "men" behind the curtain, but haven't we known that for an awfully long time now? Time will tell if this movie indeed presages a new noir or neo-noir cycle. But we probably should adjust our film-going expectations and anticipate more films like this one to appear over the next few years as the noir fever that gripped Hollywood in the aftermath of 9/11 lightens up.

--Richard Edwards, 7/14/11

[1] Manohla Dargis, "Creepy People With a Plan, and a Couple on the Run," http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/movies/04adjust.html?scp=1&sq=adjustment%20bureau&st=cse

[2] Roger Ebert, "The Adjustment Bureau (2011)," http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110302/REVIEWS/110309994