The 1940s saw the rise of film noir, an era of gritty crime dramas, where a troubled man in a fedora traded quips with the femme fatale just before gunshots rang out.
As a schoolboy I loved those old black-and-white classics starring Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum whenever they aired on TV.
By the time I was old enough to go to R-rated movies in the ‘80s, there was a wave of “neo-noir” films such as Body Heat and Blood Simple. Unlike the ‘40s flicks, modern neo-noir amplified everything – vivid colors, sex, music, violence – into a potent pulp cocktail.
A subset of this genre especially fascinated me: a new type of “nerd noir,” about naive boys drawn into a dark world.
They were updated versions of the Parsifal myth in which the young fool longs to be a Grail Knight and rescue the damsel, but is quite unprepared for the corrupt wasteland he enters.
The prime example was David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.
Nice boy Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) fancies himself an amateur sleuth, and recklessly dives into the unknown. For the first time, I saw someone like myself, a nerdy college student, in a contemporary noir.
The earnest Jeffrey starts as a curious voyeur, and then tumbles into a terrifying netherworld. The unhinged depravity of Dennis Hopper’s character pushed beyond the limits of my innocent imagination.
I remember walking out of the cinema, devastated, utterly disturbed. Like a duckling forever imprinted by its first caretaker, the extraordinary Lynch film shaped me at the moment of peak receptivity.
In Less Than Zero a freshman (Andrew McCarthy) comes home to a neon-and-toxin Los Angeles. While he had escaped to college on the East Coast, his old friends had descended into hedonistic misery.
The noir premise is that his buddy (Robert Downey Jr) is in debt to a drug dealer. The film's visuals and music are steeped in a sensuous ennui, the backdrop for Downey's riveting portrayal of a doomed comrade.
Look – it’s autumn 1987, and this particular young graduate has flown from Dublin and arrived in New York. He doesn’t know anything.
(I still don’t know anything.)
On the subway A-train, crack users fell asleep on the seat next to me, and in the West Village young men walked the streets slowly, hollowed-out from the virus ravaging their organs.
In Bad Influence meek accountant James Spader finds an alpha mentor in Rob Lowe. The amoral Lowe guides nerdy Spader to explore his repressed impulses, until (of course) it all goes too far. The movie is a slick, lurid melodrama, and I watched it many, many times.
The one time I witnessed an armed robbery, it was not at all noir. Rather it was a sunny spring afternoon in busy midtown Manhattan. I was at a large Blimpie’s sandwich restaurant, crowded with office-workers like me on lunch break. Not yet vegan, I was eating my usual tuna-salad on whole wheat, with a bag of potato chips.
Two men approached the front counter, no masks or theatrics, and one slowly produced an automatic pistol and waved it calmly, just to announce what was happening. His partner handed the cashier a brown paper bag and asked for all the cash. The armed man scanned all the seated diners, and our glances briefly met. I felt more puzzlement than fear – this all seemed too casual to be scary.
The gunmen were there-and-gone in under three minutes, as if picking up a takeout order. After they left, I finished eating my sandwich, and went back to the office (where I was a dweeb drafting voltage specs onto blueprints for new franchise restaurants like Taco Bell and Blimpie’s).
I walked the Hell's Kitchen streets where State of Grace was being filmed. Sean Penn is the undercover cop intertwined with the gangland tribe of his old neighborhood.
He tries to save his childhood friend (Gary Oldman) from a spiraling fate. [ln these Parsifal tales, women are reduced to accessory roles, either pure goodness or evil. See the Note at end of essay for alternatives.]
Modern Manhattan was also the setting for a neo-noir Hamlet, where the prince was portrayed by Ethan Hawke as a “slacker detective.” Like myself, he spends hours wandering the aisles of the video-rental store, reciting soliloquies under his breath.
By the time Hamlet was filmed in 1999, Kyle MacLachlan was no longer the fresh young hero – instead he played the scheming uncle, Claudius. This Parsifal had become a corrupt king, a warning to me.
The astonishing power of cinema is that I was far more traumatized by Blue Velvet than I was by facing an armed man during an actual robbery.
The young man who obsessively watched those films seems a different species now. Back then he mistook the aesthetics of darkness for philosophical depth.
Those neo-noir movies were fever dreams, rites of passage, as he charted his own ragged course across the wasteland of early adulthood. Not to find the Grail, but to learn the vastness of his own ignorance.
I was learning to see in the dark.
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NOTE:
Hollywood studios are primarily run by straight white men, so most movies produced reflect their particular anxieties, especially noir. However in the '80s and '90s there were a handful of neo-noir films from other perspectives, that are definitely worth viewing.
Kathryn Bigelow made Blue Steel starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and Lili Fini Zanuck made Rush starring Jennifer Jason Leigh.
Black directors Bill Duke and Carl Franklin made great films in this era. Deep Cover stars Laurence Fishburne, and Denzel Washington starred in Devil in a Blue Dress.
And then there is Bound, by The Watchowskis, starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly, which I guess is in a category of its own.
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Loved this walk down memory lane, and your description of the robbery (it rings so true). And I especially like your note/ disclaimer. Hollywood and American literature were dominated by straight white men, and when things were finally changing we got this huge backlash in favor or misogyny and racism.