Many people are fans of the noir genre, but there is often debate as to what it actually is.
What exactly is the lasting appeal behind a noir style story or film? Is it the dangerous urban setting? The stark moody black and white lighting, the wised-up hard-boiled dialogue?
Perhaps one way to try to understand noir stories is to consider who it was that first created them and the times in which many of them were written. Looking at the genre from the perspective of its originators and their times, noir in essence seems to be simply highly stylized human drama with a Great Depression to post WWII era blue-collar American setting and attitude.
It started when non- “to-the-manor-born” blue collar American writers like Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich started to write stories for the masses with an eye toward American blue-collar concerns and dreams.
For in noirs, the do-or-die, edge-of-your-seat human dramas that used to take place only along castle battlements in Shakespeare’s time were now set in locations that regular working class American people recognized, like on the docks or the railroad or in diners.
With the arrival of pulp fiction, suddenly joe six-pack readers began to sit up a little straighter as the action and adventure and chills and suspense seemed that much more familiar and possible and therefore that much more interesting to them. As a result, blue-collar America began to feel its own confidence and power. Look at this wonderfully exciting and interesting place and time and country that we all build create and live in, the pulps seemed to say. Where everything is so slick and masculine and cool and powerful and stylish from the sharp fedoras to the art deco skyscrapers and the 20th Century Limited steam train.
Noir was a way, perhaps for the first time ever, to allow non-aristocratic people entrée to express themselves and their lives through literature. One of the reasons for this may have been technology; namely, the introduction of the mass-produced portable typewriter. Portable typewriters created by the Royal and Underwood companies in the early 1900s allowed a regular ham-and-egger to transform his own thoughts and concerns into fancy looking newsprint.
Eventually from the shadier sections of cities and even from the other sides of the track in America’s small towns, manuscripts started to be created and to be sent out for consideration for publication in the pulp magazines that started to crop up.
Coming up from these kinds of humble origins certainly seems to be the case with the great pulp master, Charles Willeford, who actually rode the rails as a penniless child in the Great Depression and then, desperate for work, lied about his age to sneak into the army air corps. Staying in the army long enough to see its calvary go from horses to tanks, he would win medals in WWII as a tank commander. Another legend Ed McBain, born and raised in the streets and alleys of Harlem and the Bronx, also did his stint in the war as did a Brooklyn bartender’s son, Mickey Spillane.
When we realize these writers spent their formative years in competitive hard scrabble environments and in army barracks we can start to see where the curt, quick, suffer-no-fools-gladly, get-to-the-point, hard-edged dialogue of their stories comes from.
Seen this way, we can understand where the supposedly “cynical” attitude of these stories came from—from the truth of mean streets themselves. This hard-boiled attitude, otherwise known as street smarts, is merely the hunger and struggle and poverty-sharpened realization (made often at a very early age) that what people say—especially what the elite establishment people say—and what they do are quite often at odds.
And if the seeking of justice is often a theme in these stories, it is because justice is something that those on the bottom rungs of society are a little more acutely aware of. Because if you think about it people from the seedier side of the tracks get it coming and going.
On one hand it is they who get mugged and harassed most by the gangs and mafias who thrive in the rough part of town. And on the other hand if they ever get caught up in a crime themselves (a temptation much keener for the other half as their pockets are often empty) they soon see that the justice system seems to have two tiers—one for the poor unconnected suckers who get thrown in the clink for stealing a candy bar and one for the rich who can hire the previous district attorney to be their defense lawyer to skate yet again with a gentle slap on the wrist.
And yet, despite the clear eyed knowledge that the deck seems to be stacked in a rigged game, noir greats like Jim Thompson, Ed McBain, Mickey Spillane, and Charles Willeford showed that the little guy could still act like a man, could still push back and fight for his piece of the pie. With his fists if he had to.
And that even in an ultimately doomed to fail fight against a corrupt city hall, the courage to enter the ring anyway and to attempt to navigate the often seedy underbelly of America was still the free act of a free man and a noble and heroic kind of winning in and of itself.
When we look at noir through this lens, we can suddenly see it not merely as a new genre but as a true empowering point in artistic history. In old world Europe with its stark caste system between aristocrats and commoners, it was the aristocrats for whom most if not all of literature, stage drama, music, and art was created. Even to be an artist, one needed social connections, a gilded invite to the salon.
Note how even until the mid 1900s, many of the most famous British writers—Orwell, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, Kipling, and Graham Greene—were all very well personally connected to the still powerful aristocratic British Empire. This is further evidenced by noir’s predecessor, the drawing room mystery, where British moneyed aristocrats sat around landed estates sipping sherry as they slowly and pompously pondered, who was it, old boy, that could have possibly brained Colonel Mustard with the fireplace poker in the library? But in America, a country created by and for commoners, soon new quicker and more muscular and energetic art forms were created by and for commoners.
Once this happened, low and behold, the population of the world was shown how cool and intelligent and competent and funny and sexy and lively and adventurous we lowly peasants actually were! With the onrush of snappy and fun and exciting American stories and cinema, the world was suddenly shown that regular people were often in fact more attractive than slow moving, stuffy coddled arrogant aristocrats.
Hardened by the struggle of poverty and labor and the combat of war came refreshingly irreverent, fedora wearing, tougher heroes who never tipped their hat and said ‘ello govna to an aristocrat. Instead the noir heroes like Sam Spade didn’t give a care who you were, buddy, or who your daddy was. If you didn’t get out of their way, they were going to sock you in the jaw.
Soon in the imaginative mind of the West, changes began to be made. Out went opera and in came rock and roll. Out went ball gowns and in came blue jeans. Out went fox hunting and in came surfing and riding motorcycles.
Suddenly being cool was even more important than being rich. And anyone could at least attempt to be cool. Perhaps it was true that non-bluebloods could never be king. But soft bluebloods could never be a smiling roughneck cowboy like Clark Gable could they? Or a likeable wise acre street tough like Jimmy Cagney. And so disappeared the concept that only an aristocrat could be part of an epic or a tragedy. Instead of only a king or a prince being stuck upon the horns of a life-and-death chilling dilemma, now two-bit boxers could find themselves there or even flat-footed insurance salesmen.
In sum, noir was the artistic illustration of the rising power and confidence of the American middle class. It highlighted the potential and the appeal of the human spirit and imagination when it is unfettered by burdens of barbaric and unjust social traditions that kept the mass of peasants illiterate in the muck and only the manor-born aristocrats able to eat, drink, read, write, paint, dance, sing, and be merry.
With this powerful new exciting and energetic meritocratic instead of aristocratic American vision, it makes sense that German expressionists like Fritz Lang and English directors like Hitchcock would come stateside. And that even French literary novelists such as Camus would be inspired to join in with noirish novels like The Stranger that Camus wrote after being inspired by Cain’s immortal, The Postman Always Rings Twice.
And if there is an epitome of this aristocrat versus commoner artistic cultural tension, perhaps it can be shown very distinctly in 1988’s classic noirish action film, Die Hard, where the irreverent and funny blue-collar off-duty NYPD hero, John McClane, in a muscular bloody wife beater T-shirt is pitted against the sleek arrogant Savile Row bespoke-suited prissy aristocratic Euroweenie, Hans Gruber. Worldwide applause and success of this film proved the winner of this class battle for imaginative supremacy. The world said, let the cultured aristocratic Hans flail through the warm night air above the noir capital of LA scrabbling for his Swiss watch and fluttering bearer bonds (whatever they are) as he plummets backwards to his death from the snooty let-them-eat-cake multinational globalist corporate heights. Plucky underdog, Mr. McClane, and his band of wised-up, funny, street smart American blue-collar helpers (a washed-up, twinkie-eating, dad-bod LAPD patrol cop and a funny young limo driver) come from behind to take the triumphant Americana Christmas win.
So next time when you pop some popcorn and watch your old black-and-white favorite noir, understand that what is being shown to you is something uniquely wonderful, uniquely human, and uniquely American. An energetically rebellious work of artistic human freedom of the people, by the people, and most especially, for the people.
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