I have always heard Tough Guys Don’t Dance (both the 1984 novel by Norman Mailer and the 1987 film adaptation of the same name, screenwritten and directed by Mailer) described as a “noir,” which leads me to call into question NOT the designation of either of those works as noir, but what it means for something to be a “noir” in the first place.
Of all the genre designations that exist, “noir,” might be the one that feels the least definite or circumscribed in terms of content; existing instead as a cohesive aesthetic, or really a as collection of vibes. The great film historian James Narremore suggested that the definition of noir lies at the nexus of two theorizations: Jean-Paul Sartre’s theory of “literary authenticity” as cultivated through the exploration of “extreme situations” and Graham Greene’s theory that mainstream audiences craved stories about violence and sex, what he nicknamed “blood melodrama.” “They blur,” says Narremore “the distinction between formulaic entertainment and art films,” just as much as they blur all other criteria—“except for a degree of thematic or tonal darkness, nothing, not even crime, is shared by everything that has been called film noir.”
Both iterations of Tough Guys Don’t Dance feature many elements on what we might call the film noir bingo card: we have a melancholy outsider-detective, corrupt police officers, conspiratorial forces, hard alcohol, easy women, flashbacks, voiceovers, performative masculinity, and several different iterations on the spectrum of the “femme fatale.”
Both tell the story of an alcoholic ex-convict-turned writer, Tim Madden, who is reeling via a series of alcohol-fueled blackouts after the sudden departure of his wife, when he discovers a series of horrific clues, including the severed head of a blonde woman in his marijuana stash, that all point to his involvement in a ghastly crime he can’t remember. Tim becomes, then, a reluctant and queasy amateur detective, embarking on a search through the town and townsfolk around him, but also into his memories: significant experiences of his throughout his whole life and the blacked-out short term details of the recent past.
But I argue that Tough Guys, both of them, push back against the designations of noir in such a way that interrogates the fabric of that genre, not in an aesthetic sense, but in a historical one.
With associated writers like Dashiell Hammet, James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane, Eric Ambler, David Goodis, and even the British-born but LA-transplanted Raymond Chandler, “noir” is often considered to be an American genre.
But it has its roots in Europe. Film noir originated as an outgrowth of both the post-World War I German expressionist movement and work of the American cohort of writers creating the hard-boiled crime genre. But only French critics could see the new movement as an art form of itself, however nebulous its boundaries were. Film Noir, after all, is a French name; and it was named such in a collaboration between the French existentialists and the French surrealists. Film Noir is about darkness, or the potential for darkness, in everyday life being taken to almost absurd degrees—lows heretofore believed unfathomable by those involved in the events at hand.
But the other thing that German expressionism produced was the modern horror movie. This is a film tradition which is responsible for masterpieces like Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and F.W. Murnua’s Nosferatu, a film which Siegfried Kracauer claimed could “obliterat[e] the boundaries between the real and the unreal.”
Kracuaer’s reading of German Expressionism argues that the anguish wrought by the first world war left Germany broken and waiting for a master, one which would come in the figure of Hitler, and that this dynamic is uniquely revealed in the films of this period. German expressionist films are nightmares, lavishly-decorated and elaborate disasters, about the weaknesses and dangers of both the human mind, and the human body as it serves the mind.
While German expressionism did lead to proto-detective films like Fritz Lang’s M, which further inspired American film noir, it also led, more directly, to the development of the “horror” genre, plain and simple.
Many horror films take the shape of detective films—especially when there is the encroachment of a supernatural force that needs circumscription and identification. The Exorcist and The Omen combine these aspects, for example.
But generally speaking, detective films (even film noir detective films) and horror films are regarded as different things. But despite that the book and the film versions of Tough Guys Don’t Dance are quite different from another, they both share a secret investment in restoring the bond between the detective and horror genres, redefining “noir” and its expectations. And it does this by bringing a very European sense of noir back to a fundamentally American context.
Tough Guys is set in Provincetown, Mass. Provincetown was Mailer’s beloved second home, but for the purposes of this discussion I want to underscore that Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, is also the locus for the tip of the American colonization of America. Both book and film are explorations of that particular place—not only laterally, spatially, but historically. In the book, Mailer not only provides long histories of the people of Provincetown, and the earlier Hell-town (the ghosts of which place make up the semi-transparent background of this novel, a kind of theatrical scrim), but a geologic history of the place as well. Provincetown represents in both of these versions, the accretion, the long and slow build-up of horrors. All of these layers and ghosts and former iterations are superimposed onto one another, creating a gluey mass, a sort of ephemeral and yet perpetual and overwhelming half-life shared by everyone. The real mystery at the heart of Tough Guys is a metaphysical one.
American noirs are typically preoccupied with American bureaucratic architecture and encroachment. But in its doubling-down on “Americanness” of its setting, Mailer ends up producing a noir which is more reminiscent of its European ancestors, rather like the Pilgrims who arrived to Provincetown to sign the Mayflower Contract.
Tim’s Provincetown is the nightmare world of Caligari or Nosferatu, or even some of the later practitioners of an expressionistic or macabre-surrealist tradition, like Lynch or Herzog or even Dario Argento. He finds a human head in his marijuana stash—that isn’t the setup for a traditional murder mystery, that’s the setup for a horror story.
And this is the reading that Tough Guys Don’t Dance performs on its adopted genre! Noir is a genre that asks about the existential impact of horror encroaching on everyday life. The “murder mystery” is what happens when someone attempts to circumscribe, rationalize, “solve” events that might otherwise be horror; but noir is what results from this process when the circumstances involved are so dark, so alienating, and so terrifying that even solving the mystery will not provide sufficient catharsis.
The matter at the center of Tough Guys Don’t Dance more than simply a mystery of, or investigation into, what someone did. It’s a “lost night” or “lost time” story. It is This is one man’s mystery of, and his own investigation into, what HE might have been capable of doing. It is a story about the wilds of the unconscious mind. As in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, where the villain Cesare is a tortured sleepwalker who attacks women at night, Tough Guys Don’t Dance is a about the second, sleeper self—the other side o the mind that takes over the body after the familiar side goes to sleep. It is about, say, the night half of the self, versus the light half.
Thus, the terrain Tim examines in his investigation is not only the literal one around him, but also that of his tortured mind. In Mailer’s novel, he describes the setting in terms of its macro and micropaleontology: acknowledging the invisible mineral deposits and fossils buried in the strata of the coast, describing the sculpting of the face of the land by glaciers of earlier epochs. In Tough Guys Don’t Dance, an identity is not ever totally knowable in its wholeness; it is only trackable in small doses by layers, imprints, ghosts, clues, evidence of a past which has ostensibly constructed a wholeness. Tough Guys is about finding traces of answers, only being able to trace a sense of the self.
Place and person, Provincetown and Tim are one, in Tough Guys Don’t Dance. And Tim is the embodiment of the mind-body problem, the ultimate paradox of life. His search for a murderer, and the fear that he is only looking for himself, dovetails with the novel’s presentation of the ultimate nightmare of living—which is being forced to exist among forces and within a place that can offer no concrete answers, and inside a mind that cannot offer any answers or accountability for itself.
In this way, Tough Guys Don’t Dance traces a relationship between noir as it is traditionally understood, horror, and mystery, as genres that portray, in gradations, the ultimate unknowability of the anything, and just how viscerally terrifying that is.
