A sweet little gem of a film noir featuring not one but two hard-luck dames in love with the same lug.
I want to point out something about noir and the culture that created it, something I noticed watching this one.
Noir philosophy states clearly, here and elsewhere, that the opposite of Worker is Outlaw.
Ann sums it up for Joe two-thirds of the way through the movie after he says to her, ‘Oh what do you know about it–you probably had your bread buttered on both sides for you since the day you were born’:
“You think you had to fight? Well the only way you know how to fight is that stupid way, with a gun.
Well there’s another way you probably never even heard of. It’s the daily fight that everyone has. To get food and an education and to land a job and keep it. And some self-respect … all I wanted was just a little Decency, that’s all!”.
Noir says: Look, it’s simple. There’s only one path to self-respect. You get an education, and then you get the kind of Job that it affords you, and you keep that Job, even if it’s only being a schoolteacher. Any deviation from that leads to jail if you’re lucky, and a bullet in the gut if you’re not.
In this worldview, even if you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth, there’s still no such thing as Respectability, or even Decency, without a Job. You’re just what they used to call a PlayBoy (play being the opposite of work), or what we call these days a ‘trust fund baby’ (a spoiled infantilized child with no path to mature self-respect).
The modern temptation to consider falling away from the only good path and giving in to the allure of Breaking Bad still falls squarely into the traditions of Noir from eighty years ago. Walter White doesn’t end up dying the decent cancer death he was supposed to, hooked up to the machines and surrounded by tearful loved ones. He dies completely alone and gutshot in some random enemy cellar.
***
Nose to the mass grindstone and a tiny quiet maybe even happy life, on the one hand. Love. Child bearing. Family.
Trying to buck the system and getting gunned down for it like a dog in the street, on the other.
Black and white, no exceptions … it has a certain appeal even if you feel a natural impulse to rebel against it.
***
It is also the ultimate conservatism.
If you lay your life and your days on the altar of the System and wholly become one of its workers, you will of course be inclined to believe that the system represents what is Right, in all the many ways.
The policeman is your friend, because he is the enemy of the outlaw. To the policeman, and by extension to you the worker, ‘having no visible means of support’ (being jobless) is in and of itself evidence of criminality, and punishable.
A police action, in Korea or Vietnam or Iraq or Ukraine or Taiwan, is only self-defense by the system, performed on behalf of all good gainfully employed and tax paying Americans. And so on, whether the charge is tiny like vagrancy or shoplifting, or massive and worldwide, like communism or ‘autocracy’. The detective must find a way to Truth and proving guilt, by the standards of the duly legislated penal codes. Justice must be served, at night court or Nuremberg, or Mỹ Lai.
Every part of the Democratic government is ultimately on the same side–the side of Right–but it remains your responsibility, your solemn obligation as a citizen, to vote for the representatives who are a little more right and a little less bad. It’s the only power over society you will ever have, and rejecting that obligation is a sin.
***
I’m exploding into kamacchanda. So I’ll stop there for now.
Noir is black and white, right and wrong, and in its simplicity it comforts us; in return, we love it with an open heart.
This thing I call I … loves noir too, naturally, as my birthright and my heritage.
But all that said I stand outside the comforting lines, out in the fogbound zone of gray.
I don’t know if that means I have integrity, or whether it means the opposite, and I don’t even know if it matters.
I am not my body. I am not my mind. I am not my emotions. I am not the worker, yet nor am I the outlaw: I’m the other kind.
I am consciousness unbound in a purple haze and I long to know my path.