The Noir Style

Throughout the 1940’s and 50’s, filmmakers explored a style that became known as Film Noir. This unique and unfamiliar style was explored in works that we have read or watched such as Kiss Me Deadly, The Killers, and Something Wild. Some of the most bizarre aspects of modernism are displayed in Noir works.

To get a basic understanding of the Noir style, you have to realize that most of these characters have a lot of issues. They don’t tend to be as pathetically mentally ill as some of the other modernist characters that we have explored, but they do have their fair share of problems. The characters seem to get themselves into a lot of trouble by making stupid decisions, rather than being just being mentally screwed up.

Noir works in mysterious ways. Most of the stories or movies include a hero, an anti-hero, and a ditsy, beautiful woman that creates the majority of the problems for the other characters. This problem causing female character is known as the “femme fatale”. This conniving female role is usually the downfall of the hero in Noir. They tend to seductively “prey” on the hero, and they use their looks and sex appeal to get anything they want from men. The femme fatale is the knife in the hero’s back time and time again in the Noir style.

The heroes of Noir always have one or many crucial weaknesses that cause all sorts of trouble for them throughout their quests. The most common weakness that ruins the hero is falling for the femme fatale. If the hero lets the “love” of the femme fatale get to them, they are as good as dead. However, if the hero can avoid this undertaking, they usually come out on top. Another obvious adversary of the hero is the anti-hero. These anti-heros are usually corrupt or stand for corrupt ideas; ideas that the hero is out to stop. The two obviously don’t agree in Noir, and there is almost always a battle between the two. It is important to understand that the characters of the Noir style don’t always think about the consequences of their actions, and they usually act on impulses. This is especially true for the hero.

Film Noir, and the writing style of Noir, are completely unique from other styles of literature and film. First, Film Noir tends to include settings of shadowy, dark rooms or streets. The weather is often dark and rainy in Noir works, which goes along with the whole “Noir” mood and theme. These are situations that usually frighten the characters of the work, as well as the viewer or reader. More often than not, the setting of Noir creates a feeling of insecurity and suspense for its recipient.

One of the many things that I found interesting about Noir was the fact that there are very few, if any, open endings. The Noir works that we explored seemed to have solid endings and resolve the issue. Someone usually either dies or goes to jail, so that is a fairly closed ending.

Without being able to explore my aspect of Modernism, I did find that the psychological aspect was present, and abundant! The psychology of the characters in Noir is something that I have yet to see in any other Modernist literature. Some of the Noir characters are just as mentally disturbed as other characters we’ve seen, but most of them are influenced more by their surrounding characters and situation. By this, I mean that the Noir characters’ actions and reactions are based on those of fellow characters. This may not seem to be a big deal, but it creates many battles inside the head and heart of a Noir character. They almost become “followers”, so then they are torn between their individuality and the “textbook move” that they would normally make. This battle is the psychological aspect of modernism in the Noir style.

To learn about Film Noir in a nutshell, watch this video:

Check out my In Cold Blood blog coming soon to learn about a specific example of Film Noir in a little more depth!

Long Day’s Journey Into Night

In Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, we see another horrific family situation. This is not surprising, coming from a modernist author. No other modernist family compares to the Tyrone’s, who constantly bicker at each other. Every second of the day is a relentless battle between each family member, firing off one insulting comment after another.

EDMUND: Cut it out, Jamie!  Can’t you think anything but-?  You’re all wrong to suspect anything.  Cathleen saw her not too long ago.  Mama didnt tell her she wouldn’t be down to lunch.

JAMIE: Then she wasn’t taking a nap?

EDMUND: Not right then, but she was laying down, Cathleen said.

JAMIE: In the spare room?

EDMUND: Yes.  For Pete’s sake, what of it?

JAMIE: You damned fool!  Why did you leave her alone so long?  Why didn’t you stick around?

The source of most of the issues surrounding the family is Mary’s extreme morphine addiction. She takes numerous shots of morphine over the course of the day, and by the time that night comes, she is as high as a kite. She can’t even function, and it bothers Edmund, Jamie, and Tyrone to no end. To compound this problem even more, the men of the family get progressively more drunk as the day goes on. This increases the amount of fighting and bickering even more!

Mary’s whole character is a mess of personal reflection.  She constantly refers to times in the past.  It seems as if she almost thinks she is living in the past when she gets high.  Mary talks in circles as well, constantly contradicting herself.  There is absolutely no focus or ending to any of her irrational stories, so that is almost like an open ending in itself.  Every time she brings up a new subject without finishing the previous one, it leaves the reader almost confused. 

Mary is also filled with an unbelievable amount of regret and remorse.  When she talks about the past, she constantly refers to the opportunity she had to become a nun.  She implies that her life would be much better if she had never fell in love with James Tyrone, and started a family.  It has to be psychologically damaging to her family for them to know that  she wishes that she was not a part of their lives.  Mary also implies that this “tough” family situation is the reason for her addiction. 

These open ended conversations are also seen when the men of the house argue and bicker.  For five minutes the men argue about some random subject, and then they stop arguing either when it gets too heated or when Mary comes around.  The whole arguments just stop, and there is never any establishment of who is right or wrong.  Everyone seems to always lose, leaving an unresolved open ending.

At the very end of the play, Mary goes on one final rant about being a nun.  She is completely gone at this point, and all she can talk about is “what could have been”.

I never dreamed that the Holy Mother would give me such advice!  I was really shocked.  I said, of course, I would do anything she suggested, but I knew it was simply a waste of time.  After I left her, I felt all mixed up so I went to the shrine and prayed to the Blessed Virgin and found peace again because I knew she heard my prayer and would always love me and see no harm ever came to me so long as I never lost my faith in her.  That was in the winter of senior year.  Then in the spring, something happened to me  Yes, I remember.  I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.

This is where the play ends, with Mary suggesting that she is no longer that happy at all with her situation.  The reader understands how Mary feels, but what ends up happening to her?  Does she ever get over her morphine addiction?  Does the Tyrone family situation ever improve?  On another note, does Edmund get better from his illness of consumption?  Does Jamie continue to abuse alcohol, only drinking to try and forget his mother’s problems?  Does James just continue to let Mary take morphine every single day?  By ending the play at the end of one day, Eugene O’Neill leaves all these problems unresolved and open.  In my opinion, this family situation is as close to “Hell on earth” as we’ve seen yet.  How was Eugene O’Neill able to deal with this and remain sane?  It is truly remarkable.

 

The Glass Menagerie

Another modernist work in which we see a family being slowly torn apart is The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.  Each member of the Wingfield family is like a ticking time bomb, waiting to explode.  The mother, Amy, is so pathetically annoying that she basically drives her son Tom out of the house.  Tom is a peculiar character, who seems almost lost in life.  His mother is not helping his situation at all, since she is unbearably picky.  Most of the time Tom can’t even take a breath without his mother commenting about it!

Amy begins annoying Tom at the very start of the day by screaming “Rise and shine, rise and shine!”.  Tom has to hear this shrieked and squealed every morning.  One morning, Tom decides to angrily reply “Every time you come in yelling that God damn ‘Rise and Shine!’ ‘Rise and Shine!’ I say to myself, ‘How lucky dead people are!’”  This was one of the funniest parts of the play to me, when Tom finally gets fed up with his mother and tells her how he really feels.  However, this part that i found funny is a tough situation for Tom and Amy, and is the whole problem with the Wingfield family.

Tom continuously leaves the house, and I don’t blame the poor guy.  From my perspective, each time Tom leaves the house it represents an open ending, because his mother and sister don’t know where he ever goes.  Tom claims that he goes to the movies, but Amy is never certain whether or not that is a lie.  Once, when she confronts Tom about it, he answers:

“Yes, movies! Look at them- All of those glamorous people-having adventures-hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there’s a war. That’s when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone’s dish, not only Gable’s! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves-Goody, goody!-It’s our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island-to make a safari-to be exotic, far-off!-But I’m not patient. I don’t want to wait till then. I’m tired of the movies and I am about to move!”

This makes it clear that Tom is looking to get out of his house and away from his family, and he has valid reasons to do this.  The problem is that Tom’s mother and sister can’t survive and pay the bills without Tom’s income, which places him in a serious psychological battle.  This battle is within himself, between the two choices he can make.  He can either totally abandon his family and live the life that he is longing for, or stay and support his family and be miserable for the rest of his life.  Tom’s “battle” ties into the psychological aspect of modernism, in which a character is torn apart emotionally by the choices that they are faced with.

By the end of the play that represents Tom’s psychological war against himself, he decides to choose the option that will hopefully make him more content in the end.

“Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger—anything that can blow your candles out! —for nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles Laura—and so goodbye…”

Tom chooses to leave his family, and this is how he says goodbye to his sister.  This ending is completely ambiguous, because Tom is essentially abandoning his family.  The play ends with him saying this quote, and then walking away down the street.  What will happen to Tom, or more importantly, his helpless mother and sister?  Where will Tom go from here?  Will he fulfill his “dream” of being in the movies?  Will he realize what he has done and return to his family?  Will Amy and Laura be able to survive without him?  These are all questions that Williams leaves for open interpretation at the end of the play.  Again, we see another modernist work without any of the problems solved in the end.  All that we see is another character walking away, trying to escape their problems.

Desire Under the Elms

Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O’Neill displays many aspects of modernism, certainly not just one.  This play is roaring with modernist ideas.  The most obvious is open endings, which is my original attribute anyways.  Like most modernist works, Desire Under the Elms leaves numerous plausible situations at the play’s end, none of which are positive.

Obviously, the ending of the play is the grand canyon of open endings.

SHERIFF–Open in the name o’ the law! (They start.)

CABOT–They’ve come fur ye. (He goes to the rear door.) Come in, Jim! (The three men enter. Cabot meets them in doorway.) Jest a minit, Jim. I got ‘em safe here. (The sheriff nods. He and his companions remain in the doorway.)

EBEN–(suddenly calls) I lied this mornin’, Jim. I helped her do it. Ye kin take me, too.

ABBIE–(brokenly) No!

CABOT–Take ‘em both. (He comes forward–stares at Eben with a trace of grudging admiration.) Putty good–fur yew! Waal, I got t’ round up the stock. Good-by.

EBEN–Good-by.

ABBIE–Good-by. (Cabot turns and strides past the men–comes out and around the corner of the house, his shoulders squared, his face stony, and stalks grimly toward the barn. In the meantime the sheriff and men have come into the room.)

SHERIFF–(embarrassedly) Waal–we’d best start.

ABBIE–Wait, (turns to Eben) I love ye, Eben.

EBEN–I love ye, Abbie. (They kiss. The three men grin and shuffle embarrassedly. Eben takes Abbie’s hand. They go out the door in rear, the men following, and come from the house, walking hand in hand to the gate. Eben stops there and points to the sunrise sky.) Sun’s a-rizin’. Purty, hain’t it?

ABBIE–Ay-eh. (They both stand for a moment looking up raptly in attitudes strangely aloof and devout.)

SHERIFF–(looking around at the farm enviously–to his companion) It’s a jim-dandy farm, no denyin’. Wished I owned it!

That is it.  After all the sick, twisted controversy in this play, that is all that O’Neill gives the reader for a so-called ending.  Do Abbie and Eben go to jail?  How long are they there for?  Are they killed for their crime?  Does Cabot keep the farm, or go to California with his sons?  Will Abbie and Eben get out of jail and come back to the farm?  Will Cabot ever die, and give the farm to Eben, the rightful owner? 

By ending the play in such a vague, unspecific, emotionless manner, none of the problems in the play are resolved.  So many conflicts between characters are opened up in this play, and none of then are solved.  Right before the play ends in scene four, every character opens up and spills out their emotions to each other.  Eben wants to “pay for his sin” of aiding in the death of the child by telling the sheriff that he was in on it.  At the same time, Abbie is hysterical and doesn’t want Eben to get in trouble with her.  The two of them are confessing their deep love for each other, knowing that they aren’t going to be together for a long time. 

While this is all happening, Cabot is a wreck.  He can’t decide whether to stay on the farm or burn it and leave.  He also finds out that Eben stole all his money, so then he realizes that he can’t go to California unless he has other money.  He is talking in circles, making almost comical conversation because it is so irrational.  There is really no indication of what he is going to do after Abbie and Eben are taken away.  O’Neill doesn’t specify whether be will stay on the farm, that doesn’t belong to him, or not.

There are, of course, other attributes of modernist literature present in this play.  “The (re)presentation of inner (psychological) reality, including the ‘flow’ of experience, through devices such as stream of consciousness” is another device that O’Neill uses.  This attribute is responsible for making the characters so messed up in Desire.  It is basically every man (or woman) for themselves in the play, with each character constantly fighting their family members for the power of being on top.  Eben wants to put a bullet in Cabot’s head, and take the farm that is rightfully his.  Abbie hates Cabot as well, and uses Eben to hurt him.  Then there’s Cabot, who is so profoundly ignorant, that ends up with possessions instead of companionship.  With each of these characters constantly stepping on one another, a mess of psychological damage is created.  There is not one single character in this play that has a conscience, and we continue to see that in almost every modernist work that we explore.

A Streetcar Named Desire

As Honors English III plays and movies go, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams is the best of the best in my opinion. What an up and down roller coaster of a play! I actually looked forward to coming to class every day to experience what new crap Stanley or Blanche would pull in the next scene!

From caveman, wife-beating Stanley, to psycho, train-wreck Blanche, to poor clueless Stella, they play never has a dull moment. There is an extreme conflict in almost every scene. In my opinion, that is what makes a good play or movie. Author Tennessee Williams does a phenomenal job of “illustrating” and almost exactly creating the same images in his play that are in the movie. Even when we were reading the play, I could visualize the scenes that were happening. Watching them in the movie was just like a double-play, thanks to the narration and dialogue that Williams creates.

On another note, resisting the urge to completely hate Blanche with a visceral passion is tough. Her psychotic, shaky, “all over the place” personality is hard for readers like me to understand. In the beginning of the play, I thought that she was the so-called “villain” and Stanley and Stella were the victims. However, as the play moved forward, I began to see otherwise. Blanche acts completely stuck up, and she seems to feel that she is “better” than the Kowalski’s, especially Stanley. The truth is that Blanche sees her baby sister in a dangerous situation, and she is, in fact, correct.

The tables turn in the play when we finally see the true colors of Stanley. There is then no other way to describe him but a wife beating, rapist, drunk that is ripping Stella down into his primitive world. It is ashamed for Stella that Blanche realizes this and tries to tell Stella, but she refuses to listen. Stella loves Stanley’s “bedroom” qualities far too much to realize that he is essentially ruining her life. This makes for a wretched environment in the Kowalski home.

My modernist attribute, the presence of open endings, is very apparent in this play. Stanley finally has enough of Blanche towards the end of the play. On the same night that Stella is giving birth to his son, Stanley rapes Blanche. She is drunk and disoriented, and has no ability to defend herself. This is one of the most terrible, unspeakable things that Stanley can possibly do at this point. By this point, he is the ultimate “scumbag”. Later, and this is not shown in the movie, Blanche tries to tell Stella what Stanley has done to her, but Stella doesn’t listen. Instead, they send Blanche off with two suspicious people. They appear to be a doctor and a nurse, and I interpreted that they are sending Blanche to a mental hospital. They play ends with their car pulling away with Blanche inside, and Stella balling. I’m sure that Stanley was thoroughly enjoying himself at this moment, now that his enemy and only threat was gone. He can go back to his old, fun life with Stella. On some levels though, I think that Stella knows that sending Blanche away was wrong.

Williams leaves the ending open for the reader’s interpretation. Where is Blanche going? What is Stella thinking by sending her only protection from the fist of Stanley away? Will Stanley ever come into contact with Blanche again, and maybe kill her this time? Will Stella continue to put up with Stanley’s drunken poker parties and beating her up now that they have a child? Will she ever realize that Blanche, although unstable, was right in her analysis of Stanley? These are all questions that Tennessee Williams leaves to the reader in his open ending of the controversial, mind-boggling play, A Streetcar Named Desire.

“Stellllllllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

-Stanley

Mr. Ernest Hemingway

This guy is all about the open endings in his short story The Killers.  However, it is interesting that he closes the story with an ending, and then opens it back up again in the last two lines.  About three quarters of the way through the story, Hemingway sums it up by telling the reader that the man was killed.  If the story ended at that point, it would have had a closed ending.

 Instead, Hemingway writes these last two lines:

“I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it.  It’s too damned awful.

Well, said George, you better not think about it.”

Now the reader has to think about it!!  What the heck does Sir Earnest trying to say by re-opening the topic of the killing at the end of the story?  I think he wants the reader to think about why the man was killed earlier in the story.  It would have made interpretation of the story a lot more simple if Hemingway had just ended at “They’ll kill him”.

T.S. Elliot’s Use of Open Endings

In various works by T.S. Elliot that we have read, we see the use of open endings. In The Hollow Men, Elliot finishes the poem by stating:

“This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Now this “end of the world” could be considered a closed ending by some, but it leaves me with a lot of doubt. What is this whimper? Why is the world ending with a whimper not a bang? In my mind, this leaves the reader with a multitude of questions.

Secondly, Elliot’s The Waste Land basically has no ending at all, not even an open one. I was puzzled by the so-called “end” of this poem. The last stanza is mostly in a foreign language, and the last line says “Shantih shantih shantih”. How is that supposed to be interpreted by the reader? If you can figure out what “shantih” means, I would love to know!

In Elliot’s other work, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the ending is not open. It is interpreted that Prufrock kills himself, so that is a “closed case”.

Modernism

Modernism is actually quite interesting once you begin to understand it. The aspect of modernism that I am choosing to research and expand upon is:

“A turn to ‘open’ or ambiguous endings, again seen to be more representative of ‘reality’ — as opposed to ‘closed’ endings, in which matters are resolved.”

This attribute continuously shows up in various modernist pieces that we have read. It seems like no modernist author ever “wraps up” or finishes their poem or story. This then leads to the allowance of open interpretation for the reader. To me, that is what makes modernism interesting.

They leave the endings of their stories up in the air, and don’t give the reader’s any closure.  This means that the problem is also never solved at the end of the story, making many modernist pieces of literature even more screwed up than they already are.  This helps to make the stories far more real as well, because in life, the problem is not always solved and we don’t always have fairy tale endings.  Modernist authors started to be more “real” with these open endings.

Hey…

Hey… my name is Evan.  I am a junior at Auburn High School.  I’m all about sports, being the leading scorer on the hockey team and the shortstop on the baseball team.  Sports basically run my life, and everything I do revolves around them. When I’m not playing hockey or baseball, I try to do well in school and work as much as i can.  My favorite class in school is probably this one.  For work, I am a landscaper.  I work for myself, mostly so I dont have any bosses to answer to.  So thats my life in a nutshell.