PART I
CHAPTER ONE
Rosa JH Berland
The psychological thriller, born of the 20th-century genre of cinema, film noir, remains one of the most popular forms of entertainment. It is a constant in the yearly movie repertoire. With its roots in early 20th-century German and Austrian literary and visual expressionism, the theatrical productions of Max Reinhardt, and the study of the mind by Sigmund Freud, classic film noir and its many subgenres remain one of the most important forms of pictorial modernism.
In fact, film noir is perhaps the most enduring narratival model for the telling of popular culture’s mythologies of mental illness, whether autobiographical, fictive, or even allegorical. References to mental illness in noir abound, explicitly as motifs of psychiatric troubles and psychoanalysis. Noir shows psychiatric treatments, such as hypnosis or asylums; the almost mystical phenomena of amnesia; persons with presumptive mental illness, such as sadists or murderers; those with psychosomatic illness or sexual neurosis; and, finally, the idea of gas lighting. All this makes for a grandly dramatic narrative of betrayal, horror, tragedy, and perhaps redemption.1 This essay considers ways in which mental illness is depicted in a microcosm of popular films, classified variously as proto-noir, classic noir, or neo-noir.
While critical definitions of film noir seem constantly mutable, the term traditionally refers to the classic Hollywood films of 1940–1959. Writer James Naremore has made a convincing case for the way in which the enduring genre of film noir can be seen in parallel to the typology of Anglo-American literature, a phenomenon described as “a national canon of blood melodrama.”2 Nevertheless, while noir is considered a product of American ingenuity, it is in fact a cross-pollination of the Hollywood film industry and the influence, both conceptual and ideological, of two groups of expatriate German and Central European filmmakers.3 In the resulting body of cinema, there are clear connections to the early-20th-century literary, artistic, and theatrical movement, expressionism. Additionally, their films, like expressionism itself, reflected the influence of Nietzsche and Freud, particularly Freud’s concept of the unknowable, dark, chaotic id. For many expressionists, the metaphorical or allegorical power of the unconscious, the criminal, and the perverse gave voice to their own psychological disturbances, or alternately enhanced public perception of their legitimacy and lack of regard for bourgeois values. A major feature of expressionist art consisted of challenging conventional notions, including the accepted definitions of contemporary psychology. Some expressionists eschewed pathologizing views, insisting that what may appear as mental illness could be a connection to otherworldly, mystical insight. These classic films relate to popular culture of their time, and are expressive of a particular zeitgeist, namely mid-century wartime and postwar angst. This sensibility is personified in characters who are deeply troubled, trapped, or deceived by other deeply troubled, manipulative, or criminal enemies and are themselves sometimes duplicitous, criminal, and/or psychologically disturbed. Overall, the films share a pictorial language intended to create feelings of disorientation, loneliness, and entrapment. Specifically, narratival tactics include time ellipse, first person voice-over narratives, and flashbacks. Visual devices often include stylized scenery, low-key interior lighting, chiaroscuro, deep shadows, and the use of neo-Gothic and dark, urban settings.4 As such, film noir is inescapably connected to ideas of mental illness; the often-disturbed and morally corrupt protagonists seem to be in a fragmented, unreal-seeming world where events follow no discernible order. French, German, and English films also feature unknown or hidden worlds, gothic horror, criminal psychology, and ominous plots, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Notorious (1946), Les Diaboliques (1955) by Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Breathless (1960) by Jean-Luc Godard.
The unifying factor is not entirely an external event or temptation, but rather the internal struggle of the antihero. Often the protagonists of British and American film noir resist moral corruption, which they discover all around them; they are deeply unsettled and sometimes operate as morally ambiguous agents in a morally corrupt world—often while moving toward justice. An abiding interest in criminality is seen in both Anglo-American high culture and pulp fiction of the 1920s. With its roots in the disjointed frenzy of expressionist art, dance, and theatre, noir metamorphosed into a form that assimilated the American penchant for crime novels and the popular fantasy of the gangster. Films such as The Night of the Hunter (1955) delight in the dark underside of humanity and a fascination with the split and divided self.5 This fusion is seen clearly in American films such as Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), Scarlet Street (1945) and later neo-film noir science fiction Blade Runner (1982). Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish (1983) also uses disarticulated dream sequences and haunting urban landscapes. Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) is especially interesting, since it has almost every film noir element: the femme fatal, the nefarious villain, the psychiatrist, the asylum, and the victim of amnesia. Hitchcock’s irreverent interpretation of both the field of psychiatry and the state of the mentally ill makes for an entertaining film, although it is well known that Hitchcock had little use for psychiatry in general. Ingrid Bergman plays a psychiatrist who falls in love with an amnesiac man who cannot remember his name but introduces himself as the new asylum director upon arrival. Yet the intended director was murdered in the interim. She uses psychoanalysis to identify the true murderer: the aging asylum head (Leo G. Carroll) who faces replacement by a younger rival. Hitchcock’s cinematography connects to the visual arts via a surrealistic hallucinatory sequence designed by Salvador Dali.
A certain horror exists within all film noir manifestations, as the audience is locked into the often-skewed perspective of a single character, using flashbacks to show two worlds, that of the mind and mental realm versus the physical world. The style and imagery suggest alternate realities, with memories fractured by trauma. The real, lived experience of the other (women, homosexuals, non-Western people or culture, or the mentally ill) is transformed into a symbolic construction. These constructions are either morbidly romantic and/or distorted in a voyeuristic, if not nightmarish, pattern.6 Noir extends the transformation of Romanticism to a nihilistic reflection of the traumatic experience of war and an increasing interest in the unconscious. The connection to expressionism lies both in the undermining of the commonplace and in the formal use of visual devices such as chiaroscuro, oblique and geometric angles, dramatic lighting effects, and a sense of encroaching sky or oppressive interior space. These motifs evoke a sense of entrapment, danger, and a crisis of the mind. It is not important to the filmmakers that these visions are accurate depictions of the experience of madness or mental unrest, although there is a deliberate psychological effect. However, the connection of such effects to psychoanalysis (or pseudopsychology) is at best tenuous, for the various forms of science of the mind seem interchangeable. Characters are often given spurious diagnoses, heavily inscribed by stereotypes of madness, criminality, and gender roles. Nevertheless, the spectacle of madness is a currency too omnipresent to ignore, and despite the many psychological fallacies, there is considerable artistic value in many of the films. This value lies in their power of evoking a kind of haptic experience of illness, even when plot and character interaction reduce the protagonists to caricatures. Many of the films share a disjuncture of plot, a nihilistic tone, and an interest in the psychiatric and the criminal. Formally, these productions also share an expressionist aesthetic—the use of visual devices to evoke not only the despair and crisis of postwar life, but also an echo of the realms of a constructed idea of mental illness, often in turn associated with criminality. This space, primarily nocturnal, is interspersed with visual and narrative evocations of deception and claustrophobia. It is populated with uneasy combinations of authority figures, liminal heroes, and wayward women. Fate in the most fluid sense of the word is a current that runs throughout, often laid out as a force of evil, and disarray or loss, in the language of a paranoiac.
Through all the complex and theoretical analyses of noir runs one primary thread: the idea that the genre acts as a mirror for sociopolitical anxieties. These fears are artistically cloaked in pictorial and theatrical language, and often deeply inflected by the language of psychiatry, however distilled, or used in a reductive or allegorical way. It should also be noted that popular understanding of psychiatry and mental illness seems mysteriously fluid. Critics often point out the inaccuracy of the way films depict doctors, patients, disorders, and treatments. Nevertheless, this brings me to an important point, that renditions of mental illness in film represent another type of despair: a malaise, anxiety, postwar trauma, sense of difference and otherness. This crisis of meaning includes narratives about power struggles, with underlying issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and ideas of the other. If a character or villain is particularly garish and sadistic or murderous or raving, she or he is sufficiently so to allow the audience to disengage from the character and instead pay close attention to the psychologically informed plotline that “explains” or dissects the cause of such madness. Much of the recent critical literature on the import of film noir focuses on its symbolic representation of a postwar gender crisis in America. Dr. Scott Snyder notes that the femme fatale is a means to lead the male protagonist and she is often depicted as suffering from a range of Cluster B psychopathology that includes anti-social, narcissistic, and histrionic traits:
The type of character pathology personified in the femme fatale may be viewed as representative of certain misogynistic conceptualizations of the women of the time. Concurrently, these screen women may have helped to create a certain cultural image for some real-life women of the 1940s and 1950s as reflected in the areas of fashion and style, personality, and social status. “Bidirectional” causality is therefore noted in regards to the relationship between femme fatales and behavioral manifestations of Cluster B disorders in society.7
However, because noir is also a genre of the imagined world, the fantastic, the hallucinogenic, and the paranoiac, it is inherently ambiguous and constantly expansive—whether its focus is on the hard-boiled detective, the femme fatale, or the beleaguered tragic hero. Whether set in middle America or a haunted urban cityscape, noir occupies a place of dreams, fate, and descent into madness and criminality. It is a truly imagined space. In the fictive space that seems to function as fantasy, projecting an idea of illusory control over trauma, or as a device to separate oneself from the possibility into madness (e.g. ascribing a villain’s descent to a trauma so outlandish it could never happen to the spectator), we see the imprint of cultural notions of normalcy throughout.
The homicidal woman represents the unsettling of the normal or “well” person whose demons are reflected in the new nomenclature for film noir and its various subgenres. A woman may have been driven mad by deceptive family members, or she suffers from amnesia, or is herself unwieldy, without the trappings of domesticity. Or she may be an agent of her own powerful sexuality, which is considered deviant because it fails to acquiesce to a patriarchal perspective or socially acceptable arrangements, such as marriage and/or monogamy. Many works in the film noir genre position female protagonists as deviants, characterized by sexual expressiveness, which is in turn paired or equated with sociopathic and violent tendencies. Tender Is the Night (1962)—which was based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about his wife Zelda’s psychosis and institutionalization—redirects the female character into a normative pattern. Alternatively, Three Faces of Eve (1957) is an explicit rendering of the various archetypes of femininity.8 Many critics see such dialogues as a reflection of dominant social or cultural anxiety about gendered divisions of power after World War II.9 The condition of postwar America is viewed as a space of chaos, where the most destructive and terrible parts of humanity lurk behind visages and facades, a sort of haunting or possession. In turn, many of the films map out the idea of the antihero who has been transformed into this destructive force through traumatic events or self-destructive tendencies. The enduring story of quelling the “other”—whose nonnormative behavior is often shown as a mental illness—serves to reinforce power structures. Specifically, we see the way in which female characters are often associated with deadly sexuality. Thus emerges the classic paradigm: the femme fatale, whose uncontrolled sexuality is characterized not only as a mental break but also as a threat to society. Interestingly, some critics have seen this figure as heroic, for she rejects the dominant rules of power and sexual expression. Lacking a moral character, however, she is often a villain of high glamour and appeal, although clearly insane. After all, the lack of morality in the femme fatale indicates something beyond mere weakness—it is a lack of normality or even an illness. Feminine sexuality and mental illness—and estrangement from socially circumscribed gender roles—are central to much critical analysis of noir.10
In Sleep My Love (1948), the lead female character, Alison Courtland, experiences the familiar malady, amnesia. She seeks psychiatric help at her husband’s request, but in fact the psychiatrist is not a real doctor, but rather part of the nefarious husband’s plan to drive his wife to insanity and suicide so he can inherit her money. She is merely a plaything in this scenario. The fetishization of the female psychiatric patient is a long-standing rubric. As depicted in noir, mental illness involves weakness, loss of control, and victimhood, often creating a gateway into a sort of gothic horror.11 While many feminist critics see women in this genre as reflections of male fantasy, founded in Freudian theory, others have pointed out that the audience for this narrative of rebellion is much more multifaceted, and taps into fantasies of the immoral, oversexualized female character. Often using extreme or even sadistic measures to achieve power or control, this figure apparently appeals to both men and women.12
On the other hand, Janet Walker has argued that films such as Three Faces of Eve present “female roles that correspond to the limited range of roles offered in the socio-historical context of post war America.”13 Similarly, Tender Is the Night shows how the patient is led back to her feminine role, her normalcy, by the guiding doctor. Any diversion from this path is an expression of her deviance, if not illness. The conflation of a kind of distorted homosexuality with criminality is another strange thread of neo-noir, reflected most deviously in the sensational movie from 1992, Single White Female. Here deviance has a face, that of Jennifer Jason Leigh as Hedy, the immoral villain who develops an unhealthy obsession with Allie (Bridget Fonda). Depicted as an almost farcically mentally disturbed murdering lesbian, Hedy seduces and murders Allie’s fiancé. The story is poorly wrapped up in a pseudopsychiatric explanation: that Hedy had a twin whom she was trying to replace by taking over Allie. Here, as in many noir movies, the flashback ostensibly provides evidence that this is a psychiatric case, although the only real value of the flashback is to produce a voyeuristic thrill. As such, otherness (as in case of the lesbian killer) is meant to thrill, titillate, and shock. At the same time, it reinforces the idea that such extravagant criminality is confined to someone else’s sphere, and we are disinterested viewers.
Since the 1940s, film noir has served as a conceptual and stylistic framework for much of popular century filmmaking, and the considerable number of creative directors, actors, and technical styles weave into an equal number of variations of plots, narratives, characters, and depictions of psychiatric disorders. The critical language used to frame the protagonists in the various types of noir are of interest. For example, John Grant calls the elements of noir “symptoms,” a term that places the characters in the realm of psychiatry and medicine.14 Thus, film noir is positioned as a reflection of cultural anxieties. Among the primary symptoms are nihilist attitudes, plotlines that rely on the power of a femme fatale, visions of a downward spiral into loss of control, hallucinations, paranoia, flashbacks, and even confinement in asylums.
Moreover, the presence of psychiatrists or psychologists, whether nefarious or helpful, cannot be ignored and reflects an interest in psychology, analysis, and psychiatry in mid-century America, including the work of. Even when a film does not feature psychoanalysis, the language of psychoanalytic pseudoscience persists and underscores the visual disjuncture noir inherits from expressionism. We see many metaphors in some films. Specifically, the mentally ill or disturbed characters of noir are so representative of the average man that they become a metaphor for the postwar human condition, rather than an absolute representation of mental illness per se. Their narrative is an allegory for a universal crisis of the mind and spirit. Film noir psychiatrists demonstrate varying personalities; at times, they are Delphic-like beings, oracles of truth and stability. Or they might represent a nefarious force. They variably seem to be detectives, prison guards, or spiritual guides.
Noir filmmakers used these imaginary constructs of mental illness, hallucination, and criminality to develop highly stylized nightmarish scenes, narratives, and the impression of imprisonment within the disturbed mind. The fact that so many protagonists of film noir seem to find happiness only to descend into violence or experience loss, not only reflects the idea of fate and misfortune that underlies so many noir narratives, but is also a language familiar to those who suffer from mental illness. The onset of a psychological breakdown often comes in waves, as a destructive force, leveling any achievement or semblance of normalcy, alienating loved ones, collapsing educational or work opportunities. This suffering, personified in the hero-antihero, is a paradigm of the reality of those plagued by mental illness and all its injurious fallouts. Mental torture is within not only the unconscious or the Freudian model of the troubled mind, but is also real in the world experience, capable of bringing down the edifices of human achievement, social systems, and relationships through violence and despotism.
At the same time, some mental imbalance or suffering may become a force to produce extraordinary intellectual and artistic ideas, creativity, personal charisma, and sexual allure. Still, in these films, just as in so much American popular culture, the crazed or the mentally ill are metaphors for evil, strangeness, and the abnormal, so that the real, lived experience of suffering is secondary. Perhaps, in the end, rather than telling the true story of the experience of living with mental illness, noir does little more than expressing our culture’s fears of the larger forces that remake the map of humanity.
Notes
1. For further discussion of this metaphorical and modernist spectacle of madness, refer to Marlisa Santos, The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010).
2. J. Naremore introduced the idea of the connections between film noir and Anglo-American literature in his article “High Modernism and Blood Melodrama: The Case of Graham Greene,” Iris 21 (1996), Special Issue on European Precursors of Film Noir. As well, Geoff Mayer notes that in contemporary coverage these films were often referred to as melodramas, with additional qualifiers or adjectival phrases (rather than diagnosis) such as neurosis, psychiatric, psychological. Mayer refers to Steve Neal’s extensive survey of American trade journals (1938–1960), “Melo-Talk: On the Meaning and Use of the Term ‘Melodrama’ in the American Trade Press,” The Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall 1993): 66–89; Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell, Encyclopedia of Film Noir (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 8–11.
3. The first group arrived in the 1920s during the Weimar period (1919–1933). Expressionist films of this era include The Student of Prague (1913), The Golem (1915), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Nosferatu (1922), The Last Laugh (1924), Metropolis (1926), Sunrise (1927) and the sound film M (1930). The second wave of German directors came in the 1930s as a reaction to the rise of the Nazi Reich.
4. Annette Kuhn and Guy Westwell, A Dictionary of Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
5. Lotte Eisner, beginning with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, not only provides an interesting analysis of visual devices, but also connects the genre to motifs seen in German Romanticism, expressionist literature, and cinema; The Haunted Screen, Expressionism in the German Cinema and Expressionism and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965). Another important model was Oskar Kokoschka’s famous 1908 play Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, a black drama about seemingly mad rituals of mating and murder. The play would become a visual, emotional, and thematic model for German expressionist theatre, and in turn for film noir’s stylistic tendencies. Theatrically, models include Reinhardt’s productions such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (1903). See also Jill Scott’s analysis of gender roles in theatre and other art forms after Freud in Elektra after Freud, Myth, and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
6. Modern artists such as Oskar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and Richard Gerstl adopted the trope of the troubled mind to express their own sense of alienation. It should be mentioned that, in fact, for the most part the embodiment of these is a device and is used either stylistically or allegorically; in part. film noir follows this model.
7. See Dr. Scott Snyder’s article “Personality Disorders and the Film Noir Femme Fatale.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 8, no. 3 (2000): 155–168.
8. Janet Walker, “Couching Resistance: Women, Film, and Postwar Psychoanalytic Psychiatry,” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: AFI and Routledge, 1990), 143–44.
9. The post–World War II crisis of gender identity is often associated with the depiction of the aberrant female who seeks to define herself or rejects traditional feminine roles, a reflection of the problem of women returning to the domestic sphere after their wartime role as primary contributors to the public workforce. See W.H. Chafe, “World War II as a Pivotal Experience for American Women,” in Women and War: The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1950s, M. Diedrich and Fisher Hornung, eds. (New York: Berg Publishing, 1990), 21–34.
10. Bram Dijkstra discusses the idea of feminine “perversity” in depth in the context of visual art in his critical texts Evil Sisters: The Threat of Feminine Sexuality in Twentieth Century Culture (New York: Henry Holt, 1996) and in Idols of Perversity, Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
11. See Didi Huberman’s incisive analysis of the moral and cultural image of the female patient in Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Boston: MIT Press, 2003); Asti Hustvedt, Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth Century Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Paul Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Late 20th-century films reflecting the myth of the mentally ill femme fatale, as well as the legacy of expressionism and film noir include The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Paperhouse (1988), and Jacob’s Ladder (1990), among many others.
12. The critical interpretation of fantasy is varied: Tania Modelski argues that the struggle between men and women or women and society as depicted in film noir expresses the difficulty of normalizing or conforming to restrictive roles and expectations. See Introduction, Kaplan (1990), 2.
13. See Walker, 153.
14. See John Grant, Introduction, A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir: The Essential Reference Guide (Milwaukee: Lime Light Editions, 2013); refer to Santos (2010).