The new sincerity of neo-noir: The example of the man who wasn't there

The Philosophy of Neo-Noir

Volumn , Issue , 2007, Pages 151-166

  Barton Palmer, R ^a  

^a CLEMSON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84894921353     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (16)

1. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Tompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985).
2. Murray Smith, "Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History", in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (London: Routledge, 1998), 8. Tis point is also made usefully, if in a different way, by Richard Maltby, who argues: "Hollywood functions according to a commercial aesthetic, one that is essentially opportunist in its economic motivation. The argument that Hollywood movies are determined, in the first instance, by their existence as commercial commodities sits uneasily with ideas of classicism and stylistic determination"
3. (Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. [Oxford: Blackwell, 2003], 15).
4. See Michael Storper, "The Transition to Flexible Specialisation in the US Film Industry", in Post-Fordism: A Reader, ed. Ash Amin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), esp. 216-17.
5. In addition to Smith's "Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History", a useful contribution to this ongoing discussion comes from Richard Maltby, "'Nobody Knows Everything': Post-Classical Historiographies and Consolidated Entertainment", in Neale and Smith, eds., Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, 21-44.
6. Smith, "Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History", 11.
7. Richard Martin, Mean Streets and Raging Bulls: The Legacy of Film Noir in Contemporary American Cinema (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1999), 5.
8. James Naremore, More Tan Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 277.
9. The model developed by the French theorist Jean Baudrillard to describe the radical transition from modernity to postmodernity might be usefully invoked to characterize the change from classic noir to neo-noir. For Baudrillard, the project of modernity is the analysis of cultural phenomena utilizing a "hermeneutics of suspicion" that allows (as in the classic examples of Marx and Freud) undiscovered, "deep" layers of meaning to be recognized and acknowledged. Postmoderity, in contrast, rejects such sweeping claims for meaning and is occupied with "playing with the pieces" of a rejected, discredited, yet still fascinating culture. In such a project of restoration lies, in Baudrillard's view, the only hope for cultural rebuilding. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983).
10. Jim Collins, "Genericity in the Nineties: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity", in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), 243.
11. Martin, Mean Streets and Raging Bulls, 27.
12. For further discussion, see Constantine Verevis, "Trough the Past Darkly: Noir Remakes of the 1980s", in Film Noir Reader 4: The Crucial Themes and Films, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight, 2004), 306-22.
13. Martin, Mean Streets and Raging Bulls, 27, 33, 32.
14. These comments draw on the fuller discussion of the two films in R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 15-35, 62-79. I thank the University of Illinois Press for permission to reprint some of the material that first appeared in that book.
15. For a useful discussion of Baudrillard's theorizing of the postmodern, see Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 60-121.
16. William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Tought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 19-20.