radiography and film noir

7/30/2019 radiography and film noir

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X-Ray Visions: Radiography,Chiaroscuro, and the Fantasyof Unsuspicion in Film NoirHugh S. Manon

IntroductionImmediately recognizable even to the film noir neophyte i

the lighting technique known as chiaroscuro, the angular alternatioof dark shadows and stark fields of light across various on-screesurfaces in films such as Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), ThDark Corner (Henry Hathaway, 1946). Raw Deal (Anthony Mann1948). and many others. Whereas critics have long suggested thachiaroscuro fittingly evokes the postwar milieu, furnishing a backdrofor tales of psychological imprisonment' w hile creating an a tmospherof claustrophobia and duplicity/ this essay seeks to focus our criticagaze a little less deeply. Instead of arguing about what chiaroscurosupposed to represent historically (in terms of German Expressionismthe advent of the Cold War, existentialism, and so forth). I attempt more basic inquiry into what the technique tends to present spatially


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do noir's distinctive lighting schemes frequently resemble a medicalX-ray, they also spell out in visual temis the noir criminal's goal ofoutward unsuspicion-a craftily engineered appearance of normalcythat is perhaps best expressed in lhe noir-era catch phrase "more thanmeets the eye." ' This cliche, when understood not simply as a fuel forparanoia but more pointedly as an invitation to see oneself not seeing,both announces that an X-ray-like insight is precisely what averagepeople lack and helps to pinpoint o;>'s overarching investment in afantasy of public obliviousness.

Whereas critics and scholars have perennially describedfilm noir as a "paranoid universe,"'' this essay argues that in orderlo distinguish itself from its close generic others, specifically thegangster film and the classical detective narrative, noir constructs arealm of paranoia on screen only in order to achieve a more proprietaryeffectan overall resonance, aura, or hype that I call the "buzz ofthe unsuspected." Unlike classic gangster films such as The PublicEnemy (William A. Wellman. 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawks,1932), which penetrate a seedy part of town to reveal the gangster'svarious masks, hideouts, and concealed business endeavors, thedeceptive "fronts" o^ film noir involve a flawless mimesis of ordinaryreality. The result is a Moebius strip-like arrangement^ in which theunderworld dovetails perfectly with our own world and modern crimesucceeds because it dares to operate in plain view. Moreover, unlikethe classical detective whodunit, which delights viewers with theslow unveiling of a narrative enigma, noir does not primarily involvea clue-based reconstruction of past events but instead suggests thatthe viewer's own surface-level encounters in the here-and-now arebuz/ing with potential intrigue, Far from broad or universal, then, thecoordinates of the noir fantasy are preem inently local; the films do notaim to encourage an overall climate of paranoia so much as a seriesof gossipy speculations by individual viewers about what might betaking place right next door.


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the barrier-defying, horizontal trajectory oi^ chiaroscuro itselfa linof sight that exists in space and that could by occupied by a beliolderbut which would reveal nothing of the guileful machinations thaudience witnesses. In other words, the exterior point of light fromwhich chiaroscuro emerges stands for the perspective of the fihn'viewer not as a cinem atic viewer per se. but in his or her past/futurrole as an unsuspecting real-world passerby. When individual noinarratives deliver viewers behind the scenes ofcrimc and conspiracythey do so while insisting that such a perspective, however imminenis categorically denied lo the average citizen on a day-to-day, momentby-moment basis. Chiaroscuro conveys a like message, but in stylistitermsa sense of the immediate adjacency of modem criminaactivities, but at the same time a complete blindness as to what itranspiring before one's very eyes.

The hallmark of film noir lighting design, I argue, is itemphasis on the semi-permeabiiity of spatial dividesthe on-screeevocation of light passing through an aperture, or series of aperturesfigured in precisely the optical/photographic sense. Whether thshadow -casting obstruction is eomprised of slatted b linds, lathed stabalusters, or a window with a private investigator's name painteon it. the striking depiction of light having passed through lo "X"wholly consistent with the aura of unsuspicion I view as both noirnarrative core and its key generic difference. When understood not athe silhouette of an object but as the shadow ofa veil, it becomes cleathat noir's distinctive lighting does more than simply enhance realismand provide visual interest: it underscores the films' desire to thrilaudiences with their own obliviousness: a looking-without-seeing thatakes place not in the theater, but in one's real-world wanderings anmundane interactions.From Detection to Unsuspicion

Although one could identify scores of fiJm.s noirs in whi


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a muscular liquor salesman named Bamey Deager (Lloyd Gough),Quimby spirals into a soul-searching depression and finally decides tomurder Deager. Quimby's plan is to establish a second identity so hecan get away with the perfect crim e, and a series of brief scenes dep ictsQuimby "s transformation from a milquetoast night manager at a CulverCity pharmacy into a noir mastermind. At his optom etrist's office, thebespectacled Quimby leams about "'invisible plastic contact lenses"that will help to alter his appearance. In his apartment, he chooses anew name-"Paul Sothem"being careful to check the phone bookto ensure that no one else in the area has that nam e. M oving into a newapartment in Malibu. he establishes his false identity through pleasantsmall talk with the landlady and a next door neighbor. From a phonebooth, he makes a threatening call, announcing to Deager's valet thathe is Paul Sothem and is going to "get" Deager for "what he did.'"l-lagging down several separate drivers, he gradually hitch-hikes toa spot near Deager's beach house. Each of these scenes representsan unsuspicious action that, to borrow a term from the idiom of noir,decodes as "confidential," thanks in part to the cynical retrospectivevoice-over of Police Lieutenant Collier Bonnabel (Barry Sullivan).At the same time, each of the scenes features chiaroscuro lightingsometimes subtle, sometimes intense, but always present reinscribingour sense of having accessed the inaccessible.

The setting of Tension is a world of normal-looking drugstores, apartment complexes, bowling alleys, and beachfrontdevelopments, yet the interiors of these mundane locates are linedwith bold ailemations of darkness and light. As I explain in the nextsection, it is as if our most banal assumptions about everyday localityhave been X-rayed to reveal a dark and undetectable d isease. The keyis that Quimby's scheme is at once highly sophisticated and ever soclose, part of one's own world. Not only are police detectives beingdeceived by a new breed of criminals such as Warren Quimby, butso are you. dear viewer, and this fantasy of unknowingly brushing


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conspiracies and heists depicted in film noir can never be as blunt oinvasive as the armed robberies, tunneling jailbreaks, and street-fronexectitions of the 1930s gangster film. Nor does the perpetrator of noir crime view his end goal as an intricate puzzle the sort solved bySherlock Holmes, Hercuie Poirot, or Charlie Chan in their respectivfranchises. C ounter to both the short, sharp shock of the gangster filmand the brain-teasing puzzle of classical detection, noir's deceiverperpetuate an ongoing- meticulously maintained facade, engineerinthe public's obliviousness in an ever-changing present. Against thbackdrop of these waning genres, film noir calls into question thvery possibility of detection itself, enthralling viewers with what JackShadoian has described as "the paradox that one can look and look andnot see what's happening" in real life (169).

Shadoian's description of an endless, fruitless visual searchbegs the following question: li'film noir forecloses the possibility odiscovery, then where (if at all) does o/rs enigma appear? RolandBarthes has described the "hermeneutie code" as "the variou(formal) terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggestedformulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed" (19). Althoughcertain films noirs. especially those featuring private investigatorsmay proceed toward the solution of an enigma in a fairly standardway, my contention is that no/r's overriding logic is not hermeneutiin Barthes' sense, but instead hermetic. By this, I mean that a crimnarrative becomes noir at the moment it represents a vacuum-likdeception at the verv surface of thingsa carefully managed artificiareality that the public sees but fails to detect. Updating the dilatorvmystery plots of the Holmesian detective, /i/m noir aims to producphilosophical contemplation of the thresholds of detectability rathethan viewerly puzzlement itself In such an arrangement, the enigma inot a matter of questing discovery but instead bears on the possibilitof hiding in plain sight. Even when investigation forms a major parof the narrative, as in Tension, to the extent that an audience deligh


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Fihi noir's concern with undetectability is illustrated in acharacteristic bit of noir dialogue delivered by private investigatorDan Hammer (Pat O'Brien) in Rijfraff { IQA TetzlalT. 1947). Whenquestioned about his encounter with a recently murdered m an. Hammercan say nothing definitive:

Look, he comes to my office, says he needs abodyguard. Maybe he's got a lot of dough on him1don't know. M aybe he 's hot. M aybe anything. All Iknow is I never saw him before today.Unlike the classical detective, the noir private eye's past experiencewith criminal deception m akes him resigned to uncertainty. He know sas little about the solution to the mystery as the average man on thestreet, but brings with him a special advantage : he knows that he doesnot know and plays his cards accordingly. By contrast, as o/r envisionsthem, ordinary citizens (referred to above as the "public eye") remaincategorically unsuspicious of what is going on right in front of them;they do not know that they do not know. Such epistemological hair-splitting, I argue, is precisely noir's point, a thesis that becomes clearwhen we compare DaJi Hammer's swirling sense of uncertainty to theexpectation of certitude avowed by Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone)in The Scarlet Claw (Roy William Neill, 1944):

Mr. Penrose, for the first time in my long pursuitof crime. I confess that I find myself baffled. I'm adetec tive. I need tangible clues.What Holmes (and his viewer) desires is what /7/m noir defines asunavailable: clues. Upending the quasi-scientific procedure of theclassical sleuth, noir confronts its viewer not with the absent source ofan enigma but with the undetectability of crime in the first place.^

This is not, of course, to say that explosive violence, bloodstains, murdered corpses, etc., never appear mfilm noir. Rather, suchmalignant displays, about which public suspicion is both warrantedand expected, are themselves to be understood as sites of potential


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not really be a hold-up: an illegal gambling operation might not bwhat it seems, etc. Upping the ante on gangster deceptionin whiccrime is camouflaged by an innocent outward appearance (the machingun in a guitar case is iconic)films noirs such as Criss Cro .v (RoberSiodmak, 1949), Kan.sas City Confidential (Phil Karlson. 1952). anCrime Wave (Andre de Toth, 1954) depict crimes concealed by othstrategically planned faux crimes. Consider the opening scene oAnthony's Mann"s Railroaded! (1947). in which a beauty shop is front for a gambling parlor, which is in turn the site of an "insidj ob" heist scheme perpetrated by phony gangsterswearing maskand sporting bad attitudes, of course. The paradox of such a scenariis self-evident: in noir. even the fronts are fronts.

Taking his or her place alongside various conspiratoriadeceivers on screen and recognizing the great lengths to which thewill go in order to secure the pub lic's obliviousness, the viewer of ois invited to contemplate the objects, people, and events of ordinardaily life in a sinister light. The milkman making his daily roundthe entrance to a local ballet school, or the sight of a bicycle parkein a suburban front yardfrom the perspective of noir, each exists ia flip-flopping state of permanent "maybe."^ When in our day-to-dawanderings nothing appears pointedly curious or odd (which is mosof the time, to be sure), everything, at its surface, must be vaguelenigm atic. This fantasy ofunsuspicion correlates closely with a parall1940s discourse concem ing the pre-emptive power of medical X -raythe notion that the apparently healthy exterior views people take fogranted are the ones they should most acutely suspect. As I shall arguchiaroscuro is the visual index of this sense of ominous normalcy, writing on the walls that spells out noir's foremost narrative conceit:magical/impossible X-ray vision that penetrates the skin of deceptioto disclose an endless series of shadowy criminal machinations whilstressing the ever-so-tenuous proximity of a blithely unsuspicioupublic eye.


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are employed so frequently in noir criticism that they have ceased tomean anything . A more useful approach to chiaroscuro is afforded byMarc Vemet in his article ''Film Noir on the Edge of Doom ." Workingto dispel the notion that Expressionist lighting in Hollywood cinemais solely the province of film noir. Vemet pinpoints a directionalimperative in the technique:

"Expressionist" lighting is placed low on the set(often on a horizontal axis), sets off a dark space inthe upper part of the frame (absence of sun or moon),is partial (it lights only part of the space and of thehuman figure)andapparentlymonodirectional. Placedto the side of the camera, it isolates the human figurein white against a black background. Placed oppositeit, it isolates a silhouette against a white background.Laterally, it creates a delineation of the silhouette bymaintaining zones of shadow upon it f. . . ] . (9)

Though Vemet convincingly rejects any exclusive connection betweennoir lighting and German Expressionism, there are nonetheless otherobjective criteria that set apart o/> lighting from its analogues in relatedgenres. Following from Vernet's assertion thaXfilmsnoirs tend to bemarkedly horizontal in their lighting design, I argue that chiaro.scuromust be understood not only as lateral but also as predominantlyarchitectural in origin.

Unlike horror film, whose iconic shadow is figural (a handwith ominously curled fingers, a strange silhouette, a figure in a cloak,or a frenetically fiapping vampire bat), in film noir shadows almostexclusively refer back to some architectural structure or partition^aneffect easily discerned in noir's most distinctive shadow: a name orbusiness title illuminated on a street-facing window so as to projectits distended letters across an opposing wall, like an inverted stencil.^Here, as elsewhere, chiaroscuro is not designed to be spooky, or toremind us of the hidden nooks from which some evil creature might


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Lacking either of its two key componentshorizontality (i.e. sideby-side-ness) and architectural obstruction chiaroscuro would faito strike us in the same uncanny way: as a writing on (he walls, othe walls. Indeed, in conceiving of the basic shape and structure ochiaroscuro, the student of noir would not be wrong to imagine thblueprint ofa building rendered not in its standard "'font" but with itwalls in boldface. Or, in keeping with the diagonally slashing bandof light-and-dark themselves, we could say that chiaroscuro is noir'best means of placing wall boundaries in italics. In both their severityand repetition, the slanting angle of shadows from Venetian blindrepresents an ail-too-literal itaiicization of film noir's coneem withcontiguity and separation, highlighting the point of interface betweenthe criminal and the legitimate that the general public fails to recognizas such. In this manner, chiaroscuro does not imply a hidden depthas in the secret passages and clandestine rooms of Gothic horror andthe classical whodunitbul rather a deceptive surface we fail to sefor what it really is."

Considering the fact that the mise-en-scene of noir is nobroadly illuminated so much as it is shot through with light, is inot possible to draw a connection between /7/m noir lighting desigand a radiograph, commonly called an "'X-ray'"? Although it wouldbe difficult to verify whether the creators of individual films noirever consciously intended for their lighting effects to suggest an Xray view into a body sealed in skin, it seems clear that the viewer'own penetration beyond the walls of hermetically-sealed criminaconspiracies forms a major part of noir's mystique. Conceived in thiway, as a kind of hypodermic infiltration, noir lighting techniques dmore than establish a mood: they idiomatically restate, in shadowand light, Ihe truth-exposing image that results when certain types oradiation are shot through the human body. The m eticulous decep tionwe witness in such films as Double Indemnity, Tension, He Walked BNight (Alfred L. Werker and Anthony Mann. 1948). and The Killin


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pervasive and perverse cultural apparatusone that confounds thedistinctions between the public and the private: specialized know ledgeand popular fantasy" (107). In chiaroscura noir's patented markerthat X-ray vision is now taking placethis perverse fixation on ourown public unawareness becomes iconic. Consider, for instance,the classic noir point-of-view shot in which a character peers out awindow, gently pushing up one slat in the blinds to allow an adequateview, while carefully ensuring that he or she will not be seen lookingout.

Master crimitial Roy Morgan (Richard Basehart) peers through Venetian blinds inHe milked By Night (1948)

In such arrangements, Venetian blinds do not constitute akind of disguise or mask (which any passing viewer would register


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as moucharabiehs. not windows so much as trick mirrorswith thprivate domain taking visual ow nership over the public.'- At the samtime, the resultant chiaroscuro denotes the lone gaze that is capable oseeing into the interior of crime despite an absolute prohibition on sucseeing-^the boundary-defying gaze of the cinematic audience itselfbut only insofar as the X-ray insight afforded by the film is understoodas an impossible viewpoint in the real world outside the theater. Noipositions its viewer as looking in on the realm of conspiracy ancrime in the same way that a physician X-rays a human body, withinsight made possible only through technological trickery (here, boththe trickery of the cinem atic camera and fictional narration, includinvoice-over, fiashback. etc.). It is precisely this tricky, magical aspecof X-ray transgression that is written on the walls in film noir. Indeedas I shall show, this metaphor of the radiograph is so keen that oncannot help but note the resemblance between the shadows cast byVenetian blinds and an X -ray image of the human ribcage.


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Although radiographs had been in use since the tum of thecentury, Cartwright identifies the period between the late 1930s andthe mid-1950sa phase that closely parallels the rise and decline ofclassic/7//M noirwith the mass popularization of X-Ray technologyin America. Owing largely to campaigns against tuberculosis,''the chest X Ray had by mid-century become both a routine and asignificant part of everyday life" (152). In this context, a surprisingsource of enlightenm ent with regard to both the structure and thematicsignificance of chiaroscuro are the promotional tracts u.sed to marketX-ray technology to would-be American consumers. The followingpassage, from the 1941 Eastman Kodak promotional pamphlet X-Rays and You, explains the emerging technology in layman's terms,encouraging the reader to frequently X-ray his or her various bodyparts to reveal what cannot be seen:

Put part ofa man's body against a photographic plateand project the x-rays through him onto the plate andthe rays would blacken the plate where they couldget through, but not where they couldn't, and they'dblacken it blackest where they could get through mosteasily. So what you'd have would be a picture of theman's insides. . .in shadows. (6)

In a striking correspondence, what is this if not an almost point-for-point description of chiaroscuro^s painting with light and shadow,except in reverse (dark on light, instead of light on dark)? The om inous,anxiety-inspiring potential of X-ray technology is acknowledged inother parts of the Kodak pamphlet:

A good many people are still afraid of the x-rays justbecause the apparatus that generates them is such aninfernal-looking machine. But you might as well beafraid of your photographer because he puts his headunder a black cloth. [. . .] As a matter of fact, whatyou ought to fear if your doctor suggests an x-ray


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In this excerpt,'^ the kinship between X-rays, chiaroscuro, and thhermetic structure of noir deception becom es clear. The human skin not only a shell-like container, a screen beyond which vision is barredbut it is also a site where intemal normalcy (i.e. good health) is takefor granted. In short, the skin is a com monplace site ofunsuspicionviewable surface at which things appear "perfectly fine." Recapitulatein visual terms as chiaroscuro, the behind-the-scenes detour offereby the noir narrative resembles an X-ray because both an X-ray anthe noir narrative infiltrate an otherwise sealed interior while insistinthat the skin remains unruptured. Moreover, as noir repeatedly makeclear, in the real world outside the theater, a skin-defying X-ray vievof our neighbors, co-workers, local businesses, and so on. is mosneeded in cases where outwardly no symptom appears.

Not surprisingly, actual radiographs do occasionally appeaon screen in film noir, as if to help decode the hieroglyphic impoof the chiaroscuro that surrounds them. Consider, for example, thappearance of an X-Ray in a montage sequence from Nora Premis(Vincent Sherman, 1947). In the m idst of a series of vignettes depictinthe illicit affair between Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith) and Nor(Ann Sheridan), we see the once-dedicated physician swathed ishadows from Venetian blinds as he enters his dark bedroom anlies to his wife (Rosemary DeCamp) about where he has been. Thbedroom chiaroscuro then lap-dissolves to a shot of a chest X-Raon Talbot's office desk. It is a day or two later, and Talbot is agaicovering up his affair, this time by phone, with the X-Ray serving aa visual parallel to an unsuspected deceit that will soon spiral out ocontrol.''* In another Vincent Sherman film, Bacf^re (1950), Nurs.liilie Benson (Virginia Mayo) breaks into a doctor"s office after hourto retrieve an incriminating file. When she is accosted by a janitor (Louis Johnson), she tells him that everything is fine and that there no burglar. Her excuse : she just needs to retrieve some X-Rays. Ashe enters the office, the Venetian blinds form an X-Ray-like patter


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frame his wife for murder. Quite appropriately, given noir's concernswith undetectability, the X-Rays come back Inconclusive, neitherproving nor disproving the detectives' hypothesis.'^ Perhaps the mostmemorable appearance of a medical X-ray in noir comes In D.O.A.(Rudolph Mate, 1950). The radiograph is displayed in yet anotherchiaroscwo-Unged doctor's office and, as in Backlash, it revealsnothing. Despite his perfectly normal appearance, both inside andout, protagonist Frank Bigelow (Edmond O'Brien) has nonethelessbeen poisoned and has less than twent\-four hours to live. Suchfailed X-Ray diagnoses in noir only underscore my thesis. It is notthe penetrative revelation of X-ray technoiogy per se, but instead anamplified sense of "perfectly normal appearances" that provides thecoordinates foT noir's fantasy.

The radiographic impulse in noir is given a more allusive,although equally deliberate treatment in a sequence from Billy W ilder'skeystone/77m noir D ouble Indemnity^afilmhat arguably perfects thechiaroscuro aesthetic and serves as a template for many noirs to follow.The crucial moment comes in the film's opening sequence, in a seriesof apparently insignificant lines that are spoken just before Walter Neff(IVed MacMunray) embarks on a play-by-play account of his failedperfect crime into the Dictaphone of his boss. Barton Keyes (EdwardG. Robinson). Bleeding under his jacket from the gunshot wounddealt him by fenime Jatale Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck),Neff enters the lobby of the Pacific All-Risk insurance company; theofticc building is quiet, dark, and still. The only words spoken in thesequence, and the very first words we hear in the film, pass betweenNeff and an elderly night watchman (.John PhilUber) whose job it is tooperate the elevator during off-hours:

NIGHT WATCHMAN. Working pretty late aren'tyou, Mr. Neff?NEFF. Late enough. Let's ride.NIGHT WATCHMAM. You look kind of ail in at


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[Laughs.] I say it's rheum atism.The conversation is clearly something more than empty banter, andbeyond establishing NefT's none-too-talkative preoccupation withthe bullet hole in his shoulder, screenwriters Wilder and RaymondChandler seem to have two things in mind. First, an effort has beenmade to evoke a sense of the mundane routine of the everyman. withthe night watchman's pedestrian discourse appearing just before theheartless tale of murder and deception we are about to hear from NeffSecond, the dialogue interjects a touch of political commentary abouthe cynicism of big business, since the very insurance company thaemploys the elderly watchman will not insure him. In addition to thesetwo readily interpreted signs, however. I will posit a third meaningfor the exchange, one which derives from a conspicuous omission inthe scripted dialogue. Again, keep in mind that part of these wordsresonance derives from their isolation. They are absolutely the onlywords we hear prior to the com mencem ent of Neff's famous voiceover, and thus appear in a sort of narrative vacuumin a relation tharesembles that of a caption to its picture.

Presaging the lengthy "inside view" of murderous conspiracywe are about to hear and see , the wa tchm an 's lament can be translatedas follows: when confronted with certain perceptual limits (in thiscase, the limits of the human body) differences in interpretationare inevitable, and lacking any positive confirmation of the internacondition, disagreements between what "they say" and what "I saymust go unresolved. All this is plainly stated by the character. Wharemains unspoken is what the night watchman so obviously needsthe confimiative view offered by an X-ray, a view that could penetrateoutward appearances to reveal the invisible truth of the old man'heart condition."" By conspicuously withholding the word "'X-ray" athis moment, the dialogue speaks it even m ore loudly, anticipating thestructure of NefTs voice-over throughout the film. It is precisely anX-ray view of the inner workings of conspiracy that the narrative o


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is reconfigured as an active quest. The figure of the am nesiac appearsin such films as Slreet of Chance (Jack Hively. 1942). Deadline atDawn (Harold Clurman, 1946), Somewhere in the Night (Joseph L.Mankiewicz, 1946), /m/jac/(Arthur Lubin, \9A9\ Shadow on the Wall{Pat Jackson, 1950). Beware, My Lovely (Harrys Homer, 1952), and TheLong Wait (Victor Sav ille. 1954). Most notably, in the first major sceneof The Crooked Way (Robert Florey, 1949), a radiograph of the skullof Eddie Rice (John Payne), displayed in a doctor's office replete withextreme chiaro.scuro, symbolizes the protagonist's pervasive memoryloss. Visible in the X-Ray, the piece of shrapnel permanently lodgedin Eddie's brain is no more outwardly apparent than tlie true motivesof the various former acquaintances he will encounter as the narrativeunfolds. In the above listed/i7/,v noirs and others, the am nes iac's questto realize the significance of common places and events stands as anespecially extravagant example of noir's effort to generate the buzzof the unsuspected. The structure of the amnesiac narrative is strictlydialectical: whereas noir posits that ordinary folks/tJ/7 to suspect theimmanence of crime, the amnesiac is that subject who fails to fail tosuspect at every point of contact with the world.'' All too aware ofhis own obliviousness hypercognizant of the potential importance ofeach scene, each incidental encounterthe amnesiac spends all of hislime scann ing a series of mundane locales in search of that one detail,that one fissure or "tip off," that can verify the source of a crisis only herecognizes. The amnesiac thus underscores noir's thesis about publicunsuspicion by enacting its opposite: a widespread, indiscriminatesuspicion of everything the average citizen obliviously passes by.

Although the 1946 Irving Reis film Crack-Up may not be thebest-remem bered of the noir amnesia scenarios, it is nonetheless highlyrepresentative. Protagonist George Steeie (Pat O'Brien) embarkson a short voyage by train. In the middle of the trip, George's traincrashes into a second oncoming engineor so he thinks. The plot'smajor enigma, crvstallized in the blinding white light George sees


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of the crash with an intensified skepticism. Whereas, on his first traintrip, nothing at all was scrutinized, on the second trip, everything iscrutinized. Of course the film's viewer has no choice but to go alongon this second pass through a series of scenes. Asking the vieweto gaze skeptically at a succession of normal-looking scenarios, thamnesia narrative rehearses the locked-out perspective noir wants tinstigate in its viewer's real-world dealings outside the theate r Havinbeen made extra-suspicious of each scene the protagonist drifts intothe viewer of the noir amnesia film confronts a story-world that, in itturn, offers up a series of distressingly ambiguous tab leaux .

Amnesiac veteran Eddie Rice (.lohn Payne) receives a confounding diagnosis frommilitar>' physician Arthur Staccy (Raymond Largay) in The Crooked Way (\949)


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and after a couple of seconds the man glares back at George, as ifto say, "What are you looking at?" The key link to the epistemologyof the X-ray, however, lies not in the viewer's affective response tothe retum of George's look (this is nothing like the climactic terrorof Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film Rear Window, when Lars Thorwaldfinally looks back at "JefT' Jeffries) but instead in our recognitionof the ultimate ambiguity of the card player's seemingly hostileresponsethe fact that he promptly returns George's glare with anentirely normal human response to being stared at. By reciprocallystaring back, the card player does his part to reinforce the hermeticsea! of deception in true noir fashion, sinee not staring back itselfwould have seemed out of the ordinar>'. That is to say, an outwardlysuspicious clue would have emerged only if the card player refused tolook up, signifying a possible attempt on his part to remain coverttoappear (falsely) unconcernedthus providing George's inquisitivegaze with a point of entry.'^ Taking this potential error into account.the more com plex action that transpires is impenetrably unsuspicious,thus worthy of an X-ray. Ihe card player is neither simply lookingat George nor is he not looking at George. Instead, given theprotagonist's pre-existing suspicion of everything around him. we getthe sense that the card player is pointedly not not-looking-at-George.fhe paradoxical, loop-like logic of this scenario nullifies the very ideaof detection.'" George's persecutors are no more or less remarkablethan any of the other people on the train, several of whom likewiseinteract with George while acknowledging his strangely impertinentbehavior. Perhaps they all are in on it? This vexingly uncertain, almostHeisenbergian relation between the seer and the seenan uncertaintythat comes into play when things do not appear innocent, but ratherJust normalis precisely the buzz noir wants to evoke.^"

Unlike the average man- or woman-on-the-street. whom)ioir positions as an oblivious passerby, the protagonists of amnesianarratives such as Crack-Up are compelled to look too closely. The


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not only as a novel twist on the classical detective's quest to sort oua murky enigma, but also as noir's most emphatic statement abouthe knowledge-deflecting potential of real world surfaces themselveLacking anything like an X-ray, the amnesiac is in the world but lockeout of any connection to it; the entire world is an unconfirmative "X.Conclusion: X Marks the Genre

According to Marina Roy, the letter X "as an isolated graphemhas always been used in scientific and philosophical discourses to stanin for an unknown or variable quantity, measurement or quality" (13In his chapter on the letter "X" in Glossalalia: An Alphabet o f CriticaKeyM'ords, Tom Conley discusses the "iconic value [of "X "] as signthe unknow n," suggesting that "the beauty of .r ow es its force to a richistory of the art of concealment, deceit and magic" (342). Conlegoes on to identify a list of the various sites at which "X" typicallappears: pirate maps, perspectival vanishing points, lighting desigin classical film, advertising gimmicks, and mathematical eqtiationto name but a few. To this list, we may add the so-called "X -m arksthe-spot" murders of the Victorian classical detective, which providan opportunity for the sleuth to demonstrate his skill, along with thpromise that the mystery "X" will in the end be replaced by rationaexplanations, timelines, motives, and finally the name of the guiltparty. However, to the extent that such non-noir mysteries enunciate oimply th af'X marks the spot where the body was found," their conceris purely logistical, identifying the specific position of the corpse ia matrix of other material clues. With the rise of the gangster genrin 1920s and 1930s America, "X" continues to designate a murderecorpse, but with a distinct new twist. The iconic "X " of gangland ispredetermined space-time coordinate at which a rival mobster or stoopigeon is "put on the spot" marked for death and then systematicallgunned down in clear public view. Such executions are not motivateby simple revenge but by publicity itself, with an "X " coldly indicatinthe place of death on the front page of the next day's tabloids. Mo


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promise of future retribution, but instead a blanket designator of ourimpossibly irresolute relation to what is present-the strange insightthat in any given circumstance there may or may not be something toit. To return to a quote from the Kodak booklet X-Rays and You, filmnoir imagines a familiar landscape full of "things that can't possiblyhe found out," except by way of an X-ray vision we do not possess.Written on the walls in striking chiaroscuro, the conceptual X-rayaccomplished by the noir narrative encourages a distinct world view,a fantasy in which the heart of crime remains at once adjacent to ourown lives and perfectly sealed up. Or, to paraphrase Walter NefFsgut-spilling dictation to Barton Keyes at the beginning of DoubleIndemnity, we can say that noir is detennined to set us straight aboutsomething we can't see because it's smack up against our nose.

Celebrated today for its remarkable aesthetics and sordidthemes, it is all too easy to forget that noir was first of all a form ofcommercial entertainment, actively seeking viewers' engagementin conventionalized and reproducible forms of pleasure. In 1940sand early 1950s Am erica, the paradox of the unsuspected crime wasanything but box office poison; indeed, it was no/r's most marketableformula. Simultaneously invokinganddenyingthe inside-out viewpointafforded by the X-ray, noir sets itself apart as that brand of Americancrime film that thrills viewers with the promise of a possible secret,not a possible answer. As such,^/m noir does not seek to raise publicawareness about the prevalence of modem crime or the need for skilleddetection, but rather to cultivate an awareness ofimsiispicion itself. Inmy view, this is the most unified statement we can hope to make aboutthe notoriously diverse corpus of film noir. Counter to commonplaceassertions about its '"paranoid universe." noir does not aim to engenderactual audience paranoia but rather a playful trompe I'oeil effect inwhich we momentarily trick ourselves into believing that the worldaround us is full of undetectable intrigue, only so as to readjust ourperspective, now seeing through to the absurdity of such unfounded,imaginary conjecture. In this way. film no ir's fantasy ofunsuspicion can


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NotesI would like to thank Lucy Fischer, Todd McGowan, Brian Pricand Meghan Sutherland for their incisive comments on earlier drafof this essay. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of FilCriticism for their very helpful suggestions and advice.

' A passage from Foster Hirseh's The Dark Side of the Screeepitomizes this line of thinking: "No white wall in any noir drama free of shadows. [... ] Horizontal, barred, criss-crossed lines on walcreate a prison-like aura, underlining the psychological and physicenclosure that is at the core of most noir stories' ' (90).- Of the thematic relevance of chiaroscuro. Nicholas Christopher say'The oblique lighting and camera angling [. . .] reinforce our implicunderstanding that the characters" motives are furtive, ambiguouand psychologically charged; that their innermost conflicts andesires are rooted in urban claustrophobia and stasis: and that thetread a shadow>' borderline between repressed violence and outrighvulnerability" (16).'Beyond its everyday use. the phrase appeared in various 1940advertisements including campaigns for Kellogg'scereal (c. 1944) anNewsweek (beginning in 1949), which touts the penetrative insight oits news analysis by stressing that "There's always more than meethe eye!""* Although the phrase "paranoid universe" appears in Bick (19Gunning (301), and Koepnik (181). virtually all existing scholarshion film noir makes some reference to "paranoia" as a predominanmood. Notably, only Joan Copjec invokes the phrase "paranoiuniverse" in order to rethink it: "[Wlhile this paranoia is usuallassumed to indicate an erosion of privacy that permits the Other penetrate, to read o ne 's innermost thoughts, yi/m noir helps us to sethat the opposite is true. It is on the public level that the erosion ha


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topology of unsuspicion in noir.^ Later in the film. Quim by 's success at remaining unsuspected isbluntly voiced when police lieutenant "Blackie" Gonsales (WilliamConrad) asks an officer at headquarters to trace his only lead in themurder case, the name "Paul Sothem." Upon receiving the report, hevoices his frustration to his partner Bonnabel: "Get a load of this."Not in the phone directories. Has no car ownership. He's not on anypayroll or hotel registry. No hospital cards on him. No charge accounts.Never took out any insurance. He doesn 't take milk from a milkm an.Doesn't have a newspaper delivered. And he's got no police record."All we've got to do is find him.'' What the police initially cannotcomprehend is precisely what the entire film has worked to establishfor the viewer: that "Paul Sothem" does not exist as such and is livinga completely normal-appearing life under a different identity hisutterly quotidian true identity as a pharmacy night manager. Theparadox of this scenario is self-evident: Quim by 's deception is perfect,and perfectly noir, because in practice it is no deception at all. Afterall, in seeking to get away with murder, what could be more convincingthat simply acting like oneself? Th is vacuum-like unsuspiciousness isunderscored when Quimby/Sothem, on the verge of stabbing Deagerin the neck, discovers that he cannot go through with the murder. Thenext day, his estranged wife C laire returns to him. Having leamed ofhis aborted plan, she has killed Deager herself, thus framing Sothern,a man who does not exist, for a crime he did not commit.' For a succinct structuralist account of the classical detective storyand its difference from the suspense thriller, see Todorov (47).'' These are not my own rhetorical inventions, but examples of criminalfacades within the narratives ofactualfilms noirs: He Walked By N ight,No Que.stiom Asked (Harold Kress, 195 1), and The Desperate Hours(William Wyler, 1955), respeetively.' The "inverted stencil" I describe appears in The Maltese Falcon


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feature chiaroscuro. Consider Tension, The Chase (Arthur Riple1946). Backlash, Nora Prentiss, Out of the Past (Jacques Toumeu1947), and Pitfall (Andre De Toth, 1948) as just few exam ples of filmwith striking daytime chiaroscuro,^ Offen labeled as noiralthough in my view incorrectlythe filCornered (Edward Dmytryk. 1945) and more recently The UsuSuspects (Bryan Singer. 1995) provide interesting noir test-casesince each presents some form of hermeneutic shadow-effect in ordto conceal the identity of a mastermind figure." While I agree completely with Joan Copjec's assertion thchiaroscuro in noir must be understood not as a "genuine illusion odepth," but instead as an "ersatz representation of depth" (192), I amled to this conclusion by a different route. Whereas C opjec's brillianl,acanian analysis of film noir emphasizes the postwar transition t(a culture of private jouissance in which "nothing can lie hiddeeverything must come to light." she does not explicitly address thsite at which noir's illumination of the private impacts the viewer: thordinary-seeming real landscape outside the theater. One consequencof this omission is a tendency to foreground the "lonely room" mot(189) as a marker of generic difference while discounting the num erouscenes in which criminal deceptions take place in full view of a gaggof innocent bystanders. For instance, when Copjec says of Phyllis anNeff"s meeting p lace in Double Indemnity, "Jerr> 's Market is a privaspace I- . .J empty except for a few shoppers who take no interest itheir existence'" (190), we need to be clear about two things. FirsJerry's Market is in facX full of people. In the first of two scenes at tmarket, I count no less than thirteen shoppers in five tiny aisles, twof whom have speaking parts, which is to say nothing of the dozen oso people treading the sidewalk outside the supermarket in the sceneestablishing shot. Second, this plenitude of non-witnessing passerbyboth here and in other films noirs~does not invalidate Copjec


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representation of depth'" becomes clear. Borrowing Copjee*s terms, ifthe "depth" of noir deception resides in the banality of surfaces, thenone way to 'Mie hidden" is precisely to "come to light"^the two areno different. For a Lacanian reading of the shoppers at Jerry's Marketin term s of desire a.nd th& objet a, see Manon, 21-3.' In the noir espionage drama The House on 92nd Street (HenryHathaway, 1945), a two-way or "trick" mirror is used in the FBI'ssurveillance of a Nazi spy ring. Repeatedly, the narrator refers to thisaperture of observation and concealment as an '*X-ray mirror." Suchdiscourse signals that "X-raying" was recognized in the 1940s as agcneralizable concept, and not as specialized technical jargon or as atrade name (e.g. "Xerox " or "Kleenex").'-' Cartwright discusses a number of late-1930s and 1940s promotionalfilms that similarly extol the benefits of routine radiography, includingHighlights and Shadows (1937), They Do Come Back (1940), andTarget TB{\95^){\A1-59).'" Despite its initial sim ilarities to a "women's picture," the conclusionof Nora Prentiss delivers the markedly noir paradox of a living deadman. Owing to a series of seemingly impossible plot twists revealedin fiashbacka fatal incident of surgical malpractice that allows thetwo-timing Talbot to switch identities with his dead patient, followedby Talbot's facial disfigurement in an automobile accidentwe leamthat not only is Dr. Richard Talbot still alive, but that he is about tostand trial for his own murder. So fiawless is the line of his deceptionthat it loops back on itself, re-intersecting with an earlier pointin his trajectory only to deny Talbot readmission to his prior, non-dissimulated self. In such conundrums, noir virtually defines for theaudience what the word "hermetic" means, setting the conceit of theaudience's impossible X-Ray vision in high relief.' The film ends with a classic declaration of no/>'s hermetic logic.Detective Tom Carey (Richard Benedict) tells a group of gathered


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call the aorta, that is enlarged. An enlargement like this m eans, 'Takit easy, old man,' almost as much as an enlargement of fhc heart itseland the only way to know for sure whether there is enlargement again by means of the x-rays" (15).'^ Bringing together noir's fantasy of unsuspicion with the sIowKunraveled mystery of tbe classical whodunit, the amnesia film can brightfully considered a hermetic hermeneutic narrative.' Such simple, straightforward deception is the province of thgangstera logic brilliantly captured in a comical exchange betweetwo mob thugs in Martin Scorsese's neo-gangster film The Departe(2006). Delahunt (Mark Rolston) says to Fitz> (David O'Hara). "Sethat guy over there. He's a cop . He's not paying attention to us. He'scop." The joke is that, in such an arrangem ent, virtually every passerbmust be a cop .' The connection between the hermetic structure of noir amnesia anradiography is only reaffirmed when we finally leam the reason foGeorge Stee le's memory loss. An outspoken lecturer at the "M anhattaM useum ," George innocently requests to use an X-Ray to exam ine thbrush-strokes of one of the Museum 's paintings, unaware that in doinso he would uncover both a forged artwork and a web of conspiracin the museum's administration. Before any X-Raying can take placGeorge is lured onto the train, kidnapped, and subject to narcohypnosis in order to make him seem insane. He retum s to his place owork a madm an, raving about a train wreck that never occurred. W heno one can confirm his slor>; George's entire waking world is turneon its head. Suddenly everything appears questionably counterfeit.- It is no coincidence that the Coen Brothers' neo-rto/> film ThMan Who Wasn't There (2001) references the popular notion of th"uncertainty principle" deduced by Werner Heisenberg in 1927the idea that "looking at something changes it." The aggressivelintersubjective logic of noir deception amounts to something like a


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Works CitedBarthes, Roland. S/7.. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and

Wang, 1974.Bick. lisa J. "The Beam That Fell and Other Crises in The MalteseFalcon.''' The Maltese Falcon: John Huston, Director. Ed.

William Luhr. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995.Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual

Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.Christopher. Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the

American City. New York: The Free Press, 1997.Conley, Tom. "X." Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords.

Ed. Julian Woifreys. New York: Routledge. 2003.Copjec, Joan. "The Phenomenal Nonphenomenal: Private Space inFilm Noir." Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Verso,

1993.Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and

Modernity. London: BFl Publishing, 2000.Hirsch, Foster. The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. Cambridge,Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2001.Koepnick. Lutz. The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler

and Hollywood. Berkeley: U of California P. 2002 .Manon. Hugh S. "Some Like it Cold: Fetishism in Billy Wilder's

Double Indemnity.'' C inema Journal 44.4 (20 05): 18-43.Roy. Marina. Sigfi After the X. Vancouver: Advance/Artspeak, 20 01.Shadoian. Jack. Dreams and Dead Ends. Cambridge: MIT Press,1977.lodorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard.

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.Vernet, M arc. "Film Noir on the Edge of D oom ." Shades of Noir. Ed.Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1993. A'-^a^.v and You, Rochester:


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