Joss and Noir...I think I get it now

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goldenboy

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Alright, I think I just had an Angel-like epiphany. Was just starting another book on my coffee table, "Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld" by Thomas Hibbs, and it got me thinking...Gothic stories and "noir" are very closely related. And, the TV show "Lost" really seems to be true film noir. Here's Hibbs' description:

"While there is no consensus on precisely what defines film noir, its exemplary instances occur in the post-World War II period, a period of tremendous success, progress and growth in America. It was nonetheless a period of unease, uncertainty, and foreboding. Film noir captures the disconcerting and often suppressed sense that something is deeply awry. It is a dark negation intended to counter the bright affirmation of the public culture of the era. Yet it is never a simple negation. Indeed, film noir is both dramatically and artistically complex. Its darkness and shadows, its emphasis on absence over presence, underscore the depth and mystery of the most mundane experiences. Into such a disorienting, threatening, and yet inviting world, noir thrusts its would-be hero, who sets out on a quest to solve a particular mystery. But the quest is equally a search for communication, love, and meaning."

"Film noir does not, then, present us with heroes who stand beyond good and evil, but with the seeming impossibility of heroism in a hostile world. The downfall of the protagonist is not entirely negative. The tragic structure of the would-be hero's quest underscores the gap between his longing for intelligibility, meaning, and love, on the one hand, and his failure to figure things out and achieve salvation, on the other. This longing itself provides the motive force for the drama."

"The device of the flashback is typical of this genre. By insisting on the way the past impinges upon the present, the flashback underscores the contingency of the present and future, the way we are held captive by the past. But this is not a fatal determinism, since it prompts a quest through memory to discover the truth about the past, a truth that never evident but may allow us to endure in the present."

"By putting our conventions into question, film noir opens up the possibility of a more fundamental and more comprehensive inquiry. Its accent on darkness and mystery is an affront to Enlightenment confidence in transparent objectivity and progress. According to the modern conception of progress, we know precisely where we are, where we want to go, and how we are to get there. Film noir recovers the pre-modern conception of life as an always tenuous quest, wherein we are dependent on veiled clues and the uncertain assistance of others. Although fulfillment is never secure, the longing for wholeness and love remain at the very center of the plot. Autonomy is a debilitating illusion, and bold self-assertion, a self-destructive vice. Film noir thus engages, without succumbing to, nihilism."
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I think this sums up "Lost" really well. And also, I think it sums up nicely almost all of Joss's fantasy output to date. When I first heard Joss describe "Angel" as film noir, I was thinking "well, yeah in a superficial way, I guess it is". He's a private dick in LA, fighting crime.

But just consider that description. Angel's longing for "meaning", purpose, love, connection with others. The show makes extensive use of flashbacks to Angel's past as Angelus"”this drives the drama, in typical noirish fashion. It's a tragic, arguably futile quest he's on. Trust of strangers as well as friends is a huge issue. And also, the more he goes off on his own, broods, doesn't cooperate with others, the more Angel suffers. Angel is his most fulfilled when he suppresses his autonomy, individualism and learns to rely on others. Very noirish.

Many of the same things can be said of Buffy and Mal Reynolds. Noir themes seem to be a deep part of what Joss is doing...Noir seems to be a fascination of many genX creatives"”Joss, Tarantino, Rodriguez, JJ Abrams...I think it speaks to the insecurities, preoccupations of that generation.
 
You know what I always found interesting about the Whedon writers and their attraction to Noir? It's the almost hateful reaction it seems to spark in some of us towards it.

As examples I would offer up the way some react to Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco, The Inside, and that yummy noirish ending to Not Fade Away.

Some don't just dislike those kinds of things. They hate them. Why is that? I, of course, have a theory.

I think Noir offends mainstream sensibilities. It contradicts what I would call "the Millenium Message", which says something like - What is good is what satisfies you. Nothing else matters as long as your self esteem is intact, and you are content, so get out there, and acquire stuff to make yourself happy.

Noir contradicts this. The urge to satisfy self, at the expense of the whole causes conflict.
 
Interesting, goldenboy. I never would have thought of Lost as noir in a million years, but you have a point. At least as far as the flashbacks go. There are a lot of great classic noir movies that use flashbacks the same way. Out of the Past comes immediately to mind. Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity, too, although they tell their whole stories via flashback and just use the present for a framing device at the beginning of the tale (they start at the end, flashback to the beginning and then progress linearly back to the end). Lost's protagonists don't really fit the noir mold, though. Taken individually, many of them do (ambiguous morality, shady pasts), but noir doesn't really work well with an ensemble. It's all about the lone protagonist.

If they really are going for noir on Lost, it's worth chewing over that noir protagonists are usually denied redemption (or are redeemed only in death), and they tend to end the story worse off in some way than when they started (losing the girl, not catching the bad guy).
 
LazyDolphin said:
Interesting, goldenboy. I never would have thought of Lost as noir in a million years, but you have a point. At least as far as the flashbacks go. There are a lot of great classic noir movies that use flashbacks the same way. Out of the Past comes immediately to mind. Sunset Boulevard and Double Indemnity, too, although they tell their whole stories via flashback and just use the present for a framing device at the beginning of the tale (they start at the end, flashback to the beginning and then progress linearly back to the end). Lost's protagonists don't really fit the noir mold, though. Taken individually, many of them do (ambiguous morality, shady pasts), but noir doesn't really work well with an ensemble. It's all about the lone protagonist.

If they really are going for noir on Lost, it's worth chewing over that noir protagonists are usually denied redemption (or are redeemed only in death), and they tend to end the story worse off in some way than when they started (losing the girl, not catching the bad guy).
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Yeah, point taken about the ensemble aspect. I'm still attracted to the idea though 'cause the "Lost" flashbacks are all about individual conflicts, problems. Also, with classic noir, typically a man must team up with, trust a femme fatale. The drama hinges on trust, tentative cooperation with another, right? Usually ends very, very badly, lol.
 
nerd4hire said:
You know what I always found interesting about the Whedon writers and their attraction to Noir? It's the almost hateful reaction it seems to spark in some of us towards it.

As examples I would offer up the way some react to Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco, The Inside, and that yummy noirish ending to Not Fade Away.

Some don't just dislike those kinds of things. They hate them. Why is that? I, of course, have a theory.

I think Noir offends mainstream sensibilities. It contradicts what I would call "the Millenium Message", which says something like - What is good is what satisfies you. Nothing else matters as long as your self esteem is intact, and you are content, so get out there, and acquire stuff to make yourself happy.

Noir contradicts this. The urge to satisfy self, at the expense of the whole causes conflict.
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Yes! As I see it, noir in effect calls into question the value, the "success" of rationalism, individualism, materialism"”deep, fundamental tenets of Western Civ"”pieces of the American Dream. That's why I love it! And that's why I loved the most noirish Angel eps"”the finale being the pinnacle of that noir spirit.

It's kind of amazing"”it totally makes sense to me now as the genre of choice for the postmodern age: Lynch, Jarmusch, Tarantino, Chris Carter, Joss, now Abrams"”all seem to make use of classic noir conventions. Noir"”like the Gothic"”projects pre-modern dread, irrationalism, spiritual longing onto modern, rational, individualistic Western culture.

In this age, it's almost embarrasing to witness Buffy and Angel longing for belonging"”for conformity, in a sense. So much in the culture says "Be youself. Be a rebel. Follow your bliss. Go buy that new, cool thing and you'll be happy." And then they actually go off and sacrifice themselves for the greater good, out of a sense of "duty", or something. Outrageous! Who knows if what they do will even matter?

It's kinda wierd. Postmodern noir. You could almost see it as a critique of post-WW2 modernism, faith in science, progress"”but also possibly a repudiation of 1960s, "if it feels good, do it", "me generation" selfishness. Postmodern noir is in a position to critique almost everything in the culture, post WW2. It's like a survey of the wreckage caused by both of those two extremes in the culture.
 
I agree, and people who have bought into the mainstream mesage don't like to hear the message of postmodern noir. I think they object to it on a gut level.

When you tell them Numero Cinqo sold out as a hero to get stuff to satisfy himself, they call that bad writing. If Rebecca Locke from The Inside is a successful, strong, woman, she's not allowed to be tortured by her demons to the point she can only show the real world a shell. That's bad acting, they say.
 
nerd4hire said:
If Rebecca Locke from The Inside is a successful, strong, woman, she's not allowed to be tortured by her demons to the point she can only show the real world a shell. That's bad acting, they say.
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Oh, yeah. I gotcha. I never was drawn in by that performance, but that makes complete sense thematically. It probably would have begun to feel more "appropriate" had the show lasted. Mulder and Scully were obviously very stoic, detached"”they kept things at an emotional distance to stay sane while they did their jobs.

That detachment, subtlety is quite common to noir and runs completely counter to the Oprah-fied, psychotherapy, self-esteem, express yourself, modern pop culture.

I was just thinking..."Not Fade Away" reminds me of the end of "Casablanca". Angel abandons a budding romance with Nina to go off and heroically rejoin the "war effort""”just like Rick abandons any dreams about Ilsa"”even greater things are at stake.
 
You know the one it reminds me of? What's that one where Harrison Ford is killing androids in futuristic LA? Mostly it connects with me as something to compare NFA to, because, you know, LA, rain, night.

Hey is that HF movie noir, do you think? I think so, or at least some kind of interesting mutation.
 
Mmm yeah, Blade Runner. Fray is totally Blade Runner as well. Spielberg copied that style a bit in AI and Minority Report as well. Philip K Dick dystopian, oppressive, rainy, bleak...noir! All that good stuff.
 
OMG! I share this writer's ambivalence about Spielberg...although he claims there's no Blade Runner copycatting. Spielberg has used noir conventions, but he hates the noir message! Or...actually doesn't even understand it. He trys to "resolve" noir, tack on a happy ending. Joss and other, younger directors "get" noir and love it.



"Spoiler alert: If you haven't seen Minority Report yet, this may ruin a few surprises.

Minority Report: un-noir noir

The consensus is in: Minority Report is (except for the last bit) some kind of masterpiece. But what kind? Spielberg insists it's science-fiction-cum-film-noir. "Mixing the genres really interests me now: film noir, mystery, science fiction. I'm in my mid-50s, I'm no longer afraid of the dark," he said at the Minority Report Seattle press round table. In fact, Spielberg thinks his film is something of an improvement on the noir genre. "I looked at all the mysteries that I remembered as a young film student loving," says Spielberg, "like The Man Who Knew Too Much (the second ), North by Northwest, Chinatown, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Key Largo. I had a field day looking at them"”what's the protoplasm that makes these mysteries work?"

Noir is flawed, he discovered. "A lot of them actually don't work, [they're] so confusing you never really find out who did it. "¦They were kind of going off the star power and the sexuality of Bogart and the film noir style, which made everything seem more gripping than it actually was." Spielberg is proudest of the element that most critics have liked least in Minority Report: the plotty whodunit denouement."


"Minority Report is packed with noir elements, artfully updated (and, incredibly, it's not derivative of Blade Runner). But it omits noir's essence. Noir is about circumambient evil whose tendrils reach for your heart and about your horror at seeing your own heart reaching back to greet them. Everything's stacked against the anti-hero, including his own nature. Ungovernable passions drive him to jail, death, or worse. When Seattle Weekly's Brian Miller asked Spielberg, "Can you talk about free will and Original Sin that's embedded in these cops as inquisitors?" Spielberg said, "Ooh, heavy!" and laughed. "Is your destiny sealed and you have no vote, or [not]?" said Spielberg. "It probably takes every ounce of effort you can possibly gather, [but] I'm among those who believe you can take control of your life." Minority Report makes Cruise's fate suspenseful, but Spielberg is incapable of buying the icy nihilist determinism of John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, and Alfred Hitchcock, the three main influences on the film. For Spielberg, evil presents an opportunity for self-improvement through self-control. Fate can be dodged, like Indiana Jones' rock.

Noir is about ruined American dreams; Minority Report is about a man and society redeemed. Spielberg can't help but celebrate the triumph of the nice-guy will. He gave kind hearts to Michael Crichton's maleficent greed-head Jurassic Park developer and stony, opaque Schindler, and he gives Minority Report a happy ending. He gives Max von Sydow a Minority Report role echoing Huston's Noah Cross in Chinatown"”but after the final betrayal, von Sydow begs his victim's forgiveness. If you put von Sydow in Minority Report and Huston's Noah Cross in the scales of evil, your balance becomes a catapult, and Max goes flying like ET on a bicycle over the moon. Uffdah!

Spielberg is as good as Huston, Kubrick, and Hitchcock. But if he thinks Minority Report is real noir, he is, as Chandler put it, "crazy as a pair of waltzing mice."

http://www.slate.com/id/2067489/
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Read this thread last night and so wanted to reply but I was tired and my head wasn't there, hopefully it is now.

Lately I've been watching Veronica Mars (stick with me here) and making avatars for Faith's VM forum. In doing so I've noticed the lighting and framing, and I knew VM was noir but doing this has really made me think about it. The colour pallette is very much green and black, and when I think of Angel I think of a more eartly brown and black (the hotel to me was mainly brownish, that kind of earthy tone). Can't remember the framing so well as its been a while. So cinematically, I'd say Angel is very noir, and it is obviously shot like that on purpose.

As far as narrative is concerned, I agree with what hsa been said. There is certainly this sense of seeing the grand solution, but never reaching it. Nor never really caring for it. In the last season I got this nihilistic feeling from Angel. He knew he had to do good, that he couldn't let down the people around him but really, he didn't want to. Maybe he caught the bug in the end because he really wanted to slay that darn dragon but before that I got the feeling that he felt like he was just being kicked while trying to help others. Which is of course a noir-hero trademark.

And Speilberg saying Minority Report isn't noir, what a plonker. I think the ending was an attempt to make a happy ending to it all, which is why he didn't work. Noir is made to make us uncomfortable and unhappy. It would be like ending an Amerian Pie film with Jim dying.
 
Xander said:
Lately I've been watching Veronica Mars (stick with me here) and making avatars for Faith's VM forum. In doing so I've noticed the lighting and framing, and I knew VM was noir but doing this has really made me think about it. The colour pallette is very much green and black, and when I think of Angel I think of a more eartly brown and black (the hotel to me was mainly brownish, that kind of earthy tone). Can't remember the framing so well as its been a while. So cinematically, I'd say Angel is very noir, and it is obviously shot like that on purpose.
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That's interesting. I believe that in Angel's/Wes's office in the Hyperion, the walls are painted green.

In Buffy, green abounds. Giles apartment walls, the green fields of the cemetary, The Magic Box walls. Seasons 1, 2"”the eps often have a sickly green cast"”and I don't think it's just the cheap filmstock and weak lighting.

David Fincher's noirish flicks often have that sickly green cast as well.
 
LazyDolphin said:
If they really are going for noir on Lost, it's worth chewing over that noir protagonists are usually denied redemption (or are redeemed only in death), and they tend to end the story worse off in some way than when they started (losing the girl, not catching the bad guy).
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I wonder...At first, Shannon seemed to be merely a materialistic, bratty child. Yet all she seemed to really desire (based on her final flashbacks) was love, and to be taken seriously. On the island, she always wanted someone to believe in her, trust her. She seemed to get that, finally, with Sayid. He finally seemed to be convinced that she wasn't deranged, distraught about Walt, Boone. And he clearly loved her. Seconds later, she's dead. Is that post-mortem redemption of a sort?
 
goldenboy said:
I wonder...At first, Shannon seemed to be merely a materialistic, bratty child. Yet all she seemed to really desire (based on her final flashbacks) was love, and to be taken seriously. On the island, she always wanted someone to believe in her, trust her. She seemed to get that, finally, with Sayid. He finally seemed to be convinced that she wasn't deranged, distraught about Walt, Boone. And he clearly loved her. Seconds later, she's dead. Is that post-mortem redemption of a sort?
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Honestly, I think they FUBARed her character in her final episode. I don't mean the gut-shot (although that certainly did a literal FUBAR on her). You could argue that she was redeemed in her final moments because Sayid believed in her (well, actually, you just did argue that), but I think that whole episode was such a violation of the character of Shannon that any redemption seemed kind of hollow. I would have preferred to keep her bitchy and materialistic. Sometimes a bitch is just putting up a facade to hide her weaknesses, and sometimes a bitch is just a bitch. She doesn't have to be two-dimensional, but they went so over the top with making her a sympathetic victim that it felt false.

TANGENT ALERT!
The problem with giving EVERYONE flashbacks on the show is that the writers seem compelled to make EVERYONE sympathetic in them. Even questionably-moraled folks like Sawyer. He was humanized (a lot, actually) by his flashbacks. I'm still holding out hope that we discover in a future flashback that Kate was on the run in Australia because she's some crazed mass-murderer. Holding out a very teeny glimmer of hope, mind you. 🙂 I like the way the show plays with moral ambiguity in the present-day story line, but somebody needs to be morally ambiguous (or even outright evil) in their flashbacks, too.
 
Yeah, well, I guess that's the possible downside of having a billion protagonists. Is everyone in a sci-fi purgatory, to be redeemed one by one? Could get a little tedious, I hear ya.
 
..Then, it's very much like Fantasy Island was. Everyone gets what they need in the end, if not what they want...
 
goldenboy said:
That’s interesting. I believe that in Angel’s/Wes’s office in the Hyperion, the walls are painted green.

In Buffy, green abounds. Giles apartment walls, the green fields of the cemetary, The Magic Box walls. Seasons 1, 2—the eps often have a sickly green cast—and I don’t think it’s just the cheap filmstock and weak lighting.

David Fincher’s noirish flicks often have that sickly green cast as well.
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Been a while since I watched an Angel ep, but yeah now that I think about it they were green. Maybe im thinking more of S5 W&H, that was very browny.

Also, good think I, being a resident of the UK and thus not seen S2 of Lost yet, has already been spoilt about what was talked about in the last few posts.
 
What is the Lost schedule in the UK? Can some folks get the new eps immediately via cable or satellite?

Another thing about Lost, the bad guys (others) don't even seem like real human beings"”they're so robotic, psychotic. Maybe they will eventually be fleshed out as well.

I think "Angel" could have taken advantage of light and shadow more than it actually did"”if they were really attempting visual noir. Need to study those eps a little more closely. I'm back on Buffy season 2 right now...
 
goldenboy said:
What is the Lost schedule in the UK? Can some folks get the new eps immediately via cable or satellite?
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In the UK we're about half way through season 1 of Lost - we've just seen the Sawyer flashback ep.

If you have digital cable/satellite you can see next week's ep on the E4 channel straight after the one shown on terrestrial TV (Channel 4)...this is only good for one ep I guess, 'cos you'd have to watch the next ep on digital anyway 🙂
 
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