Noir for Dummies, and Spn s6

[fannishliss]

Some thoughts about Noir and spn s6

I don't really get Noir. 

Just to put that out there, so that people will not think I'm setting myself up as an expert. Quite the contrary!! If you have taken Noir 101 or 202, please lay it on.  I'm very curious and eager to hear what other folks think about how s6 is using the conventions of Noir to further the storytelling arc of spn s6.

Here are the movies that I think of when I think of Noir (I did some wikipedia research but it didn't help me much, since Noir seems to be a slippery term):  The Maltese Falcon.  A Touch of Evil. Vertigo.  Chinatown.    (Please feel free to attack any of this, or add other movies that might be more helpful.)  In more recent terms, in what might be examples of "neo-Noir"  the works of David Lynch, of whom I am a big fan, especially Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Drive.

The big themes of Noir seem to be to be: guilt, corruption, duplicity, the assumption of false identity, or the opacity of identity, the dirty secret, the Horror inside the heart of darkness. (um, Apocalypse Now as Noir?)

There seems to be a connection between Noir and detective fiction, especially the Hardboiled Detective... but in Noir, it looks like the Detective gets dragged down into the muck by the secrets he uncovers.   As in the Maltese Falcon, when the Detective lets the girl go to Prison -- he's serving a greater justice, but there's something so cruel about it. In Vertigo, when Jimmy Stewart falls in love with Kim Novak, who is two or three dead women, one of them supposedly possessed (don't forget our Angel's human's name is from this film).  Or when  Or in Chinatown, when dude is told to "fugettaboutit. It's Chinatown"  and you know very well he's been shaken to his core.  Or worst of all, in Twin Peaks when Agent Cooper is finally himself possessed by Killer Bob.

Okay, so then, in Season Six. we have a guy who looks like Sammy, but who Isn't.  He has a very dark gleam in his eye.  He's willing to commit Patricide to save his own skin ("Bobby's my uncle -- my father -- my uncle AND my father!!!")   And Dean, god help him, is the Intrepid Detective -- he loves Sammy unreasonalby, despite himself, getting pulled away from the Good Woman and the Kid back into the Darkness, into the place where he is a Killer and nothing more. In fact he becomes Death itself.  But he's on the trail of Something Big.  The problem is, who will it benefit when he uncovers the Truth?  "You can't handle the Truth!" as we've loudly been told.  (HOW AWESOME is our Show that it can so easily bring on TRUTH personified?!?!  SPN ROCKS!)   Is humanity all just some kind of Matrix where human souls are the batteries???

The whole theme of Trust No One was announced at the beginning of the season, and we saw right away that the Campbells were not to be trusted  -- Grandad is on the make, Christian is a Demon, and only smart-mouthed Gwen walks away clean. 

The interrogations of s6 make sense in the realm of Noir because of the frank admission that the torturer is sullying himself -- they take on quite a different tone from the overtly political scenes of torture in s4. 

Sorry Samgirls, but you can't trust Sammy.  He's at least two different people now, possibly three.
Sorry Deangirls, but you can't trust Dean either.  He's gonna swim in the muck and go down.
Sorry Casfans, but come on!  Did you ever really trust him?

If our Show is still the Epic Love Affair between Sam and Dean -- then how will the issues of Noir -- poisoned identity, horrible truths, duplicity and betrayal -- play out?  Does Dean's righteous move, to rescue the Soul of Sam from an eternity of unimaginable torment -- turn out to be the move of a duped Detective? How does Sammy deal with the Wall, the thing in his head that separates who he might be from what he was, and what he's become?

Okay, I'm out of time, I hope I've thrown down some interesting gauntlets!

Comments

[flowrs4ophelia.livejournal.com]

Hm, you bring up a lot of connections here I hadn't thought of.

"Bobby's my uncle -- my father -- my uncle AND my father!!!"
LMAO, I was way too amused by that.

There's definitely a big presence of the corruption theme with what's going on with the angels. There's no authority on what is right and wrong anymore. Balthazar figures the world's screwed and he doesn't care, he might as well start making a profit with holy weapons and just enjoy a hedonistic lifestyle. Things like souls and Purgatory are being pursued as business opportunities with no sense of responsibility. Castiel is one of the lone idealist angels still around, but if the way that usually works out in noir is any indication, that may only be because he clearly doesn't know all that's going on.

We've already seen that Dean has been being played big time from just about all angles from the start of this season. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone in Sam's group if not Sam himself somehow led the Jinn right to Dean's home to be a catalyst that would make it easier to draw him back into the hunting world. I'm not sure if I'd expect more of the same duplicity and deceit from a lot of characters for the rest of the season, or if Sam getting his soul back will be the beginning of the phase of them actually figuring everything out and getting on the right track.

The whole idea of the wall in Sam's mind seems to me like a perfect literal representation of the kind of devastating consequences it brings when some horrible truth is uncovered by the detective that he ends up regretting he ever found out. I can't help wondering if one of the big twists I'm sure is coming eventually will be that scratching the wall is exactly what Sam needs to do because his memories of the cage actually hold some important answers.

[datenshiblue.livejournal.com]

the issues of Noir -- poisoned identity, horrible truths, duplicity and betrayal

The question I've had ever since they started bandying that word, Noir, as a season influence, is: how do you take Horror and make it Noir?

Because, this show already has a genre, and in case no one noticed (but of course we all did) those themes listed above had been present throughout the entire series, since the beginning.

Sam is not who Jess thinks. Dean cons people on every hunt, in every town. John makes Dean promise to kill Sam if he can't save him, and swears him to secrecy. Mary Winchester was not the sweet innocent girl John believed, but a hunter, daughter of a hunting clan, who made a deal with a demon. Angels were never who we presumed they'd be. Ruby was playing Sam. Sam hid his addiction to demon blood. The boys hadn't known that Bobby killed his own wife. Or that he was considered the town drunk and crackpot.

So, Noir... riiiight... what's new?

Long before they brought up Noir, Eric set the theme of season six as saving someone you're close to, your family, as opposed to the bigger season agendas of the five season arc, saving the world from the Apocalypse. I don't think they can bring all that to a halt on a dime, but the first half of the season was about finding out what was going on with Sam, among other threads, and the second half will be tying all those threads together.

So, I'm still scratching my head over the whole "Noir" thing. How can you make a horror-themed show Noir?

[fanaddict.livejournal.com]

Quick thoughts while the little guy naps:

To me, noir is more about the atmosphere than specifics, the sense that no one can really be trusted even when there's no evidence for that (eg there's no evidence for distrusting Castiel, but the way he was presented this season created doubt - same with Sam except we finally got the proof that something really was wrong with him). Noir creates a dark world (literally ,often - and SPN certainly went down that visual route) where the seedy underbelly is exposed to the intrepid hero, who is not without sin him or herself (almost entirely himself - noir tends to be a very masculine world where women are the least trustworthy of them all).

I would posit:
1) SPN has always had elements of noir mixed in with horror, it's the ratio that's shifted.
2) While there have been ongoing trust issues between the brothers all along, the noir aspect came from the loss of who Sam really is, while roboSam ran around in his body impersonating him - it makes noir's don't take things at face value literal.
3) The Epic love story thing... I think traditionally, the noir hero loves the untrustworthy, lying woman for whom he does many questionable things. Change gender and add the name Sam, and Dean becomes the noir hero. Sam is the reluctant heroine because he doesn't want to be saved - something also that goes along with the noir darkness.
4) I'll bet anything the visuals lighten up and we move away from heavy-handed noir now that Sam is re-souled, and it will become more about escalating tension for when will the Wall break. It's the gun introduced at the end of Act 1 that must go off before the end. So I think that puts us back toward more creepy horror psychology.

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

I like your questions, and my attempt to answer is this -- in Horror, we presume innocence, while in Noir, we presume guilt.

In Horror, the monster grabs an unsuspecting innocent, and even Hunters are innocent in that they are essentially carrying out a fight in self-defense. In Noir, someone is guilty as sin-- the monster is inside-- and in s6, Hunters are no longer in it to save people -- there's profit, there's a take. In s1-5, even after Dean became a Demon and Sammy drank demon blood, no one doubted their essential humanity -- it was their standard, their anthem. Now, Dean finds himself doing dirty work for demons, taking on the mantle of death... whereas Sammy was reduced to an abomination, while his soul was flayed to the core (presumably, I still don't know how we got from zero information about the cage to knowing everything that goes on inside it).

It's true that it's not new that Dean thinks of himself as a killer -- but what happens when he deliberately shucks everything, including Sam, to actually become nothing but a killer? We saw him fingering the ring and looking at Sam --- wondering if, after all, he'd have to kill the thing his brother had become -- and I don't actually believe that would happen. But in a Noir, his good intentions in bringing back the soul (for both selfless and selfish reasons) would backfire in horrible ways he can't anticipate. One thing about "Robo" Sam -- he is clean. His drive to protect himself is primal, like a tiger or a wolf. You might kill a maneater, but you can't regard it as morally compromised. Robo-Sam, while amoral and intensely dangerous -- was not morally compromised. Who knows what this new, amalgamated Sam will be like? Does he have a demon behind the wall? or, something worse???

I'm thinking now about A Touch of Evil. In that film, it's about how a corrupted lawman plants evidence to bring down criminals he "knows" are guilty. His corruption is thorough -- yet it turns out that when the good guy brings him down, the criminal he framed was in fact guilty. It seems like that kind of twisted amalgam of corruption and justice is the difference between horror and noir.

Yay Friday is coming!

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree with you about the way Noir has been used so far... but in most seasons, things have gotten way darker from the halfway point to the end -- and this season has ALREADY been so dark!!

I just can't help but remember the end of Twin Peaks, when Agent Cooper, so heroic and virtuous, smashes his head against the mirror because Killer Bob is looking out. I don't want that for Samndean!!! D:

I am also drawn to the moment in Lost Highway when the husband pants to his wife "I want you, I want you" and she whispers back "You can never have me!" The radical unknowability of the woman (femme fatale) I think you're absolutely right is transferred here onto Sam -- that glittering darkness in his eye as he stares down the prostitute or when he goes after a witness... he's scary, but he IS the perfect Hunter... and Hunters = Monsters, is the equation s6 suggests. I'm afraid both Sam and Dean will be Hunters and Monsters by the end of s6 -- with some stab at partial redemption I'm hoping!!

I love how Supernatural has the generic freedom to actually personify Truth -- the aspect of Noir in which Truth is twisted and edged comes to life in a horrorshow!


Re Castiel, I have a lot of respect for him in terms of how he played for free will -- but he opened a can of worms with Balthazar and such that he never foresaw. He thought he was just a maverick --- he didn't realize he was a precedent. Now his hands are covered in the blood of his brethren -- how far will he have to go to "save" Heaven? will he be forced to betray Samndean (again)?

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

Balthazar does seem like a heavily Noir figure, or neo-Noir .... the faded Knight, addicted to and weakened by pleasure...

Castiel's idealism is beautiful -- but doomed? Even if he wins, his hands are covered in blood.

I agree with you that the Wall itself is the most Noir aspect we've seen so far. The way it divides self from self from self in Sam's mind is just boggling. I love that idea that whatever secret lies behind it might hold important answers -- though poor Samgirls if he has to throw himself into Mount Doom yet again!!

[datenshiblue.livejournal.com]

If you don't mind continuing this a little bit further...

I like your questions, and my attempt to answer is this -- in Horror, we presume innocence, while in Noir, we presume guilt.

I think that's too broad a statement, because horror itself has gone through phases. Classic horror might presume the victims innocence but modern and cinema horror often play everything on the victims' guilt. The most obvious example is the Saw series but there are lots of others. There may be one or two innocents but most of the victims are awful people the audience doesn't mind seeing off, it's what lets the audience cheer for the monster.

I agree complete that RoboSam was a clean slate. Not an improvement on our tarnished but heroic Sam, but not evil. And I had the increasing sense that he was learning. The action of having Sam's soul returned from the cage by Death was so sudden, abrupt and violent it left me gasping with shock rather than cheering.

I still don't know how we got from zero information about the cage to knowing everything that goes on inside it). - I had to mention that this struck me too, suddenly everyone knows what's best for Sam, everyone knows what's been going on in the cage for a year. The truth, or assumption?

Definitely yaY on the Friday thing. ;D

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

cool, I'd love to continue.

I know abs. nothing about Saw... in fact I tend to avoid horror films in general. The last thing I saw was Jensen's My Bloody Valentine, and the issue of his guilt or innocence is key to the film... so you may have a point there. There's also vendetta horror, right? where the villain presumes guilt and picks people off? but there's still a sense of self-preservation on behalf of the heroes?

I used to read a lot of Vertigo comix... things like Hellblazer. Constantine is def. not innocent... but that's what make him such a Noir figure, in his trench and all.

My basic problem in understanding Noir is the shifting sense of identity. I go in with a suspension of disbelief as to the identity of characters, and then Noir upends that, leaving me confused and disconcerted. I guess I'm not post-modern enough (or too much!)

Here from Heavy_Meta

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Just a possibility since I've been wondering about this myself, but could it be that in horror there generally is considered to be a good/bad while in Noir it's always grey? I mean, plenty of horror has questions of good and bad--Frankenstein lays that out way back in the 19th century: both Frankenstein and his monster are both good and bad. But perhaps a difference between Noir and Horror is that in horror there is assumed to be a good and bad somewhere, where as with Noir the bleaker idea is that there are no true answers there.

Though probably a lot of what they meant by noir here is just making allusions to noir conventions as noir conventions rather than horror conventions (even though they can overlap). Ruby was playing Sam just as Sam or Samuel played Dean, but the Dean in S6 is more self-conciously supposed to be "the detective" when the Dean of S4 was self-consciously just the hero worried that Something Was Wrong with his brother. Likewise other obvious shout outs like titling an ep The Third Man and so comparing post-non-apocolypse heaven to post-war Vienna.

Re: Here from Heavy_Meta

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

I love The Third Man, though admittedly I'm thinking more Pinky and the Brain than Orson Welles. :)

When you bring up Frankenstein, it brings up the idea of the Byronic Hero -- the Hero who is greatly "superior" to most other humans, but has a fatal flaw, usually hubris, that brings him down. Victor F. meant to conquer death, conveying a great good to humankind, but ended up creating a "monster" that he was incapable of loving. What if Dean, by bringing Sam's soul back, ends up doing exactly that same thing?!?!

Visually the theme of black and white shading to gray is played out beautiful in the Lynch films I mention... especially Lost Highway. There's a fantastic moment in s5 -- when Castiel meets Lucifer and gets trapped in the ring of fire -- as he progresses down the hall from shadows to deeper shadows -- that is so Lynchian and creepy. I know it's s5, but it's so Noir!! (I think!)

Re: Here from Heavy_Meta

[datenshiblue.livejournal.com]

Though probably a lot of what they meant by noir here is just making allusions to noir conventions as noir conventions

I have a feeling it's mostly this. ;)

in horror there is assumed to be a good and bad somewhere, where as with Noir the bleaker idea is that there are no true answers there.

With Supernatural, I don't see any change from the idea they've held to from the beginning that there's evil, but it's understandable, and there's good, but it's flawed and particularly human. :)

[flowrs4ophelia.livejournal.com]

Because, this show already has a genre, and in case no one noticed (but of course we all did) those themes listed above had been present throughout the entire series, since the beginning.

Thing is, noir is usually defined as a film style as opposed to a genre, because it's characterized by certain story elements usually combined with a distinct visual style, which are usually present in detective stories but can be applied to a large variety of things. Lots of science fiction works, for example (like Blade Runner, Gattaca, Dark City) are recognized as modern noir or "neo-noir" because they have a lot of these elements consciously incorporated into them.

Genre is pretty easy to define while noir is kind of notoriously difficult to define in a way that encompasses everything that can possibly make something reminiscent of noir. But I think there generally has to be a definite and conscious noir influence in order for something to fit the style, the term can't just be applied to any work that happens to have some of the common themes like corruption and deceit in it. I mean, a lot of the common themes of Westerns can also be typical of noir, but that doesn't make them noir. This season of SPN on the other hand actually shows an intentional influence from noir, not the least with how some scenes even have a dark visual style with a kind of light-and-shadow contrast that is often associated with those kind of films.

I think the biggest distinction between this season and the past ones is how the plot arch is being set up to be unraveled as a mystery story, while the overall story of 1-5 was more like a hero's journey. You don't have to have a crime story or mystery for something to be noir, but it's still a plot pattern that is probably the most strongly recognizable as being so. There are a lot of other elements that are fairly easy to relate to noir, but so far I've found they've been worked into the show subtly and don't feel out of place in SPN. Just because they're taking this kind of inspiration for the story arch doesn't mean the defining aspects of the show as a horror or a story about family or any of that have to be taken apart to accommodate that change.

[flowrs4ophelia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, as a Sam girl and also a fan of film noir who's kind of reveling in this direction the show is taking, I'm very conflicted about where this could go! LOL. But I think it's possible we've been mislead in some way about what exactly it would mean for the wall to break. (Who knows, maybe Death is the surpise big baddie here and he's actually trying to cover something up and his intentions in employing Sam and Dean as his P.I. team are not as agreeable as they'd hope.) I'm sure even if Sam survives it the consequences will really not be pretty, but the idea that Ignorance Is Bliss would be a bit anti-climactic and unsatisfying for a way to end that particular plot thread.

[desertport]

I'm mainly familiar with noir through Raymond Chandler novels and his own writing on the hardboiled detective genre. Coming from there, I'd add another item to your list, though I'm not sure if it's a quality of most other types of noir.

Chandler writes, "down these mean streets a man must walk who is not himself mean," and his detective is modeled after a chivalric ideal. The idea of detective as white knight puts him in contrast with the seamy underbelly of society he's forced to confront. He's almost unbelievably idealistic, despite his cynicism, and does the right thing even when it's against his own best interests (which is why he never gets the girl).

I've always kind of leaned away from a reading of Dean as that white knight character, the one hero of the show, probably because I'm still pathetically holding out hope for a return to Sam and Dean not being at odds with each other so they can BOTH be the heroes. But Kripke says otherwise, Dean is the hero, and I suppose that jives with the noir theme, for there to be a solitary detective struggling hopelessly against something way bigger tham him.

I really like the idea above that Sam has been a femme fatale over the first half of S6! That seemingly innocent object of desire who is actually someone to fear. Too awesome. Very interesting meta, anyway. I had sort of been wondering about the noir label myself.

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

I think the special appeal of the Show is that there are two Heroes who are very different yet brothers -- bound to each other on a souldeep level. If Dean is a Knight, it doesn't necessarily mean that Sam isn't -- just that at this time, it's Dean's quest that drives the story, whereas in the past it's been Sam's quest, either to revenge Jess or to save Dean -- or in s5 to put Lucifer back in the bottle. With Sam desouled, he still seems to have agency -- but he's not a Knight, because he owes no allegiance. Desouled Sam is first and foremost concerned with what's best for himself. Dean otoh has historically felt most comfortable when pledged to the service of a greater cause (and John, a specific feudal Lord if you will). Right now, he's been cut loose -- a kind of Ronin -- and he finds himself delivering packages for the wrong people. :)

I feel like the seasons have always gotten darker from the midpoint on... and I just have to wonder what that will mean for our Heroes!

As for Sam as the femme fatale, I keep going back to Ms. Novak in Vertigo, and the layers and layers of identity she takes on. There's not a direct parallel in terms of plot, but certain thematic resonances in terms of possession, resurrection, and falling. It also brings me back to the old misogynist question "do women have souls?" -- in that Sam, without a soul, takes on the valences of a femme fatale, because of his flat, mirror-like unknowability.

[fannishliss.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this contribution as a fan of noir. I do find it confusing to keep the stylistic elements (like a stark use of darkness and shadows, or the use of tableaus as from German expressionism) from the storytelling elements or generic expectations.

I love Dark City! An underappreciated film. It's so self-conscious and so very fun. My husband and I have referenced it constantly since it first came out. :) .... and of Course, Blade Runner-- which I think Dean explicitly references calling Sam a replicant at some point?

I was kind of interested that Death picked Dean out as "the intrepid detective" -- I came across a couple of reactions about how the phrase kind of pings out, and I think maybe it calls attention back to the Noir theme.

thanks for your link! :)

[amonitrate.livejournal.com]

1) SPN has always had elements of noir mixed in with horror, it's the ratio that's shifted.

I totally agree with this. There's quite a few elements of noir in season 4, especially in Castiel's storyline.

[flowrs4ophelia.livejournal.com]

Dark City is awesome. :) And ha, I'd forgotten about the "replicant" reference Dean makes, that's right.

[quickreaver.livejournal.com]

I love this whole thread. Got nothing to add (mostly because I'd be in over my head) but it's a wonderful rumination. Just sayin'!