Noir and the Ivory Tower

While film noir has long been a staple at university cinema studies departments around the country, hard-boiled fiction and noir novels have been a little slower to make their way into college curricula, except in explicitly “genre” courses, such as those dealing with the detective novel. This is changing, however, and increasingly Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, in particular, appear on 20th-century American Literature syllabi alongside the likes of Faulkner and Fitzgerald.

When I was in graduate school at NYU in the late ’90s, it was already perfectly acceptable to choose hard-boiled fiction as the subject of a dissertation (in the past, it might have been a harder sell, as your dissertation subject, if considered too “obscure,” can limit your academic employability). That dissertation eventually became a book with a mouthful of a title, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir.

In the book, I focus primarily on three authors, Chandler (on whom I have developed an enduring fixation), James M. Cain, and Chester Himes, as a way of looking at the appeal of the “tough guy” figure in the 1930s through the early 1950s. I wanted to link the tough guy to similar figures we see in Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck--many writers who are considered canonical, often at the expense of what is dismissed as “popular” fiction. So, I look at Chandler and Cain as offering two variations on the tough guy and then to Himes as offering this exciting, absurdist revision--a revision that is steeped in his historical moment (late-1950s into the ’60s).

My central argument is that the tough guy seized the popular imagination because he spoke to many of the cultural anxieties of the period: in hugely generalized terms, the Depression’s “Forgotten Men” (if a man is defined by his work, what happens when he can find none?), World War II gender realignments (e.g., women entering the workforce, war trauma), and Cold War containment panic and the rise of the nuclear family ideal. Generally lower-middle- to working-class and without family or close ties, the tough guy navigates his way through a changing world figured as threatening, hopelessly corrupt, even “unmanning.” And, as one of the primary attributes of the tough guy is his solitariness, he struggles amid the family focused, Organization Man ethos of the 1950s and must transform himself, or risk turning into a nostalgic icon or a source of parody.

(Perhaps even more so, the filmic tough guy. In his seminal 1972 article, “Notes on Film Noir,” Paul Schrader famously argued that “the rise of McCarthy and Eisenhower demonstrated Americans were eager to see a more bourgeois view of themselves. Crime had to move to the suburbs. The criminal had to move to the suburbs. The criminal put on a gray flannel suit and the footsore cop was replaced by the ‘mobile unit’ careering down the expressway. Any attempt at social criticism had to be cloaked in ludicrous affirmations of the American way of life.”)

Hard-boiled and noir fiction continue to wrestle, explicitly or implicitly, with changing notions of manhood in compelling ways, although they are rarely given full credit for the complexity of their approach. On the hard-boiled front, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed pursues, with rigor, a beset masculinity (and impotency) at the core of a mob patriarchy. Likewise, Allan Guthrie’s stunner of a new book, Hard Man (due out in June), packs beneath its turbulent story a rich and twisty exploration of masculinity and its obligations, and how manhood must constantly be demonstrated in order to be assured.