Black Noir

Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are pioneers of the noir protagonist; with their grim assessments of human nature and honesty that borders on cruelty, these straight white male protagonists laid the groundwork for the aloof yet somehow righteous upholders of justice. Bob Jones adopts this identity and morphs it into an alarming yet fascinating character, plagued by the relentless racism of World War II as a black man. All three noir protagonists navigate the anarchy of the 1930s and 1940s in the United States by using fear as an organ of perception and justice. Noir is grounded in gritty urban settings–namely San Francisco and Los Angeles–in order to express the loss of connection between the social classes. 

Spade and Marlowe assume the role of the detective who can travel between these geographical compartments and the social classes that inhabit them without ever truly being connected to any of them. They feel a sense of nostalgia–a temporary relief from the trials of the present by imagining a past that never truly existed–as they travel to places that remain the same save for the people who live in them. Although Spade never explicitly names what is different about these places, it becomes clear through subtle nuances that people who are considered to be “other” have replaced the traditional white population. Jones is part of this group; consequently, nostalgia has little to do with his cynicism about the world around him. 

Jones buys into the promise of materialism that has overtaken California, using his car to navigate the disconnected parts of the unforgiving city. Unlike Spade and Marlowe, Jones feels the need to constantly prove himself as the constant threat of racism is always at hand. All three noir protagonists are obsessed with having been done wrong, and for this reason, they adhere to strict moral codes that ultimately lead to their downfall.

The femme fatale is a facet of noir that plays a significant role in the actions of these three protagonists. Spade, Marlowe, and Jones view sex as a power struggle that can only be engaged in with the most poisonous of women. The femme fatale is a symbol of male castration who is fatal not only to the men she uses her sex appeal to win over but ultimately to herself. She lives on the exigencies of society just as the protagonist does. Yet Jones becomes aware of a contentious dynamic between black men and white women; both groups are considered to be “other,” and both are vying for power in the emerging workforce of the 1930s and 1940s.

I was not certain of many facts while reading Farewell My Lovely by Raymond Chandler, but I was always certain of the location. Chandler uses the space of Los Angeles extensively, from the hills to the ocean, and name drops just about every city surrounding it, including America’s finest city and my home, San Diego. As someone who knows all of the mentioned locations and has been to several of them, I was surprised at how I still felt uncertain and unsafe in the space. Chandler uses the darkness of Los Angeles to implement the darkness of the noir theme into the novel. He creates such vivid scenes of despair and descent into darkness that even places I had positive associations with became tainted by noir. Ventura, where my boyfriend’s grandparents own avocado and lemon orchards and cousins are always around to swim with, now is the line where the police will catch a murder if he makes a run north. The Pacific Ocean, where I surf and swim with sharks, now hides gambling ships, murders, and anyone else trying to hide secrets. San Diego, my home and the city I know like the back of my hand, (presumably) hides an elusive and powerful man. The novel imbeds my home with secrets and uncertainty, proving no one and nothing is safe from the darkness, even places bright during the day can change with the setting sun. This reality has helped me grasp noir and has helped me realize the mindset of the writers at the time. Chandler lived in Los Angeles, but he could still write it as this dark and scary place where corruption and murder infect every aspect. Even he could see his home as a place filled with darkness, and that cynicism, which has been difficult to grasp, became clear in the new telling of Los Angeles.

Emerging in the interwar years primarily in the United States, both modernism and noir express cynicism, nostalgia, and the cyclical nature of life. Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely is an edifice of noir. The central action of the plot revolves around mysteries or crimes that contribute to the downfall of protagonist Philip Marlowe; this is similar to the downfall of Sam Spade in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Both white male protagonists face the anarchy of the 1930s and 1940s with cynicism, the belief that people only act in their own self-interest. Marlowe and Spade treat the people around them with bluntness and insensitivity to their emotions. Yet their unchanging moral codes appear to justify their contempt for greed and dishonesty. 

Not only that, but Marlowe and Spade are able to play in the moral shadows of their world without completely descending into its depths; this is because they are not considered to be “other.” Marlowe and Spade are required to complete both physical and metaphysical journeys that are cyclical in nature as antiheroes that paradoxically uphold moral codes. That is, Marlowe and Spade do not fit the descriptions of queer, black, female, and foreign characters that they consistently belittle. 

Nostalgia also plays an important role in the intersection between modernism and noir; the places that Marlowe and Spade used to know remain largely the same except for the “otherness” of the characters that have moved in. Even the definition of what it means to be white is changing. Both Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Velma Valento play the part of the femme fatale in these novels; the former is of Irish descent, and her pale skin and red hair are frequently described by Chandler in an effort to invoke a connotation of a foreign criminal. Velma, on the other hand, passes as white because she trades her red hair for a bleach blonde.

In my last post, I emphasized the difficulty in defining Noir, the origin of the term Noir, and I brought up how it is a term that does not help the readers or viewers understand the genre. I would like to retract my statement. I disagree with myself from a week ago. I argue now that the word “Noir” is the most perfectly coined term to describe the genre and its themes. It’s more than just about dark corruption among the characters and their world, it is about the false hope of receiving justice. The characters chase the light but keep finding themselves pulled into their darkness.
Noir is starting to feel like a walking paradox with the stories being full of absurdity, but still being plausible. Let’s take the Femme Fatale as an example. These female characters are always draped in white from head to toe with bleach blond hair to represent their innocence and purity when in fact their characters cause the most harm to the main character. They are a walking contradiction. Let’s take a look at another example, the detectives in the Noir books we have read so far are meant to be upholders of justice when in reality they give the reader an uncanny feeling and have this moral ambiguity. This character complexity brings realistic characters to life.
I still stand by what I said last week that Noir is difficult to define, and in my opinion, the reason for this has to do with defining abstraction and making the abstraction tangible. When that really shouldn’t be the way of addressing Noir in the first place. Before I elaborate let me first define abstraction or abstract. I’m using these words to reference the concepts in Noir like psychological violence and warfare, hopelessness, and corruption. These concepts don’t feel tangible and when trying to do a deep analysis of Noir, it becomes difficult. An example, of tangible themes, are the anti-hero, the femme fatale, greed, and the want to have the “unattainable.” We should try approaching Noir as books for pleasure to understand it deeply, not as a class assignment. A “class assignment perspective” has the potential to dull the mind when trying to take in the themes and culture of the books. Let’s Keep in mind I’ve only read two books of Noir some of these themes might change or take more of a shape later on. This feels a bit ridiculous to talk about as an English major when all we deal with is abstraction but isn’t that what makes our field of study a paradox in itself? We try so hard to define and make palpable what we read and study for our own understanding when some things are just never meant to be put in words. Not every feeling has a word to define, and Noir is a genre with abstractions that I am barely beginning to understand.

We tend to be drawn to the macabre and the mysterious in our lives because it invites a seductive change from the status quo of everyday life. Noir tends to deal with this a lot in the genre because the principal character gets to experience the upside down of this strange and dangerous world, while still being removed from it. In “Farewell, My Lovely”, Raymond Chandler creates this raunchy story of Phillip Marlowe and his encounters with the foreign underbelly of the grey world. He retains the Sam Spadesque persona in Marlowe, but adds a more human layer to him giving him sarcasm and only the driest of humor. This style allows the audience to dig deeper into the stories and the characters as we learn how we should take the words of our narrator. One thing the story does not shy away from is the side of the world we like to pretend does not exist. People like to pretend they have it all together, all the time, but the reality is everyone is vulnerable to a fall from grace. 

In the era this book lives in, the foreign represents the best way to unveil the discomfort of vulnerability because these people entrenched in a new society where they are ostracized and pushed to the fringes are the most susceptible to danger. When confronted with the idea of flaws and imperfections, the audience conceptualizes these better when their protagonist is facing a world that feels far removed from the reality of everyday life. The jewel heist turned murder in a case of a secret identity seems entirely impossible, but nonetheless, beckons the audience to ponder the deeper moral and ethical iniquities that lie beneath the surface. Even if our imperfections never catastrophize into murder, they still taint and seep into the deepest corners of life. Being aware of the darkness within each soul is tantamount to understanding the idea of noir. There is an element of it in each of us, and I hope to dive deeper into what this genre truly means as we read the books that reach past the detective stories. 

The reason this is so interesting to us, I think, is because we focus so hard on finding the diversity in today’s media. We celebrate these differences today, whereas these differences were supposed to be covered at all costs back then. Especially in the film industry, every actor with an ounce of non-european white complexions had to change their names and appearance in order to blend into society. This hiding in plain sight is another aspect people can strongly relate to today because of the new ways we are forced to conform to. More lies behind the facade of every pretty face, and skeletons will always come out of the closet. Experiencing these stories gives us a place to live out our imperfections without the consequences of our own vulnerability.

So far in our course, we have touched on the idea of race in the world of Noir and what it means to be a foreigner or not from the United States. While reading Farewell My Lovely, I learned that the world of Noir can be diverse and not only consist of white people. In The Maltese Falcon, I learned that the world is much smaller than it used to be with the development of transatlantic travel. Bringing these two aspects into conversation with each other, I am having a hard time defining what it then means to be a foreigner. I would argue that the role of the foreigner is not correct in terms of being foreign in the sense of not from the United States, but rather foreign as in unfamiliar to the characters.

In Farewell My Lovely, many characters take on the role of a foreigner, mainly black characters, people of color, or even characters from a different class, many of which are from the United States. Having taken courses that explore the dimensions of race and class in the United States throughout multiple periods in time, I have always seen these divides as very distinct, therefore, anything outside of what you would consider normal would be foreign to you. We see that a lot in Farewell My Lovely, as many of these characters are trying to cling to what they think is normal through nostalgia. Through this concept of the foreigner, I find it interesting as to how people of different races are perceived. In The Maltese Falcon, there are people from all over the world interacting, but characters such as Brigid O’Shaughnessy are also seen as foreigners, even though I would argue she is not any different from a character such as Spade, who is supposed to embody what it means to be a “typical American.” All in all, there is a fear of change and the unknown in the world of Noir, which I would say is like our own, and this fear is very much getting intertwined with issues of race, class, and even gender, broadening our definition of what it means to be a foreigner.

In my personal experience, nostalgia does not revolve around “better” times compared to the present as much as it revolves around more familiar times than the present. An obvious example from my life is the commonly reported nostalgia for the days during the COVID lockdowns. I have seen several articles and social media posts discussing how people find themselves yearning for the time when they were in their isolated routine at home during 2020. While very few people would attempt to make the argument that the COVID lockdown represented a better period than we are currently in, the desire to be back in that time remains. Why? I think it revolves around the certainty with which we view that time through the lens of the present. In other words, while we definitely do not know what today or tomorrow holds for us, we know positively what those days held for us during COVID lockdowns because we have the added benefit of those days having already been completed. Therefore, the nostalgia that we feel for the past is really just a desire to be in a familiar situation, even if that situation is objectively worse than our current situation.

In Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (and the 1944 movie adaptation Murder, My Sweet) the audience is thrown into a world in which nostalgia is a driving force for the actions of several central characters. First of all, the opening scene of the book sees an ex-convict, Moose Malloy, searching for his girlfriend who he had been dating eight years ago before he went to jail. It is apparent that Malloy is looking to rekindle what he had in the past, before his jail time. While this is a less subtle form of nostalgia driving the plot, it is still worth mentioning. Beyond Malloy’s search for Velma, our narrator, Philip Marlowe, fills the first chapter with nostalgic language. Marlowe tells the reader in the opening line that he is on “one of those mixed blocks” on Central Avenue in LA that is “not yet all Negro.” Describing a neighborhood in such a manner screams nostalgia – “not yet all Negro.” There are many ways to communicate the same message about a demographically changing neighborhood, but Marlowe chooses a communication method that seems to contain a sense of disappointment at the new/yearning for the old. The establishment into which Marlowe goes is now owned by a black owner and filled with black patrons – something that was not the case in years past. This change, and the subsequent murder that takes place within the changed establishment, work together to indicate that it used to be better when the bar was owned and frequented by white Americans. While film code of the 1940s kept this exact scene from making the final cut in the movie version of Chandler’s novel, directors instead played with the sign of the name of the bar, Florian’s, by blacking out the “L” and “A” in the name leaving a sign that read “Forin’s” to get a similar message across. It is a subtle detail, but important in the context of nostalgia and how it drives the plot of the story.

What I think is important to recognize, as stated earlier, is that this nostalgia is not really a desire for a “better” time. In Farewell, My Lovely, the new black owner and black customers likely have very similar life stories as the previous owner and customers that were white. After all, they live in the same neighborhood and are similarly situated from an economic perspective. What Marlowe and Malloy are yearning for, then, is simply a sense of familiarity. It’s not that the new owner or customers are fundamentally different people with regards to their lives than the old owner and customers were, but rather that Marlowe and Malloy do not know them. In fact, it could well be the case that life was worse in some ways for Marlowe and Malloy when they knew the owner and patrons well. In spite of this possibility, however, Marlowe and Malloy yearn for the past in the same way that many yearn for the days of the COVID lockdown. I think that we can learn from this to always consider fully what we desire from the past rather than ignorantly stating that it was better “back in our day.”

There is no doubt that Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are masculine. Their masculinity is aggressive, almost suffocating. They drink continuously throughout the day, go wherever they want to go whenever they want (even without a gun, if you’re Spade, because he is so manly he only needs to rely on his own fists), flirt with tons of beautiful women with figures they can admire, and avoid feminine products like “filter papers,” opting for the more masculine “course ground coffee” instead (Chandler 195). They make jaded comments like “[all women are the same] after the first nine,” but admit that they really “don’t know anything about women,” because women are an entirely different species all together (Chandler 225, Hammot 17).

Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Effie Perine, Anne Riordan, and Velma are undoubtably feminine. They flaunt their curves and use their sex to get what they want, depend upon men to give them protection, rush to aide and assist their suitors (especially Effie and Anne), and often act like children in need of a tissue to blow their nose into and a long nap. To be a woman, according to noir novels, is to be beautiful, but weak and afraid.

 A woman’s fear is dangerous. Velma kills Malloy because “she was afraid of him,” as did Brigid, frightened by the interest these men gave them. A woman’s fear (and its consequent outcomes) is hysterical, impulsive, and irreversible.

 However, a man’s fear is different. In certain doses, it is acceptable—even desirable to make a man more relatable. Jameson argues that the reason why Humphrey Bogard “obviously stands for the hero” and was able to “[distinguish himself] from the other stars of his period” was in his very ability “to show fear” (20). Because Bogart admits that the dark and violent world around him is unpredictable and dangerous, he becomes powerful and attractive to watch on the screen. Philip Marlowe admits plainly that “[he’s] scared stiff” because up until then, he has remained relatively steely and decisive.

At a certain level, the heroic, smart, inherently masculine antihero accepting “feminine” qualities is appropriate. It makes the man even more of a man because he is able to admit his “feminine” faults while still remaining powerful and dominant, and while solving the mystery in the end. Noir reveals a realm in which gender stereotypes are blended together in such a way that the strength of man and the weakness of women are reinforced.

When I think of the Sam Spades in my life (and unfortunately, there are many), I am overwhelmed with a sense of spite and a desire to both humble and embarrass them. The boy I met at Domerfest who told me “People say I look like Chris Evans,” a student Senator who signs her email signature as “Future Supreme Court Justice ’28,” the CEO I met networking who refused to make eye contact with any females that came to his station—they all elicit a certain reaction within me that makes me more violent and confrontational than I’d like to admit.

And yet, Sam Spade is a character I found myself not only rooting for but found myself wanting to get a chance to interact with. Sure, he’s cocky and selfish, views women as a commodity and sees non-Anglo-Saxon people as less than himself, but for all his smart remarks and vanity, I have to wonder if some of that arrogance is deserved.

 Without inspecting his partner Miles’ body, without talking to any witnesses, Sam Spade utters two words that convince me that he has figured out the mystery 18 pages into the novel: “Damn her.” Spade’s abnormal reaction to the death of his coworker prove that firstly, his relationship with Miles was strained, and that secondly, he knew what had happened. He has no desire to search his partner’s corpse or to question Brigid, but instead returns home and got himself drunk, “scowling” as he thought about “her.” This “her” had to be Brigid, the woman who despite all of her tricks, lies, and wrongdoings, Spade invites back.

 Perhaps Spade has the same noxious relationship with Ms. O’Shaughnessy that I share with him: an acknowledgement that the other is a bad person, that they have fatal flaws, and yet, a desire to be with them, to see their next clever move.

 “You always think you know what you’re doing,” Effie warns Sam before he fully dives into the mess of the aftermath of the murder and the hunt for the Maltese Falcon. But perhaps, as Spade’s words and actions prove at the end of the novel, this is because he does, in fact, know what he’s doing. He knows Brigid is evil and damned, and yet, he appreciates her figure and her sharp sense of wit and capitalizes upon this.

 When the District Attorney later questions Sam on who killed Thursby, Sam replies that he doesn’t know, and even if he did know, “[he] wouldn’t” disclose it. “Everybody,” Spade says, “has something to conceal,” and in Spade’s case, he chooses to conceal “[his] guesses” (145). This comes from a sense of pride, a desire to be the only one to solve the case and a superiority complex that while everyone is scrambling around, Sam Spade sits, surveying, knowing.

Perhaps then, that is the reason why I love Sam Spade so much even though he is so womanizing and cocky: his confidence is justified. The Sam Spades in my life have never solved a murder hours after it occurred and certainly aren’t as clever as the “blond Satan” himself, so they must be humbled. Sam Spade’s toxicity, on the other hand, can be tolerated.

In Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality, Fredric Jameson writes:

… the principal effect of violence in the American detective story is to allow it to be experienced backwards, in pure thought, without risks, as a contemplative spectacle which gives not so much the illusion of life as the illusion that life has already been lived, that we have already had contact with the archaic sources of that Experience of which Americans have always made a fetish (5).

In both of the works we’ve encountered so far, The Maltese Falcon and Farewell, My Lovely, it is an act of violence that spurs our protagonists towards the action of the plot. Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, is killed while tailing Floyd Thursby, who also winds up killed under mysterious circumstances. Archer’s murder propels Space to investigate the circumstances around his death; he reaffirms this at the end of the novel, saying to Archer’s killer, Brigid O’Shaughnessy: “‘When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it’” (116).

Noir, with its treatment of established forces of power, law enforcement, the private eye outliers, and morally ambiguous side characters, is especially effective when intervening in politics and society. Sam Spade’s response to the violence inflicted upon his partner, a white man of equal standing, speaks to the moral order presumed to exist by Dashiell Hammett. Sam Spade, an aspirational figure of self-assured, white masculinity, juxtaposes the flawed characters we meet through his investigation of the murder: an effeminate man, a fat man, a subserviant boy for hire, and the classic femme fatale. Under Jameson’s notion of the “contemplative spectacle,” readers are made immediately aware of the blight upon each of these characters; their characterization contributes to the larger, broader spectre of immorality that contributed to the killing of Mile’s archer.

Farewell, My Lovely also opens with a murder, the killing of Sam Montgomery by Moose Malloy. The circumstances surrounding the death differ greatly from The Maltese Falcon. Philip Marlowe is investigating a missing person case when he sees a felon, Moose Malloy, attacking a man outside a nightclub. The victim of this violence, a black man at a black establishment in a predominantly black neighborhood, is referred to as “It,” lacking in any sympathy or humanization (5). Marlowe, a white man, approaches the nightclub out of curiosity and is himself accosted by Malloy, also white. Malloy drags Marlowe upstairs and proceeds to batter the club’s black bouncer; Marlowe, with an air of cool, views the scene with a curiosity that suggests he’s less of a hostage and more of an aggressively encouraged coconspirator. It isn’t until Malloy goes into the back and shoots Montgomery, the owner, that Marlowe vocalizes any objection to Malloy’s violence. This opposition is spoken by Marlowe to the terrified barkeep, another black man, who Marlowe belittles and handles roughly.

The rest of the novel unfolds much like The Maltese Falcon, in the sense that its investigation adheres to the structure/form of the “contemplative spectacle” introduced by Jameson. However, unlike Sam Spade’s investigation, Marlowe takes on the case by chance. In his narration, he says: “Nothing made it my business but curiosity. But strictly speaking, I hadn’t had any business in a month. Even a no-charge job was a change” (21).Whereas Sam Spade’s motivation came from a moral order that demands justice for an equal, a fellow white man, Philip Marlowe’s motivation comes simply from a place of curiosity and boredom, plus vague promises from the police for favorable treatment in the future. Farewell, My Lovely’s intervention of politics and society, whether intentional or not, communicates an American reality rooted in racism. Justice isn’t sought for black victims of violence though a necessity of the American moral order; rather, the threat posed by the perpetrator of said violence to society as a whole, potentially other white people, compels law enforcement to act, though they do so apathetically.