Blackhats
February 17, 2018 5:39 PM Subscribe
relevant t'my interests. podnuh.
/tips hat, canters by
posted by mwhybark at 9:18 PM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
/tips hat, canters by
posted by mwhybark at 9:18 PM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
Nice article, I'm a bit of a grump when it comes to some writing on genre, particularly that in the overused catch all "noir" family, but this essay did a commendable job in at least covering most of the bases in regards to the history of the term and how they were applying it in their selections.
The selections themselves too were well chosen, incomplete of course as they must be, but with some nice reach to them hitting most of the expected titles and enough of the lesser known ones to round out their claims. It wasn't until I was almost done reading it that I noticed it was under the TIFF banner and written by Nick Pinkerton, which help explain its higher standard of care over the history, concepts, and labeling then is often found in "noir" enthusiast writings, eager to claim everything they possibly can as yet another example of the soi disant genre.
It is in fact difficult to conceive of a western being made today without a hint of noir about it — the western had a measure of innocence to lose, while noir never did, and as such it suits our ever-more cynical times.
This end quote while certainly true in its initial assertion and ending observation, leaves me a bit conflicted. There is something that rings false to me in linking even the popular ideal of the western to innocence and therefore falsity and the "noir" to cynicism and therefore honesty that oversimplifies things. While there definitely were westerns that exhibited an excessive and benign unreality, some Roy Rogers movies for example, most westerns weren't that and didn't show the world as some almost paradise momentarily gone astray.
In a similar way, the worlds of some thrillers were also often unreal and no less or more simplistic in their world views and often equally "innocent" in their view of morality. Historically they're both, in their usually accepted dominant forms, male centered dramas built around male suffering and redemption. The measure of innocence seems to be weighted overmuch by how the story ends, whether the main character lives or dies on his path to redemption and by how the that character sees the world rather than looking towards the man as someone in a world and whose flaws can be measured by our normal experience as much as how he sees it. Noir endings in that sense are often the attempt to justify a history of bad behavior by a moment of good action, which is an innocent ideal in its way.
Really, both genres are much too complex to try and simplify in such a manner, and while genre studies of films are useful, they have, in my mind, also led to some misinterpretations of movies due to category error. The standard genre labels are only one way to categorize movies, the stories, images, and ideas can be measured in many other ways. When the category label obscures the movie, then it isn't serving much useful purpose at all and from my perspective that happens much too often.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:35 PM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
The selections themselves too were well chosen, incomplete of course as they must be, but with some nice reach to them hitting most of the expected titles and enough of the lesser known ones to round out their claims. It wasn't until I was almost done reading it that I noticed it was under the TIFF banner and written by Nick Pinkerton, which help explain its higher standard of care over the history, concepts, and labeling then is often found in "noir" enthusiast writings, eager to claim everything they possibly can as yet another example of the soi disant genre.
It is in fact difficult to conceive of a western being made today without a hint of noir about it — the western had a measure of innocence to lose, while noir never did, and as such it suits our ever-more cynical times.
This end quote while certainly true in its initial assertion and ending observation, leaves me a bit conflicted. There is something that rings false to me in linking even the popular ideal of the western to innocence and therefore falsity and the "noir" to cynicism and therefore honesty that oversimplifies things. While there definitely were westerns that exhibited an excessive and benign unreality, some Roy Rogers movies for example, most westerns weren't that and didn't show the world as some almost paradise momentarily gone astray.
In a similar way, the worlds of some thrillers were also often unreal and no less or more simplistic in their world views and often equally "innocent" in their view of morality. Historically they're both, in their usually accepted dominant forms, male centered dramas built around male suffering and redemption. The measure of innocence seems to be weighted overmuch by how the story ends, whether the main character lives or dies on his path to redemption and by how the that character sees the world rather than looking towards the man as someone in a world and whose flaws can be measured by our normal experience as much as how he sees it. Noir endings in that sense are often the attempt to justify a history of bad behavior by a moment of good action, which is an innocent ideal in its way.
Really, both genres are much too complex to try and simplify in such a manner, and while genre studies of films are useful, they have, in my mind, also led to some misinterpretations of movies due to category error. The standard genre labels are only one way to categorize movies, the stories, images, and ideas can be measured in many other ways. When the category label obscures the movie, then it isn't serving much useful purpose at all and from my perspective that happens much too often.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:35 PM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]
sigh...
looks like my more of my grump escaped than intended there, sorry about that...
posted by gusottertrout at 9:49 PM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
looks like my more of my grump escaped than intended there, sorry about that...
posted by gusottertrout at 9:49 PM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]
Someday they’ll make a Strontium Dog film and we’ll have Space Weatern Noir.
posted by Artw at 9:51 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Artw at 9:51 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
gus, I can't argue with your primary point that any given Western from the genre's triumphal reign, say, 1920-1960, may not predictably hew to a rosy world view, I'll interject that the genre's triumph, and primary social function, was to mythologize, romanticize, and normalize American genocidal conquest of the West. Noir bears no such cross, and certainly did not in the same time frame. Westerns that explicitly set aside or challenge the view or function I cite above may or may not fall into a given critic's Noir box.
It's easy to identify specific movies from the era of the Western's dominance that specifically have it both ways - The Searchers, Bad Day at Black Rock, Shane, The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance - all of these movies look with pretty narrowed eyes at violence, corruption, prejudice (or what we today might call white supremacy), and at the cost of both constructing and maintaining good order in society.
That is differentiated from, say, Kiss me Deadly or The Maltese Falcon or even one of the Thin Man movies, where the disordering events or actions neither threaten societal order nor require the film's protagonist to either defend or take responsibility for good order in society - these protagonists are often ex-cops in part specifically to make it clear that they do not have that responsibility. When (or if) they restore order, it's in a very restricted purview.
So I do see that there is a change that overtakes Westerns as noir themes are introduced, and I see it often as hinging on a reduced symbolic freight for the Man with The Gun. He's no longer Lancelot.
posted by mwhybark at 10:40 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
It's easy to identify specific movies from the era of the Western's dominance that specifically have it both ways - The Searchers, Bad Day at Black Rock, Shane, The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance - all of these movies look with pretty narrowed eyes at violence, corruption, prejudice (or what we today might call white supremacy), and at the cost of both constructing and maintaining good order in society.
That is differentiated from, say, Kiss me Deadly or The Maltese Falcon or even one of the Thin Man movies, where the disordering events or actions neither threaten societal order nor require the film's protagonist to either defend or take responsibility for good order in society - these protagonists are often ex-cops in part specifically to make it clear that they do not have that responsibility. When (or if) they restore order, it's in a very restricted purview.
So I do see that there is a change that overtakes Westerns as noir themes are introduced, and I see it often as hinging on a reduced symbolic freight for the Man with The Gun. He's no longer Lancelot.
posted by mwhybark at 10:40 PM on February 17, 2018 [3 favorites]
> Artw:
"Someday they’ll make a Strontium Dog film and we’ll have Space Weatern Noir."
When can I preorder tickets?
posted by Samizdata at 11:05 PM on February 17, 2018
"Someday they’ll make a Strontium Dog film and we’ll have Space Weatern Noir."
When can I preorder tickets?
posted by Samizdata at 11:05 PM on February 17, 2018
That essay is pretty much all hat and no cattle.
posted by ITravelMontana at 7:59 AM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by ITravelMontana at 7:59 AM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
Nice piece; it name-checks some of my favorite don't-get-enough-love directors (like Budd Boetticher, whom I was lucky enough to meet towards the end of his life) and movies (if you haven't seen Coup de Torchon, run do not walk). Thanks for posting it!
> That essay is pretty much all hat and no cattle.
Do you have a point to make, or is that just another example of the rote, meaningless snark MeFites are so excessively fond of?
posted by languagehat at 12:41 PM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
> That essay is pretty much all hat and no cattle.
Do you have a point to make, or is that just another example of the rote, meaningless snark MeFites are so excessively fond of?
posted by languagehat at 12:41 PM on February 18, 2018 [1 favorite]
gus, I can't argue with your primary point that any given Western from the genre's triumphal reign, say, 1920-1960, may not predictably hew to a rosy world view, I'll interject that the genre's triumph, and primary social function, was to mythologize, romanticize, and normalize American genocidal conquest of the West. Noir bears no such cross, and certainly did not in the same time frame. Westerns that explicitly set aside or challenge the view or function I cite above may or may not fall into a given critic's Noir box.
That points to one of the problems with using these big umbrella categories for talking about movies. It's unarguably true that the treatment of Native Americans by Hollywood was racist, relying on stereotypes and othering for their stories, where even those that, loosely speaking, side with tribal sovereignty were created from the perspective of white men and were usually played by whites in make up. Yet within that racist system the values promoted varied, where Native Americans would be treated as uncontrollable savages in some films, but in many they were shown much more sympathy, again within a narrow set of racist confines, where the threat didn't come from the Native Americans, but the white who didn't respect the treaties or otherwise sought to abuse the peace that came from creating the reservation system and forcing Native Americans into it.
How much that may matter to anyone of course varies. At its most basic, racism is racism and need not be tolerated or looked at for nuance over what the essence of the values laid on top of that base may be suggesting. That is clearly fine. But anyone interested in looking at westerns for what they were saying about the conflicts within white society, where treatment of the Native Americans are one of the points of contention or where they exist as something more like a force of nature, similar, say, to a river that has been dammed and may threaten to flood if the proper actions aren't followed, then there is significant variety within the rotten shell.
That isn't even accounting for the large number of westerns that don't deal with Native Americans at all and just use the setting and accessories of the west to tell other stories. There, the implicit acceptance of conquest still exists simply due to the setting and knowledge of what it implies for most viewers, but at some point that isn't very far removed from almost all Hollywood movies where white dominance is simply taken as a fact and minority existence ignored or stereotyped into roles supporting the accepted order.
Part of the argument in the article roughly addresses that last point, where the "noir" values, as the author has them, are overlaid on the western and hybrid stories are created where even the same plot can be reused in different settings, a big city heist transposed to a small town bank robbery for example. Speaking in that way though makes the claims for genre more vague. It relies on audience/reader ideas of some core values that may or may not exist in the various films thrown under the umbrella terms but are nonetheless considered key elements of their "type". That method diminishes the value of the grouping by reliance on an artificial construction of what is "known" in an unaccounted for general sense that supplants the reality of whatever may actually be in the things grouped together.
With westerns and noirs, for example, the groupings can contain (white) liberal perspectives and conservative outlooks, shoved together under an umbrella heading that hides from above what it covers below.
From almost the very start Hollywood westerns were more complicated than the popular image would make them out to be, where they ranged widely in their methods and values. I can't say what is the "dominant" form of the western in part because I'm not even sure what that concept is trying to measure. All westerns ever made treated equally? The most popular westerns? Westerns that fit whatever form one predetermines as being a "true western"? How many need westerns need to follow some pattern for that pattern to be considered determinative and what does that say about those that don't fit?
Looking at the list of westerns I've seen as accounted for by IMDb as fitting the genre, there are films like the 1917 Wild and Woolly, which is already teasing the form by being about an Easterner who wants to be a cowboy like he reads about in pulps, only to go west and find that world doesn't exist, it's a fiction created by pulp writers. An idea that would be picked up a few more times in other comedies with actors like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton among others.
1916's Hell's Hinges is a morality tale where a preacher and gunman are drawn to their opposites in a town rife with corruption. The gunman finds himself drawn to the innate goodness of preacher's sister, while the preacher is drawn into the corrupt world of the local saloon and a woman within. Spoiler alert, if needed for a 1916 film, when the preacher is killed the gunman seeks revenge and burns the entire town to the ground. Prefiguring High Plains Drifter by 50+ years.
1928 had Victor Sjöström's gorgeous movie The Wind, where Lillian Gish plays an Easterner who moves west and is driven to extremes and possible madness by the conditions she finds. It's a movie closer to Hiroshi Teshigahara's Japanese existential dramas of Woman in the Dunes and Pitfall than it is Stagecoach.
1934 had Massacre, a precode film about Joe Thunderhorse, a Native American (though portrayed by a white) star of a wild west show who is rich and desired in white society, but returns to his reservation to find racist and corrupt officials harming his people and he takes revenge. Being precode, and surely in part because it is about a Native American, the movie is as brutal as anything one would see come out of Hollywood for another 30 years. Both in the violence perpetrated against Joe's tribe and in his revenge.
Because the "old west" wasn't actually that old to Hollywood in the early years, with actual cowboys being in many films there were also a bunch of westerns set in the present day of the time, where George O'Brien or Gene Autry would fight villains in cars while they were on horseback over threats to the war effort or for trying to steal mineral rights or whatnot.
Movies about the horses themselves were also popular at times, with the animals virtually anthropomorphized and the story being about winning them over. There were a good number of musical westerns too, many quite popular, where the movie would be sometimes set in old San Francisco, or some gold mining town, and the plot revolved around stage and making a living in the west, with an occasional gun scene to keep the tone. Dramas too could have settings that had all the outward western trappings since they were movies about the era, but be about more political/social drama like the events leading to the Chicago fire or San Francisco earthquake.
Movies about the conflicts surrounding the civil war were quite big, either leading in to the war or about the aftermath. There were "westerns" set in other countries, like Australia for Kangaroo which, other than its locale, carries many familiar western elements, or Tourneur's excellent Way of the Gaucho, set in 1875 Argentina.
Those are only some of the wide variety of "westerns" made in the years to 1952, there are many more films that also share some major elements with westerns but may not be thought of as being in the genre due to predetermining what should count beforehand. And, of course, there are also a great many films that most people wouldn't question as being anything but a western since they do fit the more general expectations well, even as they do can vary considerably in how they then use them.
Noirs are, if anything, even worse for grouping since the so called genre didn't even exist when the movies that are counted as making up the group were being made. Neo-noirs at least might have some measure of intent behind them in following the made up rules for the genre once it was popularized.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:13 PM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
That points to one of the problems with using these big umbrella categories for talking about movies. It's unarguably true that the treatment of Native Americans by Hollywood was racist, relying on stereotypes and othering for their stories, where even those that, loosely speaking, side with tribal sovereignty were created from the perspective of white men and were usually played by whites in make up. Yet within that racist system the values promoted varied, where Native Americans would be treated as uncontrollable savages in some films, but in many they were shown much more sympathy, again within a narrow set of racist confines, where the threat didn't come from the Native Americans, but the white who didn't respect the treaties or otherwise sought to abuse the peace that came from creating the reservation system and forcing Native Americans into it.
How much that may matter to anyone of course varies. At its most basic, racism is racism and need not be tolerated or looked at for nuance over what the essence of the values laid on top of that base may be suggesting. That is clearly fine. But anyone interested in looking at westerns for what they were saying about the conflicts within white society, where treatment of the Native Americans are one of the points of contention or where they exist as something more like a force of nature, similar, say, to a river that has been dammed and may threaten to flood if the proper actions aren't followed, then there is significant variety within the rotten shell.
That isn't even accounting for the large number of westerns that don't deal with Native Americans at all and just use the setting and accessories of the west to tell other stories. There, the implicit acceptance of conquest still exists simply due to the setting and knowledge of what it implies for most viewers, but at some point that isn't very far removed from almost all Hollywood movies where white dominance is simply taken as a fact and minority existence ignored or stereotyped into roles supporting the accepted order.
Part of the argument in the article roughly addresses that last point, where the "noir" values, as the author has them, are overlaid on the western and hybrid stories are created where even the same plot can be reused in different settings, a big city heist transposed to a small town bank robbery for example. Speaking in that way though makes the claims for genre more vague. It relies on audience/reader ideas of some core values that may or may not exist in the various films thrown under the umbrella terms but are nonetheless considered key elements of their "type". That method diminishes the value of the grouping by reliance on an artificial construction of what is "known" in an unaccounted for general sense that supplants the reality of whatever may actually be in the things grouped together.
With westerns and noirs, for example, the groupings can contain (white) liberal perspectives and conservative outlooks, shoved together under an umbrella heading that hides from above what it covers below.
From almost the very start Hollywood westerns were more complicated than the popular image would make them out to be, where they ranged widely in their methods and values. I can't say what is the "dominant" form of the western in part because I'm not even sure what that concept is trying to measure. All westerns ever made treated equally? The most popular westerns? Westerns that fit whatever form one predetermines as being a "true western"? How many need westerns need to follow some pattern for that pattern to be considered determinative and what does that say about those that don't fit?
Looking at the list of westerns I've seen as accounted for by IMDb as fitting the genre, there are films like the 1917 Wild and Woolly, which is already teasing the form by being about an Easterner who wants to be a cowboy like he reads about in pulps, only to go west and find that world doesn't exist, it's a fiction created by pulp writers. An idea that would be picked up a few more times in other comedies with actors like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton among others.
1916's Hell's Hinges is a morality tale where a preacher and gunman are drawn to their opposites in a town rife with corruption. The gunman finds himself drawn to the innate goodness of preacher's sister, while the preacher is drawn into the corrupt world of the local saloon and a woman within. Spoiler alert, if needed for a 1916 film, when the preacher is killed the gunman seeks revenge and burns the entire town to the ground. Prefiguring High Plains Drifter by 50+ years.
1928 had Victor Sjöström's gorgeous movie The Wind, where Lillian Gish plays an Easterner who moves west and is driven to extremes and possible madness by the conditions she finds. It's a movie closer to Hiroshi Teshigahara's Japanese existential dramas of Woman in the Dunes and Pitfall than it is Stagecoach.
1934 had Massacre, a precode film about Joe Thunderhorse, a Native American (though portrayed by a white) star of a wild west show who is rich and desired in white society, but returns to his reservation to find racist and corrupt officials harming his people and he takes revenge. Being precode, and surely in part because it is about a Native American, the movie is as brutal as anything one would see come out of Hollywood for another 30 years. Both in the violence perpetrated against Joe's tribe and in his revenge.
Because the "old west" wasn't actually that old to Hollywood in the early years, with actual cowboys being in many films there were also a bunch of westerns set in the present day of the time, where George O'Brien or Gene Autry would fight villains in cars while they were on horseback over threats to the war effort or for trying to steal mineral rights or whatnot.
Movies about the horses themselves were also popular at times, with the animals virtually anthropomorphized and the story being about winning them over. There were a good number of musical westerns too, many quite popular, where the movie would be sometimes set in old San Francisco, or some gold mining town, and the plot revolved around stage and making a living in the west, with an occasional gun scene to keep the tone. Dramas too could have settings that had all the outward western trappings since they were movies about the era, but be about more political/social drama like the events leading to the Chicago fire or San Francisco earthquake.
Movies about the conflicts surrounding the civil war were quite big, either leading in to the war or about the aftermath. There were "westerns" set in other countries, like Australia for Kangaroo which, other than its locale, carries many familiar western elements, or Tourneur's excellent Way of the Gaucho, set in 1875 Argentina.
Those are only some of the wide variety of "westerns" made in the years to 1952, there are many more films that also share some major elements with westerns but may not be thought of as being in the genre due to predetermining what should count beforehand. And, of course, there are also a great many films that most people wouldn't question as being anything but a western since they do fit the more general expectations well, even as they do can vary considerably in how they then use them.
Noirs are, if anything, even worse for grouping since the so called genre didn't even exist when the movies that are counted as making up the group were being made. Neo-noirs at least might have some measure of intent behind them in following the made up rules for the genre once it was popularized.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:13 PM on February 18, 2018 [2 favorites]
I guess the tl:dr version of that would be that breaking down movies by genre serves two main functions. One is simply that of marketing, helping in the creation or finding of "like" films based on certain surface signifiers. The other is in linking groups of films by some salient characteristic that helps provide greater understanding of the themes and dynamics of the movies within the group, enabling better understanding of what they are saying.
A genre like, say, science fiction, in the first instance, might contain Star Wars, 2001, Robot Monster and Solaris due to all the films containing some "futuristic" or otherwise currently impossible element, (current because someday gorillas with diving helmets might be a thing) that viewers can identify as something they might want to see or crude commonality. but in the second instance those same movies have little commonality that might lend to grouping them save for how they find an audience. So trying to adhere to genre in those terms becomes something akin to using the no true Scotsman argument, where you the choice of what fits defines the selections in ways that can be more obscuring than revealing.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:37 PM on February 18, 2018
A genre like, say, science fiction, in the first instance, might contain Star Wars, 2001, Robot Monster and Solaris due to all the films containing some "futuristic" or otherwise currently impossible element, (current because someday gorillas with diving helmets might be a thing) that viewers can identify as something they might want to see or crude commonality. but in the second instance those same movies have little commonality that might lend to grouping them save for how they find an audience. So trying to adhere to genre in those terms becomes something akin to using the no true Scotsman argument, where you the choice of what fits defines the selections in ways that can be more obscuring than revealing.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:37 PM on February 18, 2018
gus, thanks as again for your thoughtful responses. In our exchanges on SF it had, I think, never come up that you were interested in and knowledgeable about silents! I am generally underexposed to Western silents, but silents are a special area of interest to me. Anyway, as usual, great to read your thoughts!
posted by mwhybark at 5:41 PM on February 18, 2018
posted by mwhybark at 5:41 PM on February 18, 2018
I do want to take a moment to point to Bad Day at Black Rock (and maybe contrast it to the Ox-Bow Incident) and note that it's a film whose specific subject is contemporary-to-release-date racism and corruption, where our protagonist (Spencer Tracy) is bent on righting a wrong enacted on his Nisei World War Two buddy's family in the wake of internment and the War. It's not a noir, in my view, despite the contemporary setting and bleak view of humanity, specifically because Tracy's character is trying to right a wrong: he's a white hat. Despite this, Tracy's character is seeking to restore order to the conquered, post-genocidal West, and explicitly challenging racialized thinking and classification - maybe, if you squint, challenging white supremacy - he's still only looking to set things to rights to the extent that the laws and logic of capital and contracts are enforced. There's no thought of returning the land to the Californios of a century and a half prior or to earlier potential claimants, and indeed, these concerns are well outside the boundaries of the film's concerns. So he's trying to restore order in the classic manner of other Westerns.
In the Ox-Bow Incident, a posse lynches innocent men, one of whom is Mexican. The story is apparently also metaphoric with regard to American society in the 1940s and seems to implicity condemn lynching per se, not solely the incident depicted in the film (which was apparently somewhat controversial at the time). This film is arguably noir, because there's no resolution, and a traditional mechanism of the restoration of order itself is the film's focus, which at the end of the movies is shown to be a mechanism for the creation and preservation of, if not disorder, injustice.
Despite the film's failure to restore order within its' cinematic universe, the film may also be argued as outside noir because it makes an implicit plea to the audience to work against mechanisms of social enforcement such as lynching, and thereby presents a hopeful mechansim for change to the audience. Put on the white hat, if you can, it challenges. In the meantime, what's operating there instead?
posted by mwhybark at 6:01 PM on February 18, 2018
In the Ox-Bow Incident, a posse lynches innocent men, one of whom is Mexican. The story is apparently also metaphoric with regard to American society in the 1940s and seems to implicity condemn lynching per se, not solely the incident depicted in the film (which was apparently somewhat controversial at the time). This film is arguably noir, because there's no resolution, and a traditional mechanism of the restoration of order itself is the film's focus, which at the end of the movies is shown to be a mechanism for the creation and preservation of, if not disorder, injustice.
Despite the film's failure to restore order within its' cinematic universe, the film may also be argued as outside noir because it makes an implicit plea to the audience to work against mechanisms of social enforcement such as lynching, and thereby presents a hopeful mechansim for change to the audience. Put on the white hat, if you can, it challenges. In the meantime, what's operating there instead?
posted by mwhybark at 6:01 PM on February 18, 2018
Perhaps at the root of the issue is that noir and the western are different beasts. The genre category "western" is a big umbrella term, as Gus mentions. Lots of films fall into the genre that are very different - El Topo, Kermit Maynard's output, Victor Sjöström's the Wind, Great Silence, Stagecoach (any versions), Tex and the Lord of the Deep. As long as it bears a passing resemblance to something with hats, horses, and guns more often then not it is considered a western. That means as a genre it is uniquely flexible and mutable. You can have comedic westerns, political westerns, westerns set in other cultures, and on and on.
Noir functions differently. I've always thought of noir more as a mood or an aesthetic rather then an actual genre. While many bear some relation with noir not every mystery made in the 40s is a noir, not every noir is a mystery/crime drama but they often incorporate elements of these related genres, not every B&W Expressionistic film is a noir but many noir depend on shadowy photography, noir can be populated with world weary & cynical characters but these can exist outside of noir just as easily, nor does is it alone in having bleak or unresolved ending. I think because of this nature as a "genre of mood" it can graft onto a more open genre like the western without much difficulty. But is it any easier to define? Something like Pursued or maybe Rancho Notorious can be defined as Western Noir, but I don't think Searchers or No Name on the Bullet can be despite having characteristics of noir. I think a better category or subgenre to describe these might be the Psychological Western (particularly those in the 50s).
As Gus rightfully points out, the western as a genre isn't solely reinforcing settler/coloniser myths just as war films aren't propaganda for Manifest Destiny. If you go deeper, there is more nuance then that. There's a cultural & historical component to genre. More often then not an era's interpretation of a genre reflects the time and the audience for which they are designed. Popular films (perhaps populist is a better word here) of a genre, in particular, I think illustrate this very well and the exceptions to this rule can also be revealing.
As an example, I recently watched Raoul Walsh's (director of the film Pursued mentioned in the OP) Saskatchewan. Its easy to dismiss this 50's film on the surface - it definitely fulfills its production goals as a programmer with the requisite "cowboys" vs "Indians" action, Shelley Winters as the tough talking love interest with a past, Alan Ladd as the handsome & noble white hero; all the requisite western action/adventure you could want at under 90 minutes. Contemporary movie goers looking for a big budget western would get essentially what the poster told them to expect. But being a Raoul Walsh film there's other things going on.
It takes place in Canada for starters (the Saskatchewan of the title is Fort Saskatchewan in Alberta rather than the province). Canada & the US had very different histories when it came to the settling of the West but again the differences are important. While it is still a racist film there's a bit of nuance playing on this bit of history - when an American marshal kills a Cree man (presumably a Plains Cree - the "good" indigenous people of the film) for stealing a rifle, Alan Ladd slugs him and takes him to task for that murder (doesn't charge him for the murder of course). The US marshal defends himself by saying "that's how we deal with our Indians". Ladd's character's response is that (paraphrased) "that's not how we do things in Canada. We believe in peace and that's why we only have a few hundred deaths from our conflicts and Americans have had thousands." Not entirely true of course but nearly true and definitely a moment of self awareness in what is essentially an oater. The film ends with continued peace between the white colonizers with the Cree and at the root of that peace is that the Canadian authorities have been embarrassed into it by their blanket racism and ambient fear of the other, something easy to miss.
posted by Ashwagandha at 6:30 PM on February 18, 2018
Noir functions differently. I've always thought of noir more as a mood or an aesthetic rather then an actual genre. While many bear some relation with noir not every mystery made in the 40s is a noir, not every noir is a mystery/crime drama but they often incorporate elements of these related genres, not every B&W Expressionistic film is a noir but many noir depend on shadowy photography, noir can be populated with world weary & cynical characters but these can exist outside of noir just as easily, nor does is it alone in having bleak or unresolved ending. I think because of this nature as a "genre of mood" it can graft onto a more open genre like the western without much difficulty. But is it any easier to define? Something like Pursued or maybe Rancho Notorious can be defined as Western Noir, but I don't think Searchers or No Name on the Bullet can be despite having characteristics of noir. I think a better category or subgenre to describe these might be the Psychological Western (particularly those in the 50s).
As Gus rightfully points out, the western as a genre isn't solely reinforcing settler/coloniser myths just as war films aren't propaganda for Manifest Destiny. If you go deeper, there is more nuance then that. There's a cultural & historical component to genre. More often then not an era's interpretation of a genre reflects the time and the audience for which they are designed. Popular films (perhaps populist is a better word here) of a genre, in particular, I think illustrate this very well and the exceptions to this rule can also be revealing.
As an example, I recently watched Raoul Walsh's (director of the film Pursued mentioned in the OP) Saskatchewan. Its easy to dismiss this 50's film on the surface - it definitely fulfills its production goals as a programmer with the requisite "cowboys" vs "Indians" action, Shelley Winters as the tough talking love interest with a past, Alan Ladd as the handsome & noble white hero; all the requisite western action/adventure you could want at under 90 minutes. Contemporary movie goers looking for a big budget western would get essentially what the poster told them to expect. But being a Raoul Walsh film there's other things going on.
It takes place in Canada for starters (the Saskatchewan of the title is Fort Saskatchewan in Alberta rather than the province). Canada & the US had very different histories when it came to the settling of the West but again the differences are important. While it is still a racist film there's a bit of nuance playing on this bit of history - when an American marshal kills a Cree man (presumably a Plains Cree - the "good" indigenous people of the film) for stealing a rifle, Alan Ladd slugs him and takes him to task for that murder (doesn't charge him for the murder of course). The US marshal defends himself by saying "that's how we deal with our Indians". Ladd's character's response is that (paraphrased) "that's not how we do things in Canada. We believe in peace and that's why we only have a few hundred deaths from our conflicts and Americans have had thousands." Not entirely true of course but nearly true and definitely a moment of self awareness in what is essentially an oater. The film ends with continued peace between the white colonizers with the Cree and at the root of that peace is that the Canadian authorities have been embarrassed into it by their blanket racism and ambient fear of the other, something easy to miss.
posted by Ashwagandha at 6:30 PM on February 18, 2018
Although it's mainly about older examples, I was surprised there wasn't a single name-check of, say, The Wild Bunch -- or the very modern "Border Incident" movie Sicario. In different ways these both draw on the elements here identified as the noir western.
I guess I see genre, overall, less as a constraining box and more a matter of a flowing river with its main strength in the middle but eddies and inflows and backwaters galore. Or, if you wish, a checklist. Clearly the Western was a creative genre driven by creators who understood what they were doing, while noir is a genre defined after the fact by critics -- overseas critics! -- who could see what those with their eyes close to the Moviola could not. I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with critics teasing out something from what was formerly nothing. But there are strains of Manifest Destiny within the Western that come from history itself and are difficult to disentangle. It's a little like the insight that the Hollywood tradition of the "slavery movie" being the exact opposite of telling black history, while in fact being almost exclusively about white history. Black pain, and black nobility, being reflective on the white viewer. (I wouldn't be surprised if someone were to make the same argument about Holocaust movies, frankly, though I haven't seen it.) The Western is almost always about a white protagonist being able to remake themselves, whether through redemptive violence or turning away from violence. It's about putting that redemption in a framework where the violence is justified and centered. Some of these same intersectionality-derived lines of argument might well be used to shatter the core of noir as well, but ultimately noir is -- nearly always -- less about reifying a mythos than it is about the individual perspective of a world that is barrelling along by itself, mythos be damned.
posted by dhartung at 10:40 PM on February 18, 2018
I guess I see genre, overall, less as a constraining box and more a matter of a flowing river with its main strength in the middle but eddies and inflows and backwaters galore. Or, if you wish, a checklist. Clearly the Western was a creative genre driven by creators who understood what they were doing, while noir is a genre defined after the fact by critics -- overseas critics! -- who could see what those with their eyes close to the Moviola could not. I don't think there's anything terribly wrong with critics teasing out something from what was formerly nothing. But there are strains of Manifest Destiny within the Western that come from history itself and are difficult to disentangle. It's a little like the insight that the Hollywood tradition of the "slavery movie" being the exact opposite of telling black history, while in fact being almost exclusively about white history. Black pain, and black nobility, being reflective on the white viewer. (I wouldn't be surprised if someone were to make the same argument about Holocaust movies, frankly, though I haven't seen it.) The Western is almost always about a white protagonist being able to remake themselves, whether through redemptive violence or turning away from violence. It's about putting that redemption in a framework where the violence is justified and centered. Some of these same intersectionality-derived lines of argument might well be used to shatter the core of noir as well, but ultimately noir is -- nearly always -- less about reifying a mythos than it is about the individual perspective of a world that is barrelling along by itself, mythos be damned.
posted by dhartung at 10:40 PM on February 18, 2018
SIcario doesn’t get a mention but Wond River does. On the one hand it’s really good, on the other it is kind of a movie about how Jeremy Renner is the best there is at being Native American.
posted by Artw at 11:36 PM on February 18, 2018
posted by Artw at 11:36 PM on February 18, 2018
Excellent replies! Yeah, the western by being more a marketing genre, one where even at the very beginning of movie history in the US there was something like a platonic ideal of the genre and any movie that contained enough of those elements then was liable to be seen as a "western", balances a bit uneasily against noir in the sense of noir being an imposed genre of likenesses seen by critics across different films that were then grouped together to provide some greater sense of some tone or values those movies had adopted that gave fresh perspective to them.
For me, one of the key ingredients that does link some westerns to some "noir" thrillers is in the absence of reasonable controlling authority, authority in illegitimate hands, and the potential need for the individual to take matters into their own hands and provide some sense of justice or fail in the attempt. That isn't a signal quality of all westerns, some have a more defined system of justice, military or local, but the locale "on the frontier" for most makes appeal to the larger government structure difficult or impossible. In noirs the system is often either broken, uncaring, or unable to response adequately at whatever level of interaction the characters find themselves in. Threats, in those instances, must be dealt with outside the law or by taking on the role of that authority oneself, sometimes to a wrong or bad end.
This is something different than westerns or thrillers/procedurals where larger systems are operating in the manner they are charged with but face systemic problems in relation to crime, war, or other large scale disruption. The perspective in both noirs and westerns of that sort is generally deeply masculine, even when women are involved. Violence becomes a virtual necessity in resolving the issues as the opposing force is so often implacable or outside normal systems of address. The themes then are often centered around examining the values and limits of the individual man in times of crisis and what they are willing and able to do when faced with an existential threat. That speaks a bit to why things like flashbacks are so frequent in noirs, where the examination of events leading to this point allows a view of who the characters were to better see who they have to become. Westerns don't tend to rely as much on flashbacks, but don't need to either since the setting and exposition about who the character is and how they arrived in the locale will tend to cover much the same ground given our awareness of the genre conventions.
One of the objections I have about trying to "noir" over every other genre any time some dark turn of events happens or things end badly is that these kinds of themes and existential examinations happened in films since the beginning, long before the movies later labelled noirs were made and the term was coined. For purposes of helping viewers find like toned movies or those with a bleaker outlook regardless of genre, I don't really object to having a blanket term if that works for people, I more just object to how it frames what we see in the movies and what isn't being noticed.
War movies, for example, also have their version of themes of existential dread that go beyond the usual conventions around feeling vulnerable in seeing comrades die and knowing your life is at risk to. When the war movie is about the large military goals and needs and the value of self sacrifice then it is addressing systemic concerns where the role of the individual within that system is examined as to their duties or sacrifices in keeping it functioning and helping it succeed for the (alleged) greater good.
Some war movies don't do that, John Ford's early feature Lost Patrol being one notable example that shares many traits with some other films made later. In Lost Patrol the military men we see are caught away from normal lines of authority, trapped in the desert where they are repeatedly attacked by Arab enemies and their number slowly dwindles. One of the notable things about the attacks or the enemy is that they are almost entirely abstract or invisible to the characters and the viewer. The conflict has no shape, men die from the bullets of enemies they nor we never see. Their deaths, and lives in this situation, have no logic or reason to them beyond the knowledge that is just their lot, to live and die away from everyone and everything they might care about, lost in the desert.
There are westerns, non-military and military, that share this theme, where the Native Americans are abstractions in the film, they exist and take action, but they aren't "personalized", dramatized in systemic terms, or really explained other than in their existence as potential threat. This method can make the threat feel less like an external battle against a defined enemy than an internal battle or battle between those under threat as to how to react or live and die in such circumstances. These movies share some of the same psychological concerns as some noirs, where the interest is in the individual responding under threat of death absent the ability to appeal to some larger authority for order or salvation.
Fort Dobbs, a 1958 Gordon Douglas western with Clint Walker has many of the attributes associated with noirs, but also varies in how it presents them so it both fits and doesn't under the term. The film starts with the main character murdering a man for reasons unknown and then attempting to escape justice by fleeing across the desert. He finds a man's body with an arrow in his back, and swaps clothes with him, shoving the body over a cliff ledge so his pursuers will think its him and break off their pursuit. He then wanders until reaching a ranch where he attempts to steal a horse but is shot by a young boy who catches him at it. He's nursed back to health by the boy's mother, who we will eventually learn was the wife of the man whose clothes he stole. The group is put under threat by Comanche attack and have to wend their way to safety, but difficulties ensue from without and within as the woman finds her husbands clothes and the man runs into an old friend who is going to sell repeating rifles to the Comanche. They eventually make their way to Fort Dobbs, going their instead of the closest town due to that being where the man committed murder, and find the military mostly dead and the posse searching for the man holding down the fort.
The plot of the movie keeps circling back to the actions of the man at the opening and events refuse to let him escape without dealing with his actions by placing the woman, her child, and the sheriff as sort of substitute for the murder he committed and why that put the rest of the events in motion. The themes and even a few scenes have a fatalistic and dark noir quality to them, but the Comanche attacks and setting work against that in some other ways. Whether this makes it a "noir western" or just another western is up to the viewer to decide I guess, but that would be the case for a great many westerns from all eras since that umbrella genre covers many different thematic strains.
Go go back to an earlier point, it is interesting how readily we can recognize some traits as belonging to or as referencing some genre. Bad Day at Black Rock, definitely feels like a western even as its story and concerns are more modern. It also does have some shared traits with movies classified frequently as noirs, and Tracy's look itself calls some of visual identity of some of those same films to mind. It seems to be to be more sui generis than fitting any clear category, but borrowing from different genres to make use of their conventions to provide aid and interest to the audience and perhaps enhance its themes. Having Tracy's Macreedy take on the air of some western sheriff and the look of that more like a noir heavy is a odd but effective mix. That the movie's plot hinges on the war and guilt, where Macreedy can be seen from the town's perspective as threat and the larger perspective as fighting for justice.
There are so many other great examples of films that touch on conventions from both genres, but really don't fit either, like The Night of the Hunter for one, and movies lumped into the genres that defy some of the signal attributes people associate with them or use those attributes for opposing ends. Tourneur's Nightfall, sometimes considered a quintessential noir, does start out as such a by the book example of the genre I have to wonder whether Tourneur had read some of that early writing on the subject by the French given that being Jacques' own heritage. Tourneur's Out of the Past was one of the films cited in early writing's on noir, but it's also something of an outlier in theme for Tourneur, so I wonder if Nightfall, which starts like a noir, but finishes in celebrating connection and trust in a field of blindingly white snow isn't a response to those themes of darkness of paranoia Out of the Past helped identify.
Ah, I could go on about these things at ever greater length, but I guess I should stop since that's way too long again already.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:36 AM on February 19, 2018 [1 favorite]
For me, one of the key ingredients that does link some westerns to some "noir" thrillers is in the absence of reasonable controlling authority, authority in illegitimate hands, and the potential need for the individual to take matters into their own hands and provide some sense of justice or fail in the attempt. That isn't a signal quality of all westerns, some have a more defined system of justice, military or local, but the locale "on the frontier" for most makes appeal to the larger government structure difficult or impossible. In noirs the system is often either broken, uncaring, or unable to response adequately at whatever level of interaction the characters find themselves in. Threats, in those instances, must be dealt with outside the law or by taking on the role of that authority oneself, sometimes to a wrong or bad end.
This is something different than westerns or thrillers/procedurals where larger systems are operating in the manner they are charged with but face systemic problems in relation to crime, war, or other large scale disruption. The perspective in both noirs and westerns of that sort is generally deeply masculine, even when women are involved. Violence becomes a virtual necessity in resolving the issues as the opposing force is so often implacable or outside normal systems of address. The themes then are often centered around examining the values and limits of the individual man in times of crisis and what they are willing and able to do when faced with an existential threat. That speaks a bit to why things like flashbacks are so frequent in noirs, where the examination of events leading to this point allows a view of who the characters were to better see who they have to become. Westerns don't tend to rely as much on flashbacks, but don't need to either since the setting and exposition about who the character is and how they arrived in the locale will tend to cover much the same ground given our awareness of the genre conventions.
One of the objections I have about trying to "noir" over every other genre any time some dark turn of events happens or things end badly is that these kinds of themes and existential examinations happened in films since the beginning, long before the movies later labelled noirs were made and the term was coined. For purposes of helping viewers find like toned movies or those with a bleaker outlook regardless of genre, I don't really object to having a blanket term if that works for people, I more just object to how it frames what we see in the movies and what isn't being noticed.
War movies, for example, also have their version of themes of existential dread that go beyond the usual conventions around feeling vulnerable in seeing comrades die and knowing your life is at risk to. When the war movie is about the large military goals and needs and the value of self sacrifice then it is addressing systemic concerns where the role of the individual within that system is examined as to their duties or sacrifices in keeping it functioning and helping it succeed for the (alleged) greater good.
Some war movies don't do that, John Ford's early feature Lost Patrol being one notable example that shares many traits with some other films made later. In Lost Patrol the military men we see are caught away from normal lines of authority, trapped in the desert where they are repeatedly attacked by Arab enemies and their number slowly dwindles. One of the notable things about the attacks or the enemy is that they are almost entirely abstract or invisible to the characters and the viewer. The conflict has no shape, men die from the bullets of enemies they nor we never see. Their deaths, and lives in this situation, have no logic or reason to them beyond the knowledge that is just their lot, to live and die away from everyone and everything they might care about, lost in the desert.
There are westerns, non-military and military, that share this theme, where the Native Americans are abstractions in the film, they exist and take action, but they aren't "personalized", dramatized in systemic terms, or really explained other than in their existence as potential threat. This method can make the threat feel less like an external battle against a defined enemy than an internal battle or battle between those under threat as to how to react or live and die in such circumstances. These movies share some of the same psychological concerns as some noirs, where the interest is in the individual responding under threat of death absent the ability to appeal to some larger authority for order or salvation.
Fort Dobbs, a 1958 Gordon Douglas western with Clint Walker has many of the attributes associated with noirs, but also varies in how it presents them so it both fits and doesn't under the term. The film starts with the main character murdering a man for reasons unknown and then attempting to escape justice by fleeing across the desert. He finds a man's body with an arrow in his back, and swaps clothes with him, shoving the body over a cliff ledge so his pursuers will think its him and break off their pursuit. He then wanders until reaching a ranch where he attempts to steal a horse but is shot by a young boy who catches him at it. He's nursed back to health by the boy's mother, who we will eventually learn was the wife of the man whose clothes he stole. The group is put under threat by Comanche attack and have to wend their way to safety, but difficulties ensue from without and within as the woman finds her husbands clothes and the man runs into an old friend who is going to sell repeating rifles to the Comanche. They eventually make their way to Fort Dobbs, going their instead of the closest town due to that being where the man committed murder, and find the military mostly dead and the posse searching for the man holding down the fort.
The plot of the movie keeps circling back to the actions of the man at the opening and events refuse to let him escape without dealing with his actions by placing the woman, her child, and the sheriff as sort of substitute for the murder he committed and why that put the rest of the events in motion. The themes and even a few scenes have a fatalistic and dark noir quality to them, but the Comanche attacks and setting work against that in some other ways. Whether this makes it a "noir western" or just another western is up to the viewer to decide I guess, but that would be the case for a great many westerns from all eras since that umbrella genre covers many different thematic strains.
Go go back to an earlier point, it is interesting how readily we can recognize some traits as belonging to or as referencing some genre. Bad Day at Black Rock, definitely feels like a western even as its story and concerns are more modern. It also does have some shared traits with movies classified frequently as noirs, and Tracy's look itself calls some of visual identity of some of those same films to mind. It seems to be to be more sui generis than fitting any clear category, but borrowing from different genres to make use of their conventions to provide aid and interest to the audience and perhaps enhance its themes. Having Tracy's Macreedy take on the air of some western sheriff and the look of that more like a noir heavy is a odd but effective mix. That the movie's plot hinges on the war and guilt, where Macreedy can be seen from the town's perspective as threat and the larger perspective as fighting for justice.
There are so many other great examples of films that touch on conventions from both genres, but really don't fit either, like The Night of the Hunter for one, and movies lumped into the genres that defy some of the signal attributes people associate with them or use those attributes for opposing ends. Tourneur's Nightfall, sometimes considered a quintessential noir, does start out as such a by the book example of the genre I have to wonder whether Tourneur had read some of that early writing on the subject by the French given that being Jacques' own heritage. Tourneur's Out of the Past was one of the films cited in early writing's on noir, but it's also something of an outlier in theme for Tourneur, so I wonder if Nightfall, which starts like a noir, but finishes in celebrating connection and trust in a field of blindingly white snow isn't a response to those themes of darkness of paranoia Out of the Past helped identify.
Ah, I could go on about these things at ever greater length, but I guess I should stop since that's way too long again already.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:36 AM on February 19, 2018 [1 favorite]
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