(Noir) Dream State: California in the Movies

Despite a confluence of influences—hard-boiled detective fiction of the 1930s, German expressionist films of the 1920s, and the censorship that arrived in the mid-1930s—film noir is very much a California thing. It is a product of the aspirations and the lusts it inspires and the confusion and disappointment it generates. The eroticism in noir relations rather consists of the drama of initial seduction, which is sometimes synonymous with the drama of breaking a man’s spirit, or at least his willpower, or at the very least his normal instinct for self-preservation. The men invariably end up damaged or broken, though it must be said that the women of noir usually don’t fare well, either. The Killers, Tension, The Maltese Falcon, and D.O.A. end with the femme fatale heading to jail. In Detour, Criss Cross, Out of the Past, The Lady from Shanghai, Scarlet Street, Double Indemnity, Gun Crazy, Too Late for Tears, Decoy, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Murder, My Sweet, and really too many other noirs to count. 

Yet the destructive women of noir weren’t identical. They had in common the possession of a certain intense allure that could result in death, and yet within that broad definition, there was lots of room for variation. On the benign end of the spectrum we find Yvonne De Carlo in Criss Cross (1949), who just wants to get free of Dan Duryea, her menacing mobster lover. She sees Burt Lancaster as her ticket to freedom, and they both end up dead. But she’s not a willful agent of destruction, nor is Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street (1945), who is merely sloppy and self-indulgent and willing to go along with her boyfriend’s criminal schemes. In their respective films, De Carlo and Bennett were, in a sense, simply relaxed and natural, and the movies were paranoid fantasies of what might happen to a man who became ensnared by temptation. Most noir women were more actively amoral. They represent fantasies of a female sexuality completely divorced from the constraints of morality. They are male projections, and as such they can be thought of as misogynistic creations, but they were also fantasies of female power. And the attraction they hold for men in these films is the opportunity they offer of sex with a free woman—a completely free woman who is, at the very least, the man’s equal. Yet from early in the film noir cycle, the women in these movies became something more than examples of greed supercharged by amorality. There was something additional to their natures, something skewed. 

Audrey Totter in Tension (1949) leaves her husband (Richard Basehart), a perfectly nice pharmacist who is devoted to her, and then ends up killing the lover she left him for. In Too Late for Tears (1949), Lizabeth Scott is not just greedy but demented by greed. When she and her husband find $50,000 in a gangland drop-off, she persuades the husband not to turn the money over to the police. Soon, the gangster who missed the money shows up at her doorstep, but her avarice and ruthlessness are such that she ends up scaring him. But in a way that’s just a corollary of the California idea—freedom is worth the risk. Speaking of female perspective, Born to Kill (1947), set mostly in San Francisco, did something perhaps unique: It reversed the sexes and thus created one of the more fascinating examples of the form. 

Claire Trevor in Born to Kill is like a combination of the men and women that usually populate noir. Like noir’s evil women, she has a streak of perversity. While on a trip to Reno to get divorced, she stumbles onto a gruesome murder scene, but, not wanting to get involved, she doesn’t call the police but instead remains curiously detached, even though she knew one of the victims. Soon after, she figures out who the murderer is—a big, hard, brutish man with no discernible charm at all, played by Lawrence Tierney. But again, she fails to call the police because, of all things, she finds herself physically attracted to him. In this, she is like the noir men—she knows better but can’t help herself. As photographic entities, both cities (San Francisco and L.A.) are beautiful, and being beautiful, they convey the California idea that here is a place so lovely that people must make their own problems. And people do. Even divorced from the ugliness, bad weather, miserable atmosphere, and strategic difficulty of navigating life that we find in other cities, people in film noir find the means to screw up their lives in catastrophic ways. Yet there’s a difference in the beauty of San Francisco and Los Angeles and what that beauty means on screen. In film, San Francisco represents a pristine ideal: You may be having a rotten time, but the city is perfectly fine. 

In Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum takes time off from watching his life circle the drain to ask Rhonda Fleming if she has ever been to New York. When she says no, he tells her, “You take a trip there one time. You’ll find out why I’m in San Francisco.” San Francisco is like a pure essence, sometimes a moral rebuke, sometimes an impervious ideal, against which the impurity, perfidy, or unhappiness of the characters can stand out in sharper relief. This brings us to a key difference between San Francisco and Los Angeles in the movies. San Francisco doesn’t care if you live or die. But Los Angeles? Los Angeles wants to kill you. L.A.’s beauty is the beauty of illusion. Its beauty is the face that the devil shows you for the sake of luring you in. And then the head slowly spins around and there are worms coming out of its eyes. It’s not something phony that’s hiding something dark and true. Rather, it’s something irresistible and empty that’s hiding the true depths, implications, and consequences of its emptiness. San Francisco is Olympian, disinterested. L.A. tempts you—that is, you the movie protagonist—with everything you know you shouldn’t want but do—pool parties, sex with strangers, indolence, unearned status. In the history of cinema, there has never been a Hollywood party presented on screen in which any protagonist ever had fun. 

Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947) introduces a group of wealthy sharks, all with a blood lust to devour each other. But then they do—and somehow manage to devour no one else. Everett Sloane and Rita Hayworth turn an amusement park hall of mirrors into a shooting gallery. Both end up dead, but the one almost-innocent bystander—the Irishman played by Welles himself—walks away with barely a flesh wound. In a Los Angeles noir, he could have easily been killed, too, or better yet, he would have been executed for their murder. One of the most seductive and mad of femme fatales is the relatively unknown Jean Gillie in the film Decoy (1946). She played a woman obsessed with a buried treasure. Her bank-robbing boyfriend is in prison, and she is desperate to get a map to where he buried the money. Along the way, she kills several people and thoroughly enjoys it. She kicks the jack out from under a car, causing it to collapse on a man underneath it, and laughs. In San Francisco noir, the world can make sense. In Los Angeles noir, the whole point is that the world does not make sense. In fact, it’s almost as if everything is made subordinate to that assertion, so that the story becomes secondary. Every movie becomes a quiet scream: Something is terribly wrong. It has become a commonplace in noir studies to say that the rise of film noir is related to the detonation of the two atomic bombs that ended World War II, and to the nuclear arms race that followed. In this way, the nihilism of noir becomes an expression of the existential terror inherent in people’s belief that civilization was on borrowed time and that humanity would soon destroy itself. Noir would have no power, no resonance, and could make no connection if we didn’t fear the cold implications of the modernity that noir and Los Angeles express. In noir, we wake up to the nightmare that follows our seduction. It’s a world in which God doesn’t matter—or worse, has decided that we don’t. 

Consider Petulia, set in San Francisco and released in that disturbed year of 1968. At one point, someone introduces “Bobby Kennedy” as a conversational topic. Meanwhile, Kennedy died four days before the film was released. Such was the ever-changing horror show of America that the film was made in and released into. The title character, played by Julie Christie, is a married British woman who tries to pick up a doctor (George C. Scott) at a charity ball at the Fairmont Hotel. In Petulia, director Richard Lester presents San Francisco as a trendsetting archetype, interesting in its way and glamorous, if observed from a distance. Lester knew something about glamour and about universal loci of cool, having filmed the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night in the London of 1964. But while that earlier film presented a burst of joy, Petulia shows a world in which love has been corrupted, perhaps cheapened by casual encounters, so that it no longer has meaning; or perhaps it’s that the casualness of sex has detached it from mystery, so that the meaninglessness of it all has been revealed for all to recognize.

Matthew Bright’s Freeway, an independent film from 1996, offers an interesting inflection on the usual California serial killer genre. It presents a teenage girl (Reese Witherspoon) when she runs off on her own, to avoid being placed in foster care, she gets picked up by a seemingly nice, respectable school counselor (Kiefer Sutherland), who turns out to be a serial killer. What makes the film a comedy (believe it or not) is that the movie invests its teenage protagonist with a completely unaccountable sense of self-worth and a skewed but definite moral center. “Why are you killing all them girls, Bob?” she asks accusingly, a line that invariably gets a laugh from the audience because of its bluntness and purity. Why, indeed. The fact that there isn’t and cannot be an answer to that question places Freeway very much in the California tradition. But the fact that it features a heroine who has not only a sense of right and wrong but also an ability to stand outside the madness and react with more anger than despair or cynicism makes it a California story with a difference. —"Dream State: California in the Movies" (2021) by Mick LaSalle