Pulitzer-winning author Michael G. Kammen uses the term “American biformity” to describe the American temperament, for in his view Americans are a “people of paradox”:
torn between their isolated selves and the crowd, their individualism is a collective one (1-20). Ever since the days of the Wild West we have seen this paradox in the “mythic heroism” of American cowboys (Stewart 136-38), who were worshipped for their aloof stance30 in a border-town society: the typical cowboy-hero arrived alone in a corrupt town filled with villains, and killed the leader of the bad guys in a one-on-one gunfight, a showdown at high noon. The love of vigilantism has been an American idiosyncrasy ever since the opening of the frontier in the later 19th century, yet this vigilantism is also
30 One notable example of “mythic heroism” would be Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huck Finn, in
which Huck Finn is cheered as the noble loner in the discourse of American (pop)culture.
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inevitably a form of anarchy which shows no respect for the civilized discourse of American democracy.
Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929) was the first American hardboiled crime fiction, and it introduces the archetype of the vigilante in the anarchic society of the Great Depression. Continental Op gets himself mixed up in a web of city government, labor union and police corruption in the town of Personville, which Op calls Poisonville.
Involved in an ongoing gang war, Op finds that his girlfriend Dinah Brand has been killed with an icepick that has his fingerprints on it. He is often held captive by criminals but finally breaks free and kills them all. In the end, Op decides that he must enforce the law himself, without official sanction, since none of the gang leaders will do it, and thus he becomes a sort of vigilante-anarchist of the sort we often find in Hollywood crime films, including those featuring comic book superheroes and jaded police detectives.
The USA during the Great Depression was going through a very turbulent period, one marked by the forces of both anarchism and fascism and by the conflict—whose tactics became those of guerilla warfare— between the John Dillinger gang (bank robbers) and the government men led by J. Edgar Hoover (the forerunners of the FBI). Dillinger and Hoover are American icons who represent the self-conflicted zeitgeist of the 1930s:
Dillinger is the romanticized anarchist, like the famous Wild West outlaw Jesse James and depression-era outlaws Bonnie & Clyde, while Hoover stands for American hegemony and benevolent executive power. (JFK: Ask not what your country has done for you but what you have done for your country!) As Zizek points out in The Sublime Object of Ideology (11-55), American vigilantism is quite often complicit with the official
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system of law and order, just as the cowboy-hero executes the criminals at high noon and then delivers the town back to the sheriff. Americans might cheer for the romantic loner Dillinger but they will still side with Hoover at the end of the day. In Hammett’s Red Harvest, then, we have this paradox: after cleaning up the town by killing off all the crooks, Op is ready to deliver the town over to a new group of crooks (the corrupt bureaucrats) so that he can relax and get back to his old life again.
W. R. Burnett, who wrote one of the first gangster novels, Little Caesar, in 1929, was Dashiell Hammett’s contemporary in the early period of hard- boiled crime fiction.
Hammett focused on tough-guy vigilantes while Burnett, who said that “crime is only the left-handed form of human endeavor,” was interested in mobsters. His world was and is an anarchic one that does not know the saving grace of vigilantism. Burnett criticizes the social system that denies criminals redemption, placing his characters in a world of
“twilight morality” (or moral ambiguity) where the bad guys are seen to also have certain virtues and the supposedly righteous are seen to also be malicious. A comparison of Hammett’s Red Harvest with Burnett’s Little Caesar will serve to provide a more complete picture of American anarchy during the Great Depression, now seen from the perspective of the outlaws and thus from a perspective outside the duality
victim/victimizer. Here we must remember that criminals can also be the victims of destitute circumstances and of the inequality of the system; crime might be their only way out of poverty. The figure of Caesar Bandello (the gangster figure in Burnet’s novel, largely inspired by Al Capone) will be interpreted as a socio-semiotic body that expresses and “delivers” the cultural history of American anarchy.
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British historian Eric Hobsbawn claims that the universal appeal of the American vigilante-detective is closely tied to the “in-built anarchism of American capitalism”
(272-90). For here we have a utopic idealization of “ultra- individualism”: the body of the vigilante-anarchist lies beyond the control of the system, even as he becomes a reflexive sadomasochist inflicting pain on himself. As Deleuze notes, the organism collapses into a Body-without-Organs after being decoded and deterritorialized by the flows of desire.
Crime is a negative representation of desire, and the bodies of the killers in Hammett’s novel are themselves in some way disintegrated, just as is the flesh of their victims. Thus one might say that the victims, their victimizers, and the vigilante-detectives who try to bring the victimizers to justice all get dissolved into quasi-bodies by the desiring machine of America’s Great Depression and the build-up to the Second World War—a
blood-soaked state of anarchy in Red Harvest.
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Chapter Four Sex: James M. Cain
We will mainly focus on James M. Cain’s novel Double Indemnity (1934), inspired by the Snyder-Gray case in 1928, as well as the film adaptations based on Cain’s novel to elucidate the various facets of representing the transgression of female sexuality in the hard-boiled literature.
First, we will examine the bodily performance from the main protagonists of Double Indemnity, in which female flesh is dramaturgical while the male body is reflexive, so we can explore the body politics of Cain’s fiction along with his other
notable novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, where sexuality is often consummated in death. Second, we will tackle the extension of Cain’s femmes fatales in various films inspired by Cain’s Double Indemnity and how the formlessness of hyper-femininity has been forcefully given form through the socio-semiotic bodies of Hollywood film stars.
At last, in Lawrence Kasdan’s film adaptation of Cain’s novel Body Heat, the use of colors has emancipated the form of female sexuality, and the image of the femme fatale is now given a feminist interpretation so woman’s sexuality can finally be as raw and untamed as the way James M. Cain described it in 1934.
1. Dramaturgical Body: James M. Cain’s Femmes Fatales and Abjectified Murderous Sociality
Erving Goffman mentions the idea of bodily performance as a sequence of social exchanges in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Thus the process of two people agreeing on the murder of the other person can be an expression of murderous sociality represented through the murderers’ bodily performance. Moreover, Julia Kristeva talks of the idea of abjection in Power of Horror, and simply put, abjection is a marginal state that cannot be demarcated with a clear sense of boundary. The major female characters in
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James M. Cain’s hard-boiled crime fiction are often figures of abjection, and their femininity is often an abjectified sexuality that hoovers between Eros and Thanatos, represented in Cain’s abjectified murderous sociality.
Unlike other major writers of hard-boiled crime fiction, Cain favors to tell the story of crime from the perspective of the victimizers (rather than the detective) in the form of confession and his story is always about a married woman who plans to murder her spouse by the help of the other man (Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice). In the act of persuading the other man to commit murder, the femme fatale has to make full use of her sexuality as well as her body to have the Death she desires.
Phyllis Nirdlinger is the murderess in Cain’s Double Indemnity, and we would look into the inconsistency between Phyllis’ bodily actions and her true intentions to illustrate the idea of “dramaturgical body.” Phyllis and her accomplice Walter Neff are putting on an act before they both agree on the murder of Phyllis’ husband. By Goffman’s idea, individuals exchange information by their “given and given-off” bodily performance in their face-to-face interaction. Hence, Walter and Phyllis have to put off their “personal front” (identities they have taken for the conventional sort of sociality) to attain a state of murderous sociality when they are both “discredited” in front of each other.
The unbridled sexuality of Phyllis Nirdlinger is abjectified for being unable to be defined, excluded outside the form/matter. Accoridng to Judith Butler, genders are performed and bodies are detached from the actuality of nature. Phyllis Nirdlinger’s dramaturgical body is an example of the formless feminine sexuality embodied perversely in shapeless Death. Woman as the wife becomes Kristeva’s so-called “the female who wrecks the infinite” because her mask of domesticity can actually cause more damages to the social order.
Sex in Cain’s novels is often accompanied by the act of violence: either the couple embraces and makes love by the husband’s dead body or the act of sex is performed
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joyously in aggression. Man as the accomplice of woman’s husband-killing becomes the reflexive/looking-glass body that is made available to project the woman’s wish of Death.
In their co-presence, man and woman are members of this mutually consented murderous sociality.
At last, we compare Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice with Double Indemnity.
Both are inspired by the Snyder-Gray case in 1928. Postman is relatively romantic for having a femme fatale who is actually in love with her accomplice, who still desires to be with her right before he is sent for gas chamber. We would elaborate how the idea of
“amour fou” (crazy love, obsessive passion in French) gets materialized in the novel and how the aspect of genocide/xenophobia during the Great Depression is rendered through this unusual kind of romance.
Putting on an Act: Murderous Sociality
Insurance man Walter Neff comes to a Spanish-style suburban residence in Glendale, California, where he meets Phyllis Nirdlinger – a woman who is about to change his life for good. They are immediately attracted to each other as Phyllis gradually persuades Walter to kill her husband for her. The couple plans to kill Mr. Nirdlinger – Phyllis’
husband, on train so Walter’s insurance company will pay twice the amount on the singular death of Mr. Nirdlinger. Everything is about “putting on an act” in Double Indemnity, and Phyllis has to pretend that she is innocent in front of Walter at the moment they meet. Walter, on the other hand, has to feign that he does not wish to get involved in anything illegal in order to resist Phyllis. However, Walter has been intrigued about idea of conning insurance company long before he meets Phyllis.
In James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity, everyone is putting on an act. They are giving the performances of themselves as to use their bodies to make the performance right, in order to get the things they desire. Thus the bodies all become perfomative through a
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complicit “co-participation” of the murderous couple. In Walter’s first impression, he perceives Phyllis as some thirty-something woman with “a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair.” In brief, she has “a washed-out look” with “the shape to set a man nuts” (Cain 110-11). In their first meeting, Walter has suspected Phyllis not purely
interested in getting her husband a better deal to cover his automobile. In spite of his suspicion of Phyllis, Walter consents to meet her again just because of her irresistible sex-appeal.
In their second meeting, Phyllis wears “white-sailor suit, with a blouse that pulled right over her tops, and white shoes and stockings.” Phyllis in all white conjures up an image of naïve school girl. Such contrast causes an enormous arousal in Walter as he keeps uttering “I wasn’t the only one that knew that shape. She knew about it herself, plenty” (115). Walter meticulously observes Phyllis in close details: “her brow wrinkled up, and I saw there was nothing washed-out about her. What gave her that look was a spray of freckles across her forehead” (116). The freckles on her face give a touch of girlishness on her. As Walter asserts that he likes her freckles, Phyllis contradicts him humbly. She chooses to serve tea in the house while the maid is gone and she feigns to forget it. A scene of polite mannerism is out there: a lady, dressed in white, acts coyly as the freckles on her face compliment her girlish naivety. However, the guileless image is about to be dissolved when she proposes the idea of phony insurance to Walter: “Mr. Huff, would it be possible for me to take out a policy for him (her husband), without him
bothering him about it at all? I have a little allowance of my own. I could pay you for it, and he wouldn’t know, but just the same all this worry would be over” (118). Phyllis is putting on an act as a virtuous caring wife who wishes to guarantee her husband’s safety by settling an insurance policy for him (without him knowing it).
After the proposition of fake insurance offer, they embrace and kiss each other passionately. Despite that he knows that “everything else about her is like red-hot poker,”
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he kisses her on the mouth and pulls her face against his while he is “trembling like a leaf.” She responds and kisses back then she puts on a love-scene by telling him that she falls for him the moment she sees him. The offer of automobile insurance is just a smoke screen to keep him around her side. He rumbles her hair and they “make some pleats in the blouse” (Cain 118).
In their third meeting, in which they finally consent to commit the crime together.
Phyllis shows up at Walter’s residence in Los Feliz hills, wearing “a rain coat and a little rubber swimming cap with raindrops shining over her freckles.” What reveals after Phyllis taking off her raincoat is “a dumb Hollywood outfit – sweater and slacks” which were considered fashionable during the nineteen thirties when this novel was published.
She apologizes for losing her head with that offer of phony insurance then proposes to cancel the proposition. However, Walter begins to think differently. He starts to conceive ways in which they can end Mr. Nirdlinger’s life “accidentally-on-purpose.” He suggests she might want to “drop a crown block on him” while “it nails her between the eyes and they flicker” (Cain 120).
The more she withdraws the idea of murder the more Walter is into it: “I’m not crazy, and I’m not joking, and you’ve heard of such a thing in your life, because it’s all you’ve thought of since you met me, and it’s what you came down here for tonight” (Cain 121).
The more lies Phyllis tells him, the more Walter is sure about her interests in murder. As he chooses to treat her like “an alley cat,” Walter promises to pull off a seamless perfect murder for her “straight down the line.” In moments as such, Phyllis simply responds him with a hysteric wailing: “Please, Walter, don’t let me do this. We can’t. It’s simply – insane” (Cain 123). Later on, they discuss the details on how to murder Mr. Nirdlinger, and Walter figures it is best to do it on the train because the insurance company pays twice the money on such accidental death.
Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life mentions two types of
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sign-activities channeled through the individual’s daily bodily performances – “the given and the given off.” In this way, individuals give away information about themselves to
“define situation” so that they can live up to “the expectation of others.” In their bodily performances, individuals provide “accessible carriers of sign-vehicle” to create situations favorable for their own self-interests, which can be a purposely designed
self-expressiveness. In the “given” information, individual utters “verbal symbols known to attach to symbols” while the “given-off” information is delivered through “wide range of actions” as the means of communication. Whether it’s the given or the given-off bodily performance, it is likely to be “intentionally conveyed misinformation”: the given is turned into deceit while the given-off is an act of “feigning” (Goffman 2).
In Double Indemnity, Phyllis Nirdlinger “gives” the falsified utterance of her
innocence when she insinuates her wish of murder to Walter and implants the idea into his mind while her body “gives off” various signs of vulnerability – tea-serving, dressed in white, being shy from the compliment on her appearance and crying. Phyllis Nirdlinger utters words of deceits while her body cooperates to feign signs of feminine frailty, and all her words and bodily actions are contrary to her true intention – the premediated murder of her husband. In other words, Phyllis Nirdlinger gets what she wants by pretending not to want it.
Still, there can be a “fundamental asymmetry in communication process” because the perception of others can be opposite to the bodily performance. In spite of her elaborate act of purity, Phyllis fails to convince Walter of her innocence. The
information-game between Walter and Phyllis becomes a “potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation and rediscovery” (Goffman 8). What Phyllis is aiming to gain is a “calculated unintentionality” that can successfully lead her to find a competent accomplice of murder.
To start with, Phyllis needs to conceal her true intention until Walter discovers what
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