To begin with, in this dissertation we would like to summarize the previous research done on the works of the three main authors of classic American hard-boiled crime fiction novels: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler. In The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain and Chandler, William Marling discusses the novels of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler in the context of narrative theories as well as that of cultural and historical changes in American society during the Great Depression. Marling speaks of the impact of technology on the style and technique of popular literature, emphasizing how the mass production of motor vehicles
re-programmed Americans’ lifestyle by giving them much greater freedom of movement, and how the general public’s embrace of cinema—especially with the rise of sound-flicks
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like The Jazz Singer (1927)—led to the faster pace of literary narratives.6 Marling shows how this “metonymic aesthetics” was used by Dashiell Hammett as “a vehicle of
allegorical impulse” in his novels (117, 143). Hammett, he says, has a tendency to use
“cubist reduction” to depict his protagonists. For example, Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon is described as a “bear like” man with a “conical shape” due to the “steep rounded slope of his shoulder” (Hammett 1), while Continental Op in Red Harvest doesn’t have an actual name in the novel, as Op is a man whose self-definition is based on his
perseverance, his tenacity (Marling 133, 122).
In 1928, Ruth Snyder and Henry Judd Gray were sentenced to death for their murder (made to look like an accident) of Snyder’s husband, Albert Snyder, after Ruth persuaded Albert to sign a “double indemnity”7 insurance policy.” This was a sensational event because Ruth Snyder was one of the first women to be electrocuted in the history of the United States. James M. Cain, a professional journalist, was deeply inspired by the Snyder-Gray case, and based two of his best novels (The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity) largely on it. Both novels are about the murder of a husband by his wife and her lover, and in the end the criminals-lovers are sentenced to death.
The image of the flapper—a woman who bobbed her hair, smoked, danced, wore leg-baring short skirts and flirted with men—has been an ambiguous one as far as the traditional concept of the woman’s role and image is concerned. Ernest Hemingway, long
6 Ernest Hemingway’s short story The Killers (1927) was written in the form of a film-script as he was experimenting with this new cinematic writing technique, one which fascinated and repulsed him at the same time. In the 1940s, The Killers was adapted into a movie of the same title, starring Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner.
7 This means that if the policy holder dies in an accident, the policy will pay double.
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before Cain, tackles this question of whether a flapper can be an adequate wife and mother in his critically acclaimed novel The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which Brett Ashley is the catalyst for the disintegration of the traditional world of men around her due to her unbridled sexuality. Ruth Snyder, who was also a flapper in her youth, became a
notorious model of female transgression, an icon, after her execution during the Great Depression; this reputation was enhanced by the fact that her lover Judd Gray had
exclaimed in court that she was a “Tiger Woman” who had manipulated him into helping her murder her husband.8
When it comes to the works of James M. Cain, Marling uses a Freudian motif – the triangle of “the Father, the Prodigal and the Elder” (from Christ’s parable of “the prodigal son”)—to interpret the narrative technique of James M Cain’s novels (Marling 22-23).
Cain’s protagonist, he says, is often “a prodigal stranger who disrupts a weakened nuclear family”—one that is struggling with “economic hardship” and “sexual temptation”
(Marling 160). If Cain embeds the cultural anxiety about female transgression
(represented by the Snyder-Gray case) in his novels, he also tends to focus on xenophobia.
For example, we have the attitude toward the ethnic other in The Postman Always Rings Twice, where Cora wishes to get rid of her Greek husband because she doesn’t wish to produce “a greasy Greek child” (Cain 37), and in Double Indemnity, where Walter hires a male Filipino housekeeper whose careless glamour emulates that of Clark Gable (105).
Both novels are narrated from a first-person perspective in the form of a confession. In
8 In Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ruth becomes Cora, who is married to a Greek restaurateur, and Judd is Frank. In Postman, Cora is reluctant to produce an heir for “the greasy Greek” and so she seduces Frank, and then convinces him to help her murder him. In Double Indemnity Ruth is Phyllis; she is married to a much older man, and persuades Walter the insurance man (now Judd) to help her murder her husband so that she can get the insurance money.
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their cinematic adaptations, filmmakers chose the technique of voice-over narration as well as that of flashbacks to introduce the story to the audience as a sort of immanent space within human consciousness. There are narrative gaps within the stories as the protagonist’s “self” is problematized through his/her excessive desire for sex, money and violence.
If Cain employs “metonymic reduction” in his depiction of Southern California (Marling 245), Raymond Chandler is a geopolitical observer in his cognitive mapping of Los Angeles and Hollywood. Chandler applies the technique of “physical relations of matter” to the profiles of his characters. This technique is also called “laymen’s physics”
as the hierarchy of values between and among things and people is ironically flattened (Marling 215). For instance, in Farewell, My Lovely, Philip Marlowe says “the women had good legs and displayed their inside curves more than Will Hays would have liked.
But their faces were as threadbare as a bookkeeper's office coat.” (25). If Deleuze and Guattari speak of the “celibate machine,” and claim that “the eroticism of the machine liberated other limited forces as a mechanization of experienced embodiment of pure intensities, repulsion and attraction,” Marling assumes that this “celibate machine”
fabricates the dynamics of hard-boiled men (Deleuze and Guttari 19-26). To be hardboiled is “to eliminate the soft, the old, the fat, the feminine and the emotional,” a praxis necessary for survival in the rough period of the Great Depression when
individuals were perennially conflicted by their desire for “sexual freedom and social status” (Marling 231).
Since the hard-boiled individual is driven by the Deleuzian “celibate machine,” the
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hard-boiled crime writers use “alienating effects” to create a world of “claustrophobia, paranoia, despair and nihilism” (Marling 266). The American roman noir contributed to the American film noir, and the filmmakers evoke an “absent, mechanized economy” that could be “immanentized and represented by technique” with a stylish “figuration” of the demons within the human psyche (245). The cinematic focus takes us from “synecdoche to metonymy” with its “diegetic powers and mimetic skills” (258).
Several scholars talk about masculine anxiety and the making of the “male self” in hard-boiled American crime fiction. Paula Geyth notes in “Enlightenment Noir:
Hammett’s Detectives and the Genealogy of the Modern (Private) ‘I’” that “the subject’s definition of the self (in Hammett’s fiction)” is achieved “through self-control and self-denial,” and here Geyth uses the metaphor of Odysseus to describe the relationship between Hammett’s “man” and the femmes fatales. The latter are a bit like Circe, whose main purpose is “to tempt the hero to forget – and thus lose – himself” (38). The classic example would be Sam Spade’s decision to send Brigid O’Shaughnessy to jail for her murder of his former business partner Archer, and his reason is simple: “this is bad for business.” Carl Freedman and Christopher Kendrick argue in “Forms of Labor in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest” that the hard-boiled detective operates by means of “linguistic labor”—smoothly talking himself out of various perilous situations in his dealings with the gangsters in Personville, while the only female character, Dinah Brand, operates by means of physical labor through her involvements with other men. As would be implied by a traditional patriarchal-hierarchical model, male subjectivity is assigned to the domain of linguistics while the female is restricted to the field of bodies and sensations (12-31).
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J.P. Telotte discusses the uses of voice-over narration and flashbacks in Voices in the Dark: the Narrative Patterns of Film Noir in director Billy Wilder’s film adaptation of Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944). The plot of the movie is told through Walter’s confession, which is being recorded on a Dictaphone after Phyllis shoots him. Walter records this message for his colleague Keys, who is the conscientious father figure in the movie. Raymond Chandler, hired by director Billy Wilder to co-write the script of Double Indemnity, chooses to enhance the part of Keys to strengthen the theme of homosocial bonding between the men who have mutual trust and respect for each other, while the heterosexual bonding between Walter and Phyllis is based on anything but mutual trust and respect. The story is thus told through flashbacks, which are really the mental images of the bleeding, dying Walter who remorsefully utters: “I killed him for money—and a woman—and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman” (40-57). The montage assemblage of flashbacks, along with the subjective voice-over narration, is thought to be classically exemplified in the case of Wilder’s Double Indemnity.
As for the homosocial bonding between Walter and Keys, Carl Freedman notes in
“The End of Work: From Double Indemnity to Body Heat” that there is an unspoken
“homoerotic feeling”9 between these two: “the solid reliability of masculine friendship is contrasted with the dangers and unpredictability of heterosexual dalliance.” In
Freedman’s view, something “quasi- sexual” takes place between them when Walter ignites the cigar of the absent-minded Keys. In the end, it is Keys who lights a cigarette for Walter as the latter lies dying by the elevator, and Walter tells him “I love you, too”
9 J. P. Telotte disagrees with Freedman’s view.
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(62). It was in 1981 that director Lawrence Kasdan adapted Cain’s Double Indemnity into a movie called Body Heat, which Freedman regards as a postmodern interpretation of
“America’s terrible economic malaise” now “aggravated by the political and moral humiliation of the Iranian Hostage crisis that began in 1979.” Kasdan changes the location of the original novel so that Body Heat takes place in Miami, Florida, and this location- change allows “the valorization of leisure” of late capitalism to be highlighted in the film’s frequent beach scenes. In Kasdan’s movie, the femme fatale doesn’t get
punished; she continues to embrace her leisure time on the sun-drenched beach while “the shining all-American anti-hero at the dawn of the age of Reagan” is serving his
life-sentence in jail and dreaming of nailing the corrupted murderess (72-73).
Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, set in early-1940s Los Angeles, was also adapted into a movie of the same title by Robert Montgomery in 1947, and the film script was loosely drafted by Chandler before being handed to Steven Fisher for revision.
Robert Montgomery casts himself as the detective, Philip Marlowe, and shoots the entire movie from a subjective perspective, so that the audience is looking at the scenes from Marlowe’s perspective. This technique creates the effect of an “all-perceiving subject”
and the viewer experiences a confusion of truth and self in the domain of “the real”
(Telotte 103-20).
In summary, the critics’ and theorists’ interpretations of hard-boiled crime fiction as well as film noir tend to mainly focus on the contexts of historical and social change in American life between the late-1920s and early-1920s as these are depicted in both the novels and the films. The socio-cultural background is set, in critical discussions and
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interpretations, in relation to psychological and philosophical perspectives such as those of Freud, Lacan and Deleuze, and in relation to the role of both narrative and cinematic techniques10.