adaptations of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity during the nineteen forties to emphasize the fact that the expression of female sexuality has been given a docile form in the film adaptations while the female sexuality in the original novels remain raw, untamed and formless.
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
95
The definition of film noir by Borde and Chaumeton is “the state of tension created in the spectators by the disappearance of their psychological bearings.” James M. Cain’s literary texts are modified for film adaptations of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity while the images of Cain’s femmes fatales are reformed by the elites of film studios to patronize the dominant cultural discourse on femininity. Cain’s formless feminine sexuality is given a form for the making of modern-day myth of film noir.
In terms of body-politics, the making of socio-semiotic bodies involves two forms of oppositions: exploitation/liberation and deviance/pathology. By these two polarities, we shall analyze the deliberate problematizing and pathologizing of female sexuality, which finally becomes a material-based image molded by film studios that complies with the public consensus. The latter seems especially true in the performance of Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck, whose images become the prototypes of femmes fatales in popular culture. Later on, the images of Cain’s femmes fatales become Jameson’s “blank parodies,” mimicked and recycled repeatedly in the postmodern neo-noir.
From Literary Texts to Film Adaptations
Borde and Chaumeton declare in A Panorama of American Film Noir: 1941-1953 that the style of film noir was formed from 1941 to 1945 while “the glory days” took place from 1946 to 1948. Since then, “the theme of the woman who encourages a murder” has dominated the genre, particularly with The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, along with other films like Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet36, John Huston’s’The Maltese Falcon37, and Otto Preminger’s Laura38.
These films were called “crime thrillers” by the time they were released until French
36 Adapted from Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely. Director renamed the film as Murder, My Sweet so people then would not mistake it as a musical comedy.
37 Adapted from Danshiell Hammett’s novel of the same title.
38 Adapted from Vera Caspery’s novel of the same title.
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
96
critic Nino Frank gave this genre of American film a name – film noir. According to Nino Frank, this type of American film is a combination of “crime adventure and criminal psychology” and often this is about “the plot of an adventure whose final stake is death.”
In other words, film noir is “a film of death in all senses of the world” (Borde 5). Noir is often about “the eroticization of violence” and “the strangeness is inseparable from what could be called the uncertainty of the motives” in its protagonists while “the very
strangeness of the oeuvre lies in these spineless, mysterious creatures who lay their cards on the table on in death” (Borde 11). That is to say, film noir is “a shared feeling of anguish or insecurity” catalyzed by “moral ambivalence, criminal violence, contradictory complexity of the situations and motives” in the characters of the story. In short, film noir is about “the state of tension created in the spectators by the disappearance of their
psychological bearings” (Borde 13).
Film noir is also a genre highly influenced by psychoanalysis39 as the protagonists’
“interest in love and money” is quite often a camouflage for their problematic mental state: “a cover for libidinal fixation (conflicts).” From the perspective of French critic, noir is “the poetry of wet cobble-stones, suburban nights and pallid dawns” (Borde 23).
The content of noir story is inspired by the psychoanalysis of the human unconscious while its aesthetics is explicitly evoked by German Expressionism and Surrealism in art.
By the examples of the screen adaptations of Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, we would look into how literary texts are reshaped by the culture in the representations of their film adaptations.
The most famous adaptation of Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice is the version featuring Lana Turner and John Garfield in 194640, directed by Tay Garnett. Scripted by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch, and in this film adaptation the filmmakers filter the fright
39 The first film noir inspired by criminal psychology is Blind Alley, directed by Charles Vidor (Borde 19).
40 Before the Hollywood adaptations, there were European directors who had adapted Postman into movies:
Le Dernier tournant in 1939 (dir. Pierre Chenal) and Ossessione in 1942 (dir. Luchino Visconti).
‧
97
of miscegenation out of the original novel. The husband is to be eradicated on account of his impotency in senile age, and Cora’s last name is changed to Smith. In Hollywood mega-star Lana Turner’s interpretation of Cora Smith, the femme fatale becomes a
“radiant and relaxed” bombshell who actually has a “legitimate aspiration” of murder – to
“eliminate an aging husband for a handsome young man” played by volcanically virile John Garfield. In the film, what motivates the couple’s second attempt of murder is the elder husband’s selfish demand of his much younger wife to spend the rest of her remaining youth nursing his dying sister in some secluded town over the border41. Here Cora’s reason of wanting Nick to die seems comparatively justifiable as Turner gives a
“genuine simplicity” to the female character.
On the contrary, Barbara Stanwyck’s performance as the murderess in Double Indemnity is less appreciated for her “perfidious sensuality” while Turner’s femme fatale is relatively “salubrious” as the noirness is made “divine” by “the roundness of a breast and the contour of the buttocks” in Turner’s sensual figure. Irene, the wardrobe supervisor, arranges Turner to dress in white in order to diminish the ominous atmosphere of murder and embellish Turner’s body by the movement of her hip. The launch over the film trailer is captioned with “if you’d known her, you’d have done as he did . . . the crime of passion within everyone’s reach” (Borde and Chaumeton 48-49).
The first encounter between Turner and Garfield (Cora and Frank) in the film is “the falling of a simple lipstick” that “opens and closes the traffic parenthesis.” Here we see an attractive woman in white bikini smearing her lips, totally absorbed within her own reflection in the mirror, and a man comes along and observes her in an awe of her beauty.
Then her lipstick falls unto the ground, and the woman takes it for granted that he will automatically fetch it for her. But he does not. He insists that the lady has to come to him
41 In the original novel, Cora wants Nick to die because she is repulsed by the idea of bearing his mix-blooded child.
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
98
herself for it. This has become a wrestle of power that leads to sex antagonism. In the film, Frank is no longer the first “legitimate” white man chosen by a racist woman who is disgusted by her marriage to a Greek restaurateur for murder. Garfield’s Frank is now a blue-collar hero with magnetic machismo, determined to tame the shrew right at the first sight of this seemingly inaccessible siren. In the film, Cora tries to keep herself in a distance from Frank, who is eager to impress her with his un-usual proletariat intellect.
She has fought to put him off but he is nimble and intuitive to her emotional needs while her own husband is slow and negligent: he even encourages his young pretty wife to dance with Frank while he plays the guitar to amuse them. This plot-deployment has made it easier for the audience to be related to the adulterous couple: the viewer might possibly feel sympathetic over an attractive woman of flesh and blood who is stifled in a marriage with a woodened un-attentive elder man who is incapable to make her happy, unable to even give her the passionate love life she wants.
Billy Wilder hires Raymond Chandler (one of the quintessential writers in hard-boiled crime fictions) to write the movie-script for James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. Cain’s novels have a reputation for looking good on the page but when it comes to the speaking dialogue, they might lose the dynamics of motion and rhythm.
Chandler injects a unique sense of catchy vitality to the film’s dialogues as well as the narration from Walter. The movie begins with Walter telling the audience that “it is a hot afternoon” and he is about to visit some family in Glendale and everything smells like honeysuckle. Then Walter delivers the most famous line: “How do I know sometimes murder smells like honeysuckle?” Moreover, Chandler eliminates the pseudo-romance between Walter and the daughter of his victim and focuses more on the spark between Walter and Phyllis. Phyllis’ last name is changed as Dietrichson in the movie. In Chandler’s version of Double Indemnity, the story is told by a bleeding Walter who confesses his crime to his colleague Keys by a message left over the phonograph of Keys’
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
99
office. Chandler stresses the fraternal bonding between Walter and Barton Keys, and Keys, played by Edward G. Robinson, functions more like the father figure in Wilder’s film. In the film, Walter and Keys constantly show their mutual affection by lighting
cigarettes/cigars for each other.
Director Billy Wilder and the wardrobe supervisor Edith Head (famous for her costumes for the Alfred Hitchcock blondes and Audrey Hepburn in the fifties) want Barbara Stanwyck to look as cheesy as possible, as Wilder remarks: “I want her to look like the phoniest person on the inside.” Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson is now wearing a flamboyant blonde wig with fringes over her forehead, and in Stanwyck’s performance, Phyllis does not act like a demure lady depressed in white, oozing a feeling of school girl shyness with the freckles against her pale skin. In the film, Phyllis is no longer frail but an earthly self-assured harpy-like woman who unapologetically demands the man to kill for her. She wears sun-glasses in the drug store and she wears big flashy emerald ring over her finger to showcase her state of material affluence. Phyllis is no longer Death incarnate, and the air of feminine abjection in the original novel is lessened to a great degree. In addition to the emerald ring, Stanwyck’s Phyllis also wears an anklet with her name inscribed on it so she can be as vulgar and coarse as Wilder thinks she should be.
Chandler’s interpretation of Double Indemnity centers more upon Barton Keys as the surrogate detective vigilante who is determined to do justice by exposing phony insurance cases. Chandler dilutes the grotesque element in the novel by turning Phyllis into a strong, self-sufficient woman driven by greed rather than a singular case of mystery in Cain’s original novel42. Chandler makes the story more dynamic by putting more explosive actions and less emotional exclamations, and Chandler has Walter shoot Phyllis in their last embrace43 so the story becomes more male-dominated as a result. Wilder subverts
42 In Cain’s description of Phyllis in the original book, Phyllis is in love with Death and she claims she simply finds it beautiful when people die.
43 In Phyllis’ last scene within the movie, she asks Walter to hold her tight and she tells that she’s never
‧
100
the original novel by casting a sunny, cheerfully hunky Fred MacMurray who emanates a smooth charm as Walter Neff to build a greater contrast: sex and murder happen right under the sun-drenched southern California with its smiling, healthy-looking, beautiful people. The film ends with Keys telling Walter that he loves him, too, when he lights a cigarette for Walter for the last time.
Hollywood has transformed Cain’s literary creations into something else, and the modifications on the appearance of Cain’s femmes fatales flatten the depth and reduce the complexity in the original characters. The abjectified sense of doom is relatively diluted in the films than in the novels: Cora is no longer an ethnic fundamentalist who has a love for rough sex44 but a classy blonde siren who actually acts like a lady; Phyllis loses the air of girlish timidity and the touch of glamour, and she is no longer a dreadful Death in human form but a sleazy, strong-willed woman motivated by her desire for wealth and sexual attention45. Hollywood sanitizes the gloom and penchant for Death/Thanatos in noir but leans toward the side of Libido/Eros in the adulterous couples. Together, the film crew and the cast had created the culturally approved socio-semiotic bodies for the femmes fatales.
Bodies as the Sign-Vehicles
Film noir is the American myth created by Hollywood filmmakers ever since the heyday of crime fiction and crime thrillers. According to Roland Barthes, “myth is conveyed through a discourse” that utters the messages mapped by the culture (107). In
loved anyone or cared for anyone, she’s rotten to the core, but something happened to her when she is unable to fire the second shot at him, When Walter holds her for the last time, he kills her and returns to Keys’ office to make a confession by the phonograph message.
44 In the novel, Cora enjoys being bitten on the lips until she bleeds and she likes to have her clothes violently ripped off by Frank. Sex right beside a corpse does not disturb her but enhance the excitement.
45 Some critics nowadays assert that Barbara Stanwyck, for her performance as Phyllis Dietrichson, has become a feminist icon because her Phyllis expresses a strong sense of determination in the female
character which was never seen before her. Also, unlike Rita Hayworth in Gilda and Lana Turner, Stanwyck was not exactly a phenomenal beauty and what distinguishes Stamwyck is the strength in her character.
‧
101
modern time, myth takes the forms of “language, discourse and speech” in order to have various “verbal or visual” types of “significant unit or synthesis” (109). There are three parts in the making of modern-day myth: the sign, the signified, and the signifier. Barthes’
notable example would be a black solider saluting to the French flag on the cover of Paris Match. This image signifies French imperialism while the personality and the cultural history of the black soldier are severely overlooked to patronize a mainstream discourse (110-11) Meaning is sufficed into the sign while the signifier is hollowed for the making of the myth as “there is a presence of the signified through the signifier” (115).
Just like the black soldier on the cover of Paris Match, the bodies of mega-stars like Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck are also used to rationalize the dominant ideology.
According to Freud, the concept “distorts the manifest meaning of behavior” while taking shape in form, so it is the form that enables the meaning to exist. There are two types of signifiers in Barthes’ idea on modern-day myth: the full signifier filled with meaning and the empty signifier reigned by form (Barthes 121). The result would be a myth built upon a wide variety of forms that are “frozen, purified, eternalized, and made absent” (122-23).
In short, the primary attribute of myth is “to transform meaning into form” (131).
Hollywood films are fabricating contemporary myths to create the form of cultural consensus that formulizes the spectrum of meanings.
Meaning is made by negotiation in the situation where signs are built as “the form of power” that “shapes what an object represents and what others may make it represent.”
Bodies can be a vessel that delivers the socially negotiated meanings – “the socio-semiotic and sociocultural factors involved in the use of this ideological construction” (Owens and Besistle 201). Bodies as the sign-vehicles of culture have carried the weights of stigma and they have become culturally/socially spoiled identities in need of urgent management.
The “discursive formation” of the socially/culturally marginalized body conjures a
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
102
“liminal socio-semiotic space,” and this is “the pollution discourse” that renders the fear of “miscegenation” in the realm of “fascination, exaggeration, horror and taboo.” Nick Padapakis – the Greek husband of Cora in Cain’s original novel is the sign-vehicle of the racially contaminated body as the “hostility toward interracial relationships hinges on constructions of racial and cultural differences as absolute and of families and
communities as monoracial and monocultural” (Owens 202). What Cora in the original novel craves for is just a monoracial/monocultural American heritage without any hybridity involved, and she is willing to kill for this twisted sense of racial purity. Here
“bodies are framed within existent ideological discursive formations forged under
unequal and unjust social circumstances” and they become “subject to a colonizing gaze”
(Rambo 213). Meanwhile, the bodies of Cain’s two dominant female characters Cora and Phyllis are also transformed into sign-vehicles – the forms of femininity in the cultural routine of film noir.
The phenomenal presences of Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck have set up the forms of femininity as Hollywood wardrobe supervisors like Irene and Edith Head accentuate their sensual attributes while the fluorescent light of black and white
photography gives them an ethereal aura of mechanical divinity on the silver screen. The sacredness of feminine beauty is dialectically contradicted by the profanity of sex and murder. There are two polarities of socio-semiotic bodies that “reinforce” and contain the female bodies into the discourse of social norm: “deviance/pathology” and
“exploitation/liberation” polarities (Rambo 214-16). Female bodies are deliberately sexualized to be sold as commodities, and in case of film actresses, their bodies are spectacularized to be visually consumed by the audience. Here the hyper-feminine flesh is
“invested with symbolic meaning and symbolic value – use-value, sign-value,
exchange-value, and sign exchange value – through the functioning of discursive order”
(215). Women in film noir often trade their bodies, their sex for money and power as “the
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
‧
國
立 政 治 大 學
‧
N a tio na
l C h engchi U ni ve rs it y
103
concomitant use/sign value in an exchange” (215).
The mixture of Eros and Thanatos is a representation of “pathologized and
problemized” sexuality to render “a culture in which sex is defined in terms of dominance and submission “ (217), and Hollywood helps to mode the social stereotypes of deviance that “closely resemble those that appear in popular culture.” The images of Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck have founded the signs of feminine allure according to the public perception of femmes fatales, and their shared attributes are their trademark blonde hair,
problemized” sexuality to render “a culture in which sex is defined in terms of dominance and submission “ (217), and Hollywood helps to mode the social stereotypes of deviance that “closely resemble those that appear in popular culture.” The images of Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck have founded the signs of feminine allure according to the public perception of femmes fatales, and their shared attributes are their trademark blonde hair,