John Berger in Ways of Seeing says that “man acts while woman appears” to how man and woman differentiates in perceiving him/herself in the act of seeing. According to Berger, man’s presence relies on “his capability to do things” to others while woman’s presence mainly comes from “her attitude toward herself” with the understanding that
“things can be done to her.” Quite often, man’s perception of woman is based on “her physical emanation” such as her aura and smell, and woman has been taught since childhood to watch and survey herself while man is encouraged to survey woman.
Therefore woman is both “the surveyor and the surveyed” of herself and she is perfectly
‧
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
180
aware that how others perceive her determines how she will be treated by others89 (46-47). The concept of femininity can therefore be a “calculated charm” and the
surveyed feminine woman can be posing nude while “imagining man looking at her and offering her femininity to be surveyed” (55).
Applying Berger’s ways of seeing to the gender-relationship in American hardboiled crime fiction, the femme fatale often appears nude without being actually “naked” (being naked, for Berger, is “without disguise”), and the women in these literary texts are often disembodied to conjure up a self-conflicted emotion of love and hate in men, like Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by The Bachelors in 1912. Mildred Haveland, the
murderess in Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake, has killed several people in a row by using her many disguises. As Mildred runs out of masks to wear, she has to suffer a cruel form of retribution – she is sexually violated and brutally killed (raped and strangled to death) by the man who has loved/hated her most, her divorced husband Lieutenant Degarmo. On the other hand, Velma in Farewell, My Lovely shoots a man who has loved her for eight years and then kills herself when she can no longer be “nude” without being “naked.”
Laura Hunt in Vera Caspary’s novel has aroused great passion in all men but the love she can inspire often leads to hate, a hatred that is strong enough to deform her. Woman in the noir world then, can only be nude without being naked. Once she is stripped naked she meets her horrid death, just like the vivisected body of the Black Dahlia, which harshly allegorizes woman’s “naked” body in the form of a “noir” scene or presentation.
In Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony,” the law is practiced through a torturing machine that penetrates the prisoners with needles fixed in glass. However, Kafka’s story ends with the official integrating himself into this killing machine, for he chooses to perish along with the bureaucratic system he belongs to. According to Tamsin E Lorraine,
89 In Berger’s words, “every woman’s presence regulates what is and is not ‘permissible’” while “her action is only read as an expression of her emotion” (47). In brief, man expresses himself through his words while woman expresses herself through her body.
‧
181
Kafka’s bachelor chooses to abolish his “oedipal molar identity”90 by disintegrating (or deterritorializing) himself within this celibate machine of “In the Penal Colony.” As his body is torn into bits and pieces, Kafka’s man becomes a newly embodied “molecular becoming” – an aggregation of his partial objects (Lorrain 180). The images of women (the femmes fatales) are embedded into this Kafkaesque celibate machine that invites both
“repulsion and attraction” in men (Bogue 68). Thus this celibate machine manufactures the images of violence through the flesh of women.
Carrouge brings out the “analogous mechanical relations” in Kafka’s celibate machine, which he calls “the Gordian knot of the interferences” between “machinism, terror,
eroticism and religion (or anti-religion),” in which all the hierarchies and values are broken down to give “a pleasure one can qualify as autoerotic or rather automatic”
(Deleuze and Guttari 18-25). This torture apparatus of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”
utilizes the “victim-machine circuit”: desire is “distributed” through the protagonist’s intense “auto-affection” or self-pleasure. In this automatic self-destruction, self as becoming is “engendered” from within the brutally torn flesh (Bogue 73). In short, this machine inflicts pain in order to create pleasure.
In Cain’s Double Indemnity, the body of Mr. Nirdlinger (the murder victim) is laid upon the railway track, and as Nirdlinger’s body is destroyed, Walter and Phyllis
passionately embrace, thus signaling the close link between passion and murder, sex and death. Similarly, Frank and Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice make love beside the dead husband’s body after the car crash, while the death of Nick Paradakis intensifies their erotic desire for each other. In Cain’s novels, in effect, the murderous couple places the husband’s body within the celibate machine as killing machine, enthralled by the dissolution of his innocent flesh. However, murder is like a one-way train and the last
90 “Oedipal molar identity” means the sense of self that is built in binary oppositions, for instance, man or woman, black or white, good or bad; “anti-oedipal molecular identities” refers to a hybrid state that contains many diverse attributes simultaneously without binary oppositions.
‧
182
stop is Death; the victimizers, sooner or later, have to put themselves into this machine in order to fully consummate their pleasure-in-death (jouissance).
Furthermore, the life of vigilante detectives like Philip Marlowe, Continental Op or Sam Spade is a long-suffering resistance against this celibate machine. They watch as desire spreads over the entire social body, including themselves, like a disease while living in fear of contamination. The detective has to remain celibate in order to flee from the death signaled by both the killers and the femmes fatales; he opts not to fulfill his deepest, darkest desire as if this were for him a form of celibacy. Thus by submitting to a law he has no faith in, he meets his emotional or spiritual death within the celibate
machine, and in this way avoids becoming “blood-simple.” The vigilante stands aside and quietly witnesses how others’ bodies get dissolved by the celibate machine while
gangsters like Little Caesar are subsumed within this machine when the art of self-preservation fails to safeguard him.
3. Bodies without Organs, Crimes Novels, Crime Films
As Deleuze and Guattari note, “capital is indeed a body without organs . . . not only the fluid and purified substance of money . . . it produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduces itself” (Deleuze and Guattari 10). Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus propose the idea of a Body without Organs (BwO (Body without Organs) is an assemblage of numerous things or fragments of things gathered in a single text. BwO can be a state of heterogeneous multiplicity or a pure condition of cultural hybridity without any specific form. Also, BwO is a desiring production that shatters the
Mommy-Daddy-Me triangle within the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the context of American hardboiled crime fiction, the bodies of vigilantes, the victimizers and 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
183
victims are split into the normadic agents of “pure multiplicities”91 by sex and violence so the human fleshes can be turned into the capital flows within the literary texts to be consumed by the readers during the Great Depression. BwO is not a revolutionary overthrow of the existent but an accelerated process of
deterritorialization/reterritorialization, in order to contribute to an auto-organism of immanent pleasure.
As we know, the American hardboiled crime fiction of the Great Depression became the basis for film noir during the nineteen forties. However, once hardboiled crime stories are adapted into films, they become a BwO in any-space-whatevers while the films’ image-bodies create a tactile dimension through the presence of the (albeit virtual or projected) corporeal bodies of the actors. That is to say, through the
performative affects of the films, emotions are dissolved, becoming no longer “culturally coded expressions” but pure affects in “a constant flux” which are now to be transmitted internationally (Rio 7-10).
In fact, this loss of emotional bearing in film noir has become so pervasive that it has had a great impact upon certain European filmmakers, who have produced their own kind of film noir precisely to embody or express this unique and originally American cultural syndrome (Vincendeau). Thus for example we have Alain Delon’s La Samourai (196792), which also gives us the ultra-individualist force of anarchy as it challenges and
deterritorializes a rigid, territorialized governmental power.
In this way American hardboiled crime fiction and American film noir has lost its ideological connotations and become something universally appreciated by all. That is to
91 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze explains, “[M]ultiplicity must not designate a combination of the many and the one, but rather an organisation belonging to the many as such, which has no need whatsoever of unity in order to form a system. The one and the many are concepts of the understanding which make up the overly loose mesh of a distorted dialectic which proceeds by opposition” (182) In short, “pure
multiplicity” means the hybrid form of identity without binarism.
92 According to Ginette Vincendeau, Jean-Pierre Melville’s La Samourai in 1967 pays homage to American film noir This Gun for Hire in 1942, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.
‧
184
say, the libidinal urges within these American genres, perhaps these American “bodies without organs” have become destabilized, deterritorialized and reterritorialized in another culture.
‧
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
185
Works Cited.
Anthony, Andrew. “James Ellroy: Haunted by his mother’s ghost.” The Guardian.
August 22, 2010. <http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2010/aug/
22/observer-profile-james-ellroy>
Abrams, Jerold J. “From Sherlock Holmes to the Hard-Boiled Detective in Film Noir.”
The Philosophy of Film Noir. Ed. Mark T Conrad. USA: UP of Kentucky, 2007.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. NY: Noonday Press, 1957.
Bataille, George. Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood.
San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.
Bedore, Pamela. Dime Novels and the Roots of American Crime Fiction. UK:
Palgrave McMillan, 2013.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. NY: Verso, 1968.
Bernard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance:
Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West and Mass Culture in 1930s. NY: Cambridge UP, 1995.
Black, George D. Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics and the Movies. UK: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Bono, Edward de. Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.
Bogue, Roland. Deleuze on Literature. NT: Routledge, 2003.
Borde, Ray,pmd amd Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir:
1941-1953. Trans. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002.
Brandt, Keri. “Intelligent Bodies: Embodied Subjectivity Human-Horse Communication.”
‧
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
186
Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body. Eds. Dennis Waskul and Phillip Vannini. UK: Ashgate Publishing,2006.
Bray, Christopher. “One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson – review.”
The Guardian. 2013.
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/28/one-summer-1927-bryson-review>
Burnett, W. R. Little Caesar. NY: First Printing, 1972.
Burrough, Bryan. Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. NY: Penguin Books, 2004.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. NY:
Routledge Classics, 1993.
Brooks, Xan. “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For review – a disreputable but deodorized sequel.” The Guardian. 2014.
<http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/24/sin-city-2-a-dance-to-kill-for-review -rodriguez-miller-rourke-eva-green>
Cahill, Spencer E. “Building Bodily Boundaries: Embodied Enactment and
Experience.” Body/Embodiment: Symbolic Interaction and the Sociology of the Body.
Burlington: Ashgate, 2006.
Cain, James M. The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and Selected Stories. NY: Everyman’s Library, 2003.
Campbell, Duncan. “Black Dahlia killer trail leads to my father, says ex-cop.” The Guardian. April 19, 2003.
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/apr/19/usa.books>
Caspary, Vera. Laura. NY: The Feminine Press, 2005.
Chandler, Raymond. The Lady in the Lake. NY: Random House, 1992.
Chandler, Raymond. Farewell, My Lovely. NY: Random House, 1992.
Conrad. Mark T. “Nietszche and Definition of Noir.” The Philosophy of Film Noir.
‧
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