Current Forum: Session 10: Film Noir and Sexuality	Read 5 times 	
Date: 26-Mar-2001 23:57:56	
Author: WARNER, JENNIE E. <jew3484@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Not noir 	
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       LA Confidential is not a film noir, but it is a gangster/romance flick that envies Reservoir Dogs for having Quentin Tarantino for a papa. LA Confidential, having arrived in the wake of hit 
Tarantino films such as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, attempts, with its drugs, sex, and gangster violence, to be as gritty as a Tarantino film, but lacks that twisted Tarantino charm and wit. LA Confidential does have quite a bit of graphic scenes involving violence and sex like that of a Tarantino film, and this, according to Belton, would put those films out of the noir category (204). (Thus, I am not considering any of the above mentioned films to be noir.) In his discussion of The Big Sleep (1978), Belton says, “…its graphicness dooms it as a film noir” (204).
       Furthermore, Belton describes a film noir as creating “an uncomfortable and disturbing malaise or anxiety in their viewers” (200). Noir films accomplish this affect through a combination of cinemagraphic techniques; such as low-key lighting, wide-angle lenses, and extreme camera angles; and by dealing with psychological/existential issues including the “choice between being and nothingness” and feelings of alienation in contemporary urban life (201). 
       I propose that LA Confidential does not create an uneasy feeling through the conventions as laid out by Belton. Any confusion and disorientation caused by LA Confidential is the result of 
the unclear way in which the story is played out before the camera. In other words, the dialogue is not as informative as it could be and scenes seem to go by briskly and leave you scratching your head wondering, “why was the young actor guy dragged out of the house with the topless blonde woman?” The story is full of back-stabbing and double-dealing, which makes it complicated, but it seems that there could have been a way to make the various twists and turns in the plot a bit more intelligible for the viewer. 
       The violence in LA Confidential is enough to make anyone uneasy, especially the scene where the police beat the Mexicans, but, again, this is not necessarily the flavor of uneasiness 
supposedly caused by film noir. The film is set in the late 40’s/ early 50’s and has a mysterious, sexy, and glamorous woman, but these elements alone do not constitute a film noir. According to Paul Schrader the film cannot be a noir because it was not made between 1941 and 1958 (201). One of the main characters, Budd White, ends up driving away with the Veronica Lake look-alike in a kind of “happily ever after” motif; this is also not noir. Belton says that a characteristic of noir is that a “hero’s moral fallibility leads to his…death or in an otherwise unhappy ending” (200). However, even though Belton also says that a film needs only “a single character, situation, or scene that is noir,” I think this film lacks the psychological depth to truly be a film noir (201).