Current Forum: Session 10: Film Noir and Sexuality	Read 8 times 	
Date: 26-Mar-2001 22:25:23	
Author: THOMPSON, GREGORY J. <gjthomps@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Confidentially... 	
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       L.A. Confidential (Hanson, 1997) presents several key points at which to challenge the definition of film noir. That is to say if any definition can be fully agreed upon. Belton presents 
with and Jeneen and Aaron nicely illuminate the film noir as genre series or mode question. if we are to look at L. A. Confidential through this lens we could begin to see where there are similarities yet simultaneously cracks in the definitions. As genre, the film is set in Los Angeles of the early 1950s poised against the supposedly glamorous life of Hollywood. Certainly see the industrial grittiness of big city life and we also the stock characters that Belton highlights such as the "proletarian, tough guy, anti-heroes ensnared by femme fatales." As Aaron has pointed out however, the film plays upon this expectation and actually presents characters either as incomplete without other characters or it turns character type on its head such as the femme fatale really being a prostitute with a heart of gold who is saved from her "evil" lifestyle. 
       These events would seem to place the film in the series definition in the fact that the film lacks certain institutional elements that would make it a particular genre. This is perhaps most evident in the death of Jack Vincennes. It would seem that it is to he who will be our hero but he is killed very unceremoniously in Smith's kitchen, hardly a hero's death. The audience's expectation that he will be hero and Bud white will be villain is thwarted at this moment and later Bud in fact Bud becomes one half of our noir hero. Finally in terms of noir as mode we are left with an easy feeling about the movement of the film. This is achieved in multiple ways, not the least which are the constant shifts in plot the 
continually force the viewer to shift allegiances. 
       It is in the realm of the aesthetic qualities of noir that the film seems to have its greatest difficulty in maintaining the noir label. As Nick states, the film is collection, or pastiche of many elements, that might have previously been part of noir but now come across homage rather than genre. The "city" feel that many noir films embraced is lacking from the film, although Los Angles was a "big city," and as the police chief calls LA "the city of the future." It doesn't have the mean streets feel or crampedness of a New York or Chicago or even the down on your luck feel of Dashiell Hammett via John Huston's seedier side of San Francisco in the Maltese Falcon (1941). In some ways it is noir for the suburbs. There is an emptiness to these city streets that don't make them feel dangerous to the viewer they are merely spaces in which action takes place. Finally if film noir is literally "black film" then it would seem that aesthetically there should be darkness and shadows, large parts of this film however occur in daylight and those moments that are either at night or in darkness are well lit. A moment that comes to mind is the death of Jack a potentially classic noir moment well lit. (Again I will give credit to playing against the type, Jack's death came as greater surprise in this lighting.)