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Joan Copjec
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Slavoj Zizek, following up remarks made by Lacan in his 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter" ', has noted that one of the differences between classical detection and the hardboiled/noir variety is that in the former the detective accepts money for his services, while in the latter he does not. 30 It is Al Roberts (in Detour), however, who supplies the most revealing reason for the noir protagonist's inability to deal with symbolic currency. Reluctant to accept a ten-dollar tip for his piano-playing, he spits out his definition of money: 'a piece of paper crawling with germs'. What happens, I have tried to argue, is this: the neutral, dead system of symbolic community and exchange that had supported the classical world has given way in film noir to a world that crawls with private enjoyment and thus rots the old networks of communication. Something similar happens to numbers. Where formerly the counting of people, statistics, had estab-lished a network of relations that protected - and protected us from - private enjoyment, film noir allows us to witness the spoiling of this network that takes place when privacy comes to the surface. Seen from Keyes's perspective, statistics enable the discovery of new facts; from Neffs perspective they threaten annihilation since, to him, they represent the existence of other people. And in the noir world, this is the greatest horror.
I describe this situation here not to deplore or criticize it, nor to attempt to resolve the questions of cultural politics that flow from it; it is, for better and for worse, the set of circumstances we in the developed West, and the USA in particular, now inhabit. So it will serve both as the context from which we must think about the meaning and direction of some of the newest mutations in the nair sensibility, and, dialectically, as the subject of that sensibility's reflections back upon us. But before turning to consider those mutations, it may be worthwhile to rehearse briefly those aspects of film noir conceded to be its constitutive features, even by critics who otherwise disagree over where it belongs and what it means. These aspects typically involve a combination of iconographic, stylistic, narrative and thematic features: iconographically they stretch from the dark city streets and lurid jazzy bars to the privatized, alienated space of the car and the modern urban apartment, and down to the close-up level of the cigarette, drink, swanky dress, trenchcoat and slouch hat; stylistically, from the use of voice-over and flashback to expressionistic lighting and decentred and unstable compositions, often in deep space; narratively, they include a new emphasis on deviant psychological motivation, the deviousness and frustrating confusion of the male protagonist's project or quest, and the outright hostility, suspicion and sexual attraction between the often confused and weary male protagonist and the duplicitous, powerful femme fatale (with a good asexual wife-mother figure optionally dead or waiting in the wings) ; and thematically, they consist above all in the 'absurd' existential choice of moral behaviour according to one's own individual ethical code, in a hopelessly dark universe in which more consensual authorities are ineffectual, irrelevant, or corrupt.
In Bakhtinian criticism, the concept of the chronotope provides us with a useful tool for synthesizing and mediating all such features into a common image of a given narrative form, its quintessential phenomenal 'feel'. Vivian Sobchak's, 'Lounge Time: Post-war Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir' usefully reconstructs film noir's chronotope:
The diacritical contrast that structures film noir . . . is between the impersonal, discontinuous rented space of cocktail lounge, nightclub, hotel, and roadside cafe, on the one hand, and the familiar, unfragmented secure space of domesticity on the other. The noir chronotope has no room for children or for rituals of family continuity: 'no weddings, no births, no natural deaths, no family intimacy and connection can be eventful here.' Even leisure is more suffered than enjoyed in the 'lounge-time' of the shadowed space of film noir. The characters generated by this chronotope are transient, without roots or occupation, in a world where murder is more natural than death. The chronotope of film noir . . . perversely celebrates the repressed hysteria of a postwar cultural moment when domestic and economic coherence were fractured, spatializing and concretizing a 'freedom' at once attractive, frightening, and ultimately illusory.
Terminator 2 thus not only reconstructs the fallen public world and queasy temporality of classic film noir but also constructs them together in the form of an apocalypse that has, in effect, already occurred. Like Walter Benjamin's once-scandalous Angel of History, the film's chronotope offers us a perspective from which modernity appears less a 'chain of events' than 'one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon, wreckage, and hurls it in front of [our] feet', a 'storm' that is 'what we call progress Yet the very incongruity of such a rhyme between the ruminations of a Marxistmodernist intellectual in Europe at the end of the 1930s and a contemporary Hollywood blockbuster film raises its own set of questions concerning what 'conditions of possibility' must have been met before such a view could become mainstream. What preconditions must be met before a mass audience can find such an anti-progressive perspective pleasurable, can 'want to believe this', as Leo Braudy says of the rise and fall of generic perspectives in general; and what consequences follow from Terminator 2's particular channellings of that desire?
Fredric Jameson suggests that the predominance of dystopic visions in contemporary science fiction signals the general loss of our ability even to conceive of, much less struggle to enact, a utopian social vision, trapped as we are within both an imperialist nation in decline and the overheated 'perpetual present' of postmodernist culture. 16 And much of Terminator 2 , with its timed bursts of violence merged with state-of-the-art special effects, offers itself up to such an interpretive hypothesis as Exhibit A. (Call to reception theorists: how many in the American audience recognized in the evil cybernetic techno-war depicted in Terminator 2's opening post-apocalyptic sequence an image of a hysterically celebrated Gulf War just past, in which 'our' machines mowed down their human bodies, as the saying goes, 'like fish in a tank'? And what were the effects of this surely unintentional echo?) Yet here again, like a good blockbuster, Terminator 2 also invites us to critique the violence it presents, and quite explicitly, in Sarah's diatribe to scientist Dyson. 'Men like you built the hydrogen bomb,' she roars. 'Men like you thought it up . . . . You don't know what it's like to create something.' It is a speech that might have been drawn from, or at least inspired by, the works of such essentialist critics of male instrumental rationality as Susan Griffin, or such proponents of a maternalist-based women's peace movement as Sarah Ruddick or Helen Caldecott; and it is there for the taking, not instead of but right along with the violence it decries.
This is not the place to launch a full historical-genetic investigation of the anti-political, anti-institutional tendency within American culture. Yet it seems clear that one effect of the terrible defeats dealt out here throughout the 1980s to every potentially progressive constituency has been to deepen widely held libertarian-individualist suspicions that no structural or institutional transformations for the better are possible, that nothing political can be done. Such an increased and self-confirming hopelessness has, I think, had much to do with the putatively radical theory we have produced over the past decade. What is most absent from the present moment of confusion and dejection all along the left, and most necessary for its redemption, is the confidence that individuals can come together in collective action to transform societies structurally and institutionally for the better. In this respect, the rebelling/conserving schizophrenia of radical theory is at one with the pleasures of the rebelling-but-conserving cinematic texts we have examined: both being not so much about that absence of confidence as presupposing it, and offering us pleasures that can only appear within an asocial kingdom from which such confidence must have been banished a long time ago.
The more general form or methodological implication of this same point might run as follows. If the political events and theoretical critiques of the past decade or so have inoculated us - feminists, people of colour, gays and lesbians, 'post-Marxist' socialists, all of us - against any low-grade Hegelian fever and its chief associated symptom, the chronic assumption of a progressive dialectic chugging away somewhere, anywhere in the social universe, they ought not to blind us to the various non teleological ways in which social desires and social realities continue to work themselves out dialectically nor to our responsibility to do what we can to make those dialectics utopian again. It is in the service of precisely such insights and responsibilities that Aujhebung, that corny old concept of 'cancelled yet preserved in a higher synthesis', must itself be cancelled as a natural endowment of any group , or tendency of any social force - yet preserved, at least as the possibility that radical practice can connect with socially constructed desire in such a way as to make a difference. Otherwise, whatever the principal locus of its engagement may be, radical social and cultural theory is all too likely to be condemned to an interminable shuttling quite similar to that we have seen in our two films, between the thrilling sublime of one or another form of 'permanent revolution' and the desperate catch-up of attempting to restore and strengthen old identities and game rules feared lost.
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Following a logic that is something more than historical coincidence, the current Technicolor film noir renaissance (Public Eye, The Two Jakes, even Barton Fink, etcetera) occurs exactly as the interior space of classic ( 1 945-55) films noirs is being excised from the American city. All but gone is the kind of hotel room in which Philip Marlowe once regained consciousness - the torn window shade, the single bare lightbulb hanging from a twisted wire, the iron bedstead, the water pitcher and basin used for shaving. There are no longer blocks of poor-but-respectable families living in faded tenements for the hero to wander through, looking for some undefined thing that he will recognize on first sight. There are no more characteristically appropriate offices for the hard-boiled detective; and no more by-the-week rooms for the femme fatale to rent, no questions asked.
Whilst the disappearance of the actual spaces offilm noir has been highly consequential for those forced into homelessness, it has not presented a problem to the makers of revivalist films noirs, who can reconstruct virtual gritty reality in the form of film sets. Now we have a fictional recuperation of the proletarian city just as the actual proletarian space is historically lost. This double movement, to the extent that it shapes the theoretical unconscious, stymies understanding of the homeless situation. Who could possibly want to save this abject, filthy, dangerous space, except as a kind of fictional forbidden territory habitable only by heroes, villains and fools? This space was created to serve as a place from which to flee, or to enter only as a matter of courage beyond reason. With jails, asylums, old folks' and foundling homes, charity hospitals and the like, this space defines the imaginary boundaries of urban misery. Yet the fact remains that the abject interior spaces of film noir, originally a nostalgic bourgeois phantasm of gamey or 'real' subproletarian existence, could, if preserved, serve as a sheltering haven for the homeless.