Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy

Page-Barbour Lectures

by Robert B. Pippin

The crime melodramas of the 1940s known now as film noir shared many formal and thematic elements, from unusual camera angles and lighting to moral ambiguity and femmes fatales. In this book Robert Pippin argues that many of these films also raise distinctly philosophical questions. Where most Hollywood films of that era featured reflective individuals living with purpose, taking action and effecting desired consequences, the typical noir protagonist deliberates and plans, only to be confronted by the irrelevance of such deliberation and by results that contrast sharply, often tragically, with his or her intentions or true commitments. Pippin shows how this terrible disconnect sheds light on one of the central issues in modern philosophy--the nature of human agency. How do we distinguish what people do from what merely happens to them? Looking at several film noirs--including close readings of three classics of the genre, Fritz Lang's "Scarlet Street, " Orson Welles's "The Lady from Shanghai, " and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past--Pippin reveals the ways in which these works explore the declining credibility of individuals as causal centers of agency, and how we live with the acknowledgment of such limitations.

Genres: Film, Philosophy, Criticism

152 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2012

About the author

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy, including Kant's Theory of Form; Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. In addition he has published on issues in political philosophy, theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom. He also wrote a book about literature and philosophy: Henry James and Modern Moral Life. A collection of his essays in German, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, appeared in 2005, as did The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, and his book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche, moraliste français: La conception nietzschéenne d'une psychologie philosophique, appeared in 2006. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy appeared in 2012. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is also a member of the German National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[Nat]

I watched a lot of movies in grad school. I had to watch a lot just to try to keep up with everyone else in the philosophy department, both grad students and faculty, who had an overwhelming knowledge of movies. It was presupposed that you were familiar with the Cavell remarriage comedies (we watched the Philadelphia Story A LOT) and the Melodramas of the Unknown Woman (I avoided most of those--but I saw Now, Voyager in Paris and it was weirdly intense). Zed organized a screening of North by Northwest with special guest commentator Ted Cohen. I went to screenings for a class on Ophuls that Miriam Hansen taught, I watched all the Westerns that Pippin screened in Doc Films that led to his Westerns book, and I watched both The Lady from Shanghai and Out of the Past in the big lecture theater in the Social Science building at Chicago when Pippin was screening them for this book. I think Jay loaned me his copy of Scarlet Street. Doc Films had incredible series that ran all the time--the best being the Michael Mann series that ran in my 8th and final year (saw Thief, The Keep, and Heat all on the big screen). A bunch of us saw Errol Morris present The Fog of War at Doc after showing a bunch of his Miller High Life commercials. I saw Thom Andersen present all 3 hours of Los Angeles Plays Itself. Melody and I endured two hours of Tom, Tom the Piper's Son, which is mostly just extreme close ups of frames from a silent film, so you have no idea what you're looking at. They showed a bunch of the unwatchable Andy Warhol movies, but I didn't go to those. I got motion sick watching Lady in the Lake in a screening for one of Jim's film and philosophy classes (it's shot all in the "first person", so when the detective gets punched, the fist is right in the camera, etc.).

Reading Pippin's film books reminds me of the fun of going to grad school at Chicago, where everybody seemed to be talking about movies all the time. The chief pleasure, reproduced pretty well in Pippin's discussions in the book, is just having more and more details of a scene, or complexities of the plot that you missed, pointed out to you. I have no idea why that's so enjoyable, but it is. Pippin is a very astute observer and so it's fun just to listen to him describe a scene. For example, in the opening of Out of the Past Pippin points out a bunch of overlapping relations between "seeing" and "hearing" and the truth:

-"(In a conversation at the lunch counter, the nosy waitress, in teasing Jim about the amount of time 'his girl' is spending with Jeff, says she only 'says what she sees', and Jeff asks if she is sure that she doesn't just 'see what she hears'.) The boy tending the gas station is a deaf-mute (and we learn quickly that Jeff alone in the town can understand sign language, can hear by seeing, in other words, instead of what we will learn to suspect people in the town do, see only what they hear)." (p.28).

Plus it's kind of amazing just to listen to Pippin explain the insanely complex plot of The Lady from Shanghai.

[Peter Lindstrom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although Professor Pippin is an astute film observer & critic, this is a book on philosophy, not film criticism. That's a big reason for my three-star rating: while Pippin writes well and clearly, his style is workmanlike & not terribly exciting, though that does mean his ideas come through clearly.

And Pippin's biggest idea is the fatalism of much of America film noir confronts viewers with the fundamental philosophical problems of industrial society. In fact, Pippin asserts these popular films do so as well as the "high art" of Fontane, Tolstoy, James, Musil, Ibsen, Beckett (in any case, I think Pippin is correct in asserting these films and writers do a far better job of presenting fatalism than actual philosophers like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche.)

Naturally Pippin is very selective with in the four principal films he uses as examples and while he can't be faulted for his picks, I am disappointed Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" was not included: the story is certainly fatalistic & includes powerful material like "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state" or "You're just a killer./Partly. I'm a cop."

That said, Pippin's finale, using "Double Indemnity" to examine the nature of good and evil in modern society is powerful stuff: it was it was unsettling as the first time I read Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" & she offered two example reflecting the fatalistic nature of society. The first was an observation that ideally government is supposed to set a moral example but governments are just as capable of breaking laws as people, be it Jim Crow or the Final Solution. Her other example is how moral acts aren't possible without an immoral contrast. Arendt makes her case with how today we praise Denmark from saving its small Jewish population from the death camps during five years of Nazi occupation. But we forget this was only possible because Denmark surrendered just two hours after Germany invaded to preserve their infrastructure & their economy—for the next five years, these Danish resources served the Nazis as they inflicted harm on the rest of Europe.

[Alicia German · Rating 2 out of 5]

I also had to read this for film class but it was better than the first book. I’d give it 2.5 stars.

[Full Stop]

http://www.full-stop.net/2012/08/03/r...

Review by Michael Schapira

Many recent philosophical debates about the locus of human agency have turned on very large issues: for instance, does secularism free up the possibility to be the true authors of our lives, or does the disappearance of religion render our actions more or less meaningless (in any rich sense)?

Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelley’s All Things Shining and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age give a broad diagnosis of this condition and venture two competing answers. Has the reign of the commodity, refined by technology, turned us into bundles of manufactured desires seeking fulfillment? Or should we embrace the new opportunities technology affords us in a “post-human” age? Both sides of this debate significantly broaden the more technical question of how we understand the actions of others and ourselves, adding to it a complicating historical component, giving the question an added gravity.

In two recent books Robert Pippin has offered a compelling and unique contribution to this philosophical project through the seemingly modest path of examining two genres that flourished in mid-20th century American film: the Western and film noir. “Westerns,” Pippin writes in Fatalism in American Film Noir, “adopt a mythic style of narration appropriate to founding narratives, presenting us with questions about the possibility of law, often the question of the psychological possibility of allegiance to law, in prelaw situations.” Noirs on the other hand “concern something like ‘the other side’ of the mythological coin, human life under conditions of corrupt or decaying or incompetent law, the postlaw world of disillusionment one might say.”

Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2012/08/03/r...

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is more philosophy than film theory, so if you seek the latter you might want to pass on this one. That said, sandwiched between introductory and concluding chapters which take up the philosophic points of agency, are three chapters that analyze in great detail three noir films from the 1940s: Out of the Past, The Lady from Shanghai, and Scarlett Street. Although these three films are analyzed from the perspective of fatalism vs agency - and there are a fair number of purely philosophical arguments put forth - the discussions of the films are exceptional and insightful.

In discussing Out of the Past Pippin makes the point that regardless the philosophical - the metaphysical - arguments calling into question the possibility of human agency, what would it mean to live our lives as if we didn’t have agency? What would that look and feel like? And then he suggests that what noir films - at least the three he analyzes - show is exactly that: lives one could construe as driven by fatalism, but also lives that, depending on the vantage point or the knowledge gained, exhibit agency in the most basic way: by acting.

With regards to The Lady from Shanghai Pippin makes much of the voiceover narration and the problem of unreliable narration in general, and specifically shows that it is the narrator’s self-deception which leads to his diminishment and fatalism. Pippin also reminds that we (and characters) are never just subjects, but also objects. A theme that is picked up in the analysis of Scarlett Street. Even when we think we are directing things we are often unknowingly actors in another’s drama.