PINPOINTING TYPES OF FEMALE CHARACTERS IN THE "TOUGH-TENDER" CONTINUUM

Extremely interesting research opportunities will continue to arise from the use of the Noir-o-Meter™ to examine the narrative and tonal range in film noir. We've been showing some examples of that in a series of posts here, including the most recent one which broke out the "hard-boiled" vs. "melo" orientation of the films being screened in the upcoming Noir City LA series (April 13-22).

Dan Hodges, a leading proponent for the revised examination of the narrative interrelationships in film noir (most notably in his trenchant, polemical "Against the Hard-Boiled Paradigm"), has engaged with a portion of the "noir elements" approach. Responding to the most recent blog entry here via its incorporation at the Blackboard, Dan notes the ratio of "women in distress" (WID) vs. "femmes fatales" (FF) in the upcoming Noir City series, showing that even the small sample size (19 films) produces a result that tends to confirm his claim that "femmes fatales," along with "hard-boiled detectives" are much more of a minority presence in films noir.

We're not at all surprised to see this, of course, and it would be interesting for Dan to apply his breakouts of WID and FF to the greater subset of films noirs shown at Noir City SF, where we anticipate similar results.

Here, however, our most useful followup exercise is to follow Dan's initial statement in his post, where he suggests a possible typological correlation between the type of female characters prominent in individual films noir (WID or FF) and the subtype of those noirs themselves (as measured by our "tough-tender index" and displayed in our recent charts).

We do this by adding a color code to those films in the NC series where Dan has identified the presence of WIDs and FFs. The question is whether the films, once identified in this fashion, will conform to the "spatial location" in the chart (a pictorial representation of a kind of "noir narrative continuum") with respect to the "hard-boiled" and "melodrama" regions we see depicted there.

When we do this, we do see such a tacit correlation, albeit with some overlap, as the color-coded version of the chart indicates:

Color key for the chart is as follows: green for Femme Fatale (FF); red for Woman in Distress (WID); purple for Homme Fatale (HF); black for the presence of both FF and WID in the same film.

Our "Homme Fatale" film from NC LA 2018 (in the upper portion of the top right quadrant on the chart) is He Walked By Night, a police procedural that portrays the most ruthless of criminals via one of noir's most chilling performances (from Richard Basehart). The more purely criminal a character is, and the less interaction with either society or the opposite sex, the more purely "hard-boiled" a noir is likely to be.

Approaching the other end of the scale (the black data point furthest to the right in the the lower right quadrant) is the film that Dan identified as being one of roughly two dozen noirs that have both FFs and WIDs present in the story. This film is Jealousy, a rare B-film from emigré director Gustav Machaty that depicts a shifting, complicated quadrangle of characters who form a series of mutating triangular relationships. (And remember that we identified the "degree of triangulation" noir element as a means by which the sub-types of noir are separated from one another: the more triangulation of characters, the more likely the noir is "melo"; conversely, the least amount of emphasis on triangulation is present, the more likely the film is "hard-boiled.)

In the in-between, we're not surprised to see some overlap in films with WIDs or FFs, because the noir elements overlap in many differing combinations and these impulses are capable of mixing. However, note that we do see a distinct visual trend even amidst the presence of an overlap--the WIDs, even in this small sample, do move toward the "melo" region, while the FF's move toward the "hard-boiled" region.

Using larger data samples, of course, is the next step for such a visualization effort. We're highly confident that this trend will be confirmed once that's undertaken. We are also asking Dan to supply his list of the films where both WIDs and FFs are present, so that we might map their location on such a chart. Our current theory is that the greater presence of women--even those of such competing "types" as FFs and WIDs--is likely to create a sub-class of "melo-noirs" that are more focused on female psychology in a world where so much is stacked against them.

Once we have Dan's list, we can test this theory, and report the actual results. Stay tuned!

"TOUGH-TENDER" DISTRIBUTION FOR NC LA 2018

The Noir City LA (they like to call it "Noir City Hollywood") festival schedule for 2018 is out--20 films over ten days. It's more of a kitchen sink approach, looser (and better) than the rather contrived "Noir from A to B" gimmick that the Film Noir Foundation has employed of late.

The films skew into the 50s (thirteen of them were released in 1950 or later, including another Muller-Ellroy noir conjunction built around L.A. Confidential) and present two interesting Paramount titles that the FNF boys have finally turned their attention to after churning out so many mediocrities from Universal--The Turning Point (1952), one of the first (and arguably the best) of the Kefauver "organized crime noirs," and The Scarlet Hour (1956), Michael Curtiz' quirky remake of Double Indemnity, where the difference in tone and attitude between the 40s and 50s noir is summed up perfectly by the character played by Elaine Stritch.

Better late than never, at any rate. And add to that turn of phrase the fact that the FNF is following in the footsteps of Elliot Lavine and at last screening noirs with some actual social relevance, as evidenced by their Joseph Losey triple bill (The Prowler, M, and The Big Night, all made in 1951).

As noted, this is a bit of a step up from recent efforts, and continues the FNF's retrenchment into American noir.

With the schedule announced, we are once again in the position of being able to graphically present the films on the "hard-boiled to melo" scale that we've been employing in recent posts. We don't think you'll be surprised to see that NC LA 2018 skews toward the hard-boiled side of things:

The films with the high "hard-boiled to melodrama" character element ratios (those in the upper left quadrant of the chart) are He Walked by Night, Kiss Me Deadly, Dragnet, and Armored Car Robbery. The films with a high "MELO RATE" (those in the lower right quadrant) are Jealousy, The Turning Point, and Night Has A Thousand Eyes. The rest of the films in the series are reasonably close to the overall average for these measures, though the graph shows that there is still a significant skew toward the hard-boiled.

The series plays at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood from Friday, April 13 through Sunday, April 22.

HOW DO SPY NOIRS DIFFER FROM "STANDARD" FILM NOIR?

We specialize in loaded questions. But it's one that must be asked and answered, in order to fully demonstrate that the analytical approaches in the Noir-o-Meter™ align with the continuing research that Dan Hodges is conducting regarding a key aspect of film noir's evolution--the rise of the "spy noir."

Using the noir elements, it's possible to make general statements that go beyond Dan's purely narrative approach. (As we will see, the Noir-o-Meter might well help Dan do a more thorough job of discriminating between which spy films are "noir" and which are not--his decision to lump in any and all of the films that contain even a soupçon of noirish visuals might well explain some of the results that we will examined below.)

The charts below show the aggregate values of the noir elements (using the 26-element system as opposed to the still-in-development 27-element system with a reduced value for "flashbacks") for the entire classic noir database (films from US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Scandinavia, Japan, Korea, Mexico and other South American countries). These are raw values--the second chart scales these to the 200-point system to show the range of intensity that these elements possess.

Alongside the overall data are the analogous data values for just over 70 "spy noirs" comprising a large percentage of the films identified in various sources and synthesized into a single group in Dan's research. The side-by-side comparison of these values will show the differences in emphasis and intensity that the Noir-o-Meter detects for "spy noirs" as distinct from the overall set of films in the database:

Note that elements which come from the "hard-boiled" components of noir are shown in blue, while those that come from the "melodrama" understructure are shown in green. The DIFF column is based on a scale where 100 means that the intensity value is exactly equal between noirs as a whole and "spy noirs."

As you can see, the "spy noirs" are, as a group, around 20% less intense than the overall population of films noirs. All elements where "spy noirs" are at least 15% less intense have had the raw "spy noir" values and the DIFF measure put into bold type for ease of reference. 13 of the elements--half of the entire element grouping--are at least 15% less intense. Only three elements--violence relative to character development/interaction; exotic/remote/barren location setting; and a betrayal/double-cross--are more intensely present in "spy noirs" than in noirs as a whole.

Examining these differences by element types is instructive. Given that "spy noirs" have a more rigorously formulaic approach to establishing character, it's not surprising that the intensity of noir attributes as possessed by characters in "spy noirs" is significantly lower. By contrast, there is much less of a difference in the visual elements.

But note that plot/screenwriting elements show the greatest dip in intensity. This is because so many of the early "spy noirs" do not partake of any of the narrative strategies that first developed in melodrama in the late 30s and early 40s (a trend that is traced in David Bordwell's recent book REINVENTING HOLLYWOOD). Later on, these techniques began to be applied to spy noirs as well, but they were "late to the party" in terms of this narrative innovation (and this is reflected in the numbers).

The hard-boiled/melodrama "balance in tension" within film noir is what the Noir-o-Meter succeeds in quantifying for us, and we can see how this relationship differs in "spy noirs" as compared to noir as a whole. The intensity of both element clusters is lower in "spy noirs," but the greatest drop is on the "hard-boiled" side. As a result, "spy noirs" trend toward the "melodrama" understructure by roughly another 10%, focusing more on actions and visuals than on flamboyant manifestations of character. When the "ruthless" character is part of an assumed worldview as manifested in the the "spy noir's" dramatic context, the actions of those characters are less outside the norms of behavior than what we customarily see in film noir as a whole. Hence the "hard-boiled" portrayal of character is diminished.

Thus the hard-boiled to melodrama character element ratio is lower as well, though it is not as pronounced (down to 84 from 89).

Now let's look at the same data expressed in the 200-point system of the Noir-o-Meter. We've color-coded for levels of intensity:

We highlight in bold type the elements which have the greatest drop in intensity in the spy noirs--and, per the discussion above, you can see that it's the elements in the "character" and "plot/screenwriting" element types that have all of these.

The "decriminalization" of the "spy noir" is most evident in the difference seen in the noir element entitled "story told from the perspective of the criminals." Though spies in "spy noirs" often commit acts that in other contexts would be considered criminal in nature, they are seldom treated that way within these films. The suspension of moral rules within this narrative sub-universe gives them a "pass" in this area, even though we don't see characters in spy noirs as any more "morally ambiguous" than the garden-variety noir character.

All in all, "spy noirs" are definitely noir as seen by the Noir-o-Meter, though they are much closer to the 100-point dividing line. This is largely due to the fact that the early "spy noirs" grade lower in many of the elements measured here--the average Noir-o-Meter™raw score for "spy noirs" made up until America's entry into WWII is just over 90. That average rises to 109 for those films made in 1942 and beyond.

DO AMERICAN "WAR NOIRS" TEND TOWARD "MELO"?

One of the theses that Dan Hodges (the indefatigable critic of classic film noir's deceptive "hard-boiled paradigm") has promulgated is that the American noirs made during World War II (particularly those made from 1940-43, before the war effort reached its peak of effectiveness and prospects for Allied victory began to significantly improve) were different in tone and character than those which began to appear in 1944-45 throughout the rest of the decade.

While virtually all noir scholars (including Dan) don't  accept the notion that film noir is not primarily an American phenomenon (Dan is more open to this fact than most, but has wanted to couch this as a function of the rise of "spy noir"), what becomes clear when we apply the analytic tools built into the Noir-o-Meter™is that American noir is significantly less "hard-boiled" in the years 1940-43.

Using the measurement tool we've been applying variously in recent posts--a scatterplot depiction of the degree that characters in noirs skew toward the "hardboiled," measured against the overall "MELO RATE" (using all three element types--character, visual, and plot/screenwriting)--we can see that what Dan used to call the "war noirs" (as discussed in his essay for Film Noir Reader 4) definitely skew to the "melo" side of the chart:

(Recall that films whose scores land in the upper left quadrant are more "hard-boiled," while those that land in the lower right quadrant are more "melo.")

The chart tells us that Dan was indeed onto something, especially when we compare it to the master chart that appeared several posts previously. "War noirs" are rarely "hard-boiled": as a group, they are noticeably different than the films which are made after WWII.

This chart does not include any of the spy noirs that Dan has uncovered in his most recent research. We'll include them in a subsequent presentation, which will deal more specifically with the relationship of "spy noir" to the overall notion of film noir, along with a parallel examination of a significant sub-category from France that Dan (and virtually all other students and scholars of film noir) overlook as they cling to an Anglo-American paradigm for how to define the "essence" of noir.

What is the name of that significant sub-category? According to scholar Colin Crisp, it's called the "provincial gothic." Its application will eventually be seen as pivotal to a more complete structural understanding of how the noir "virus" seeped into the bloodstream of melodrama and ran rampant, with various sub-categories and sub-types taking their turn in the limelight before a coarser, more calcified concept of noir's essence coalesced, coagulating critical appraisals of it almost from the dawn of the attempts to assemble and evaluate its history and significance.

DO FRENCH NOIRS TREND TOWARD "MELO"?

We are getting enough data in the Noir-o-Meter to take a look at this question. And we can do so using the same method we've been using to examine the "spectrum" of film noir (in our previous posts, which do not include the French noirs graphed in the chart below).

The "revisionist" camp (which has to be extremely precise in identifying exactly what it is revising, as there are so many "revisionists" out there...) has one wing which wonders about the hard-boiled, while also (usually to a lesser extent) turning a skeptical eye to the claims of "American exceptionalism" when it comes to film noir.

What if we discovered that the earliest manifestation of film noir, which is (arguably) the French--who begin in the early 30s, as expatriated directors with various flavors of "dark cinema" in their previous work make their way through France and influence the "local talent"--what if we found that these earliest manifestations of noir were by and large much less "hardboiled" in nature? What would that say about the "American brand"? Would we start to see it as something that was influenced by historical and aesthetic conditions unique to it and that it might at last be seen as a kind of aberration to what developed previously and elsewhere?

It's entirely possible that such might need to be the case...at least, the preliminary results from our mapping of "tough vs. tender" as it applies to French noir is concerned. (For this to be fully mapped, of course, we'll need to go past the 60 or so noirs in this initial mapping--we'll need to create the Noir-o-Meter data for all 507 French noirs that we've unearthed to date.)

But the chart below, using the same approach ("Hardboiled vs. melodrama character element ratio mapped against the overall MELO RATE") shows us that French noir looks a lot more like that subset of American noir with high scores in character triangulation--the ones we've taken to calling "melo-noirs." Take a look:

Note that the distribution across the chart is a great deal tighter than what we saw in the American sample. "Hardboiled-to-melo" character element ratios with high "hardboiled" scores are less frequent and not nearly so extreme here, in the French noir universe.

Now there are many, many more French noirs to add to the database, including a number of the "poetic realist" films (which turn out to be just one of three major sub-types of film noir that developed in France during the 1930s). So we can't be totally sure that this distribution is totally accurate...but it's an intriguing indicator of some potentially game-changing perceptions about film noir. Stay tuned!