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Val Lewton’s Naturalism and Historical Trauma
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Journal Article
Val Lewton’s Naturalism and Historical Trauma
2022
Overview
Off-brand for a studio known for its glossy Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, the epigraph, set against a backdrop of a knight holding aloft a cat pierced by his sword, references respectively a fictitious quotation, book, and author (see figure 1). In the Introduction to a collection titled The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler outlined the overall code and structure of his detective fiction featuring private investigator Philip Marlowe (such as The Big Sleep, 1939; Farewell, My Lovely, 1940; and The Lady in the Lake, 1943): according to Chandler, detective fiction tells of \"a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction\" (vii). \"[D]own these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,\" Chandler concludes, providing a \"quality of redemption\"-or, more properly, a detective functioning as an heroic redeemer-unavailable to the naturalistic sufferers of a modern \"world gone wrong\" (\"The Simple Art of Murder\" 193). Identified as a discrete genre by French critics after its heyday in the 1940s, film noir comprises not only a cinematic style but also themes, plots, and characters located in postwar disillusionment and a loss of confidence in the ability of institutions to restore order in the naturalistic \"mean streets\" of the urban jungle.2 Beginning with the movie version of Double Indemnity (1944), with its moody atmospherics of smoky, shadowed daytime interiors punctuated with strips of lights through Venetian blinds, films noir placed the viewer in the position of the point-of-view character forced to interpret situations in which nothing is as it seems.
Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
