Manny Face briefly contemplates some films noir – “In a Lonely Place”, “The Killers”, “Out of the Past”
Listening to Echo & the Bunnymen change in my player from “Heaven Up Here” to “Ocean Rain”, I take a moment from this writing and look over at Tango Baby, to watch her as she sleeps – an angelic vessel at peace carrying my child.
Is there such a thing as the inevitable? Or can we change things, with what had appeared inevitable suddenly becoming unthinkable, looking impossible? We avert a particular course and preserve another. The preserved way, then, and not the changed way, becomes inevitable. But the preserved way changes – doesn’t it? And isn’t the changed way preserved?
And what will happen to the record I’ll have left, once my time is done here? Will my story be erased, as though I had never been here and none of this had ever occurred, or will it be preserved? And preserved in what way? Will people reading it understand what I have said, or what I have tried to say, or will their understanding only be at best an interpretation? And how will other records, both genuine and phony, which come before and after, change mine? And who will judge other records, which surround my record and influence how it is perceived, as being genuine or phony; who will say, ‘This record is legitimate and this one not’; and what are the criteria for deciding?
What does it matter what I think? What will it change? We must live our own lives the best we can. Know what I mean? In my time here, on this Earth, I’ve learned there aren’t that many things that make us happy, but I’ve also come to understand you don’t need that many; that what we are given, without even asking, is enough.
It’s possible one grows happier the more one realizes and comes closer to losing the things that make him happy. And it’s not these things that are lost, for they are always here, always changing form around content that never changes, but it is we who are lost to them, with death, if that is the thing that happens here. It is not something I quite understand.
The player changes from “Ocean Rain” to Propers for The Feast of All Saints by Elizabethan composer William Byrd – “Gaudeamus omnes … Sanctorum omnium”, “Timete Dominum – Venite ad me”, “Iustorum animae”, “Beati mundo corde”; I think of John Smith, whom I believe I have gained as a new friend.
The player changes to The Psychedelic Furs – “Talk Talk Talk”, then “Forever Now”. I think of Jack Step, and of how I can do nothing to help him.
He’s gone to a Kansas diner to deal with his past, and that past is catching up with him in the worst way. He’s all alone. He’s in a way in which nobody can help him. He talks about poison, life’s poison, referencing films noir, a slew of B movies, as poison, like the poison he takes, that Johnnie Walker brings him, the poison he’s returned to, inviting Johnnie to come back to him, to return into his life, asking Johnnie to fill up his sea of sorrow, so Step can drown in it.
Sometimes, as in those films Step talks about, there is a desperation born of deadly sin that turns into an obsession over which we have lost control – whether it’s lust, or greed, or wrath – and that desperation dogs us, follows us, weighs on us and won’t let up, but torments us and drives us – into a trap, a corner, like a rat, committing crimes, like a depraved creature, where it kills us, and if it doesn’t kill us, leaves us dead inside. Crimes committed against others are always committed against ourselves. The sin is our poison, the trap is one of our own making. If the sin is heinous and grave enough, there is no escaping it, there is no absolution or redemption – it follows you to your death, and may even be what kills you.
The films that Jack Step mentions over in The Commix, where he works, or used to work – “The Big Combo”, “Kansas City Confidential”, “The Stranger”, “He Walked by Night” – they end well because, I think, the antagonists’ evil is not the focus, but it is rather the welfare of the people or the societies upon which these antagonists prey.
By contrast, in the films “In a Lonely Place” “The Killers”, and “Out of the Past”, the focus is on individuals who are not necessarily traditional bad guys in the movie sense, with clearly laid-out sinister plans and delusions of grandeur. They are, rather, intense, troubled individuals who, one feels, could have turned out okay, but suffer and perish from the consequences of their own desperate isolation. Somewhere they took a wrong turn – in their minds.
We don’t know and never find out what demon torments and drives Humphrey Bogart in the 1950 “In a Lonely Place”, directed by Nicholas Ray, the “lonely place” of the title being the alienated self – one filled with wrath.
Bogart’s character, Dixon Steele, is a cynical, frustrated Hollywood film writer with a violent temper who has been short on success since before the war. We know he has a history of violent outbreaks with a police record to back it, but we cannot be certain that his lack of success over the last several years was a turn that fate took in his life, making him worse, or if his bad trait, or his inability or unwillingness to control it, drove him down and out of the reach of success.
But he falls in love, and that seems to change everything. Apparently having again found meaning and inspiration in his life, Steele gets feverishly to work on a movie script. But he is under the pressure of a potential murder charge, which he tries to parry with seeming indifference.
Nevertheless, in what looks like a desperate attempt to break out of his cursed life, with the murder charge hanging over his head, his lack of recent success, and his jaded past, he drives the escape plan of his love relationship with an intensity that is nigh sinister. This results in a shattering of the relationship at the very moment the news breaks that the real murderer has confessed, relieving Steele and seemingly clearing his way to happiness. Instead, he is left with no choice but to recede back into an isolation that is worse than the one he had briefly come out of before.
In “The Killers”, a 1946 picture directed by Robert Siodmak, based on the short story of the same name by Ernest Hemingway, and starring Burt Lancaster in his debut role, Lancaster plays a boxer whose career is cut short by a severe hand injury. He then gets involved with a criminal gang largely as the result of falling for a glamorous femme fatale, played by Ava Gardner, who is in with this bad crowd.
Treacherously using his simple-minded lust for her, the glamorous broad lures the former boxer into a double cross in which he is provoked into taking all the loot from a major payroll heist that involved other accomplices and running away with her, but then she takes the money herself and disappears. It turns out she ends up with the heist’s criminal mastermind, the both of them having used the boxer to ultimately come into sole possession of the stolen dough themselves.
For here, the small-time top crook is the real alpha male, the ruthlessly calculating and conniving man in the safety of whose arms and lair the dame can live her good life, the wealth and lifestyle preserved in a badness seemingly left untouched by the law, the badness couched in the untraceable wealth. To cover up his tracks, the boss hires a pair of hit men to kill the former boxer. He has already lost everything – the money, the girl – and now completely alone, forlorn, dejected, depressed, and hunted, he passively, almost indifferently, accepts his fate when he finds out he is about to die.
Greed. Lust.
A man also falls to lust in the 1947 “Out of the Past”, directed by Jacques Tourneur. Played by Robert Mitchum, a tough ex-private investigator gets out of the detective business in New York in exchange for a simpler life in a new place clear across the country in California under a new name and away from his past, but that past catches up to him with a vengeance.
The character played by Mitchum, Jeff Bailey, who is really Jeff Markham trying to live his new life under a new name, brings on himself the trouble that eventually comes out of his past to kill him with a double cross involving a femme fatale he was hired to track down for a big shot gangster but ends up taking her for himself.
In her unblinking, matter-of-fact, unemotional cold-blooded ruthlessness, the woman is beautifully sick, treacherous, and very deadly. What’s worse, her deadliness is so transparent it is all but predictable, and yet, no one seems able to see it – hypnotized by her spell, lured by her deviousness, seduced by her deception, transfixed by her danger. Jeff Markham sees it, but when he finally tries working against it, it turns out to be too late.
She kills Markham’s former partner, who finds them and tries to blackmail the couple, threatening to tell the big shot about them if they don’t pony up. Then she leaves Markham with the dead body and goes back to the big shot. When Markham shows up, she tries getting him killed, but failing that, instead kills the big shot, who has already tried to hang yet another murder on Markham in a frame-up to get him back for having doubled crossed him and stolen the dame. That makes three murders he didn’t commit that can be hung on Markham.
By now the dame has woven Markham inextricably into the web of her existence through blackmail, able to hang raps for murders on him unless he joins his life with hers. Having failed to kill Markham once using an executioner she sent to get Markham but who ended up killed himself, perhaps Markham and this dame are truly a match for each other and belong together. But Markham wants no part of her. He wants out and back to a wholesome, honest girl he’s met, fallen in love with and was planning to marry. When he sets the bad dame up in a double cross that’s meant to kill her and, with any luck, free him from his sordid past into the clear to pursue his new life, his luck runs out – although dying herself, she kills him.
Another Elizabethan composer turns in my player; John Dowland and his “Lachrimae”, or “Seaven Teares” – “Lachrimae Antiquae”, “Lachrimae Antiquae Novae”, “Lachrimae Gementes”, “Lachrimae Tristes”, “Lachrimae Coactae”, “Lachrimae Amantis”, “Lachrimae Verae”.
Sweet bliss that draws on heavenly delight. Know what I mean?
Manny Face, May 4, 2014