"I Want to Know More About You: On Knowing and Acknowledging in Chinatown"
Essay by Francey Russell
Noir presents a world in which our confidence in human knowledge and knowing is tested under the pressure of certain difficult "realities", not only the reality of human corruptibility and the implications of war (noir is often understood as a uniquely "post-war" phenomenon), but even more intimately and philosophically, noir grapples with the reality of human separ-ateness, the difficulty of knowing an other, and the possibility that in the realm of human relationships knowing, conceived as a matter of gathering information (the detective's or PI's modus operandi), will neither suffice nor satisfy. Following Cavell, we might say that the dissatisfactions of knowledge would be supplemented by acknowledgment, but that such human responsiveness to one another is rarely achieved in the world of noir—which is to say that noir evidences acknowledgment and the need for it primarily through its failure.
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With respect to the general plots of noirs, even after truth has been revealed or a case has been cracked, the morally unstable universe that we are left to live in is a world in which we no longer believe that truth is tethered to the good. In noir, the revelation of truth, when and if it comes, rarely provides redemption; we might say that in this world truth has lost its appeal or efficacy, or that we have been shaken from our fantasy of its power. Even in instances where a relatively good or upstanding character finally ascends to a position of power (The Big Heat, L.A. Confidential), or love wins out (Gilda), the question we are left with is whether moral principles or a love of truth are still meaningful or efficacious (rather than naïve, wilfully blind, risky, or impotent) in the world of film noir.
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Finally, of the highly general claims we can make of the genre, the standard economy of imagery in noir involves a play of space and light that creates an atmosphere of inescapable duplicity and disorientation: dark back alleys, noisy clubs, claustrophobic interiors, blinding police lights, shadows dissecting faces, photographs and mirrors, repetitions and dou-blings. The city becomes a prison, safe and dangerous spaces become indistinguishable, and the human form—primarily the face—is darkened or obscured, compromising our familiarity and confidence as its disfigurement, whether by shadow or more literally, through violent action, intimates a fearsome unknowability.
