I mentioned this essay by Will Straw in my "Truly Obscure" piece on New Orleans noir director John Sledge. I initially encountered a few paragraphs of it online and then through interlibrary loan obtained the collection of essays that includes it, The Cinematic City edited by David Clarke. The entire essay proves to be not only well worth reading, but one of the best articles on late noir I've encountered anywhere (and the rest of the book looks like it will be interesting, too).
The essay is a little afflicted by Academic Speak, such as "What marks this intertextual space, in part, is the proliferation of urban sites which films, magazine articles and expose books will posit as centers of vice and corruption to be exposed" -- the use of lazy, cliche locutions such as "intertextual space," "sites," and "posit" (as well as other usual suspects such as "discourse," "reconfigured," "cultural field," etc.) can only be deplored by anyone who cares about good writing. The use of the reigning humanities house style is especially to be regretted when, as in Mr. Straw's case, the research is excellent and the insights are sharp (and the writing not bad when it doesn't stoop to jargon). So I recommend overlooking the style as much as one can and instead getting down to the meat of the essay, which vigorously surveys the relation of expose films, often with city names in the titles, to the confidential magazines of the era, the Kefauver Commission vice hearings, and the increasing generic importance of the figure of the "rogue cop" (in which novelist William P. McGivern was a specialist).
Straw is very perceptive, too, about "the resurgence of regional film making practices and marginal distribution and exhibition circuits" that I've been writing about in many of my "Truly Obscure" mini-essays. He is also shrewd about noir canon making and canon expansion, especially in a passage that pretty much nails me to the wall (my bolding):
Part of film noir's beauty as an object, Marc Vernet suggests, is that there is always another film to discover...for the cinephilia which surrounds the urban thriller of the 1950s, the unearthing of new titles has a more obviously illicit dimension. Over time, the archaeological discovery of new, obscure films has become inseparable from an unearthing of the lurid and degraded, as the fan/historian is led into more and more peripheral corners of an industry undergoing dissolution and change. The films still to be turned up will almost certainly be those which come from mid-decade or later, long after links to a postwar disillusionment or to the nobility of the private eye tradition may be made with a straight face. The works which remain are likely, as well, to be residues of the transition from the breakup of the old Hollywood to the emergence of new spaces of filmic exploitation and industrial marginality. One form of cinephilia, of course, has been drawn to such obscurity, to the collecting of examples which not only add to a list but lead towards the boundaries of an industry/system.
Guilty! Guilty as charged!
UPDATE (6/8/2009): There is a good characterization of "unreadable" Academic Speak at the mardecortesbaja blog:
The academic style could be created with a not-very-sophisticated computer program, one that generated ideological catchphrases and embedded them in barely grammatical English sentences unconnected to each other by either logic or common sense.
Another problem I have with contemporary academic writing in the humanities is that the academy no longer has any ideological use for greatness, which is believed to be an outmoded, power-asserting, hegemonic concept (to lapse into their way of talking for a bit). But I do have a use for it -- all discourse is not created equal, and I am interested in what makes some discourse more valuable and more inspiring. I'm old-fashioned that way. Valuation is undeniably tricky, problematic, and subjective; but if I was denied all appeals to value, I don't think I'd have much reason to talk about anything.
To put it another way, if I don't get to say that Joni Mitchell is better than Britney Spears, I'm going home!
UPDATE (6/9/2009): Roger Scruton writes about a "flight from judgment" in the humanities, and while Scruton is often far too conservative for me (and some of the commenters on this particular post are reactionary boors), I generally would endorse what he has to say here. Respect for the past and for some notion of standards is where I usually find my most productive common-ground with conservatives.
Breakfast is being served
2 years ago
