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Sartre, Shakespeare, and the Film Noir: Deep Thinking About the Little B Movie
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14370 |
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THE ARTS
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6 / 1988 |
2,707 Words |
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Paul Coates
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If the specter of Marilyn Monroe haunts the women of the late twentieth century, then that of Humphrey Bogart dogs its men. If Monroe represents the utopian image of woman as both asexual friend and breathless siren, Bogart, in turn, embodies the man who has learned to live with the independent women by whom so many modern men feel threatened. His disillusionment may be evidence of hidden battle scars, but at least he has survived. Indeed, just as Monroe can be deemed so feminine that her femininity overflows to envelop males (creating transvestites in Some Like It Hot, so Bogart's masculinity can be seen as being sufficiently powerful to "masculinize" the women in his vicinity, with their broad shoulder-pads, acerbic wit, and deep, throaty voices.
As always, the mythical figure supports contradictory interpretations; it is the embodiment of contradiction that renders him/her mythical. Bogart's perennial hat and famous trench coat declare him at one with the mean, drenched city streets, in which the rain will always ensure that the context is noir too. (Their wet glitter also recalls that of the black-robed femme fatale.) If Bogart is wounded, he is nevertheless a survivor, unlike Belmondo in Breathless, who takes Bogie as his icon. And Bogart at least has the courage to enter the fray, unlike Woody Allen. Thirteen years after Godard's film, Allen took Bogart as his guiding genius (French enthusiasms enter America with some delay). Allen's Play It Again, Sam is a deliberate misquotation of Bogart's "Play it!" in Casablanca, the "again" a telltale sign of the nostalgia that solicits the return to life of the warrior sleeping the big sleep. Woody sees Bogart as the oracle who can tell him all he never dared ask about the other sex. Unlike the jittery Allen, Bogart is ever cool. His cool is a come-on, he is always ready--the boy scout sans illusion as a talisman in the winter of patriarchy.
Paradigmatic Relationship
Semiologists speak of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships between images. The syntagma is an image whose meaning is determined by the images that precede and follow it; one might wish to align it with montage, as practiced by Eisenstein. The paradigm is an image that refers (consciously or unconsciously) to another image or set of images: its context is implicit within it. It calls up the specters of alternative images, to which may allude and pay homage, or from which it may deliberately diverge. This form of image may itself be seen as a paradigm--the paradigm of postmodernism, which describes a world that is always already there.
In the sense employed in the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, the postmodern image could be described as "double-voiced." In postmodernism, however, images of this kind do not engage in a battle for hegemony over the word, such as Bakhtin saw embodied in the carnivalesque folk culture that mocks the aristocratic forms of high culture. Their relationship to the images they draw on--as Fredric Jameson has shown--involves pastiche rather than parody (only Robert Altman, in The Long Goodbye, has had the courage to parody the pieties of film noir and face the resultant furor): not direct struggle for supremacy, but the indirect strategy of the parasite, which never seeks to displace the host body it depends on for survival. Here, allusion glances off her original image, rather than supplanting it.
At present, the majority of these limpets draw sustenance from the body of film
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