Titus in Hillsdale, or Film Noir
I recently received an invitation to speak at Hillsdale on movies & history, which I’m looking forward to: Hillsdale is my favorite American campus, since students there call me sir! But this also reminded me of my first visit to lecture there, also on movies, in a series on film noir. This was a wonderful program because it involved showing the movies—The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Killers (1946), Out Of The Past (1947), &, my suggestion, Laura (1944)—& then discussing them at some length, giving everyone a chance to look back at an America which is now just out of living memory, but which somehow still defines who we are.
So here’s my 2022 Hillsdale lecture: Beauty, Tragedy, Law, & Advertising—about the most beautiful noir, Otto Preminger’s Laura, starring Gene Tierney as the title character & Dana Andrews as the tough cop who saves her. It’s a brief half-hour, followed by a q&a which was fully as long. I talked quite a bit about selling beauty & beautifying commerce, salesmanship, especially in connection with our troublesome social media. Influencers were not ubiquitous then as now, but one could see this spreading. But I also talked about men & women in relation to justice & moderation, film noir & rom com, & the task of art & the need to conserve the national memory.
I also talked about the major noir theme, the agony of men in a society where justice & self-respect don’t count nearly as much as what we call success. These movies had stars like Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, & Dana Andrews, manly figures, yet the stories are very harsh—their characters are defined by suffering, failure, & deception. The temptations faced by policemen & detectives like Sam Spade & Mark McPherson, as well as the less reputable but perhaps fiercer protagonists of the other two movies, Swede & Jeff Bailey, are all tied to glamour. In a way, they’re trying to escape America, which isn’t working out for them. Since they cannot have the self-respect of middleclass Americans, free & productive citizens, they’re looking above or below that level. This is an early taste in America of the kind of storytelling we’re now drowning in, where the sordid & the exalted seem inextricably linked or even indistinguishable. But in mid-century middlebrow art, American confidence weighed more than it does now—now we have a kind of alliance of the glamorous upper class & the sordid criminal or lower class against an increasingly confused middle class.
I made an effort, that is, not just to connect the movies to American concerns, but to clarify the issues & therefore show how art can help defend sanity in America. Artists could be somewhat more patriotic, Americans could be somewhat more artistic. The questions from the audience (including the students’ questions) helped raise these issues & allowed me to reveal that despite the ordinary opinion of ordinary Americans—Hollywood is unpatriotic, because they don’t care about ordinary people—the glamour industry’s embrace of political activism, adding moralism to decadence, is all about the wrong kind of caring for America, the wrong kind of attempting to save America.
Art is expected to edify & entertain; put crassly, edification means repeating what we already believe, entertainment means offering us novelties—so it’s very difficult to say how they could go together. Yet that’s the expectation & we basically have two options about arranging these elements. The novelties could be the morality—that’s the demand of Progress, surprising us, for example, with new civil rights, all the way to psychopathic self-mutilation. Or the novelties are instead something more like intellectual puzzles, dealing with the limits of our moral principles, which we already know & rehearse in our storytelling. We have the former, but we used to at least sometimes have the latter. It’s worth wondering what can be done in this situation. Decent Americans are uninterested in culture.