Over at CriminalElement.com, Max Allan Collins (The Million-Dollar Wound) provides a very detailed history of hardboiled. Excerpt:You don’t see the term "hardboiled" much any more. "Noir" has supplanted it, co-opted from the French film critics who intended it for the American crime films made during and shortly after World War II. Those critics had co-opted the term from Serie Noire, the black-covered paperbacks from publisher Gallimard that reprinted the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane.Read the whole thing. Collins deftly digs to the root of hardboiled’s family tree, pulling up not only familiar names such as Hammett and Chandler, but lesser known authors and some of the periodicals that spawned the subgenre. Unfortunately, he only devotes a small space to the differences between hardboiled and noir, writing, "Many noir writers, in a trend beginning in the ’80s and ’90s, do depart from what I would view as hardboiled. An emotional aspect dismissed as sentimental has been banished for a more paranoid, harsher world view." I would argue that’s only half the story. Sure, lots of noir is bleakly nihilistic, but some imbue it with a moral sense more akin to classical tragedy. Consider The Square, for example. Quibbles aside, though, this article is well worth your time if you’re the least interested in crime fiction.
Hardboiled, as early as twenty years ago, became a dirty word in publishing. Cozy mysteries were outselling hardboiled, and likely still are. So the appropriation of "noir" was a hipper, more elegant-sounding way to rebrand the tough stuff.
(Picture: CC 2009 by practicalowl)
10 comments:
I actually believe hardboiled and noir are interchangeable terms -- and should have made that more clear in the article. The writers of the period where hardboiled as a term as been supplanted by noir are simply adding another aspect to the work...although nilhilism and darkness has been around since Cain, Thompson and McCoy.
Hi, Max! Thanks for stopping by.
Actually, I got the idea from your article that you thought they were the same thing. What do you think of this piece from Hard Case Crime's Charles Ardai where he argues that noir and hardboiled are separate subgenres? The way I've heard it explained is that hardboiled is tough guys doing tough things to other tough guys whereas in noir the protagonist always ends badly. Of course, those noir endings can be because of the "paranoid, harsher world view" you mention (which I don't like) or because of some flaw or wrongdoing in a character (which I enjoy more).
As much as I value the importance of endings, I tend to view the hardboiled/noir dichotomy in terms of heroism. A noir hero tries--or is forced by conditions into trying--to bear the weight of the world. Phillip Marlowe, with his ironic yet significant links to medieval chivalry and idealism, is the prototype of this genre. Christopher Nolan's Batman (and to a lesser extent Frank Miller's) is the modern distillation. This hardboiled Batman is not the hero we deserve but the hero we need" simply "because he can take it." He's hardboiled enough to do what needs to be done.
Noir is something else. Noir protagonists feel less heroic, more like men caught up in circumstances beyond their control. Often, yes, noir tends to be the harshly moralistic force of punishment for transgressions; often, too, it can be an expression of forms of nihilistic and existential philosophy. But even if noir ends well for its protagonists, it positions them not as heroes but as limited, mortal humans scrambling to survive.
Cinematically, as much as I love Brick or The Lookout or The Town, I feel that the comedy Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels has an equal place in the genre. Sure it doesn't end with the heroes paying for their crimes, but it focuses on their weakness and vulnerability, rather than their power in a harsh and bitter world.
Honestly, CR, I'm a little less than evangelistic about the distinction. The two genres might be too young to draw hard-and-fast distinctions. I dunno. I'm still thinking about it.
I don't believe in hard-and-fast distinctions in matters of art, but I do believe that (as cognitive scientists would put it) archetypal categories with fuzzy boundaries are hugely useful.
I don't want to say that "this is hardboiled, therefore it cannot draw from noir" or "this is noir, therefore it cannot draw from hardboiled." But I do think it is very interesting to say "see this vivid example? See how different it is from this other vivid example? You don't need to read them the same or judge them by the same standards."
In short, I think all genre categories are to some extent loose and arbitrary, but that they inform the way we read books or watch films. The noir-hardboiled distinction, for instance, helped me to take modern dark noir on its own terms, instead of eternally longing for Chandler's compassionate, humorous, world-weary hero to appear in every noir story I encountered.
I once heard the various genre fiction likened to alley cats: They're always interbreeding. But I don't think that means we have to always take sub-genres on their own terms. There's a lot of noir I like and a lot I abhor, even though I can appreciate what the authors of both are trying to do.
I suppose it depends on what "take on their own terms." C.S. Lewis started an introduction to Paradise Lost with the insistance that while there may (or may not) be moral reasons to reject a cathedral, one at least first needs to know what it is trying to do.
The same applies, for me, to the noir/hardboiled split. Once I knew that noir was trying to do something different, I was a better reader of the genre. Doesn't mean I like everything in it, or even always approve of the basic aims. But it does mean I can stop condemning noir for not being hardboiled.
I agree with Lewis entirely on that point. My interpretive frame work is really rather simple: I try to understand with the author is doing and then I evaluate it. Too many folks invert that order.
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