Noir films reveal the disconnect between Breen Office moral uplift and the darker reality of America

Contrary to general opinion, Noir films do not just show the grimmer parts of American life.

Their particular effectiveness is to give you both the official version and then show you the unofficial reality.

It was a bit like public school and high school in my day : we got plenty of sunny uplift from our unaltered textbooks, '40s and '50s NFB films and present day CBC radio school broadcasts.

But just outside the classroom, TV's noir and sci fi horror movies , combined with tv newscasts, told us all was not really that rosy in the human animal kingdom.

Of course, learning in school and on television about good old Uncle Joe Stalin's Katyn Forest mass graves, Auschwitz, DDT, Thalidomide and Nuclear Fallout had already prepared us to trust film noir far more than any government official ....

Noir only talks of emperors to claim they have no clothes

Noir actually doesn't really talk - much less frankly : the Breen Office put full stop to that idea.

But its small scale and relatively personal dramas among downmarket nobodies are free to cast a highly suggestive and subversive mood - and they do - in (Sam) spades.

Their mood clearly suggests that corruption, double-crossing and deception extends through all aspects of human life - not just in the lower ranks where dis-honour among working class thieves has long been taken for granted by the upper crust.

That the big double cross actually extends upwards to (or is that 'extends downwards from' ?) the sunny, sacred, servants of the people top of national society.

And beyond. Far beyond.

With Nazi Germany's abrupt 'Pact with' and then 'Attack upon' communist Russia being perhaps the ultimate double cross - particularly to the left wing writers, directors and movie critics who responded by creating Film Noir in the years immediately following Germany's sneak attack upon its new ally.

When, in turn , mainstream Hollywood's newest best buds, Russia and America, also suddenly fell out with heated criminations, it only further fuelled Film Noir's downbeat deconstruction of the overly sunny "official version" of reality ...

'Noir Science' of the 1940s

Compared to the complex , indeterminate and unresolved plots of 1940s Noir films, mainstream Hollywood plots - then and now - tend to look like they had all been successfully predicted centuries in advance by Isaac Newton or Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Predictable, determinist, reductionist, logical, elegant : words of praise in Science - and in mainstream Hollywood.

It as if news of the 20th century revolutions in probability theory, quantum theory, contingency theory et al has never reached mainstream Hollywood.

Okay - a commonplace criticism of Hollywood plot-making.

But what if we reversed the criticism : searched scientific theories to see if some of them displayed the makings of a well-made Hollywood plot and others  displayed more Noirish plotting ?

I can think of many.

For example , the 1920s saw a fierce and highly personal counterattack by the geological establishment defending Charles Lyell's vision of a slow gradual orderly geology against the new unpredictable geology revealed by young Harlen Bretz's theory of a sudden massive Missoula Flood in ancient times .

To his critics, Bretz's explanation for the some highly unusual geological features seemed positively Noirish -- suggesting a hidden dark unpredictable side to what their own Breen Office had always portrayed as a cheery sunlit orderly process.

Others ?

Obviously Martin Henry Dawson's new vision of the chaotic random horizontal genetic transfers found in the microbe world versus the universal and orderly vertical genetic inheritance scheme proposed by his (intellectual) rival Charles Darwin....

'Farewell My Valento' : all wartime America tries 'passing' as native born WASP

When an originally dark-haired Italian-American woman successfully 'passing' as Mrs Helen Grayle (an icy blond member of 1940s Los Angeles' upper crust) is threatened with the exposure of her dark (literally : noir) secret , Velma Valento kills and kills and kills again.

All to prevent her secret from ever coming out.

This basically is the engine that drives the plot of the first and greatest noir cum private eye story ever : Raymond Chandler's FAREWELL MY LOVELY (1940).

The city of quartz passes for diamond

From 1920 till 1960 (the years of the very height of high modernity) Los Angeles's population repeatedly told the census people that it had the highest percentage of native born white protestants of any major American city - most residents also claiming to be born with clearly Anglo-Saxon names.

Some - a few - might have been telling the truth - but not many.

Adapting your real name to sound more native born Anglo Saxon did not just start and end with people in Show Biz or LA : it was a national passion under Modernity.

And claiming to attend a mainstream protestant denomination (once every decade - for someone else's funeral or wedding) never ever hurt any 'passer' either during the era of Modernity.

And so what if you were originally a swarthy Italian or a light Colored - who could tell anything anymore in a nation addicted to having deep tans and peroxided hair ?

One of the greatest successes of Modernity film's censor board (the Breen Office) was in preventing any hint on screen of deliberate miscegenation : the races deliberately choosing to sleep together.

But perhaps Modernity's greatest fear was of the screen showing examples of what later is revealed to be unintentional sexual miscegenation.

That Mary Douglas-like nightmare of the supposedly white native born protestant WASP bonkette in your Big House bed actually turning out to be a swarthy dark , foreign and Catholic crop picker from out in the dirty fields .

In the early 1940s, the Allied nations justified the conscripting of their young to possibly die as necessary to protect the vital "small c" catholic concept that 'all men are brothers'.

Meanwhile, Joseph Breen's office, working (ultimately) under the direction of the Pope, struggled hard every day to deny this fact ever appearing on the screen.

But then the race-traitor Raymond Chandler (that rare southern Californian who truly was white protestant anglo saxon and native-born) slipped a catholic darkie 'past' Breen : and Noir was born ...

Academic Peer Review and the Breen Office : can you tell the difference ? Is there a difference ?

Did Hollywood's notorious Joe Breen spend his entire career defending normal movie making within the current movie-making paradigm , rather than encouraging new voyages into untravelled waters ?

Is that how social scientist Thomas Kuhn would have regarded the Academy of Film Producers' reviewing activities, if he had looked at them instead of the Academy of Scientists ?

We'll never know - but it is worth asking ...

a Noirish account of wartime penicillin : un-superheroes

With Un-superheroes, I hope to offer up a bit of astringent reality, after years of  nothing but the Breen Office version of wartime penicillin -- with all its 'hands across the water' and Allied buddy bonding...

'40s Gotham : birthing Superheroes & Noir ...

One can think of Golden Age Comic Book Superheroes as Breen Office pre-approved but Golden Age Film Noir as Breen Office pre-disapproved.

During WWII, Hollywood was not taken over by Allied government censors , contrary to expectations.

Instead Hollywood (Breen Office) censorship methods simply took over the Allied governments.

The bright uplift that Joseph Breen always strived for within the small - virtual - world of major Hollywood  films became something Allied governments tried to fairy dust over all of their nations' activities.

Allied war efforts certainly killed many neutral and occupied nation civilians - hundreds of thousands of them in total.

But you would never see the Allied propaganda efforts boast about these deaths in the way the Axis did about their complete destruction of civilian Lidice's entire population and houses.

But Allied  newspapers and books remained surprisingly free to comment about everything but immediate military operations .

As a result , the front pages (& Hollywood 'war' movies/comic books) had huge but empty war stories , all about Breen Office uplift and how the fiercely determined Allies were united in seeking a quick end to all forms of discrimination.

But those newspapers' same back pages had plenty of tiny but fact-filled items on examples of Home Front profiteering, slackers and racists.

By 1943, this dissonance had led many left leaning film people to start turning out film noirs that hinted at this moral disconnect....