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.In Devil in a Blue Dress, the voice-over does not trip.We laugh with the voice-over at Easy s stupidity andFRANKLIN S NEW NOIR  171innocence.Unlike Easy, the voice-over knows better than to trust Joppyor to be caught in the compromising situation in which Easy Wnds him-self.We identify with the voice-over s authority and separate ourselvesfrom the Xawed Easy.Flashback is also in authoritative mode in Devil in a Blue Dress andoperates similarly and as a complement to the voice-over.In Wlm noir,Xashback tends to be in tension both with the narrative (which it tem-porally derails and sends abruptly into the past) and with the voice-over(which loses some of its control over events).9 The result is that thevisual style of Wlm noir unsettles the narrative.But in Devil in a BlueDress Xashback is used to a different effect: it clariWes the narrative.Inthe middle of the Wlm, Richard McGee (Scott Lincoln) is found dead inhis house by Easy and Daphne.We haven t seen him for a long while,so when we see him on the Xoor dead, the Wlm conveniently provides aXashback to our Wrst encounter with McGee in an effort to clarify forus who this person is, when we saw him last, and what his role is in theWlm.A similar use of Xashback is made later on after Easy gets ahold ofthe photographs of Matthew Terrel (Maury Chaykin) with naked chil-dren.Rather than fragmenting the temporal line of the plot, as happensin Wlm noir, in both of these cases, the Xashbacks instead keep the timeline intact.Indeed, these Xashbacks are superimposed on the image ofthe Wlm s present, and they are photographed in soft focus in what seemlike efforts to give clarifying information harmlessly, without signiW-cantly disturbing the present of the Wlm.Neither do they take us out-side the time line framed by the beginning and end of the Wlm.Thusthe Xashback has an important stabilizing effect.It maintains the Wlm scoherence even as it keeps the audience, the Wlmmaker, and the voice-over outside the Wlm s temporal Xow.It contains the Xow of time withinthe boundaries of the events and narrative of the plot.It emphasizes thatour time and the time of the characters in the Wlm are different.So far, we have seen how Franklin seems to harmonize or homog-enize the very visual and narrative devices that are in tension in Wlmnoir.He manipulates color, voice-over, and Xashback in such a way asto create for us and for his narrator a perspective that is safe from the172  FRANKLIN S NEW NOIRXow of time, a perspective that ensures an objective point of view, a per-spective of a collective voice that seems bigger than Easy.The collectivevoice that stands outside time is the voice of a community of AfricanAmericans that has its visual correlative in the bird s-eye view of theutopian neighborhood with which the Wlm ends.Berrettini rightlyremarks that the Wnal shot of Central Avenue in Devil in a Blue Dress isin signiWcant tension with what he calls a threatening future L.A., moreviolent and corrupt, marked by Red hunts, increasing racial tensions,corporate-urban sprawl, and government corruption (Berrettini 1999,85).In the promotional material for the Wlm, Franklin describes thatspace as  the heart of the city s black community.Central Avenuein 1948 was tantamount to Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance ofthe 1920 s and 1930 s. It is not surprising that Franklin would chooseto end his Wlm with this utopian image and with the voice-over thatstresses the importance of friendship.An image of a community of self-determined male black friends who are responsible and who are notviolent provides the necessary stability for an ideal community of fam-ilies not unlike the one we see at the end of the Wlm.This tranquil,objective, stable, harmonious, coherent bird s-eye view seems very dif-ferent from the violent, subjective, unstable, fragmented perspectivesof noir, but at what cost?Chandler and MosleyFranklin s Devil in a Blue Dress is to Murder, My Sweet what WalterMosley s novel of the same title is to Raymond Chandler s novel Fare-well, My Lovely.Indeed, Mosley s narrative style is a nostalgic transfor-mation of the violent hard-boiled style preferred by Chandler.FredricJameson calls Chandler  the least politically correct of all our modernwriters ( Jameson 1993, 37).He says that  Chandler faithfully gives ventto everything racist, sexist, homophobic, and otherwise socially resent-ful and reactionary in the American collective unconscious (37).Hethen adds that these feelings are  almost exclusively mobilized for strik-ing and essentially visual purposes, that is to say, for aesthetic ratherthan political ones (37).Jameson s comments on Chandler s politicalFRANKLIN S NEW NOIR  173incorrectness, and on the aesthetic function of his racism, sexism, andhomophobia, are left undeveloped as a provocative aside.And yet it ispossible to develop Jameson s point by revisiting an earlier essay onChandler (published in 1970) and Jameson s 1979 book on WyndhamLewis.The reader of these works understands that according to Jame-son, Chandler s political incorrectness is a matter of neither political norpersonal opinion.Moreover, it is not the political stance or the personalopinion of a stable subject or ego.Instead, Chandler s racism and sex-ism are symptoms of a fundamentally divided subject, a subject that canboth  observe local injustice, racism, corruption, educational incompe-tence, with a practiced eye, while he continues to entertain boundlessoptimism as to the greatness of the country ( Jameson 1970, 632).Ifin this essay Jameson associates this condition with an American obses-sion and dissociation, he puts his own identity claim into question inhis later book, where he makes similar claims about the British writerWyndham Lewis.If Jameson associates this condition with a historicalmoment of advanced capitalism, he also puts his own historicism intoquestion by arguing that Chandler s and Wyndham Lewis s racism, sex-ism, and homophobia are principally aesthetic problems: symptoms ofmodernism.As should be clear to readers of Jameson, modernism for him isnot a Wxed moment of literary history.Instead, modernism must beunderstood as a mode of the aesthetic itself, that which reveals and rev-els in the accidental nature of the historical.For Jameson, Chandler sviolently racist and sexist hard-boiled style goes beyond sexism or racism,historically, politically, or personally understood, and into a mode ofwriting and living that puts into question the very notion of identity,stable subjectivity, and authority: a language and life that puts intoquestion the very possibility of a stable historical perspective.Fromthis perspective, what lies at the core of Chandler s racism, sexism, andhomophobia, indeed at the very core of his attractive and popular vio-lent hard-boiled style, is an unreconcilable, if familiar split, in languageand in being.Following Lyotard s Des dispositifs pulsionnels and Econo-mie libidinale, Jameson argues that such racist and sexist moments are174  FRANKLIN S NEW NOIRmoments of libidinal escape from conventional forms of respectability,moments of unconscious liberation from repression, moments when thesubject s desire is unrepressed and rises to the surface.In short, theseare moments when the unconstrained aesthetic is working at its mostintense against the repressive forces that surround us, contain us, tameus, and give us stable identities [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]