percolating paranoia :: essays research papers

Percolating ParanoiaFritz Langs The Big HeatFritz Lang brings the terrors of noirinto the bright kitchens of America. take to be that coffee potBY HIn Bright Lights 12 devoted to film noir, Gary Morris locates the malaise giving rise to the noir sensibi illuminey in the "mechanized, immoral, soul-destroying city."1 He defines the urban noir setting as contend its characters chances for "hope, happiness, peace, complacency, and romance" (Morris 16). Although the attack may be related to the loss of a pastoral setting as Morris suggests, many film noir narratives locate those contented possibilities in the seemingly stable institution of the family, and can be sound out as ironic, hopeless searches for a humanized, moral, soul-restoring home. According to Sylvia Harvey, "the loss of those satisfactions normally obtained through and through the possession of a wife and the presence of a family" is one of the continual themes of film noir.2 Of course, the arc hetypal array of characters in film noir are non family members, tho the hard-boiled, trench-coated detective the beautiful, duplicitous, and greedy femme fatale with a revolver shoved deep into the liberation of her fur coat and a fascinating complement of criminals ranging from sleazy and unfounded hoodlums to their glib and urbane bosses. The film noir narrative, with its aura of paranoia accentuated by nontraditional twinkle and mise en scene, usually plays out not in the brightly lit kitchen or living room of a comfortable home but at night in dimly lit back streets seem with rain or mysterious stairwells filled with looming shadows. Through a scrupulous reading of a noir text that presents both the typical film noir mise en scene and various familial images, a sense of film noirs complicated relationship to the family develops. The Big Heat (1953), directed by Fritz Lang, represents family lifetime as a sham, as a relationship of convenience, as perverse, and at long last as so fragile and threatened that even an icon of domesticity becomes a weapon.In The Big Heat, violence and criminality contaminate a lowly city, controlling elections and the police, as well as threatening familial institutions. The puke of characters I have identified as archetypal of film noir narratives is present, but, in keeping with many such films of the 50s, they have moved out of the shadowy stairwells and back alleys to occupy well-furnished homes and luxurious estates. Much of the violence occurs offscreen in the diegesis of the film, occurring no doubt in the old haunts of film noir.