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Monday, February 04, 2019

Film noir hell

Dante's detailed, claustrophobic depiction of hell captured popular imagination, although I'm not sure how many people have actually read The Inferno. For many believers and unbelievers alike, I think their mental image of hell is influenced, at least indirectly, by Dante. That includes comic books and video games. 

From a different angle, secular totalitarianism is hellish. Kafka's tormented mind provides a precursor in the The Trial, followed by 1984 and Darkness at Noon

If I were making a movie about hell, film noir would be an apt genre. Classic examples include The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep. But due to the Production Code, these are more like black comedies. 

Because neo-noir films don't labor under the same inhibitions, they're more realistic. Examples include Chinatown; Farewell, My Lovely (both of which I saw as a teenager), and L.A. Confidential. When I saw it for the first and only time, I hated Chinatown, not because it was a bad film–it's a great film of its kind–but because I was repelled by the wanton amorality of its characters. A world where you can't trust anyone. Everybody cheats. Everybody betrays everyone else. 

In the noir genre, the detective functions as the eyes of the audience. We see the world through the resignation of the detective. In a better world he might be a better man, but the noirish world is engulfed in suffocating mediocrity. There's nothing to believe in. No one to admire. No one to look up to. Everyone is trapped on the inside–not because they can't get out, but because there's no outside. They drink, philander, and gamble away their abject lives in desperate resignation, interspersed with studied cruelty to break the pitiless monotony. Sadistic comic relief. That's a hellish existence. 

2 comments:

  1. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle also wrote their own take on Dante called "Inferno." I don't remember much about it, but it was very popular...reading about it, however, the theology sounds just about as flawed as you would expect from sci-fi writers.

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  2. Perhaps another illustration is tech noir or cyberpunk. The combination of high tech with low life. I have in mind works like Neuromancer (novel), Blade Runner (film), Altered Carbon (TV).

    A totalitarian state rules through superior tech. Not unlike modern China with its surveillance systems. An evil oligarchy profits while the unwashed masses consume one another in a dog eat dog world. No redemption forthcoming.

    Also, there's a virulent self-autonomous strain in cyberpunk which is antithetical to God. It’s something akin to Lucifer’s “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” speech in Paradise Lost. By contrast, we ought renounce our autonomy if we are ever to hope and beg God for his forgiveness for our wrongdoings. After all, human autonomy cannot co-exist on the same plane with the one true God who is our Maker and our Master. C.S. Lewis put it thusly: “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘thy will be done'”.

    Cyberpunk sees the latter play out. It's an utterly self-centered existence. All that matters is what benefits oneself in the here and now. The will to power. From the audience's perspective, the ubermensch is the antihero, and that's because we haven't devolved to amorality, but from the perspective of the ubermensch's fellow denizens he's just an evil ahole living a godless life in a godless world.

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