"Is there any way to win?" asks Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), archetypal doom-ridden noir heroine in Out of the Past (1947), addressing Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), archetypal doom-ridden noir hero. He replies, "There's a way to lose more slowly." When it comes to politics in art, the mannerist noir style seems to be one of the most attractive ways of losing slowly. It makes doom more voluptuous and artful than success, makes a film's characters seem "half in love with easeful Death," as Keats put it. I often wonder if the fondness many leftists have for noir films stems from their being suckers for romantic fatalism -- defeatists who wouldn't know what to do with success if it hit them over the head.
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Rosenbaum is right to, more or less, describe any attempt to apply noir poses and thinking to political matters as defeatist and stupid.
In politics you must play to win or what's the point?
But like stubborn Newtonians who tried to use a celestial mechanics lens for viewing sub-atomic reality he goes too far with a useful idea and, as a result, creates an inaccurate theoretical model.
By dismissing the entire noir enterprise in the course of his film critique, he commits the mirror-opposite error of the "half in love with easeful Death" defeatism he (rightly) unapprovingly describes.
When Robert Mitchum, playing Jeff Bailey says "There's a way to lose more slowly" he's telling a larger story than the immediate details of the film in which these words are spoken - he's describing our unavoidable situation: living until we inevitably die. And of course, we now know that the sun itself will die at some far distant date bringing the entire human story to a spectacular and fiery end.
The fact of our (close in time) individual and (more distant) eventual species death shouldn't paralyze us and certainly shouldn't cause us to adopt some gloomy, do-nothing political posture. Rosenbaum is right to point this out.
But the noir outlook - at its core - is not as dated or useless as he asserts since we are no further away from the conditions it ultimately grapples with than our ancestors.
.d.