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Driving is Murder: The
Automobile, Violence, and the City in Film
Noir |
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Written for Professor Joan Copjec's
Reading the City: Film Noir at City College of New York. |
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December 15, 2006 |
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“Greater liberty, greater
fruitfulness of time and effort, brighter glimpses of the
wide and beautiful world, more health and happiness –
these are the lasting benefits of the motor-car.”
– Herbert Ladd Towle, “The Automobile and Its
Mission” (1913)
“Today a magnificent instrument has
ruptured the human environment in the name of progress. Its
terror has been accepted as a fact of modern war – almost
as if it were a sacrifice of war.”
– Kenneth R. Schneider, Autokind vs. Mankind
(1971)
“Va va voom!”
– Nick in Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
The years 1941 to
1958 are generally agreed to be the boundaries of film
noir’s classic period, starting with The Maltese
Falcon and ending with Touch of Evil.1
These dates most obviously encompass World War II, whose events
delayed America’s reaction to the depression years of
the Thirties2 and the country’s
unbridled embrace of the automobile. This latter phenomenon,
which began in the 1920s, found its greatest proponent in
the Interstate Highway and Defense Act of 1956, whereby the
United States government committed to pay for virtually all
of the construction costs of over 40,000 miles of toll-free
highways across America.3
But even before the Act a number of publications4
argued for decentralization as a means of national defense.
In the naming of the Act itself there is a wedding of the
automobile and war, of mobility and violence, the last two
of which are of concern here.
This paper examines the vehicular violence
found in film noirs, in relation to the changes the
automobile wrought on cities. In the four classic noirs
discussed here (Double Indemnity, The Big Heat,
Touch of Evil, and Kiss Me Deadly), violence
associated with cars is seen to be a critique and portent
of the automobile’s negative effects on the American
urban landscape. A couple recent neo-noirs are also
discussed (Crash and Boyz N the Hood) to
illustrate how violence in turn was a consequence of the changes
wrought by the automobile in ways not foreseen.
By the time of early
film noir the internal combustion automobile was
already firmly entrenched in the American way of life.5
The country’s ideals of individual freedom, prosperity,
and technological advancement all found a perfect symbol in
the car, a liberating machine with the promise of personal
mobility and control. But as the automobile began to affect
the physical and social fabric of cities and their environs,
a film movement focused on the dark sides of the city and
humanity would take an equally dark view of the car. |
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Fig. 1 – Double Indemnity |
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An early example is Double
Indemnity, the 1944 classic directed by Billy Wilder.
Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) tells the story of his involvement
in the premeditated murder of Phyllis Dietrichson’s
(Barbara Stanwyck) husband, a murder that takes place in a
car on the way to a train station. Neff hides in the back
seat of the car (Fig. 1) and strangles Mr. Dietrichson (Tom
Powers) after Phyllis signals with three long honks of the
horn. The viewer doesn’t see the murder take place but
instead sees Phyllis and her barely-suppressed smirk as she
keeps her eyes on the road (Fig. 2 – her look slightly
off camera seems to implicate the viewer in this act). They
continue driving to the station where Neff boards as her dead
husband. Neff jumps off the back of the last train car where
Phyllis waits for him in the car; together they plant the
dead husband’s body on the tracks (Fig. 3) and flee
the scene. This cover-up comes from Neff’s knowledge
of the double indemnity clause where compensation is doubled
if one dies on a train, because death via the automobile,
even in the late 1930s setting of the film, is so common. |
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Fig. 2 – Double Indemnity |
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This
film coincided with a conflicting moment between the realm
of the automobile and that of the train (pre-automobile),
when Los Angeles instituted a parkway plan affirming the car’s
role in the city.6 Wilder’s
critique of this plan is primarily in the scenes of the murder
and cover-up described above. The car and the road are the
site of murder (action) and the train and the tracks are the
site of deception (apparent inaction) as the couple attempts
to cover-up the almost perfect murder. For Walter and Phyllis
the car embodies the future – their relationship sans
Mr. Dietrichson – while the train embodies the past,
his dead body. The liberation of the car is taken to its ultimate
extreme during the act of murder, as the lovers remove themselves
from preying eyes on a darkened street. Even the honking horn
– a signal of distress or danger – dissipates
into the suburban night. |
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Fig. 3 – Double Indemnity |
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On
the other hand Neff is able to pass himself off as the dead
husband on the train, though ultimately the couple’s
murder is undone by this public space, not the private space
of the car. Most importantly, the distinction between the
realm of the car and that of the train is important because
the former creates the situation whereby Phyllis feels the
need to kill her husband. Her boredom, isolation, and desire
to escape “points to the isolation a woman may face
in the automobile-centered suburb where…she spends most
of her time secluded from public space.”7
The conflict between these two realms cannot be resolved in
the film with its fatal (and fateful)8
conclusion for both Walter and Phyllis. Double Indemnity
helps to set up some of the noir attitudes towards the automobile:
a future fraught with danger and a freedom fraught with consequences. |
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Fig. 4 – The Big Heat |
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Nine years later, in Fritz
Lang’s The Big Heat, the setting is again suburbia,
though here it is presented as a place free from domestic
conflict and home to domestic bliss. Of course in the world
of noir this bliss is short-lived. In a car bomb meant for
Detective Sergeant Bannion (Glenn Ford) his wife (Jocelyn
Brando) is the inadvertent victim when she turns the key in
the ignition (Fig. 4). In a film loaded with inventive violence,
such as scarring a face with scalding hot coffee, ultimately
the car bomb is the only violent act that is indiscriminate.
It’s also an act that directly stems from the suburban
situation of Bannion and his family. Unlike traditional cities
and their mix of transportation alternatives (walking, public
transportation, driving) the suburban milieu is characterized
by a dependence upon the automobile for mobility. This dependence
makes a car bomb the obvious choice for the mob targeting
Bannion, as he must drive to leave home at some point; this
dependence also means the end for his wife.
The choice of a car bomb in the narrative
is important for a couple of reasons. First, It causes a narrative
shift, setting Bannion off on a rampage towards the perpetrators.
Second, the explosion causes a split, permanently separating
Bannion from his wife and from his suburban, domestic bliss.
This split or splintering can be read as a commentary on the
suburban lifestyle facilitated by the automobile, a lifestyle
defined by particular prescribed roles (mother, father, children)
and possessions (house, yard, car). Two of these components
are destroyed in the explosion, therefore destroying Bannion’s
ability to continue leading a suburban life. A hotel room
replaces his suburban home as Bannion is thrown from suburban
bliss into urban noir. |
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Fig. 5 – Touch of Evil |
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The explosion in Orson Welles’s
1958 Touch of Evil occurs at the end of the now famous
three-minute tracking shot which opens the film. The shot
follows a car bomb from its setting (Fig. 5) and planting
in a car’s trunk to its explosion (Fig. 6). Newlyweds
Mike and Susie Vargas (Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh) unknowingly
walk alongside the car carrying the bomb, the car that explodes
moments after it crosses the border from Mexico to the United
States. Again the decision to use a car bomb is crucial, as
it allows the crime to be addressed by jurisdictions on both
sides of the border. The explosion separates the couple for
the remainder of the film so Señor Vargas, a Mexican
drug enforcement official, can investigate the crime. Any
comfort or security in their newly-formed marriage bond explodes
along with the car, as Mrs. Vargas is thrown into one situation
after another that endangers her welfare. |
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Fig. 6 – Touch of Evil |
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Set in
the fictional border town of Los Robles (called “the Paris
of the border” on a billboard), this location points to
the importance of movement, most obviously movement across borders,
as the car’s explosion in the U.S. brings Hank Quinlan
(Orson Welles) into the picture, complicating Vargas’s
investigation and bringing corruption into the mix. Movement
is also accentuated from this beginning, in the soundtrack of
the three-minute opening shot where music spills from the different
nightclubs as we follow the newlyweds and the doomed car –
the diegetic soundtrack of the film’s restored 1998 version
replaced Henry Mancini’s original, nondiegetic score.9
Throughout the film movement becomes confused, as do the borders,
indicating a fading of the traditional city and its legibility
towards the ungraspable, unlimited modern city of the automobile,
in formation at the time. |
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Fig. 7 – Touch of Evil |
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In addition to being a border town,
Los Robles is also an oil boomtown, evident by the presence
of numerous oil wells on the town’s skyline (Fig. 7).
While this fact is not integral to the narrative it is important
at the level of the chronotope of the film, as it was actually
filmed in Venice, California. This reference to the oil boom
of Los Angeles in the early 20th century and the uneasy relationship
between the automobile and the urban fabric of the town was
a conflict ultimately decided in part by the city’s aforementioned
parkway plan. In the film this uneasy relationship becomes clear
in a scene where Vargas and the District Attorney hurtle down
a side street in a convertible (Fig. 8). The disjunction between
the buildings and the car is obvious from the size, scale, and
proximity of the buildings more suited to pedestrians than speeding
cars. |
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Fig. 8 – Touch of Evil |
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In another relevant scene Mrs.
Vargas is taken to the remote Mirador hotel purportedly for
safety, though without a car she is effectively stranded and
at the mercy of the hooligans that eventually drug her. The
hotel exhibits sprawl, as it is described by Quinlan’s
partner Menzies as “mighty hard to find, with the new
highway branching off as it does.” Violence becomes
an extension of seclusion facilitated by sprawl and the lack
of access to an automobile, which hearkens back to Double
Indemnity. |
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Fig. 9 – Kiss Me Deadly |
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Where
Touch of Evil’s commentary on Los Angeles and
the automobile occurs at the level of the chronotope, Robert
Aldrich’s 1955 adaptation of Kiss Me Deadly by
Mickey Spillaine confronts the automobile’s impact on
L.A. directly. From the moment the credits roll it is apparent
that driving is an integral part of this apocalyptic noir. After
Christina (Cloris Leachman) coerces Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker)
to give her a ride the credits follow the car down the road,
the words inverted like markings on the road they drive (Fig.
9). What can be seen as superficial or gimmicky also portends
to the “unnatural or other-worldly events which follow.”10 |
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Fig. 10 – Kiss Me Deadly |
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When Christina meets her fate at
the hands of the torturers in an early scene, Hammer’s
car is then pushed off a precipice in an effort to cover up
her death and kill Hammer as well (Fig. 10). The latter, of
course, doesn’t happen, alluding to the idea that Hammer
is of the car and its time and therefore cannot be killed by
it. This is reinforced later by his thwarting of two car bombs
planted in a convertible given to him by Christina’s killer. |
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Fig. 11 – Kiss Me Deadly |
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Throughout
the film we see Hammer in sharp contrast to his surroundings,
most apparently in his trip to Bunker Hill. As he passes under
the funicular (Fig. 11) we see an overlapping between old and
new, public and private, à la Double Indemnity.
Once Hammer tiredly climbs the many flights of stairs and enters
Carmen Trivago’s apartment, what can be seen as overdone
clichés of Italian life – the hanging laundry,
the basket wine, the boiling pasta, and opera accompaniment
– is presented to distinguish between the traditional
and the modern, the latter symbolized by Mike Hammer and his
“fastidiously modern apartment with its Eames chairs,
telephone answering machine, and middle-brow art.”11
The clean and rational furnishings and interior of Hammer’s
apartment stand in sharp contrast to a past “that is becoming
progressively incomprehensible.”12
The view outside his apartment window (Fig. 12) plainly shows
us what is facilitating this change in lifestyle, this rationalizing
and homogenizing force (compare this view with the one from
the terrace in Crash to see a similar, later view –
Fig. 14) that takes the verticality of Bunker Hill and transforms
it into the linear horizontality of the freeway. |
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Fig. 12 – Kiss Me Deadly |
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In his adaptation of Spillaine’s
novel, Aldrich strayed from the original in numerous ways,
most obviously in moving the location from New York to Los
Angeles, from a pedestrian-centered environment to one catering
to the automobile. Aldrich also added a character not in the
novel, Hammer’s car mechanic Nick. The two are kindred
spirits, lovers of cars, driving, and speed. Nick is pulled
into Hammer’s investigation and dies as a result, killed
by a car as the jack holding it over him is released by an
unrecognizable assailant. Of the portrayals of automobiles
and concomitant violence in film noir, only Kiss Me Deadly
actually goes as far as “death by automobile.”
The perspective of this act is most revealing, placing the
viewer in the car’s position, as if to directly implicate
the viewer in Nick’s death (Fig. 13).
Another change from Spillaine’s novel to the film version
is switching the contents of the case from drugs to an atomic
weapon. Aldrich has refashioned a violent pulp novel into
a critique of capitalism, modernity and their end products,
where both the car and the bomb can be deadly in the wrong
hands. |
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Fig. 13 – Kiss Me Deadly |
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David
Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel
Crash, what could be called a sci-fi-noir,13
takes the theme of vehicular violence to its extreme, incorporating
eroticism into the mix. This controversial and misunderstood
film does more than present the sexual fetishes of a small group
of individuals centered around Vaughan (Elias Koteas) and his
obsession with recreating celebrity car accidents. It also comments
on technology and its mediating effect between individuals.
As the car’s impact has altered not only the physical
landscape of the city (Fig. 14) but also its social landscape
– how people interact with other people – the car
is presented here as the only means of emotional connection
for characters who are otherwise cold, detached, and numb when
they’re not in a car or watching one on TV. |
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Fig. 14 – Crash |
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The destructive nature of the automobile
is evident throughout the film. One example is the junkyard
where James Ballard (James Spader) and Helen Remington (Holly
Hunter) inadvertently meet while trying to find their respective
cars after an accident. The junkyard is located directly under
a highway overpass (Fig. 15). This proximity not only ties the
act of driving and destruction together into parallel strata,
but it also points to the residual spaces created by highways;
in this case only can an auto graveyard occupy the space created
by the car’s accommodation. |
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Fig. 15 – Crash |
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In John
Singleton’s 1991 film Boyz N the Hood, the automobile
is both the instigator and the facilitator of violence, with
street signs pointing to the former. After the sounds of gun
shots and a statistic about gun violence and black American
males, we see the first image of the film: a stop sign and a
distant plane; later we see “Wrong Way” and “Do
Not Enter” signs when the children walk down an alley
to see a dead body (Fig. 16). These signs signify the limited
movements of the characters in their environment. Not coincidentally
these signs pertain to the cars that reshaped the urban fabric
of Los Angeles into segregated areas with both physical and
social boundaries. The film transports us to the hood where
these signs – ironically associated with the myth of freedom
implied by the car14 –
delimit the areas where residents can and cannot tread, lest
they be dealt with by the gun-toting police. For example, when
Tré (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and Ricky (Morris Chestnut) are
driving in the “wrong place at the wrong time…the
patrolmen see this as a suspicious act and as a cause to terrorize
the pair.”15 |
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Fig. 16 – Boyz N the Hood |
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In the hood guns alone aren’t
sufficient enough for power; they must be combined with the
car to create a situation where one can perform a murder and
flee without detection: the drive-by shooting. The drive-by
is a product of the hood, an environment that requires a car
for mobility. Not coincidentally, Ricky is gunned down after
he and Tré walk back from the corner store, an anachronistic
neighborhood element and an action that make them vulnerable.
The car also becomes the identity for the individuals within
them, as the red car (Fig. 17) of Ricky’s murderers signals
their presence and relates them to earlier threats. Later, Doughboy’s
(Ice Cube) pimped-out convertible signals his retaliation for
Ricky’s death. |
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Fig. 17 – Boyz N the Hood |
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In Double
Indemnity and Kiss Me Deadly the filmmakers expressed
the shift from public mobility to private mobility via contrasting
cars with trains, at a time when the shift was underway. With
nearly fifty years between the first of those films and Boyz
N the Hood, this contrast is nevertheless presented again,
in a cut from the boys walking down their block to the boys
walking down the middle of what appear to be unused railroad
tracks (Fig. 18). Here Singleton is using the juxtaposition
to say that the boundaries of segregation and limits of movement
have changed from physical to immaterial and mediated. The expression
of railroad tracks as a boundary between neighborhoods –
most commonly illustrated in the phrase “the other side
of the tracks” – can be seen as a predecessor to
mediated boundaries like the constant, yet invisible, presence
of police helicopters overhead. The railroads are also a precursor
of the sprawl that is contemporary Los Angeles, a condition
usually (incorrectly) attributed solely to the automobile. L.A.’s
dispersed settlement pattern – established by a combination
of migrating Midwestern farmers around the turn of the century
and the railroads and trolleys in place at the time, among other
factors – merely continued as the railroad tracks were
supplanted by highways.16 |
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Fig. 18 – Boyz N the Hood |
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What differentiates the Los Angeles of Double
Indemnity from that of Boyz N the Hood is that
the latter occupies the space that the former abandoned. White
families moved from the city to the suburbs as Blacks migrated
to large cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles between
the World Wars. This influx of Blacks into the city and exodus
of Whites outside the city is one condition that created the
segregation that is the hood. These movements were facilitated
by the automobile’s mobility, via the city’s catering
to those interests. So from Double Indemnity to Boyz
N the Hood, violence related to the automobile (in both
cause and effect) is found both in the city and the suburbs.
Violence in the city arises from segregation in the wake of
the white flight, and violence in the suburbs arises from
a social disconnection created by privacy, isolation, dependence,
and boredom.
The films discussed here illustrate the numerous
shades of violence of the automobile: violence arising from
isolation and the humdrum environment that stems from automotive
sprawl (Double Indemnity), violence targeting dependence
upon the automobile (The Big Heat), violence symbolizing
a shift in the borders and boundaries of the city (Touch
of Evil), and government-sponsored decentralization colliding
with government-sponsored warfare in the extermination of
the human race (Kiss Me Deadly). The later films
illustrate how the car has become a necessary mediator between
individuals (Crash) and a tool for killing (Boyz
N the Hood). In an attempt to distill a conclusion from
these various points of view, the automobile is by its very
nature a violent entity via a break from a body-centered way
of life to a machine-centered way of life. The future fraught
with danger and freedom fraught with consequences of film
noir arise from the car’s paradoxical condition: the
false promises of freedom and mobility leading to a loss of
individual control, an increase in technological dependency,
and the inherent danger of the automobile itself. |
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1.
Silver, Alain. “Introduction.” Film Noir Reader.
Silver, Alain and Ursini, James, editors. New York: Proscenium
Publishers, 1996: p. 11.
2.
Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir.” Film
Noir Reader. Silver, Alain and Ursini, James, editors.
New York: Proscenium Publishers, 1996: p. 54.
3.
Flink, James J. The Car Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The MIT Press, 1975: p. 213.
4.
“The Atomic Bomb and the Future City.” American
City, August 1946, and “Defense through Decentralization.”
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Number 7 (1951).
5.
“If the street cars were to stop, life would go on about
as usual. But if automobiles were to suddenly cease to function,
the whole economic and social structure would be disrupted.”
Quote by Ed Ainsworth (1938) in Bottles, Scott. Los Angeles
and the Automobile. Los Angeles: University of Berkeley
Press, 1987: p. 211.
6.
Fotsch, Paul Mason. "Film Noir and Automotive Isolation
in Los Angeles." Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies,
Volume 5 Number 1, (2005): p. 103.
7.
Ibid, p. 107.
8.
“They've committed a murder and it's not like taking
a trolley ride together where they can get off at different
stops. They're stuck with each other and they've got to ride
all the way to the end of the line and it's a one-way trip
and the last stop is the cemetery.” – Barton Keyes
(Edward G. Robinson) in Double Indemnity.
9.
“As the camera roves through the streets of the Mexican
border town, the plan was to feature a succession of different
contrasting Latin American musical numbers – the effect,
that is, of our passing one cabaret orchestra after another…
The fact that the streets are invariably loud with this music
was planned as a basic device throughout the entire picture.”
Memo from Orson Welles to Universal studio chief Edward Muhl
in Touch of Evil. DVD. Universal, 2000.
10.
Silver, Alain. “Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style.”
Film Noir Reader. Silver, Alain and Ursini, James.
New York: Proscenium Publishers, 1996: p. 225.
11.
Davis, Mike. “Bunker Hill: Hollywood’s Dark Shadow.”
Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global
Context. Shiel, Mark and Fitzmaurice, Tony. London: Blackwell
Publishers, 2001: p. 43.
12.
Dimendbert, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004: p. 246.
13.
J.G. Ballard calls science fiction “The body’s
dream of becoming a machine,” in “Project for
a Glossary of the Twentieth Century.” Zone 6: Incorporations.
Crary, Jonathan and Kwinter, Sanford, editors. New York: Zone,
1992: p. 277.
14.
Massood, Paula J. “Mapping the Hood: The Genealogy of
City Space in Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society.”
Cinema Journal, Volume 35 No2 (1996): p. 90.
15.
Ibid, p. 91.
16.
Kunstler, James Howard. Geography of Nowhere: The Rise
and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1993: p. 208. |
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::
Text © John Hill |
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