Theses on noir
The detective against the police
I spent my first thirty-odd years in the Northeast, where I could “feel the whole [Atlantic] breathing, and its breath was old and sick and tired, all up and down the stations…” as William Gibson, that true inheritor of noir, once put it.
As soon as I moved to the Pacific Northwest, a latent obsession with classic noir and the figure of the detective germinated at time-lapse speed. It had antecedents: mesmeric encounters with Hammett and Chandler, with Huston films, and with the homages of Gibson, Bolaño and Kadare. But here it took on a new dimension.
What kind of roman noir was appropriate for the late twenty-teens? How to update the genre and simultaneously return it to its proletarian, oppositional roots, its critique of wealth and police power? Noir originates in a dissident current within mid-century modernism. In stark contrast to most contemporary mystery fiction, the noir classics were reflexively distrustful of the police and cynical in their assumptions about the US justice system, indeed about US capitalist society in general. The genre was a machine for demolishing tidy borders between legitimate and illegitimate commerce and force, even if it sometimes sneakily redrew them. At its best, it portrayed society’s nether regions as organically linked to its upper crust.
Wealth and crime formed a nexus of fallenness.
This organic linkage has nothing to do with the well-covered venalities of the wealthy. Rather it concerns the uncovered, existential crime of wealth, the criminal relations of production hidden in plain sight. To misappropriate Rimbaud, noir posited that “sleep in wealth is impossible. Wealth has always been public property” (A Season in Hell, 1873). Or Marlowe, succinctly: “To hell with the rich. They made me sick” (The Big Sleep, 1939).
At first I considered rejecting any sensational “revelation” of sordid venality on the part of the rich, in favor of a gaze into their more odorless, omnipresent crimes, those crimes which they don’t bother to hide. Then I reflected on the nature of these crimes of capital: not so odorless in fact. Moguls, cops and gangsters, I reasoned, are really more or less the same. I gleaned this insight from David Graeber, who mocks the dismal science’s “sanitized view of the way actual business is conducted. The tidy world of shops and malls,” he writes, “is the quintessential middle-class environment, but at either the top or the bottom of the system, the world of financiers or of gangsters [emphasis added], deals are often made in ways” that follow a more ancient logic reminiscent of the isolated traditional cultures whose Dionysian trading rituals Graeber discusses.
Consider the case of Neil Bush (George W.’s brother) who, during divorce proceedings with his wife, admitted to multiple infidelities with women who, he claimed, would mysteriously appear at his hotel-room door after important business meetings in Thailand and Hong Kong.
“You have to admit it’s pretty remarkable, " remarked one of his wife’s attorneys, "for a man to go to a hotel-room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her.”
“It was very unusual,” Bush replied, admitting however that this had happened to him on numerous occasions.
“Were they prostitutes?”
“I don’t know.”
In fact, such things seem almost par for the course when really big money comes into play.
In this light, the economists’ insistence that economic life begins with barter, the innocent exchange of arrows for teepee frames, with no one in a position to rape, humiliate, or torture anyone else, and that it continues in this way, is touchingly utopian (Debt, 127–8).
The cops are part of this archaic logic; they too prowl and feed at the top and bottom of the system, leaving the middle more or less alone. Quebecois auteur Denys Arcand’s latest crime caper, The Fall of the American Empire (2019), captures this truth with crystalline perfection. In noir as opposed to communist comedy, the same vision presents its darker side: the cops are always corrupt, as if they inhabit the world of Saint Augustine: “what are states but large-scale criminal organizations?” (City of God).
Let’s map the obscure psychogeography of this world.
Exterior
Noir ontology
The world of noir is at once ancient (fatalist, Stoic) and medieval (Augustinian, Dantean); it is also a knot of postmodern, hall-of-mirrors fatalism — right at the heart of supposedly triumphant, mid-century modernity. Its denizens — moguls, cops, gangsters — all follow a medieval logic (hence the detective as knight), or rather all follow an eternal logic that has always remained beneath the skin of modernity. The detective, clinically or savagely, removes the skin. The cops, the moguls, and the gangsters are united in their desire to keep the skin on. But the detective reveals the skin to be nothing more than a scab over the mortal wound of a foundational sin. He asks Parzival’s question, and he gets his answer — but knowledge does not bring salvation. The detective rises from the dead in every book, but no Ascension is in sight. This is no longer a Christian world; its ontology has gone feral, returning to the pagan structure of eternal cycles. The next book, the next case, begins with the detective and his fallen world exactly the same as before.
Why has the genre’s ontology gone feral? This going feral is called modernity. But it has nothing to do with progress, with Christian teleology, with Hegel or Fukuyama. With Marx, maybe, though only with Marx shaven clean of his eschatological nimbus. Isn’t this a world built on the foundational wound of capital — primitive accumulation — but one which has lost a credible salvific narrative arc and has no road toward Cardenal’s “Kingdom of Heaven that is communism?”
The detective is inseparable from her habitat; let’s look more closely at the habitat to find her.
Noir geography
Seattle is a boomtown, the natural environment for noir. The Seattle-Vancouver metropolitan axis is nothing like New York-Montreal: it’s on the rim of a young ocean, the containers from Shenzhen always looming somewhere in the background, scalding floods of capital throwing up jungles of glass and sowing an understory of rotting human detritus. Between litter and canopy, the ceaseless hustle and flow of commerce, analytics, scrabbling and sales-pitching. The first thing that struck me was that this is the kind of place Chandler’s LA was in the ’40s and ’50s: a boomtown showing its louche, nouveau-riche glitter and seedy underbelly on every corner.
This is the Seattle I want to invoke: the exhaustion of precarious workers hanging on by their fingernails (a world in which I have at least one foot), cheek by jowl with the eerie, heavy silence of neighborhoods where I’m an occasional interloper, ministering to the homework needs of wealthy children, sometimes summoned, like the food delivery courier I become when clients dry up, by app. Those neighborhoods have a hush I can only describe as plated in some dull precious metal.
And the flora! They speak of a genteel brutality, a Pacific colonial imaginary: hardy palms, the elephantine leaves of dwarf cavendish bananas and birds of paradise; the Rhododendron Society with its commemorative plaques at the arboretum; the rattan of neo-tiki bars which well-heeled disruptors leave on all fours at four a.m.… all this had to be part of the new noir —
as did the bizarre, fabricated neighborhood of Amazonia (South Lake Union), where I also occasionally had a client and where the most surreal, carnivorous jungle of all sprouts inside the great untaxed billionaire’s proverbial glass balls… The work deals with tax evasion and fraud involving these colonial legacies of the trade in antiques and “exotic” plants of questionable provenance: the colonies as the exterior projection of the metropole’s own savage logic.
The Second as well as the Third World forms part of this savage exterior: mid-century noir was never far removed from Cold-War anxieties. The outside has always already breached the perimeter; the savage is inside the house. Global geopolitical economy and the specter of totalitarianism always lurked in noir’s domestic shadows.
Today new iterations of this pattern are everywhere visible, and the jaundiced eye of the detective can’t fail to find them. My detective picks out the parallels between China’s totalitarian social credit system and the rapacious use of personal data by tech and financial firms. She asks how the dynamics of transparency and clandestinity, crime and corruption have changed since the period of classic noir, and finds that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Interior
Now that we’ve catalogued her habitat, we can study the detective in the wild.
The new noir I envisioned had to detect the identity of wealth and crime, and also to repudiate the apologetics of the police procedural — it would be a noir for an age of renewed struggle against the carceral state. Thus it had to recuperate the “amateur” or “private” detective — as a figure of opposition to police power and as a precarious worker in a ruthless boomtown. A measure of irony toward the macho, white-knight vigilante aspect of the PI had to be built in. But I had no interest in recycling the well-worn parody of the fedora-wearing stock character. Alice Notley’s Disobedience had taught me that irony can coexist with a deep appreciation of the detective figure’s mythic power.
The following theses are the result of my researches into the identity of this archetypal detective:
1. The detective is eternal.
Not a character in any bourgeois realist sense, the detective remains unchanged from case to case, story to story. This is because, while crimes are reliably solved, Crime remains: not only inextricable but indistinguishable from order. The order of a world. In this world the detective is eternal because crime is eternal. A soldier lost amid civilian decadence, a would-be Christian or communist hero stuck in the pagan limbo of capital where time has looped. Of necessity the detective becomes a Stoic, a fatalist. But isn’t she a fatalist whose desire remains intact & aimed at truth?
2. The detective is a soldier without a war.
Why do I say that the detective is a soldier? Like most aesthetic theories, mine is fundamentally no more than a distillation of a single work which for me is definitive: Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939). Chandler’s actual WWI experiences have been much mythologized, and his most direct reflections on PTSD (in The Blue Dahlia) don’t concern a detective. But Marlowe is called “soldier” 14 times by Big Sleep villain Eddie Mars; and his strange, almost filial care for the dying General Sternwood, who wants to find his missing son-in-law Rusty Regan, links him with the figure of the soldier — a revolutionary soldier, not a statist one:
The General:
“I’m very fond of Rusty. A big curly-headed Irishman from Clonmel, with sad eyes and a smile as wide as Wilshire Boulevard… He was the breath of life to me — while he lasted. He spent hours with me, sweating like a pig, drinking brandy by the quart and telling me stories of the Irish revolution. He had been an officer in the I.R.A. He wasn’t even legally in the United States.”
Marlowe asks the General’s butler:
“What did this Regan fellow have that bored into him so?”
The butler looked at me levelly and yet with a queer lack of expression. “Youth, sir,” he said. “And the soldier’s eye.”
“Like yours,” I said.
“If I may say so, sir, not unlike yours.”
“Thanks,”
Marlowe replies laconically, as always, but this is a moment of existential recognition.
A soldier is different from a cop in fundamental ways. Especially a stateless soldier. But even regular soldiers are the bedrock of force upon which state-formation rests, and thus always at least potentially revolutionary. Not so the police, whose sole function is to protect wealth. All states are built on soldiers, but functioning states are not built on the police. Soldiers, it is well-known, have at best an ambiguous relationship with the law. On the other hand, minor crimes by soldiers at war are punishable by death, whereas crimes by cops are almost impossible to prosecute. The soldier lives on the state’s exterior as well as at its foundation; military force defines the state’s limit. When soldiers are deployed to fight within the state’s territory, it is a sign of state breakdown, of revolution, and at these moments soldiers are decisive in upholding or changing the order that delineates crime and treason from civic virtue. The cops have no such power, and for them the lines between crime and civic duty are eternally muddied, whereas for the soldier they are absolute — until they are absolutely redrawn. Thus the soldier is a figure of transcendence, while the cop is a figure of obscenity and license. Police power thus operates in the same venal field as the wealth to which it swears an obscene fealty.
Over against this obscenity of the police, the detective stands as an eternally thwarted soldier, a soldier without a war. Her whole work of detection is the tortuous path the blocked vector of her soldierhood must take.
3. The detective is a worker, because her adversary is wealth
Wealth and its dog, police power. These are indistinguishable from crime.
The detective’s world is fallen, Augustinian. “What are states but large-scale criminal organizations?” (City of God). Crime is not outside; crime has no outside. It does have an exterior: corruption, the illegal. And an interior: order, legality.
The detective is a figure of desire for Law; therefore he is outside the world’s legality. As vigilante/knight errant, he must keep his desire, his thought and his iron will private, interior, in order to transcend the public sphere where human law is corrupt. This is ostensibly in the service of wealthy clients, but the clients always fall short of or indeed obstruct the detective’s transcendent, salvific mission. (The rightist connotations of this figuration of the detective are only apparent.)
Not only is human law corrupt in some venal, corrigible sense; it is an instrument of wealth, which is itself inextricable from crime. Thus the law’s corruption is intrinsic. The detective penetrates below the surface of the public and finds private venality but also the entirely licit, ontological perversion of wealth: he glimpses subconsciously the relation of property as theft. Cursed with the knowledge of this original sin, his desire must be for an inexistant Law, and must thus itself remain “private.”
All this of course is the reverse of what detectives in captivity say and what unwary readers of detective fiction think. Not so with free detectives, detectives in the wild, in the night of the jungle (which is not the metropole’s outside but its inner identity).
If opacity is the aura of wealth, which is powerless against the free detective’s X-ray vision, then transparency is the rhetoric of surveillance capital. The free detective is no more lulled by this rhetoric of transparency than she is by wealth’s heavy lustre. Therefore she has mastered the two ways of looking at, of filming, wealth:
Exterior: weight, statis, a funereal quiet, gold-plated sunlight cool to the touch.
Interior: infernal heat, whirlwinds and darkness, a deafening clamor of voices, demons and machines, the wails and enraged yelps of the damned.
This inner identity is what the free detective detects: inside crime, wealth with no bottom; inside wealth, the limitless glittering firmament of crime.
There is a name for this horror, this ghastly infinitude: capital accumulation. But the detective never speaks this name, for by uttering it he would collapse the distance — which is the genre’s miraculous weapon — between himself and what he named; he would dissolve the mystery and would vanish into the solution, annihilated.
So the detective keeps quiet about what he actually detects. Why? What is this implacable will to go on, to uphold the eternal return of the detective’s existence, this pagan limbo? Because the detective must remain “part of the nastiness” (Marlowe). He must not fully dissolve the mystery and abolish himself as detective. If he did, he would become a revolutionary, a “class for himself;” his desire straight and true, aimed at self-abolition. Instead his desire remains sublimated, remains desire for the inexistent Law — not of this world but of the next, “in the kingdom of Heaven that is communism…” The detective will never ascend to reach this Law, because this world contains no golden ladder to reach it.
Instead the detective story is a katabasis, a journey down to the sea, or to the underworld. When the transcendent, eschatological route is blocked, spiritual soldiers must turn their journeys downwards, into the dark regions. Jacques Silette: “Everyone remembers the name of the first detective, Persephone” (quoted in Sara Gran, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, p. 198). To go that road the detective must make use of the ineffable, where criticism ends and the dream begins: words that can only be sung, forced into print:
A ransom note written on the night sky above…
The searchlight slumps over, so sick of the night
And the kids on the boats, busted in the shipyard
Going down, down, down, down, down, down, down-Destroyer, “Bay of Pigs (Detail)”
