“I’m back!” says Film Noir

When I was in film class at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s, Professor Bart told us of an observation someone made during the Korean War. I’ve forgotten the details, but the observation was about showing movies to the troops after they’d return to base from battle. Troops who had just come back from the real-life horrors of battle that day would scream and jump when watching a horror movie.

In the midst of the real and deadly battles, they couldn’t scream and jump. But watching a movie, they had some kind of moral permission to react to the depiction that represented reality for them.

There are movies that are popular “popcorn movies” that bring us the universal fantasy that somebody can and wants to come save us. We are always the people on the sidewalk under the collapsing building that Superman comes in and swoops to safety. Audiences always need that fantasy.

And then there are what I consider the Triad of Genres that surge in response to specific long-term stress in society — whether it’s war, economic collapse, or the demise of democracy — and they have a sequence: first Zombies, then Horror, and then Noir.

It’s my observation that movie genres surge in parallel to the three stages of grief:

1. Learn that the loss is happening.

2. Reality sets in with shock, denial, anger, bargaining.

3. Living with reality by integrating the loss into our changed world.

Movies have always helped us look at the past. “Godzilla” was the monster that embodied the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. “Pans Labyrinth” embodied the Fascist threat that we beat (or so we thought).

Movies also help us deal with the present.

I mentioned earlier how watching “Casablanca” as the “Late Night Movie” on TV back in the day when I was a child helped form my worldview. I had always looked at it as a victory, because we were safely in the world of our victory over Nazis and Fascists. It wasn’t until recently that I finally recognized Casablanca was a movie describing the present; when it came out, husbands and brothers weren’t in the audience because they were off dying in the war far away at that very moment, and nobody in the audience knew how World War II was going to turn out.

Let’s look at our present moment.

A decade or so ago, the beginning of the Trump Epoch threat, saw a surge in Zombie movies. There was even the cultural movement anticipating the coming “Zombie Apocalypse” that subliminally grew from the impending MAGA apocalypse.

Zombie films rise when economic anxiety and social instability make people feel as if they are surrounded by an invasion that will consume and replace them. Zombies represent inescapable contagion, dehumanization, and the breakdown of what we thought had been the normal order of life.

Right now, as the Trump Epoch has completed its surge and now destroys the America we used to think existed, horror films are rampant, becoming the most successful and popular genre films in theaters.

Of course. Horror films surge when war, trauma, and fear become so large they can’t be addressed in normal human interaction … the soldiers who couldn’t scream in fear during bloody battle could during a movie in a mess tent. Horror gives form to fear itself. Our collective dread is disguised as a monster on the screen.

And now, in my opinion, we slip into the era of Film Noir.

I’ve mentioned before how I tried to find a story, because storytelling is so obviously important in society especially in times of social distress, that can embody the trauma and powerlessness we feel in reaction to the inhuman, violent, and murderous I.C.E. surges to disappear and kill people of color. I looked for historical context that could help audiences grasp what is underlying the rage and anger at losing the country we thought we lived in.

Yes, it is a story that is of interest to only “half” of Americans, the ones who are considered “enemies of his state” by our president. It is a story told with curiosity as two disparate characters seek to understand each other rather than leap to judgment and violence; half of America has no curiosity, only judgment.

I created those two very different characters and put them into historical facts, the context that could help half of America living in trauma.

As writers know, sometimes if we are lucky, we create characters who tell us what the story is and where it goes.

My characters in BOYLE HEIGHTS 1939 led me to Film Noir. The story couldn’t be anything else, they demanded.

And that’s what got me thinking that, of course, this is where we are now. America is in the moment of moral exhaustion, when stories of corruption, fatalism, and emotional ruin are needed to help us understand why we feel the trauma and distress that is overwhelming us. Overwhelming us, or worse: that we might absorb in capitulation and eventual complicity.

America is moving through the three stages of movie grief: the Zombie phase no longer applies because we have been consumed, the horror phase is complete as the monsters have won, and now the Film Noir phase is recognizing that the country we used to think we lived in is consumed by corruption, grift, hate, racism, lies, and the putrid smell of Fascism.

If we recognize the phases and the context, instead of living under the black cloud of trauma and fear, we might be able to refocus our lives in ways to steer our country back onto its proper path.