Noirs & Music Videos : share same basic narrative structure

The classic Noir narrative structure is a deliberately disorienting mix of two main activities.

One (the frame) features reflective and recollecting voice overs from the protagonist, this quiet, intimate vocal mixed up high over the relatively silent visuals (action, sfx but no important dialogue).

These voice over sequences set up the dialogue and action heavy parts of the noir, mostly events from the past, cast as if they are occurring in the present, in real time.

It all reminds me of the way most music videos work - the sequences of the singer at a mike singing have a boring visual background , if they have one at all. The words, usually of non-repeated 'verses' - reflective and recalling , are everything.

The singer - for example - recalls their lost lover.

In the dialogue and action segments (the so called actors' bits--- even if the singer is now one of those actors), there is frequently either no singing at all (the action occurs against an instrumental solo)  or the only singing is the 'voices off' repetitious singing of an already frequently heard (and unsubtle) vocal chorus, more meant to be emotionally felt than intellectually dissected in the foreground.

Here we see scenes of the singer and lover when they were happy and still together.

The song bridge might be the place in the narrative where the nominal cause for the breakup is described in words (voice over - voices off) and seen in the visuals.

In noir or music video it is a very flexible way to produce depth and narrative complexity --- cheaply.

What's there not to love about that ?

Noir only talks of emperors to claim they have no clothes

Noir actually doesn't really talk - much less frankly : the Breen Office put full stop to that idea.

But its small scale and relatively personal dramas among downmarket nobodies are free to cast a highly suggestive and subversive mood - and they do - in (Sam) spades.

Their mood clearly suggests that corruption, double-crossing and deception extends through all aspects of human life - not just in the lower ranks where dis-honour among working class thieves has long been taken for granted by the upper crust.

That the big double cross actually extends upwards to (or is that 'extends downwards from' ?) the sunny, sacred, servants of the people top of national society.

And beyond. Far beyond.

With Nazi Germany's abrupt 'Pact with' and then 'Attack upon' communist Russia being perhaps the ultimate double cross - particularly to the left wing writers, directors and movie critics who responded by creating Film Noir in the years immediately following Germany's sneak attack upon its new ally.

When, in turn , mainstream Hollywood's newest best buds, Russia and America, also suddenly fell out with heated criminations, it only further fuelled Film Noir's downbeat deconstruction of the overly sunny "official version" of reality ...

'Farewell My Valento' : all wartime America tries 'passing' as native born WASP

When an originally dark-haired Italian-American woman successfully 'passing' as Mrs Helen Grayle (an icy blond member of 1940s Los Angeles' upper crust) is threatened with the exposure of her dark (literally : noir) secret , Velma Valento kills and kills and kills again.

All to prevent her secret from ever coming out.

This basically is the engine that drives the plot of the first and greatest noir cum private eye story ever : Raymond Chandler's FAREWELL MY LOVELY (1940).

The city of quartz passes for diamond

From 1920 till 1960 (the years of the very height of high modernity) Los Angeles's population repeatedly told the census people that it had the highest percentage of native born white protestants of any major American city - most residents also claiming to be born with clearly Anglo-Saxon names.

Some - a few - might have been telling the truth - but not many.

Adapting your real name to sound more native born Anglo Saxon did not just start and end with people in Show Biz or LA : it was a national passion under Modernity.

And claiming to attend a mainstream protestant denomination (once every decade - for someone else's funeral or wedding) never ever hurt any 'passer' either during the era of Modernity.

And so what if you were originally a swarthy Italian or a light Colored - who could tell anything anymore in a nation addicted to having deep tans and peroxided hair ?

One of the greatest successes of Modernity film's censor board (the Breen Office) was in preventing any hint on screen of deliberate miscegenation : the races deliberately choosing to sleep together.

But perhaps Modernity's greatest fear was of the screen showing examples of what later is revealed to be unintentional sexual miscegenation.

That Mary Douglas-like nightmare of the supposedly white native born protestant WASP bonkette in your Big House bed actually turning out to be a swarthy dark , foreign and Catholic crop picker from out in the dirty fields .

In the early 1940s, the Allied nations justified the conscripting of their young to possibly die as necessary to protect the vital "small c" catholic concept that 'all men are brothers'.

Meanwhile, Joseph Breen's office, working (ultimately) under the direction of the Pope, struggled hard every day to deny this fact ever appearing on the screen.

But then the race-traitor Raymond Chandler (that rare southern Californian who truly was white protestant anglo saxon and native-born) slipped a catholic darkie 'past' Breen : and Noir was born ...

a Noirish account of wartime penicillin : un-superheroes

With Un-superheroes, I hope to offer up a bit of astringent reality, after years of  nothing but the Breen Office version of wartime penicillin -- with all its 'hands across the water' and Allied buddy bonding...