Blog #6

Jerold J. Abrams, in his article “Space, Time, and Subjectivity in Neo-Noir Cinema”, delved into the similarities and differences between Neo Noir and classic Film Noir. I had some difficulty understanding the majority of what he was talking about, probably because I need sleep, but this is what I was able to make out of it all: The main differences are the setting (Now not confined to cities) and the protagonists.

The protagonists in Classic Noir are, as Abrams puts it, “always a detective looking for clues to unravel the mystery of whodunit” (pg.1). They are your typical ‘Hard boiled’ detectives, looking for criminals and taking crime head on. They hunt the bad guys.

The protagonists in Neo Noir are a bit different. While they may also be detectives, their primary search is not for a criminal. It is for themselves. Be it by amnesia, trauma, hypnosis, or some other means of memory loss, our protagonist has lost or forgotten themselves. They spend the whole story looking for what is missing.

Abrams discusses three types of Neo Noir; past, present and future.

In past Noir, the story was typically in a low tech time and asked a lot of theological questions. One of the examples given, of George Lucas’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a perfect representation of this. In the film, Indiana Jones is looking for treasure (the Ark of the Covenant), as much for the adventure as he is “looking for an experience of the Ark in order to test his faith—or whether he has any” (pg. 6). He is searching for himself in a spiritual sense, searching for the Ark ultimately to see if he can have faith in God or if science is the way to go.

Present Neo Noir is… Present. It’s happening in the now. Having never seen the films listed as examples, I have to go from Abrams’s descriptions. Bourne Identity sounds like a good example of this style of Neo Noir. It is a man who has no recollection of who he is or what has happened, who suddenly turns into a killing machine when faced with a threat. He has to spend the majority of the movie trying to figure out who and what he is, and who is after him and why. Another film I might think would fit this form of Neo Noir is the X-Men series, more specifically focusing on Wolverine. He has no memory of what his claws are, where they came from, why he can regenerate, none of it. He needs to figure out who did this to him and why.

Future Neo Noir is like the other ones, just based sometime in the future. The film Minority Report is a good example. It follows John Anderton, who runs the Pre-Crime division. But when the Precogs see him killing someone in the future, he is forced to run from his own team in search of his himself (or, his future self), in order to stop the crime he doesn’t know why he is committing. Another possible example for this is the movie Looper. While he isn’t looking for his philosophical self, the protagonist here is looking for his physical self, from the future, trying to stop him from finding and killing someone in the present.