IN HIS LETTERBOXD ARTICLE THAT "HANDCUFFS" TEN NOIR CLASSICS TO TEN NEO-NOIR "MASTERWORKS"
Travis Woods, author of the upcoming book, De Palma Does Hollywood, posted a Letterboxd article today with the headline, "Dark Mirrors: handcuffing ten film noir classics to ten neo-noir masterworks." "Watchlists ready," Woods writes in the introduction, "here are ten films noir from the classic era paired with ten neo-noir thematic companions: dark cinemirrors that reflect, heighten and claw at one another as bullets fly, bodies fall and blood stains all." And he begins with Billy Wilder and Brian De Palma:
Double Indemnity (1944)Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, from a novel by James M. CainFemme Fatale (2002)
Written and directed by Brian De Palma
The stark monochrome. The Germanic shadows. The fatal ironies, the ironic fatalism. The sun-shattered Los Angeles and its inky nights. The libidinal allure of death, the existentially terrifying sex. The obsessive investigator. The lust-hammered sap willing to risk all for money or a woman or both. The ice-veined femme fatale in need of a murderous fool. More than any other, Double Indemnity is the film that most obsessively, efficiently, and thrillingly gathered together the tropes of a nascent genre and shotgunned them at the movie screens of the 1940s. No other picture so ably managed to articulate the potential of noir than this wickedly funny (and just plain wicked) tale that plays out as smirking, sensuous flashbacks during a gunshot man’s final moments when death envelops him in its permanent seduction.
The neo-(also erotic-, anti- and deconstructive-)noir Femme Fatale renders subtext as text in its opening shot: Double Indemnity playing on a TV, with its lone viewer’s body—a naked Hitchcock blonde thief (Rebecca Romijn)—reflected across the screen like a full-colored ribbon. That ribbon also thematically binds the film to works like David Lynch’s then-just-released Mulholland Drive, as De Palma crafts a maniacal cinematic essay on everything from noir to neo-noir, crime pictures to the cinema of the surreal, the nature of fantasy to the nature of identity. Above all else, as the movie’s failed Cannes Film Festival heist sequence sends Romijn’s mysterious thief into an (unreal?) double life, De Palma uses the visual language of Hitchcock, the dream language of Lynch and the thematic language of noir to finally take us into the minds of the troubled women who’ve always been lurking at the heart of this genre. This is the movie they have always been watching—and living within.