Lighting Greed and Guilt in Film Noir Term Paper

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Too Late for TearsAs the title of the 1948 film noir suggests, Too Late for Tears the unrepentant pursuit of ill-gotten wealth by one nobody named Jane. Jane and Alan and middle-class Americans; Alan is okay with that—Jane is not. She chafes at the condescension of her wealthier peers, and the opening sequence of the film centers on her griping about having to spend another evening with one of their rich friends. The sequence is set on the open road, as Jane and Alan head to a party. Jane becomes so filled with anxiety and resentment that she tries to force Alan to turn back. In doing so, she causes Alan to swerve and the lights of the car flicker on and off. As fate would have it, there just so happens to be another car pulled off to the side of the road waiting for exactly such a signal. A bag of hush money is tossed out the window into the backseat of Jane and Alan’s car. Thus begins Jane’s descent into money-fueled madness and murder. Too Late for Tears is a good example of film noir because at its heart it is about the decaying underbelly of modern America—a story about a seemingly normal housewife who becomes a killer due to her greed. Apart from its story and moral themes, however, the film uses all the stylistic elements, narrative patterns, and character development (no arc for—it’s just straight down for her) typical of the genre. The opening sequence foregrounds the central conflict of the film: Jane’s greed and desire (spontaneous, impulsive and impetuous) is set in opposition to the basic human decency represented initially by her husband Alan; he attempts to restore some sanity and order at the end of the sequence (“Slow down, I’ll take the wheel”), but it is already too late for her: like Lady Macbeth, she has set her eyes on riding Dame Fortune and the hush-money gift bag straight to the top and nothing will get in the way of her resolve—not even a little murder of decency along the way.The visual style of Too Later for Tears is illustrative of noir’s tendency to bask in shadows. Shadowy scenes, with strips of light drawing the viewer’s attention to a pair of eyes or a hand on a gun like some living chiaroscuro effect on film, proliferate in noir. They can be found in films like Notorious, The Third Man, The Big Sleep, and dozens upon dozens of others. Low-key lighting is “key” to understanding film noir, as Place and Peterson point out.[footnoteRef:1] High contrast sets the mood and tone of the story: film noir looks steadily at the tension, separation, and divide between light and darkness—the visual representation of the moral quandary found in human nature, so often the subject of history’s moral philosophers. [1: Place, Janey A., and Lowell S. Peterson. \"Some visual motifs of film noir.\" Film Comment 10, no. 1 (1974): 30.]Fritz Lang introduced the crazy camera upward tilt in M that Kubrick would use later in The Shining to suggest the superiority of Jack’s insanity as he talks to his wife through the bathroom door and tells her about how he is going to bash her brains in. Lang uses it to illustrate the unyielding slightly sadistic determination of the detective on the case of the pedophilic killer.

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Too Late for Tears’ opening sequence does not have any such crazy tilts—but it does adhere visually to one of the all-time great noir framing jobs: the opening shot is of the sedan that will be making the bag drop as it winds…

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…Jane (as the Mexican police burst in).In terms of narrative structure, the film illustrates the components of noir, too. It begins by introducing the crisis point—the central conflict—the trap (the money). It quickly descends into murder, as Jane won’t let Alan get in her way (he wants to turn it in to the authorities; she refuses and begins plotting his demise). She has to cover her tracks, which leads to more murder (just like Norman Bates cleaning up the hotel room in Hitchcock’s noir thriller Psycho or Ray trying to drag the body of Julian off the streets before a car passes to see in the Coens’ noir Blood Simple).Stylistically, Too Late for Tears achieves everything a film noir ought to achieve. As Deborah Thomas points out, when it comes to film noir “anxiety is so central to its mood.”[footnoteRef:3] Usually it is the male bringing the anxiety, as Thomas notes—but here in this film it is Jane and the anxiety stems from her insecurity about status and wealth. In moral terms, it is really just greed and vanity—but modern critics like to talk about the social determinants of this or that, as though the inner workings of the soul were secondary. What makes film noir great, however, is that it shines the light on the soul in a way that won’t allow you to look elsewhere. The viewer has to look at Jane’s face when the bag is unclasped in the opening sequence—because that’s how the film is lit. The viewer has to deal with what is going on in her soul at that moment: she is literally being seduced by money, as the eyes of the viewer are by the chiaroscuro effect. [3: Deborah Thomas, “How Hollywood Deals with the Deviant Male,” The Movie Book of Film Noir (1992): 59.].....

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