Nolan’s Memento is a non-linear film in the vein of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (Although, Pulp Fiction most certainly did it better being less predictable . The film’s scene order is reversed, with the events going back in time as the film progresses. The mystery of the film, and how it partakes in the Noir tradition, is Leonard’s search for his wife’s killer. The film begins with him discovering who he believes the killer is and Leonard taking his revenge. Okay, not technically true, it begins with a shot of Leonard shaking a polaroid as it undevelopes and we figure out the shot is playing in reverse which sets the tone for the rest of the film as it unfolds it reverse order. The film works back from one murder to another where we learn at the end of the film (or, rather, we’re lead to believe) Leonard has been murdering people named John G and then going back to looking for another one after the deed is done. Leonard takes advantage of his own memory problems. We the viewer are left to question everything we know about Leonard and the stories he’s told, he is the most unreliable narrator possibly in the history of narration. He changes the facts he holds so dear, lying to himself so he can keep having his revenge. The facts of his past may have changed as he lied to himself over-and-over again conditioning himself to believe a different past, if Teddy is to be believed. Because of his condition, could Leonard constantly reinvent himself slowly with each passing five minute chunk of time? I’m not sure, becuase I think he’s hit a wall as fall as self reinvention goes. It’s the tattoos. All the tattoos he has lead him to Teddy, he’s tattooed Teddy’s license place on his skin, and the other tattoos lead to anyone named John G. I think Teddy is the last in a line of John Gs given the permanency of the clues that lead him there.

I’m sure this would have been funnier in theaters, everything is funnier in groups. What little grounds for comedy I found in this film were entirely based in the disparity between the expectations one might have about the world, and the events that unfolded. One might expect two hired hitmen would be able to successfully kidnap a woman without a hitch, but the ensuing hijinks are what give way for the movie to take place.  The film becomes a noir at the traffic stop. From that moment on, the film is about a murder investigation, a quintessential part of classic film noir. But it spends much of the runtime then subverting classical noir tropes, with the hard boiled detective being replaced by a pregnant, low rung cop, the femme fatale is replaced by Gaear, the silent, trigger-happy hitman who accounts for much of the films bodycount. Continuing this subversion of expectations is where it draws its comedic value. The wife falls down the steps and lies motionless leading the audience to believe she’s dead, that’s not supposed to happen in a kidnapping. Jerry is under investigation from not only the police looking into the murders that occurred with connection to one of his companies cars, but also under investigation for vehicle financing and smudgy serial numbers. Two investigations in one crime film that wont overlap? That’s not supposed to happen. Killing the hostage because she was being laud. That’s not supposed to happen. Disposing of the chopped up body of your partner in a wood-chipper? That’s not supposed to happen. This subversion of anything and everything seems to be a staple of the Coen Brothers if The Big Lebowski is anything to go by. The comedy of this film is based in subversion, in the absurd, but It’s not comedy you laugh at. It’s the type of comedy that makes you think “Oh, that’s funny” before you continue watching the film.

Oneiric, in spades. The absurdity of this film can only be explained by describing it as a dream someone had after they took hefty dose of psychedelics before they slept. Absolute absurdity. The movie opens with a title sequence with a blue velvet backdrop before moving to a pristine and idilic suburban neighborhood. The kids are walking home from school, there’s someone watering their lawn, there’s even a waving fireman on an engine running board with a station dog.

The sex scene just before the midpoint of the film makes campy B-Reel porn look tame and refined. What seems even more absurd to me of the whole ordeal is how Dorothy reacts to Jeffery peeking in on her from her closet. Upon discovery she greets him with a knife, orders him to undress, and would have continued with the series of sexual acts before they were interrupted. When he visits her again the next day, she confesses to the budding feeling she’s experiencing towards him and when he goes to see her again after that the two engage in. Hardly the rational reaction to finding someone in your closet.

The musical number sung by a man in heavy make-up using a mechanic’s lamp as a microphone gets cut short by Frank’s yelling before the cast disappears in a single frame is a sequence of events that would be out of place in any other piece of media ever produced by the human species, but here it is entirely normal.

Beer plays an odd role in the film and I think it helps solidify the oneiric quality of the film. Jeffery drinks Heineken and announces so on more than one occasion, Frank thinks Jeffery is wrong for liking Heineken and instead prefers Pabst Blue Ribbon, and Sandy’s father, the detective, drinks Budweiser: “The King of Beers”. The kind of exchanges you would expect to experience in a dream after having discussed such topics before going to bed.

A film that can only be explained as Jeffery’s dream, I have trouble saying whether it was a good dream intermixed with the qualities of a bad trip or a nightmare with pleasant interludes. Either way, in the words of the woman at the deli, “I’ll have what [he’s] having.”

So it’s not really in space, but I feel like the film is futuristic enough to justify that joke. Moving on!

The important part about this film that really lends to its status as a piece of social commentary is Deckard’s Replicancy. There are other aspects of the film that speak to social issues, such as money and influence cancelling-out laws with Tyrell and how he keeps Rachel around or the consumer culture of cheap synthetics for the masses with expensive bona fides for the elites, but what I want to focus the majority of my energy on how Deckard can represent the law enforcement class traitor archetype.

According to the Director’s Cut of Blade Runner, Deckard is a Replicant but he doesn’t know it. (The audience is made privy to this information during a scene in Deckard’s apartment where his eyes display the tell-tale glow of a replicant.) And so he operates in the capacity of naïve officer who is put in the situation of suppressing the very community of which he is a part of by following the orders of a community of which he is not a part of. This reflects a present state of social issues where patrol officers are recruited out of poor neighborhoods looking for a steady job with a pension or a desire to clean up their own neighborhoods only to become, as Mongo from Mel Brook’s Blazing Saddles eloquently puts it, “only pawn in game of life.” As a Blade Runner, Deckard is tasked with finding and “retiring” replicants on Earth after they were banned on terra firma following, what is in everything but name, a slave revolt. He does all this because of orders handed down from his Homo Sapien ranking superiors (I am hesitant to use the language of “human”  in reference to mankind given the muddled nature of this film’s question of “what does it mean to be human?”, especially in the case of Rachel). There even exists the word “skin-job”, which Bryant is heard using on more than one occasion; and upon further research Deckard elaborated on the matter comparing Bryant to racist cops of the past who used the N-Word.

I think what fundamentally motivates Travis Bickle is that he is looking for anything to occupy is time. A discharged Marine, he picks up long shifts as a taxi driver so he can get paid to drive around all night instead of riding the bus. Likely haunted by his tours in Vietnam and tormented by what he sees in New York City, he can’t sleep. The film is shot from Travis’ point of view with shots from inside the cab looking out and shots of the meter, and (save for a single shot between Iris and Sport) never including a shot of something Travis can’t see. The film makes and effort to show the seedy underbelly of NYC that Travis loathes so much; he’s tipped twenty dollars by a pimp after he snatches an underage prostitute from his cab as she tries to flee, we get a long, drawn-out shot as a man describes to Travis (while the meter is running) how he’s going to murder his wife for cheating on him with a African-American man. The people of NYC pay to be seen and they pay to be ignored, and all that money eats away at Travis. He won’t spend that twenty dollars, he can’t bring himself to do it.

The “traveling salesman” has an odd arrangement of handguns on offer. They mostly look like Colt and Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolvers, but there’s more than a couple vet bring-backs from WWII with a P08 Luger and a P38 Walther seen in the case. Whoever wrote this man’s lines didn’t know what he was talking about or wanted him to look like a fool. And given the .25 Automatic’s effectiveness in the gunfight, I would say they did there research.

I’d like to think he used that twenty dollars to buy his guns, using the seedy underbelly to fund its own destruction, but he used it to pay the timekeeper. I know Scorsese did this on purpose, but I can’t piece together why. The timekeeper was the last man he killed too, likely speaking to some intent on behalf of Scorsese that I also can’t pick-up on.

And why all the sugar? Travis pours it into his coffee like he’s wishing for diabetes, he pours it on his breakfast of torn-up bread and liquor, Iris puts it on her toast with jelly.

The film opens to a cinematographic marvel of an anxiety ridden single-take crane shot that lasts over three minutes. The shot does well to show off the Mexican-American border full of people-about-town and the occasional soft glow of a neon sign as it switches between the couple riding in a car set to explode and another couple on foot. The shot ends with the sound of an explosion as the bomb set to go off in three minutes blows up after three minutes and twelve seconds (yes, I timed it), where the scene shifts to a quick cut of the car exploding before switching to the type of fast paced, wobble-shot that inspired the invention of the steadicam. The rest of the film sees occasional use of the crane shot, but usually only in establishing shots or for extreme high-angle shots.

The fight scenes are also extremely well done, with quick shots and a camera that doesn’t sit still. This sits in stark contrast with the conventions of Hollywood at the time who preferred long cuts from a single camera that panned to follow the action or was moved with a dolly. The cinematography of Touch of Evil‘s fight scene amplify the chaos and create a sense of verisimilitude in contrast to Hollywood-at-large’s theatrical and often campy feeling fights. Mise-en-scène also aids in the creation of verisimilitude in the fight scenes, especially in the barfight, as the destruction of the set that takes place as the fight unfolds with tables getting smashed and even the bar being turned over. That’s the type of shot you hope to get in one take.

Catchy by all metrics, the score of Carol Reed’s The Third Man seems to be out of place. Set in a bleak, post-war Vienna, Austria where the rubble of bombed buildings is still be cleaned up as the city recovers, the score (which is really little more than a single song that plays throughout the film when needed) captures the call for hope a street performer might champion for. A simple song of stringed instruments, it’s the kind of song you might hear while waiting for the subway or as you walk through the park. It’s mundane, and that’s the idea. The war is over, Austria is free of the clutches of the Nazis, and is rebuilding as the Allies take over the parts of the city; existence is bleak, but what better way to try and have some semblance of mundanity and normalcy that to being music back to the streets. The song is also played on a zither, an instrument that worked its way into southern Germanic folk music after the Renaissance, which helps further capture that feel of the setting.

If the film’s core was meant to capture the feel of the narrative and the characters, we would have seen something more orchestral working to build tension alongside the narrative, we would have seen a crashing crescendo as Holly discovers the true fate of his friend, Harry. But we get something totally different instead, we get a catchy tune you want to hum or whistle for a few days after you finish the film. The score is uplifting and optimistic, where the film is tense and dark. It’s what Vienna needed.

I’ve seen baseball bats less blunt than this mise-en-scène. It’s almost as if they made a check list of everything they could think of to signal a character’s sexuality, forgot about the lisp, and then proceeded to check off every single box. The first impression we have of this character, Mr. Waldo Lydecker, is of his home as he narrates over it. A whole parlor of knick-knacks, tchotchkes, and assorted items of high value, some even so precious as to keep in glass cases in the middle of the room. The middle of the room! Who is this guy, a museum curator? No! He’s just super gay and the studio won’t let Otto Preminger come out and say it. So now Preminger is in the odd position where he can’t just turn off the display on our gaydar and hand us a slip of paper that says “yes”, so he has to throw as much of everything as he can at us to get the point across that one would have to live under a rock not to see it. But even then, even if they did live under a rock, his manner of speech and place in high society, and status as a older unmarried man, because even under a rock you can still hear the movie.

And so Preminger falls-in with the institution. Using stereotypes to create characters which reinforce stereotypes and create even more stereotypes all so that a film culture can convey a series of ideas to their audience in such a way that doesn’t violate self imposed “decency” laws designed to protect the audience from themselves by preventing the aforementioned film culture from displaying to the audience images of “depravity”, “immorality”, and “debauchery”, all the while doing nothing but irreparable harm to the people represented by aforementioned stereotypes. Laying the framework for the continued stereotyping of individuals long after the dissolving of the censorship board where film-makers look at the work that came before them while forgetting of the context in which it was created, and so they blindly emulate the style and tropes of the Greats furthering the propagation of such ideas into time beyond which they were “useful”.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt is something that I think could be best described as a proto-Noir or quasi-Noir film. It contains within its run-time the makings of a crime thriller accented by Hitchcock’s signature ingredient of suspense, but lacks some of the darker elements traditionally found in Film Noir. A very bright film by most standards, Shadow of a Doubt‘s visuals take heavy inspiration from the film’s setting of California, the Sunshine State, but this has no negative impact on the film in any way and instead offers an ease of viewing that traditional Film Noir fails to offer.

The suspence around an investigation is this film’s main tie to the Noir genre as it follows Charles through his visit with family. Using the film’s score to build tension at key moments of narrative reveal, as Charles’ past begins to catch up to him. The film uses Charles’ niece, Charlie, as the mode of viewer knowledge choosing to reveal key narrative points through her experiences.

Stock characters take a back seat in this film, with only Detective Graham having a cursory relationship to the trope. Filling the role of the “hard-boiled detective”, Graham is a secondary character who serves as a love interest of Charlie and as a plot device to move Charlie to discover her uncle’s identity. Charles could fill the role of “homme fatale” but only so far as he is a man and he is a killer.

This film does show its age though, and not in its production quality but in its ending. An ending wrapped in a bright red bow with a dead criminal and no ambiguity, the last half hour of the film seems to serve as nothing more than an appeasement to the Censors. Charles’ is all but exonerated with the investigation’s second man killed in a freak plane accident, the investigation is called off and Charles can rest easy. As he walked into the house and closed the door, I thought the film had ended only to discover another half-hour of run-time and I knew immediately why it was there. Charles had to get his comeuppance, the Censors wouldn’t let the film out of the studio without that ending much to Hitchcock’s detriment.