If there is one truth to the art of theatre in the age of Shakespeare and the period directly following it (the Jacobean era, during which Ben Jonson ascended to the literary throne left empty by the Bard’s death), it is that boundaries, borders and segregating lines of distinction are not what they seem. They are, in fact, in a constant state of flux despite their apparent and implicit immutability, and this is never truer then when it comes to the depiction of what might perhaps be referred to as tertiary characteristics of gender and sexuality (that is, those characteristics of behaviour, dress and appearance that are entirely socially constructed rather than reliant on biological imperatives). However, this truth, much like the borders it describes, is itself subject to change and exceptions, and only through comparison with other forms of Shakespearean drama can these be truly appreciated or defined.

Three perfect examples of this behaviour as it relates to the theatre of Shakespearean times are the Bard’s Twelfth Night (1601), a classic comedy concerned with the manipulation of gender through the act of cross-dressing, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1612), which follows the narrative form of a modified revenge tragedy while depicting an overwhelmingly and oppressively male reaction to the concept of an apparently unmarried woman at the center of a sphere of political power, and the tragedy Titus Andronicus (1584-1589), which combines notions of racial difference with the threat of uncontrolled and uncontrollable female sexuality, its avatar of matriarchal terror simultaneously juxtaposed with the actualised notion of violated feminine innocence.

The Twelfth Night is a play most definitely born of the spirit of Elizabethan theatre, one which opens and immediately, confidently occupies itself (and thus, its audience) with the extended comedic implications of cross-dressing (that most classical of comedic tropes), the maintenance of a confused and confusing love triangle and the exacting of similarly comedic, though infinitely darker, revenge upon a figure of Puritan authority (a contentious issue in itself, given the historical context in which the play came to be written and performed). The play subsequently manages to manufacture a considerable degree of thematic stratification in a somewhat inadvertent fashion, thanks to the theatrical conceit of having its female roles played by pre-pubescent male youths.

Where, for instance, are the audience’s sympathies to lie in the confusing entanglement of role and gender which can be described as that of a man (Cesario) who is actually a woman (Viola), who is simultaneously adored in her male role by a woman (Olivia) and, implicitly, a man (Orsino) whom she in turn falls in love with, in a form only truly visible to the audience who are external to the play’s contrivances, as Viola (who is, in the physical reality outside of the play, actually being played by a feminised boy)?

The above-described sexual cacophony formed the basis for the so-called Puritan complaint on the nature of the theatre, best summarised in Phillip Stubbes’, “The Anatomie of Abuses” (1583). Stubbes wrote that there “are good Examples to be learned in [plays]. Truly, so there are: if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, lie and falsify…”.

Though the passage goes on in a similar fashion for more than fourfold the length of the above quote, and though this was not the sole facet of the theatrical tradition the Puritans took issue with, the essential “complaint” was that, in the theatre, one transcended boundaries in an unacceptable and sacrilegious manner, and all through the association of manners of dress both with position and gender, so that boys were women, and lowly actors took on the role of royalty.

The practice of associating gender with accepted Elizabethan behavioural models and manners of dress (that is, for instance, a woman was readily identifiable as a woman because she dressed and acted like one) had the two-fold effect of both producing the complaint and allowing for the theatrical trope of the so-called “convincing cross-dresser” whose disguise is utterly impenetrable to the other characters in the play (Viola, in this case).
Indeed, so deeply-rooted is this concept that Shakespeare happily switches Sebastian with Cesario and Viola the same, in Twelfth Night’s final moments. While the misunderstandings are now cleared up in the climax, Orsino continues to refer to the now-revealed Viola as “Boy”, which in the context of lines like, “Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times / Thou never shouldst love woman like me” (V.i.258–266) implies a certain homoerotic attraction and questions whether Orsino is, in fact, in love with Viola or Cesario.

While the ending that traditional Comedy required (one of semi-absolute resolution) has been produced, it also has the effect of underscoring the essentially conceited nature of the play’s characters, who are in love with the concept of loving, to the point that Olivia accepts Sebastian for Cesario unconditionally, as if she were simply in love with his/her physical appearance.

By the same token, Orsino waxes poetic to Cesario, of all people, on the deeper nature of a man’s love as compared with a woman’s love, which is made up in the “palate” and not in the “liver”, and states that Cesario should, “Make no compare / between that love a woman can bear me / And that I owe Olivia” (II.iv.91–101), the irony of his speech being that the charges he makes of a ‘woman’s love’ (i.e. “They lack retention” or may have their feelings changed easily) are qualities he fosters within himself, and which lead him to instantly accept the now-revealed Cesario/Viola gestalt in Twelfth Night’s climax. The gulf he quantitatively ascribes to the emotional characteristics of the genders is clearly not nearly as wide as he believes.

This self-indulgence is one reflected in the many upper-crust characters throughout the play, mirrored in the most decadent member of the cast, Sir Toby Belch, who simultaneously contrives to teach the Puritan steward Malvolio his place and, to a modern mind, hypocritically “marries down” to the gentlewoman Maria, whose aspirations are not condemned and punished as the former’s are. In Shakespeare’s world, however, marriage is not only a matter of class but also a matter of direction of intention and gender, as an aristocratic man may choose a mate regardless of social class, but a plebeian male does not have the same ability, nor may a woman of simple breeding actively seek out a partner above her supposed “station in life”.

Illustrations of this are wide-ranging, but the best example comes not from Shakespeare himself, but from the lesser-known John Webster, in his The Duchess of Malfi, which, along with his The White Devil (1612) deals with many of the darker aspects of human nature, to the point that T.S. Eliot, in Whispers of Immortality (1920), wrote of Webster as always seeing “the skull beneath the skin”.

The titular Duchess is, to a surprising extent, one of the strongest heroines of the Jacobean period, even despite her untimely death well before the play’s end. She actively defies the stereotypical conventions of her gender which should by all rights make her simply the unwitting victim of this revenge tragedy, rather than its heroine. Instead she is both, a dichotomy reflected in her dual status as both a head of state and a woman supposedly unmanned, though in reality this is a ruse to protect her status and center of power, as well as her secret family fathered by Antonio, ostensibly a representative of the lower-class.

In many ways, the Duchess bears a strong resemblance to the previous ruler, Elizabeth I, referred to as the ‘Virgin Queen’ or ‘Gloriana’, who was simultaneously deified by her public and rumoured to have been maintaining a romantic relationship with her cousin and royal Master of Horses, Robert Dudley. This reflection on the passing of the Tudor era appears in many works of the Jacobean era, including The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607), where the skull of a certain ‘Gloriana’ is key to the revenge plot, in itself surely not a coincidence. but it is only through her, in many ways inordinate, suffering that the audience gains knowledge of her inner strength. In many ways, Webster defies his contemporaries (of which Shakespeare was one) in structuring this revenge tragedy in such a way as to leave the “protagonist” dead well before the end of the play, her presence replaced by the (in many ways) generic male revenger, Antonio.

(The above is a short excerpt from the Richard III-esque cinematic interpretation of The Revenger’s Tragedy, starring Christopher Eccleston.)

The play is one made up of boundaries, and this understanding is reached within its first Act, during which Antonio returns from the French court full of admiration for its form and function, and implicit in his praise is a disdain for the Italian court to which he belongs and with which he is making a comparison. However, the reality is that borders in Webster’s play are much closer to home, and are circumscribed most particularly between the aristocratic upper class and the common man, as we discover when the Duchess is barred from remarrying by her controlling (and in many cases incestuously minded) brother Ferdinand, his apparent reasoning for which is his fears for the family bloodline, which he attempts to master and purify through his sister.

The Cardinal ponders, “Shall our blood/ The royal blood of Castile and Aragon/ Be thus attainted?” (II.v.22-24), a woman being simply a vessel for the fathering of heirs. While it is normally the place of a father and/or a husband in this social context to control a bloodline, Ferdinand takes it upon himself to perform this duty in place of either (one of many hints as to his desire for his sibling), and the Duchess’s refusals and flagrant disregard for Ferdinand’s commands drive him to have her murdered.

While revenge plays were generally written with a moral lesson at hand (as a form of theatre they were related to the 15th century ‘morality play’, after all), most often to do with the expunging of corruption and then, suitably, the death of the wronged revenger to correct the social order, most often due to a tragic flaw. How, then, do we reconcile the brutality of the almost saintly Duchess’s treatment at the hands of her brothers with her supposed crime, that of marrying beneath her social status, an act which Sir Toby on a whim manufactures without serious comment?

Indeed, such a reaction to female independence generally rested upon proof or suspicion of female infidelity (as with Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello), and Nicholas Brook surmises in his “Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy” (1979) that, “It has often been pointed out that there is a violation of the correct ‘order’ which is supposed to have affected Jacobean audiences with the moral force of a tragic ‘flaw’ but […] the play entirely assumes the audience’s complicity and therefore approval of the Duchess’s action”.

Titus Andronicus explores the touched-upon concept of female sexuality and conversely, chastity, in greater detail, both as a concept and as an almost physical item in itself, to which a form of ownership is ascribed. Here, we are presented with contrasts of character made through extremes, in the forms of the Lavinia/Tamora juxtaposition (that of virginal innocence versus the shadow of uncontrolled female power and sexuality in its ultimate combination, the barbarian Queen), and the equally extreme depiction of the Moor Aaron as simultaneously a singular force of evil and a loving parent as played against the the confused, wearied and titular Titus Andronicus, who starts the play as an Andronici war-hero and ends it crazed and more importantly, dead, but remembered as the type-cast revenging murderer, chiefly responsible for his daughter’s death.

(Above, the Anthony-Hopkins-flavoured adaptation of Titus Andronicus.)

Titus appears a play chiefly concerned with the control and dominance of female agency, and categorises it thus as entirely something for men to fear. Tamora is a representation of pitiless violence and sends forth her two lustful and murderous sons to do her bidding, and actively encourages their rape of Lavinia, and the Act in which this takes place places special significance on the horror of the ‘hole’ or ‘pit’ into which Bassianus (dead) is placed, and Quintus and Martius are held captive, whilst Aaron buries his treasure in a similar hole, all the while referred to as “this unhallowed and bloodstained hole” (II.iii.210) and “this fell devouring receptacle” (II.iii.235), and so the comparison between literal graves (holes in the earth) and the metaphoric imagery of the consuming female icon or genitalia is made (the concept that Freud would later christen “vagina dentata”, the toothed vagina which is linked with male castration anxiety).

Tamora is given power but this is a power that must be righted by the play’s end, as its only result is injustice, and so the ‘true’ male hierarchy must be reinstated, which it is. An understandable criticism of Titus has been that it is over-zealously misogynistic, and punishes both female characters in the play simply for their gender, a criticism borne out as even despite her brutal rape and disfigurement Lavinia is treated cruelly by her suspiciously deranged father, Titus, who as her father had previously denied her the right to marry Bassianus (thereby retaining and possessing Lavinia’s chastity).

While gender and sexuality may be alternately capable of flexibility and mutability within the typical structure of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic traditions, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that these changes are short-lived and attempt to highlight, for the intended original audience, the requirement for a return to the accepted social order and the curtailment of excess female agency.

Amazon.com stock the 1999 Hopkins adaptation of Titus Andronicus, the 2003 Eccleston adaptation of Revenger’s Tragedy, T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland, Prufrock, and Other Poems, and, of course, the complete Shakespeare.

Works cited:

BROOKE, Nicholas. Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.

ELIOT, T.S. The Wasteland, Four Quartets and Other Poems. Caedmon Press, 2000.

WEBSTER, John. The Duchess of Malfi. A.C. Black, 2003, 4th ed.

SHAKESPEARE, William. Twelfth Night (Folger Shakespeare Library Ed.), New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.

SHAKESPEARE, William. Titus Andronicus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Author’s Note: This short review-cum-analytical-overview was penned several years ago, and having been touched up in places appears to pass muster sufficient to be posted to dear old Wonderbread, but remains above all a kind of brief conceptual summary of the issues at stake in post-colonial, globalised literature, the ever-evolving canon of which Massey’s The Floating Girl is certainly (if only tangentially) a part of. That said, the book functions, by and large, as a relatively simple and straight-forwardly told detective story and not as a self-consciously ‘literary’ text, and in its dedication to an unabashedly minimalist aesthetic such as befits serial fiction the book defeats any attempts at more in-depth treatises on its structure and contents through its sheer brevity. Perhaps more would be gleaned by analysing the series in its ten-book entirety, a task to which I am happily not equal.  — Martin Kingsley

Homi K. Bhabha’s poststructural theory of cultural hybridity (specifically to do with hybridity in the wake of colonial incursion) highlights that, following the highly aggressive encounters between colonising cultures and those who inhabit the place to be colonised, a “third place” is created, inhabited by an entirely different people to either of those that contributed to its creation yet owing much to both. These “third places” are geographical as well as cultural hybrids, composed both of equal trades of social practice, ritual and theory as well as the products of nationalist resistance, and may tend to produce cultural hybrids to inhabit more easily these new and largely constructed places.

Examined closely, it is hard not to see Japan as the 20th century’s greatest cultural hybrid. While popular examples of cultural hybridization at work include the emergence of the present-day Caribbean as a rebellious survivor of the worst excesses of British and French imperialist policy, it is only in recent times (especially during the years of economic paranoia that defined and characterised the Western world between the years of 1980-89) that serious attention has been focused on Japan and its societal structure post-World War II.

Neuromancer author William Gibson, in a Time Magazine article, “The Future Perfect“, attempts to place the particular cultural seed from which grew the West’s obscene and arguably often-xenophobic obsession with Japan, and situates it chiefly as a product of international conflict and post-colonialism. “Japan…was occupied by a foreign power intent upon a program of social reengineering quite unseen in history. America…set about restructuring the national psyche. America did not, however, follow through.” Gibson then summarises the key act or catalyst of colonialism from which Bhabha’s third place springs forth, “The full-on demolition of existing power structures and their replacement with alien, egalitarian equivalents”, and finally surmises that the Japan that fascinated America was a Japan that America was largely responsible for creating.

Japan became a focus for the Western world when, with the help of an inflated forty-thousand-point NIKKEI, it seriously appeared to threaten American bases of financial power. A mythology of technological and economical prowess evolved around the island nation, and the eventual outcome of aggressive Japanese financial policy was theorised in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, “Blade Runner”, with its poly-Asian populace and towering skyscrapers, and in William Gibson’s placement of the heart of a world-wide telecommunications network within Tokyo’s future city limits in 1984’s “Neuromancer”. These portrayals were not necessarily concerned with implicating Japan in a deliberate drive to bankrupt the Western world, but the evocative imagery involved nonetheless fueled an engine of North American paranoia that led inexorably to portrayals that did.

Sujata Massey’s The Floating Girl places a half-Japanese Californian woman, Rei Shimura, in modern Japan and uses her as a looking glass through which to examine current Japanese custom and society from the perspective of a Western foreigner, a technique by which Massey’s target audience is able to bond more easily with her protagonist, which functions as their avatar even as it remains hers, being as the book is written in English and only occasionally marked by the insertion of short, common Japanese phrases, and constructed and subsequently marketed in the vein of ‘pulp’ fiction. Massey attempts to elaborate, in an era unconcerned with the threat of a Japan climbing out of recession, on the stories of sexual fetishism, social conditioning and elaborate interpersonal custom that the process of ‘othering’ has produced in the Western consciousness, but does so in the manner of a literary ‘tourist’, mixing travelogue with narrative intrigue.

Lawrence Cahoon in his “Modernism to Post-Modernism: An Anthology” defines the othering process as a method by which social structures of all sizes are “maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization”. Other similar structures “must be represented as foreign or ‘other’ through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is ‘privileged’ or favoured, and the other is devalued in some way.” As othered as Japan may have been from the West, so to do we find echoes of the inverted Occidentalism movement (Rei’s boyfriend, Takeo, is shocked at the idea of gay-bashing occurring within Japan, “I thought that was only a problem in countries like the United States”), and Massey deliberately takes aim at the violence of these stereotypes as they affect both the Japanese and the gaijin.

Here, for instance, the gaijin who enter the country on the pretext of engaging with Orientalist sexual fantasies are the aggressors and possessors of the most repulsive personalities on show. Nicky, the chauvinist who places faith in the concept that, “You have boundaries, and they [Japanese women don't,” is ultimately undone by his Japanese lover, whose limits are what causes her to kill him. On the other hand, the Senegalese Marcellus has to play up to his image as a black American, and makes a similar point about feeling particularly predated upon because of his difference: “Nobody wants to see a dancer who reminds them of the salaryman who works in the same office.” Later, he remarks that, “There is a terror of people from different cultures.” Unfortunately, Massey herself seems to succumb to a desire to present the marginalised aspects of Japanese society in a way that seems sensationalist.

Having established her hybrid detective as a four-year resident (in essence providing at least some grounding beyond the initial culture shock presented in texts such as Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation), Massey presents her avatar as both knowledgeable of Japanese society and naïve of it, and the novel is subsequently littered with constant reminders of rules of Japanese etiquette, deliberately keeping Rei at a remove by having to take note of these things as opposed to unthinkingly accepting them.

While the narrator’s central complaint is that she is not “Japanese enough”, she actively rejects aspects of the society or fails to find them, after four years, worthy of notability and thus remark, which as a authorial technique handily helps to demarcates a work of travelogue from a work of narrative progression. She surrounds herself with portrayals of the people who inhabit this third place and the behaviours they happen to exhibit: in describing them (in finding them worthy of description), they are implicitly drawn opposite to Anglicized social stylings we as Western readers are automatically conscious of, but in the process of analysis they are objectified, in many cases classified amidst and often defined by a litany of brand names and clothing materials rather than by definitively human characteristics. Examples include, “faux- and genuine vintage patterned polyester, double knit and jersey”, (pg. 8), and later, “she looked like half the Japanese college students or office ladies that I saw on the street. I couldn’t pick her out of a crowd.” (pg. 149), and “the receptionist…was wearing a stylish polyester dress without a single wrinkle”, (pg. 199).

Shimura’s narrative is price- and brand-conscious in the extreme, noting the cost of items as lowly as the sun umbrella she rents (5,000 Yen) and the bikini wax she receives (after four years, she still draws a comparison-through-price with a similar service as might be offered in the US) and a lavender wig she purchases (2,500 Yen), as well as the brands of her lipstick (MAC), hair gel (Super Hard) and swim-suit (Speedo). Japan is one of the few Asian nations to accept, openly, Western cultural and material trends as well as linguistic conceits (English words are commonly assimilated into the Japanese language), and this is one of the key aspects that reflects Japan’s growing diversity, as its youth begin to identify more globally, but Massey’s Japan reflects this only on occasion, focussing as it does on the stranger aspects of manga and anime, and the people who move in such circles.

The Californian half-Japanese Rei Shimura may appear to be the perfect hybrid vehicle from which to observe Japanese (as Gibson refers to it) “mutant culture”, and the Indian/German Massey (who had at the time the advantage of two years’ residence in Japan and previous experience with alienation having emigrated from England to the US) may appear the perfect writer for the task. The end result, however, is one that seems almost deliberately sifted of depth, and can revert to type at a moment’s notice. Hybridity is a subject that seems to elude serious focus in Massey’s Japan. Click here to purchase a copy of The Floating Girl from Amazon.com, from whom you can also purchase Homi K. Bhabha’s foundational text, The Location of Culture.

Works cited:

Massey, Sujata (2001). The Floating Girl. Avon Books.

Bhabha, Homi (1994). The Location of Culture. Routledge.

Gibson, William (April 30, 2001). The Future Perfect. Time Magazine. (Vol.157 NO.17)

Cahoone, Lawrence (1996). From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.

When Dashiell Hammet’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, was first published in 1929 it was heralded as a revolution of the detective fiction genre. The Outlook and Independent claimed it to be “the best detective novel [they had] ever read” and The New Republic noted that it transcended the “tawdry gum-shoeing of the ten-cent magazine” (qtd. in Marling, Dashiell 87). The exclusive and “aristocratic” Town & Country magazine presented a glowing, 1,500 word review of the novel (Marling Dashiell 87). Hammett had gained the acceptance from the literary intelligentsia he had craved from the beginning of his career (Marling, Roman 105) and, more significantly, had galvanised the Hard-Boiled detective genre as a legitimate literary pursuit.

Hammett, like many authors, wrote detective fiction for the pulps as a means of making money while striving for literary recognition in other areas (Marling, Roman 105). It is this low opinion of the pulps that makes the literary acceptance of Hammett’s novel so significant and presents an interesting parallel to the reception of the 1941 film adaptation of  The Maltese Falcon. While films prior to the 1941 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon exhibited the characteristics of Film Noir, these films were generally considered ‘B’ films by the studios. The critical acclaim and widespread public popularity of The Maltese Falcon, however, propelled the genre into unprecedented legitimacy and opened up the possibility of Noir films as ‘A’ films. There is far more, however, than a casual relationship between the Hard-Boiled detective fiction and the genre of Film Noir. This paper will examine the relationship between Hard-Boiled fiction and Film Noir, using Dashiell Hammet’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, and its 1941 film adaptation.

Central to the philosophy of Film Noir is a sense of “ethical unintelligibility” of its settings. This is manifested as a pervasive and pessimistic philosophy that understands the world as a senseless, brutal place in which morality is a subjective and often irrelevant cultural artifact. Krutnik (39) asserts that the Hard-Boiled mode of detective fiction deliberately sets itself apart from the “golden age” of British detective fiction, such as that of Agatha Christie. Deductive reasoning is replaced by action and mystery is replaced with suspense (Krutnik 39). Violence, sexuality and personal danger to the hero have a greater emphasis than resolution of the crime or mystery which begins the narrative (Krutnik 39). Furthermore, rather than the detective existing above the criminal milieu and restoring order to the world, he exists within the milieu and acts as an intermediary between the world of the criminals and the world of the law (Krutnik 39). We can see from this that Hard-Boiled detective fiction is a genre which strongly defines itself against the morality, sense of order and hermetically sealed room style of murder which is present in classic detective fiction. It’s response is the melancholy presentation of a corrupt world, inhabited by flawed people in which chance, murder and crime are part of the natural course of events. This deep and pervasive pessimism is laid out by Hammett in The Maltese Falcon in ‘The Flitcraft Parable’, which the protagonist, Sam Spade, recounts to his lover as a means of explaining his grim view of the world.

The parable tells the story of Flitcraft, an insurance agent who disappeared. Spade is hired by Flitcraft’s wife and, eventually, he finds him in another city. Flitcraft explains to Spade that one day, as he was passing a construction site, a heavy beam fell from above and missed him by a couple of feet. He realised that he could have died and that this meant that his honest, orderly life was meaningless. People died in a “haphazard” fashion, regardless of whether they were morally upstanding or not. He reasoned that this meant there were no consequences for what he did. He leaves his wife, travels about the country and eventually settles in a new city and starts a new family and a new life which almost perfectly mirrors his old one. As Spade puts it, “he adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell and he adjusted himself to them not falling” (Hammett 62). This parable is key into the basic philosophy of Hard-Boiled fiction, Film Noir and the moral code of Sam Spade. Marling (Dashiell 75) comments that, for Spade, “the world may not operate rationally, but rationality is the best net with which to go hunting”. This is the fundamental philosophy shared by the Hard-Boiled detective genre and Film Noir. Spicer notes that the “Noir universe is dark, malign and unstable” (4), a disordered, chaotic place in which the only way to navigate its pretence of order successfully is to acknowledge the underlying chaos (Marling Dashiell 75). While Naremore is correct in noting that “it has always been easier to recognize a Film Noir than to define the term”(9) these themes of disorder,  violence and pessimism are certainly some of the uniting characteristics of Film Noir, which it shares with the Hard-Boiled detective genre.

The Flitcraft parable is the morality of Noir distilled. It asserts that there is no reward for living a virtuous life, nor a punishment for behaving in a deviant fashion. Importantly, it is those who understand and accept this fact that have an advantage in life (as opposed to those who try to live a morally virtuous life). In effect, the potential losses and gains for Noir characters are derived from people rather than a moral compass or karmic force.  In The Maltese Falcon Sam Spade succeeds because he understands that there is no reward for a particular kind of behavior and that the only way to compete with deviants is to sink to their level. In effect, the potential losses and gains for Noir characters are derived from people rather than a moral compass or karmic force. As a result, rather than a virtuous detective who works to improve the lot of others, he is a manipulator of the highest order who continually seeks to exploit others to his maximum advantage. This extreme pessimism and assumption of a corrupt, flawed world in which the detective is a part of is a crucial component of both the novel and 1941 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon.

Sam Spade, from early in the story, is aware of the involvement of Bridget, Cairo, Wilmer and Gutman in his partner’s murder but is more interested in extorting each of them for as much money as possible than avenging his partner’s death or turning them over to the police. More intriguing is Sam’s obsession with not becoming a ’sap’ (Hammett 208). When sapped “the circulating fluid of a plant of animal runs out: what should be inside comes outside” (Marling Roman 138). Spade’s fundamental belief in the chaos of the world and his ability to manipulate it requires him to be in control of everything. He must control those around him, his personal relationships and, perhaps most importantly, his true feelings. To allow himself to fall in love with Bridget is to surrender his independence and control to her but, more importantly “to succumb is to be mortal” (Marling Dashiell 80). If Spade accepts Bridget as a permanent part of his life, he surrenders his ability to flawlessly navigate the milieu of the chaotic world and becomes just like everyone else.

The influence of Hard-Boiled detective fiction on Film Noir is clear in the 1941 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon over any of the other adaptations. The two previous adaptations painted Spade as more of a ladies man which softened the brooding pessimism and fatalistic philosophy of the novel (Mayer 9). In the 1941 adaptation, Spade is a self-serving opportunist who uses sex and violence to manipulate those around him to maximum advantage. The focus of the narrative is the psychological drama, as opposed to the solving of the mystery of the murder of Spade’s partner. It is for these reasons that the 1941 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon is considered the first true Noir. It is fitting that an adaptation of Hammett’s genre defining novel should become a genre defining film, both of which continue to act as yardsticks for their respective genres today.

Works Cited

Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. London: Orion Books, 2005

Krutnik, Frank. In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, genre, masculinity. London: Routledge, 1991

Marling, William. The American Roman Noir. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995

Marling, William. Dashiell Hammett. Boston: G.K. Hall & Company, 1986

Mayer, Geoff. Encyclopedia of Film Noir. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group Inc., 2007

Naremore, James. More than night: Film Noir in its Contexts. London: University of California Press Ltd., 1998

Spicer, Andrew. Film Noir. Essex: Pearson Education Ltd., 2002

I’ve been playing pen and paper roleplaying games, of various sorts, since I was about 14 years old. By my reckoning that’s about 10 years of indulging in this particular hobby. In that entire time I’ve not found an easy way to explain what precisely a roleplaying game is to anyone who’s never participated in one themselves. The only way I’ve ever managed to explain how these games work is by inviting someone along to one and getting them to play. In short, it’s an abstract, alienating and strange pastime and every time I try to explain with my words, I done fail. So, once and for all, I’m going to try to explain what it is that roleplaying games are.

What Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games are not.

Before we start, I just want to clear up a few misconceptions about what pen and paper roleplaying games are not.

1. These are not the games played by consenting adults who like to drape themselves in vinyl and pretend to be the Archduke of Buggery while a small midget flails them with a rabid  hamster.

2. These are not (exclusively) satanic seances in which a group of numbskull satanists drop acid and invoke the devil (I can’t deny the existence of some Scandinavian morons who ruin it for the rest of us).

3. These games are not the enemy of all good Christians/Muslims/7th day Adventists.

I couldn’t count the number of conversations I’ve had with morons who believe one of the above. It’s tough, you know, because roleplaying games tend to come in the form of books. Lots and lots and lots of books. I’m a book lover. I collect books and I read books everywhere. This means that quite often I end up, in public, with a roleplaying related book. Roleplaying books tend to be large, often hardcover and look more like a text book than a casual novel. Quite often, in a workplace lunchroom for example, I am asked “what are you studying?” or “say, that’s a big book you’ve got there”. And then, the unpleasant and pathetic attempt at explaining what I’m reading begins. So often, after such conversations, I vow I will never try to explain to people what I’m reading, ever again. But I always fall for it. Take for example this book:

Demon: the Fallen

Demon: the Fallen is a lovely little game by White Wolf publishing. Players take on the roles of fallen angels and plumb the philosophical depths of redemption and the nature of the human spirit. It’s also filled with hella cool artwork of towering demons and shiny pentagrams. Immediately after buying this game I found myself on a train, sitting next to an old man who looked nervously at the demonic text I was reading. The conversation went a little like this:

Old Man: That’s dangerous stuff, you know.

Me: Don’t worry, it’s just a game.

Old Man: Oh, so you think it’s a game, do you?!

Suffice to say, most conversations about roleplaying games go along these lines. Other common questions/comments I get are:

“So you think you’re a Wizard?”

“So you dress up like an Elf?”

“Would you like to join my bible reading group?”

What pen and paper roleplaying games are.

O.K. Relax for a second. Take a deep breath. Good, good. I think you’re ready. Simply put, a roleplaying session involves a bunch of friends, a mountain of snacks and (often) beer (or your chemical enhancement of choice). The group sits together, for hours on end, telling a shared story and getting progressively fuller and drunker as the session goes on. Each player in the game takes the role of a character in the story.

Now. I need to make this very clear. For 90% of people who participate in roleplaying games, the character they play is generally expressed vocally. We don’t dress up with pointy ears and capes, whilst gallivanting about the forest and hitting each other with swords. That’s Live Action Role Play (or LARP) and it is best left to isolated German weirdos. Generally, in Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games a person will simply describe what they’re character is doing and (often) speak on their behalf (sometimes in a silly voice). Rather than hitting one another with swords, each character is summarized with a series of numbers and descriptors, which are written down on a character sheet. This describes (in general terms) what the character can and can’t do. Actions with an unclear outcome (such as shooting a pistol or engaging in a car chase) are resolved with dice rolls. It should be noted that the math and random number generation aren’t the focus of the game, rather, they keep it fair and streamlined. It would pretty boring if you had to roll a dice every time you wanted your character to take a bite of a hamburger without choking.

There is one final thing you need to understand about Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games. In order for the game to run smoothly and coherently one player (generally referred to as a ‘GM’ or ‘gamemaster’) takes the responsibility of ‘running’ the game. This involves preparing a loose idea for the story and plot of the session (in which the player characters will star), acting as a mediator for the rules and playing the supporting cast of Non-Player Characters (or supporting cast) which the Player Characters will encounter.

That’s it.

Nerds, 4 to 6 of them generally, sitting around, drinking beer and telling a shared story. Nary a demon in sight. One of them takes the responsibility of running and shaping the narrative of the game and the rest take the roles of dynamic characters.

I should also mention that there are a HUGE variety of systems and genres of roleplaying games. Anything you’ve seen, read or heard in ANY media is likely to be represented or reproducible in a Pen and Paper Roleplaying game. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Western and even Film Noir are represented in Roleplaying Game form.

So get to it! Get some friends, grab a roleplaying book and engage in one of the best value forms of entertainment that exists for mankind! Don’t know where to start? Don’t worry, this article will be follwed with a number of reviews for roleplaying games….