The cinematic phenomenon that would retroactively be known as film noir began in a world without television. This fact has several bearings on the issue of discussion, but the main focus of this essay will be to show how this film cycle, its traditions and its sentiments, has integrated itself not only into a world with television, but into television itself. As television programming has moved steadily toward an easier, cheaper and more accessible form of entertainment than the movies, many televisual genres have been born, from the classic soap opera (The Bold and the Beautiful, Dallas) to quirky drama-comedy (M*A*S*H, Northern Exposure) to simple horror shows (The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits). The questions before us are, what of television noir, how has it happened, and does it succeed?

Firstly, I must indulge in a brief validation. It should be acknowledged that the presence of television in society, in relation to film noir, is not as culturally extraneous as it may appear: not only does it have a significant bearing on the national understanding of motion picture and entertainment, but the advent of television was one of the key factors in marking the delineation between effects had on America by World War II and effects had on America by the Vietnam War. Where American post-war disillusionment of the forties was reflected most strongly by the onset of film noir, it was perhaps more evidently reflected during the seventies by a glut of graphic and violent horror films, films that are persuasively argued in Robin Wood’s The American Nightmare to be products of a nation confronted by televisual images of the war effort, its destructiveness and its horrors. In this respect, television bore witness to the war during the sixties and seventies, and thus drastically altered the nation’s conceptions of itself.

Given that television, then, has been a strong influence on the course of America’s progressive and continuing return to ‘the dark past’, how has the cinematic reflection of that dark past been conveyed through television? The aforementioned Twilight Zone, Rod Sterling’s fantasy compound of Cold War paranoia, is a good place to begin.

Because film noir entails so many specific ingredients and characteristics, it is quite fruitless to expect to find all of them in any contemporary noir effort, especially television. To appreciate how noir has survived into new forms and works, it’s crucial that one try not to be overly purist – to accept as valid ‘bits and pieces’ of that amalgamative noir ethos. The aspect of noir that is most greatly adopted by The Twilight Zone is the existential and nihilistic philosophy that one might argue is at the very heart of the noir film cycle. Each episode is a new and frightening landscape of alienation and confusion, culminating in a revelation that damns the characters and leaves the audience without closure.

In terms of philosophy and intent, The Twilight Zone probably has the most brazenly noir sensibility to it of all American television. Its many revivals over the decades go to show that the series’ appeal has not dwindled along with the social climate that facilitated it, and no series of the same ilk (The Outer Limits, Tales from the Crypt) has been quite as successful. What needs to be understood about the show and its compatibility with noir, however, is that it was not a serial narrative at all – it was a string of weekly, stand alone stories. On this basis, a divide becomes clear between The Twilight Zone and the kind of commercial, ongoing narrative of which television became the champion. The Twilight Zone was produced and consumed on the tacit understanding that its audiences were after the kind of depressive and fatalistic ‘fix’ that noir has perhaps once provided – it was a television series that filled a niche of human desire. The really interesting attempts at television noir came much later, in the early twenty-first century, when commercial television shows that comprised serial narratives began trying to integrate noir into their formula.

The three television series’ that will be discussed here in relation to noir are Rob Thomas’ Veronica Mars, Joss Whedon’s Angel and James Manos Jr.’s Dexter.

Veronica Mars is a production that shares strong and deliberately superficial similarities with film noir, so we’ll begin with it. The series is noir in premise: the eponymous character is a Californian high school girl who works with her father as a private investigator. Through her investigations she uncovers, far more often than not, the dark and dirty sides of humanity, making her cynical and emotionally detached. Her Ordinary World, to borrow a phrase from Chris Vogler, is one of disillusionment, discontent and alienation: in the fairly recent past, her best friend was murdered, and in the wake of the crime she has become a social pariah.

One will note that such a premise could well be fitted to The Maltese Falcon or Chinatown: the disturbing journey of a private investigator, living in the consequences of a past gone wrong. Or we could take, for instance, the opening monologue to the third episode, which sounds as though it might have come direct from a nineteen thirties crime novel:

I look back over the past week and wonder if things could have turned out differently. If I hadn’t met the girl; if I hadn’t initiated the case; if I hadn’t interfered, would tonight be just another dull, quiet night in our apartment complex? Is it my fault a horrible crime played out its final chapter here? Or was what happened inevitable?

There are a number of noir elements that develop as the series progresses, as well. We become aware that no character can be trusted (every one Veronica knows becomes a suspect in her friend’s murder case) and that every revelation will make matters direr. However, these elements are really no different to those of any serial drama, because the mystery and urgency they evoke is crucial to the appeal of episodic storytelling. In this respect, Veronica Mars falls victim to its commercial nature and betrays the fundamental conflict between noir and commercial television: the nihilistic philosophy of noir cannot be sustained in commercial television because it is detrimental to the marketing appeal of television in general. In short, audiences won’t return each week simply to be depressed.

On this note, we will move on to Angel, another series whose commerciality prevents it from truly reflecting noir philosophy, but which nonetheless has value and raises points worth discussing. Angel’s premise is another inherently noir one: a lonely and broken-hearted man moves to L.A., where he sets up a small detective agency that operates only at night, while he battles the demons, figurative and otherwise, of his past. Angel has more noir elements in it that Veronica Mars, most specifically in character. The hero of Joss Whedon’s series is a fickle one: he is very literally a monster, and is responsible for countless reprehensible and unconscionable acts, but he is now seeking amends and forgiveness. Although his dark side is almost constantly hidden, and he is driven by goodness and nobility, there is nonetheless an evident dark side there, and this makes him, at the very least, an anti-hero of sorts (Veronica Mars has no real anti-hero).

Angel is also a prime example of how television can secret noir sensibility into its structure, without upsetting its commerciality. The way to uncover this is to examine singular episodes, without thought of their place in the greater canon. Because there will be time later on to rebuild a sense of hope and decency, television is sometimes able to allow stand alone episodes that have no overwhelming hope or decency, episodes that, when viewed in isolation, are about as noir as they come. Or, in short, audiences may not return each week to be depressed, but they’ll forgive being depressed for one week and return to find closure.

Take Angel’s third-season episode “Forgiving” (3.17), which deals with the jeopardy of a central character’s life and the attempt to understand an act of betrayal that he has perpetrated. Once he is found and safe, and when the reasonable motives for his betrayal have been revealed, all of the series’ regulars, sans Angel, have amassed at the hospital, where they wait for their fallen comrade out of love and loyalty. When Angel too arrives, he seems in a receptive and forgiving state. However, he quickly turns murderous, and the episode ends very abruptly with him attempting to smother his friend to death with a pillow, professing that he will “never” (his emphasis) forgive the betrayal. He is forcibly dragged off his hospitalized colleague: “You’re a dead man, Pryce! You’re dead! Dead! Dead!”

Because Angel, both as a series and as a character, deals heavily in the darkness of the human soul, this scene and its place at the very end of the episode is one that harbours disturbing philosophical implications. The darkness of this anti-hero has, even if only for a little while, won. He has not risen above his hate, or listened to his better angels, and something pure has been poisoned. It is not a happy ending at all – it is a noir ending (an even more potent example of this can be found in season four’s devastating episode “Awakening” (4.10), but we don’t have time).

On the subject of dark anti-heroes, we will progress to Dexter, the last and perhaps most noir-esque of the series in discussion. Dexter Morgan is almost an exemplary anti-hero: were he not the subject of our exclusive attention, we might even call him a villain. He succeeds in bringing, at the very least, the quietly unsettling effects of noir anti-heroism by embodying darkness. For the first time, television has a hero in Dexter who is unable to contain his darkness, and who we are supposed to learn to accept in all his dark horror.

Dexter’s philosophy is a confused and confusing one, and it plays with our moral sensibility as many great noir works have done. There is simply no facet or angle of the series that we can appreciate without being first forced to confront the essential ‘badness’ of Dexter Morgan. He is a murderer and he makes no apologies for it. Because he is the first fact of the series’ existence, and this moral conflict is the first fact of him, we are unable to escape from it. It’s almost a prerequisite for watching the series that we accept Dexter and his immoral, evil actions. Very in keeping with the style of noir, Dexter is able, though remaining brightly lit with Miami sun throughout, to question morality at a base line.

Is it then possible that one day television noir may bear the same character, location, plot and philosophy traits as film noir once did? Perhaps that question is not the proper one. James Naremore talks of “the theatrical motion picture… evolv[ing] into some other medium”. It is not out of the question to suggest that the likes of Veronica Mars, Angel and Dexter signify a shift toward a new age of noir production, to be valued separate to the forties films. Perhaps television noir is not the right term for it, but it certainly displays a significant return to ‘the dark past’, and a fascination with human darkness, that prompted film noir to begin with.

You can pick up the first, second and third seasons of Dexter from Amazon.com, as well as the complete run of Angel and the complete run of Veronica Mars.

I was having a bed-time gander through Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson the other night, and I came across his chapter on Bart as Punk Icon. Turner’s observations are astute, and more than valid (his basic contention is that Bart Simpson rekindled for the West a sense of jubuliant individualism and anarchy that had most notably been achieved in the past by the likes of Joey Ramone and Johnny Rotten), but reading his argument, I came across the quote that both spawned the conception of this jotting and gave it its title. I found the idea interesting, so I thought I’d write it down real quick, float it, see what people make of it.

The gist: no one will disagree that Bart Simpson does indeed embody individualism and anarchy. This little hypothesis assumes that it’s agreed he therefor pretty well rejects any kind of institutionalized philosophy or religion, anything that can be affiliated with authority. Key point. More later. Firstly, a few words on Punk.

Punk is singularly and extraordinarily revolutionary because it is so fucking postmodern – its a philosophy that was begotten not from an understanding about life or a dissent/extrapolation of pre-existing philosophies, but from the institutionalization of philosophy itself. Even nihilism faced the void – Punk knows nothing of the void, because it’s never looked that far. All it sees is a society that won’t let individuals “do what [they] feel like”, and that’s what it’s against. The philosophy of Punk, it’s grand comment on the human condition, is ‘fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” And that is also, essentially, the philosophy of Bart.

That’s the first half of my thought.

The second half is about trying to diffuse the cynicism of this conclusion. I don’t believe it cynical, nihilistic, misanthropic or apathetic. I believe that, despite himself, Bart’s character says something quite grand about the human condition, and all schools of philosophical thought. It is of my own personal assertion that all Philosophy is born out of a need to try to understand oneself, and the all-encompassing nature of the result is simply the reasoning that all personal crises are inherently (being, as we all are, human) of the human condition. I believe Philosophy is the long-winded answer to human uncertainty, the posited Because to the posed Why. Descartes’ famous consensus “I think, therefor I am,” is fine, but it leaves open another query: “While I’m at it, I might as well think about this, too: what am I? Who am I?”

Bart Simpson, as the quote that started all this so brazenly demonstrates, knows exactly who he is. He’s Bart Simpson. He has no need for any kind of traditional philosophy, because they are answers to a question he never asked. Unnessecary to wonder the nature of man; he knows his own nature. So in lieu of philosophy, he adopts Punk, the cultural insitution of rebellion against a society that would not allow these pioneering men and women, knowing who they were, to be themselves. In doing so, he embodies also the real threat that Punk and Punk rebellion represents to the West at large – “Who the Hell are you?” The rude question, asked simply because Bart doesn’t care for respect or manners, has more meaningful implications. Don’t you know who you are? Why aren’t you as comfortable with your own place, and your own identity, as I am?

Now, I realize, in closing, that I’ve presented a pretty rosy and idealistic visage of Punk and anti-establisment sentiments. A lot of Punk philosophy is, I admit, simply a manifestation of selfishness and irresponsibility. But Bart is not these things. He has a fundamental, almost innate sense of morality, of social responsibility, of kindness. It is submerged heavily and readily below his irrepressible anarchy, but when Bart Simpson has to do the right thing, Bart Simpson does the right thing, with ferocity and aplomb, and not because he’s told to. Because he knows what’s right, he knows who he is, and he knows what do about both.

Food for Simpsonian thought.

(For further and much better studies of this ilk, I do recommend Planet Simpson. It’s a good read, if far from legitimately academic. I also pass on Martin Kingsley’s recommendation of The Simpsons and Philosophy.)

Steven Weber looking ready to steal Christmas

The Shining is, at its core, a story about “human monsters”. The phrase is used more than once in King’s novel and deserves its place as a pivotal concept to his story because it is not a horror fable with social subtext, but one about social horrors with a supernatural backdrop. To those who are only familiar with Kubrick’s version, a brilliant film but poor adaptation, one very fundamental difference between the two should be addressed. In King’s vision, Jack Torrance is not The Madman in a Horror Film. He is a damaged, alcoholic, unfulfilled writer with a history of anger management, one who tries with all his might to be a good man and fails. The Shining is his story, and it’s a tragedy.

That’s why, after pretty staggering success with his televisual adaptation of The Stand, King jumped at network TV’s offer of another project and immediately set about telling Jack Torrance’s story his way. The result is a mixed bag of pros and cons that any real King fan can’t walk away completely ashamed of… it does, after all, bulge with all that Kubrick omitted. The lengthy characterization, the fits and starts of insanity by its lead (I love Nicholson’s performance to pieces, but I think we all agree he looked ready to kill his kid from the very first scene in the car and to hell with the hotel) and those creepy hedges that follow you around. Steven Weber, of Wings fame, does admirably with his twisted role; whether he managed Nicholson’s menace I think is beside the point. He certainly winds up healthy, convincing levels of drunk and crazy, which is all I’m after in a mini-series that won’t let anybody cuss or be disfigured.

If you have any strong objections to the production, in fact, my research suggests it will be thus: “it wasn’t fucking scary”. Well, I’m certainly not going to get into fisticuffs with anybody over that. The furthest I’d go is ‘occasionally creepy’, although I have to confess that if we’re going to be pedantic the only film that’s ever physically scared me was Alien. Even so, I think most people can save their moods if they approach the way I approach all King: I don’t come to the party to be scared. He’ll freak me out a little when he’s really in the zone, but what I love and pay for is the stark emotional realism that he’s so in tune with. In Pet Sematary, a father loses his infant son to a roaring highway truck and is tormented with the knowledge that he could, if he chose to, bring him back to life. The most horrific thing about that novel is the slow, agonized and terrifyingly inevitable actions of the father and the sick sense that they make – King is the kind of man who sees the infinitely horrific potential behind the infinitely human paradigm: there’s nothing a parent won’t do.

The Shining’s emotional realism is its foundation for all that is unreal and supernatural about it, and what’s emotionally real about the text is already pretty terrifying: alcoholism, misogyny and child abuse. On the screen we lose some of the internal deliberation by the characters which lend these themes credence, which is a shame because if there’s one thing King can do, it’s makes you forget how stupid a character is for staying in the creepy old haunted hotel when they could leave at any time by telling you exactly why they don’t. He can’t do that through images, but he tries.

When all is said and done, this production is one created from the mind of a novelist, not a screenwriter, and that shows. But it’s also one created by Stephen King and a director-actor team that respected what he was going for, and did it reasonable justice. The result is something of a guiltily pleasurable in-joke that only established fans of the novel will really appreciate, but I’m certainly not disappointed that it’s out there.

There was a time when television long-form narrative drama was restricted to the soap-opera or the occasional linked Agatha Christi adaptation on the abc. In the last 20 years, however, our understanding of what can be done with commercial television’s long form narratives have shifted and they have begun to borrow from their generic and technological neighbors. Northern Exposure, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos have moved familial, community based drama away from the exclusive realm of the Soap Opera and blended it with comedic, cinematic and suspenseful elements from film and serial fiction. These dramas allow their white, middle class audiences (like me) to vicariously experience an exotic life of crime, danger and wild sexual abandon from the completely safe confines of their living rooms. Many of these dramas project themselves into environments which are distinctly ‘other’ to the safe, suburban lives of their audiences. They tempt the audience by asking them “what if you were a gangster?” or “what if you worked in a funeral home?”. Now we have a series which takes the sex, drugs and violence of its predecessors and thrusts it squarely into the world of the American white middle class. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Weeds:

Weeds examines Nancy Botwin, a middle aged white widow who, after the death of her husband, takes to dealing cannabis to the local bored, middle aged members of the Agrestic Housing project in Anytown USA. As Nancy becomes more ambitious and her expenses and contacts accumulate, the risks and rewards for her illicit activities accumulate with them. Her regular clients and some family members begin to work for her and Ms Botwin becomes somewhat of a marijuana baroness. We have all of the elements here for the kind of thing that most people look for in a good television drama. Crime (Nancy is a drug dealer), danger (the police, rival drug lords and some of her fellow citizens pose a threat to Nancy), desperation (Nancy must succeed in her dealing venture or she won’t be able to eat) and human interest (as we follow Nancy’s story her family and friends provide thier own narratives). It’s all there, it’s all been neatly placed in the ubiquitous sprawl of suburban America and the citizens of Agrestic take on the voice of the white, middle class American.

The theme song says it all, describing the community of Agrestic as “little boxes on a hillside” which are made of “ticky tacky” and that “all look the same”. Is this not the world of the white, social-climber inhabited McMansion, inhabited by those who surround themselves with ephemera to boost thier self-esteeem? To match this setting Agrestic is inhabited by these people who live in “the boxes” that “all look just the same”. These are the bored, the pretentious and the sedated consumers of middle America. This is a bland middle class existence, where everyone is homogenized and defined by the ephemeral “ticky tacky” that they purchase and allow to accumulate around them. Each of them, deep down, yearns to commit any number of rebellions against this dreary existence and can’t for fear of loosing face in the bitchy politics of their local community.

Enter Nancy. Nancy is a sweet, clean, middle class lady who becomes a drug dealer when her husband dies. In Nancy we see the world of the middle class and lower class colliding. The adults in Agrestic who become her client base experience a renaissance of teenage freedom, ‘slumming it’ and flirting with crime and danger. It is through Nancy, and these other characters that become involved with her, that the audience of Weeds project themselves into a lifestyle of crime, danger and excitement. It is much easier for us to enter the world of Weeds because when we can empathize with the lives of the characters of Weeds. In the end, with our pointless jobs, families and health problems the prospect of a neighborhood drug dealer may become quite a salacious fantasy (did I mention that Ms Botwin is hot and is my official TV girlfriend?).

Ultimately though, it is the hilarious and heartfelt relationships in Weeds which make it a great show and the suspense and threatening criminal elements serve as a beautiful method of raising the stakes of any emotional conflicts. The people of Agrestic make up the show, with focus firmly on Nancy’s family. These social encounters can be both hilarious and endearing from the moronic stoner antics of Doug and Andy to the consequences of Nancy’s husband’s death. Most of all though, I would have to credit the show with what is the best scene between a younger person and an older family member and leave it as my final testimony to the show:

Ok, so I may have just lost some votes there, but I love that sequence. It’s one of the first times in the Series that Andy is any good to anyone and I find it both humorous and heartwarming. I think that Weeds is appealing on many levels, to many people and that it does so for many good reasons. This is a show that you can watch purely for entertainment, only to be delighted to realise, six episodes in, that there’s a weight and subtext to what’s been happening on screen, all along. The long term narrative will take you places you would never expect and jumps through stylistic stunts (from the domestic opening of season one to the Tarrantino-drenched opening of season three). If you desire quality television that will consume a week of your life, like so many alien abductions, then Weeds is for you.