Review on Eric Lott's "The Whiteness of Film Noir", by Jenna Johnson
Eric Lott’s “The Whiteness of Film Noir” is thematically based on how within film noir exists heavy undertones of racial differences and the crossing between moral borders based on racial stereotypes. To summarize his thesis, Lott argues that the “specifically racial means of noir’s obsession with the dark side of 1940s American life has been remarkably ignored.” More specifically, Lott states, film noir’s “moral focus on the rotten souls of white folks… constantly though obliquely invokes the racial dimension of this figural play of light against dark.” In other words, Lott asserts that while analyzing film noir, considerations of racial differences are a necessity.
Lott’s article relates the themes and style of film noir to several films, one of which we have close knowledge of, “Double Indemnity.” He points out numerous racial details in this specific film, such as the “black custodians and janitors” of Walter Neff’s workplace, a man who comes into Neff’s workplace with his “Greekness [that] suggests his potential for moral lapse,” and the Mexican restaurant Neff takes Lola to, which apparently makes Neff “now a moral resident of Phyllis’s Spanish house.” I agree that there are several spots where racial differences are remarked and possibly even meaningful to the plot in “Double Indemnity,” however, Lott goes very far in some of his assumptions, tying his ideas together with loaded words and phrases in order to prove his point.
There is mention of the some of the same “influentially racial” instances in film noir in Charles Scruggs’s article, “ ‘The Power of Blackness’: Film Noir and Its Critics” (notice the difference in title choice). Scruggs also points out the same case of the Greek man in “Double Indemnity” and how Barton Keyes fears the “casting [of] a long shadow upon the ‘social fabric’ of his insurance company.” However, Scruggs makes this point for a different reason than Lott, which I believe is merely to demonstrate the possibly racist feelings of the characters in the film, or in general, Americans of the time. Lott takes racial inequalities and their effect on moral behavior and makes them out to be almost the sole symbolic reason behind film noir’s reputation for moral degradation in American society.
Lott says that “[f]ilm noir is a cinematic mode defined by its border crossings,” referring to characters crossing racial and cultural borders and therefore becoming lesser people, in a “condition of moral disrepair,” because of it. True, the morals of society were portrayed rather drastically negative in film noir, but the overall basis for this was not one of race. Lott may argue that “[t]he ‘dark’ energy of many of these films is villainized precisely through the associations with race that generated some of that energy in the first place,” but the real energy behind these films was their style, devious plots new to American film, their deceitful characters, their unique cinematic techniques, and most of all, their mystery.