Using the grid of Freudian
psychoanalysis, Oliver and Trigo examine a wide array of films within the genre
of ‘film noir.’ In particular, the notions of condensation and displacement are
used throughout the text in order to suggest that the logic of identity
formation in virtually all of ‘noir’ is based on a process of exclusion,
repression and the return of the repressed oftentimes in the form of violence,
suicide or murder of the other. The work of Kristeva is brought into the mix
through the notion of the ‘abject’ which is both prior to subject formation as
the process of creating an identity (by exclusion) as a particular race, sex,
gender, ethnicity and also as the never totally repressed otherness which
always returns in one form or another.

The text is rich in detail as it offers up each film
to the psychoanalytic sacrifice when it is dissected according to the grids and
tools as named above and in turn demystified insofar as all mysteries, ambiguities
and ambivalences and particularly anxieties are explained, so it is claimed.

The traditional techniques of film
noir such as voice-over narration, flashbacks in time and out of narrative
sequence, the props of the femme fatale and the wily detective, and the
plethora of murders all fall into the condensation and displacement traps of
analysis. This procedure is applied to such varied themes as east vs. west,
north vs. south, the topography of space applied to that of the psyche such as
rooms, cities, and transportation vehicles and modes, accents of the stranger
or foreigner, bad jokes or jokes that fail in their structural mode pf
presentation. In addition, the mother as missing and indeed as the missing
piece which sets the violence of most of these films in motion is also analyzed
along these same psychoanalytic lines.

What is not clear in these analyses
however is just whose psyche is being analyzed or which level of production of
these images is truly their origin. At times it is the protagonists that are
trapped in these Freudian maneuvers, at other times it is the director or
producer of the film and in yet others the writer. In all cases, however, it is
claimed that the issues of race, sex, gender and ethnicity are played out as
representations of these same societal issues. Exactly how the psyche and the
social are linked is not thematized here and would add richly to the text if it
had been. Instead this connection is simply assumed and yet this would make the
unconscious a non-individualized phenomenon and this too is not addressed here.
One of the few references to social context is made in the introduction where
it is mentioned in passing that film noir was developed near the end of WW II
and hence focused on certain issues such as ‘the Negro problem’ which were
concerns of the day in the United States principally. Again it would seem that
a social and political theory of the unconscious is required in order to have
the individual and collective psyches meet or at least intersect.

Further, the grid of psychoanalysis
itself is never questioned or challenged in this analysis. Instead we have a
series of applications of structures to films that then are found to fall
within these structures. However elucidating some of this depiction and unraveling
of film noir is here nonetheless there is no film discussed which does not
depict the theory. Thus are we to conclude that film noir is simply using
psychoanalytic motifs as its modus operendi or that other films which do not
fit this mold were not included. One could use the same identity formation
logic of exclusion here on the subject formation of this text, perhaps.

Secondly, there is nothing
discussed concerning the films which might be called an overdetermination of
the theory presented. There seems to be no excess here where the film would
extend in complexity or finesse beyond the structures of displacement,
condensation, return of the repressed and the abject. This seems suspicious at
best and an unnecessary censoring of aspects of the film noir productions such
that other perhaps even competing structures or explanations are not presented.

The most troubling issue might be
the assumption of the social context of social problems which is assumed within
the psyche of the protagonist, film maker and writer all at once. This
certainly seems a condensation of a number of contexts into one and perhaps a
displacement of the abject — those issues that are truly borderline and do not
fit snugly within the categories used in this study.

These objections or concerns
notwithstanding the portrayal of film noir through the psychoanalytic lens here
is incredibly illuminating and suggestive and certainly does offer explanatory
structures for what are often seen as uncanny or simply grotesque or sublime
elements which are left nameless and intellectually homeless. Trigo and Oliver
have certainly found homes for them but the fit may be a bit snug.

© 2005 Irene E. Harvey

Irene E. Harvey,
Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University

Categories: Philosophical, Psychoanalysis