Noir & Zen:Shane Black's KISS KISS BANG BANG & Rian Johnson's BRICK

 BRICK

Joseph Gordon Leavitt, Emilie de Ravin, Richard Roundtree. Dir. Rian Johnson, Focus Features, 2005

Raymond Chandler was born in 1888. In 1933, a washed-up exec in the oil business, Chandler published his first pulp fiction short. For the rest of his life, Chandler helped invent modern P.I. fiction, as well as what we now generalize as crime noir, with a literary elan suggesting Lawrence or Maugham on their off-days. While Chandler toiled in his now-immortalized Los Angeles, Dashiell Hammett & his P.I., Sam Spade, worked to promote San Francisco's virtues. Though it probably goes without saying, it's hard to imagine either foreseeing a world in which their shared style would forge a literary/filmic template often imitated, frequently parodied, but never replaced - film noir. It is impossible to imagine either envisioning a future in which their filmic champions include both Rian Johnson & Shane Black.

According to Ye Olde Internet one of the more popular fan theories concerning the Coen Brothers' 1998 THE BIG LEBOWSKI posits that Donnie's (Steve Buscemi) character only exists in Walter's mind. Though contradicted by a scene outside the bowling alley in which Donnie says, to Bridges' Dude, "Phone's ringin', Dude," & Dude responds, "Thank you, DONNIE," I've always felt simpatico with the idea of a supernatural element in the Coens' slacker masterwork. As @the_hoyk will attest, I once texted him "IS SAM ELLIOTT GOD IN BIG LEBOWSKI?"

I will always maintain that Sam Elliott's The Stranger in LEBOWSKI constitutes not just "the Coens' idea of an Omniscent Narrator," as Marc replied that day, but a full-on manifestation of Divinity. It is not that Stranger appears to only speak with Dude, but that Dude always knows of Stranger's presence. Before they even speak, Dude hears "Tumblin' Tumbleweed" in his head, like a heavenly trump. Though Elliott orders1 & receives a sasparilla, he & Gary, the bartender, never speak. Stranger & Dude converse exclusively, advancing my private theory that LEBOWSKI traffics in the metaphysical as well as the parodic.

It's uncertain, at most, that crime noir's high priests intended a supernatural angle in their prose or its multitudinous derivatives, but the yearning for same makes a personal sense, if nothing else. Every great P.I. features character-defining narration delivered in such a naturalistic, fourth-wall-breaking style it's easy to imagine Bogart's voiceover: "This is all contrived bullshit, by the way, I'm just an alcoholic with writing skills & a need to opine on Southern California in character."

In Chandler, or Hammett, or their filmic descendants, I always see this inclination toward the unreal. In both book & film, the P.I.s tend to exist without a great lot of detail as to how they contrive said. Marlowe & Spade have a tendency to appear exactly where the important action in a story occurs without a great deal of pretext establishing their credibility at the scene. More - most? - tellingly, for every example of Marlowe or Spade chowing down, ordering a drink, or lighting a cigarette, it's never clear how he affords these. Marlowe's forever accepting jobs on promises of lavish payment which never appear to arrive in his bank account. In the middle of the Great Depression, Marlowe has one job - freelance do-gooder - which keeps him in food, booze, & a Hollywood address - without breaking a sweat. If ever a genre looked its readers in the face & winked, crime noir is that genre.

Whatever rules a literary/filmic genre evolves, from noir to romcom, they remain fictions. We engage with them because what we bring of ourselves meshes most closely with that genre's conventions. Which is to say it's no surprise that I suspect a genre-innovator implies more than he means. Crime noir, as hard & cold & factual as its setting, serves as a personal springboard into the metaphysical, regardless of Raymond Chandler's intent, because I bring that bent to it.

At early moments in Shane Black's 2005 KISS KISS BANG BANG & Rian Johnson's BRICK, principal characters experience events which allowed me to imagine their stories existed as much in the characters' mind as in "real time" within the narrative. Summoned to a street corner for a pay phone call, Joseph Gordon Leavitt realizes he just used a phone booth where none exists. Discovering a cache of her & Robert Downey, Junior's shared favorite mystery writer, Michelle Monaghan's character in KKBB proceeds to lose herself in its narrative. Though Wikipedia explained away both moments, my idea that these indicate authorial leaps into pure imagination persists.

KISS KISS BANG BANG & BRICK take place in the Now, regardless of their stylized & selfconscious nods to Then. Both films feel authentic - of their time & place, the Mid-Aughts, in Socal, USA. At the same time, both stories' narratives proceed at the pace & with the logic of the fever-dream. Each movie's narrative provides for its protagonist to appear & exist where he most needs to. While true of all fiction, it's hardly the reality posed by noir's defining voices. In the workaday reality described by Chandler & Marlowe, the P.I. arrives at a bus stop intent on revelation while the climactic murders occur on a beach 20 miles away. And yet, within that narrative, Marlowe or Spade or Downey's Harry or Leavitt appear at the precise time & place necessary to drop a bomb on the narrative in the story's last act. Both movies' stories define chaos, a life filled to bursting with significant characters & dialogue, of which only a few matter. Moments at which their characters always appear, regardless of actual likelihood.

Whatever Hammett & Chandler's real time thoughts, I don't find it hard to imagine either nostalgic for the stories of childhood. My own fondness for the bottle indicates a prediliction for past glory moreso than present combat. Both Sam Spade & Philip Marlowe fill the role of knight-in-tarnished-armor, midcentury men of LaMancha, characters embodying a fundamentally romantic, unreal ideal. Give them suits, cigarettes & coupes until Judgment Day, they're as real as Golems, another midcentury culture's avenging angels.

Is it at all clear that I've been writing about Shane Black's KISS KISS BANG BANG & Rian Johnson's BRICK, which both speak in the tongue of the noir in 2005? Probably not, but I have. Both films, for all their considerable differences, conform to both classic & personal rules of that genre. Both films triumph in their specific vision of noir conventions & in my more personal ideas of same, each an open ended invitation to the Possible & a finite definition of the Actual at the same time. However an individual viewer takes them, this one sees them both as among the great films of the Aughts. (Or at least the great-films-to-discuss.)

KISS KISS BANG BANG
Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan. Dir. Shane Black, Warner Bros., 2005