As far as anyone knows: Fetishism and the anti-televisual paradoxes of film noir.

摘要

This dissertation examines the characteristic narrative structures and formal devices of classic American film noir by way of the psychoanalytic notion of Fetishism, suggesting that noir represents a perverse fixation in light of emerging mid-century concerns about televisuality. Drawing upon the work of such neo-Freudian theorists as Jacques Lacan, Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey, I read noir's characteristic obsession with "perfect crimes" and "cover-ups" in a strict homology with fetishistic practice, wherein a private trauma (the sight of sexual difference, according to Freud) is resolved through a disavowal of known truths. Figuring criminal success not as "getting away with it," but as a meticulous erasure of difference between the underworld and legitimate society, noir posits two distinct perspectives: either we are on the inside witnessing it all, or we are locked out absolutely. Trading perspectives back and forth across this fortified knowledge boundary, noir's narratives offer the seductive (and decidedly fetishistic) suggestion that there may in fact be "more than meets the eye," while insisting that there is absolutely no way to verify the truth.;Contrary to much existing scholarship, which understands film noir as a response to World War II and its aftermath, I theorize noir in the context of mid-century changes in dominant media. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Americans are endlessly teased by the possibility of televisual revolution. In this context, film noir salvages one of the tried-and-true fantasy spaces of the pre-War era---the private conspiracies which daily newspapers and True Crime accounts imagine "behind the scenes" of everyday life. Film noir banks upon it's viewer's pleasure, not in being overtly threatened by crime, but in actively speculating that at any point one may be in amongst it. Understood in this way, film noir benefits from a reactionary ideal in which visual obstacles are not televisually crossed, but remain fixed and impermeable in the extreme. It is this strategy of fetishistic retrenchment, when faced with the impulse to see more and more, which in my view best explains the rise and decline of film noir between 1941 and 1955, precisely the era of television's emergence.