Why Film Noir?

I love Film Noir. 

Classic Noir. Neo Noir. Scandinavian Noir. All of it.

I can watch Double Indemnity, The Usual Suspects and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (both versions) over and over again and with each viewing learn something new, something I missed on the previous dozen viewings of those films.

What I love about Noir is that it juxtaposes nefarious behavior with love, crime with passion, theft with grit. To the uninformed it's a great escape of superiority: we watch others behaving badly and then we feel good about our lives. But if we give it the care and respect it deserves, Noir opens up the complexity of the human condition.

We are all flawed. We are all lovers and thieves and some of us had to steal for love. Some of us loved only to be robbed. Out of our time, our dignity, our truth. While the "nothing is what seems" premise that drives so much of this genre may seem trite on surface, most of us have absolutely no clue of what's going on behind the behind of people's lives.

Imagine the cinéma vérité of what we all leave on the Facebook cutting room floor? The fiscal struggles, the fights, the forage for justice and justification of our own existence.

For every Superman there's The Third Man. And often they are the very same man.

I first began my Cleveland screenplay project back in 2007. Ten years ago, when the city that became my soul's home was on the cusp of revitalization. Many already know that backstory. At the time, the premise was simply a love story of two people from the opposite side of the river. A modern West Side Story, where the cultural divide comes between two young lovers.

Industry experts, including LA screenwriters and Cleveland filmmakers read the script. And destroyed it. Because it deserved to be destroyed. And over the next decade my own life took more turns than a NASCAR race. I felt like a character in someone else's narrative. Surely I couldn't have possibly be writing this version of my own life story, for shit was absurd. Not just in my own life, but with the world at large.

In 2012's Skyfall, the James Bond tribute to Noir, Judy Dench, as M, confronts a government body that feels that her department's skills are no longer relevant. Her reply cemented itself in my gut like nothing I've heard in the past twenty years:

"Well, I suppose I see a different world than you do and the truth is that what I see frightens me. I'm frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map. They're not nations, they're individuals. And look around you. Who do you fear? Can you see a face, a uniform, a flag? No! Our world is not more transparent now, it's more opaque! It's in the shadows. That's where we must do battle. So before you declare us irrelevant, ask yourselves, how safe do you feel?"

As we all continue to live our most genuine lives in the shadows, it's during this past decade that I grew even more fond of Film Noir. These characters no longer seemed like strangers on the screen. Instead, I fully appreciated their motivations and their struggles for survival. For I was one of them now. My own experiences and the daily news ticker have made me far more cynical.

A trusted friend recently told me that I sound bitter. My reply? "I am. I fully own it."

And that's the best time to write - when you're feeling pissed off. When you want justice served and realize that IRL has consequences. So you do what you've done since you were old enough to hold a pen. You put it all to paper.

My Cleveland script has gone thru many reiterations, both in structure and in theme. Two things remained constant: the location and the central characters. However, the stakes have gotten far more serious and consequential. Because life has, too.

Ultimately, in order to have clarity on this story, I had to become a Mother. No one captured the maternal instinct better than Uma Thurman in Kill Bill - a force to be reckoned with. So will be the protagonist of my story.

With my screenplay, I want to do Noir justice. Because in the past decade, Noir has done justice by me.



The Third Man image: Google Images