The war had left some blind, and everyone else with brand new eyes, people could no longer see everything at face value, or to put it bluntly, the value of face had slumped. The world after war was no place for the frilly and meaningless, and Hollywood, as the capital of frill, had to come up with something new, and refreshingly sharp to reflect the current mood. Edgy, moody, and slick, Film Noir did this perfectly, showing the underbelly of the new modern life, the ugly side of everything that was beautiful in the 50’s.
For example, the majority of Film Noir is set in Los Angeles, the glitzy, glamour capital of America. But Film Noir wasn’t about glitz and glamour, it was about the desperate, bitchy, brutality on the other side of beautiful. The back streets of human nature. And reigning the hour of darkness, beset upon Hollywood, was The Femme Fatale.
Women had been elevated to a new height of independence during the war, and The Femme Fatale was Hollywood’s beautifully malicious take on the new, powerful female. Using her sexuality as her first weapon, and her heel as the next, she held all the cards in Film Noir, and never gave any away. Shoulder Pads, red lips, and a sharp cornered handbag, the Femme Fatale was Eve in polyester, ruthlessly hunting down loveless detectives, and tempting them to do stupid things with fruit, or far more frequently, knives and handguns. Several actresses carved a career from, well, being a bitch. Rita Hayworth for one, as the blonde manipulator in The Lady From Shangai, and Mary Astor, the only woman for Sam Spade. The Femme Fatale was the Queen of Film Noir, and she squeezed her throne for all it was worth.
She appears in Blade Runner, cigarettes et al, though far less prominently than in traditional Film Noir. Rachael-the-Replicant doesn’t appear to be the lean, mean, man-eating machine that her fore bearers were, but she still gets what she wants in the end (including a soft-top and sunset), and she of course, ensnares our wonderfully melancholy Detective Deckard, the next must-have on the Film Noir list.
An ‘alienated hero of questionable morality’ wearing a floppy brown trench coat and frown is essential to any Film Noir. He features in every classic of the genre, Maltese Falcon, A Touch of Evil and so on. As with the Femme Fatales, several actors made a living from looking miserable and slightly confused, such as Humphrey Bogart, appearing as the cool Sam Spade in Maltese Falcon, and in The Big Sleep (1946) amongst many others. In Blade Runner, Detective Deckard is classic Film Noir, he could have been pickled and sent bubble wrapped from the 50’s. He even eats in dodgy street cafés, because his job isn’t dangerous enough.
The story is normally told from this male, central character’s view, when we meet him, he is often between two situations, torn between the inhumanities of his life, and the humanity of his person. This raw state of mind often leaves the character seemingly devoid of emotion, as is Deckard, until he meets Rachael, he may as well be one of the replicants he hunts.
No wonder really, the world in which these films take place is a bleak, cold one, in Blade Runner’s L.A., there is no comfortable medium between the old and the modern, the Film Noir and the Sci-Fi, the glaring neon lights and the shadows. You sense that every character is lonely, and you never see anything ‘alive’, no grass, no plants or animals. Even a snake owned by one of the replicants is a robot,
‘Real?’ says Deckard,
‘Of course not, too expensive,’ replies the replicant.
A moment where the two characters, the hunter, and the hunted, are completely equal, because they are both living a life they need more out of, in a world where more is impossible.
It is said that great Film Noir poses the question, ‘why is this happening to me?’ a question which both Deckard ‘why am I called back? Why am I doing this?’
and the replicants can ask, ‘why am I a replicant, why am I like this?’
The answer of course, the bitter sentiment of Film Noir, ‘for no reason at all.’ The viewer watches Blade Runner’s characters like fish in a tank, with pity because they are trapped, and with resignation, because they’ll never, really, get out.
The fusion of Sci-Fi and Film Noir works perfectly in Blade Runner, using the past to paint a (dismal) picture of the future. The combination was one of the first of it’s kind, pulling two genres together to work in perfect unison. And this combination of Sci-Fi and Film Noir will continue to work because the future is unseen, and therefore to us, quite scary, and, as in typical Film Noir fashion, there’s always ‘something BAD out there…’
