by Writing Workshops Staff
2 days ago
Tom Andes, whose 8-week workshop Writing the New Noir begins this January, explores what makes this genre so essential to American storytelling.
Why Neo-Noir?
Now that it's the holidays, things have been slowing down, and I've had a little more unstructured time. Whenever that happens, I find myself wanting to read for pleasure and watch movies. Both of these things help me achieve a flow state, which I recently learned about while reading Johan Hari's Stolen Focus. Though they're both leisure activities, reading and watching movies are a kind of active rest, something that recharges my brain. They're a hell of a lot better for me than doomscrolling, anyway. And when I reach for a book or a movie, often as not, it's something in the mystery or crime genre, something noir or noir adjacent.
It's fair to say we have a problem with toxic optimism in our culture. Despite living in a society in which massive structural inequalities are baked into the system, despite the fact most of us who live in cities daily walk past someone in desperate circumstances who asks us for food or money, despite the fact the deck is stacked against most of us, we're told again and again that if we fail, it's our own damn fault. Trouble with money? It couldn't be because they haven't raised the minimum wage in years, the price of groceries and gas keeps going up, and a semester of college costs as much as many working people make in a year. Nah. You just need to change the story you tell yourself about money.
More than any other sub-genre, noir fiction acts as an antidote to the fairy tales we tell ourselves to survive as part of American life. Of course, one can go too far with this. The opposite of sentimentality is itself a kind of sentimentality, one in which the fairy tale is simply a darker mirror image of itself. But at its best, noir fiction captures the desperation that's baked into our culture. In noir fiction people want things, usually money or illicit sex. They're desperate. And things don't generally go their way. All of which can make for great storytelling.
At maybe no time do we feel this so acutely as the holidays, that time of convivial good cheer that is also among the loneliest times for many of us, or the most fraught with difficult family dynamics. Don't get me wrong: the holidays are wonderful. But there's a reason even canonical, feel-good holiday movies like It's a Wonderful Life have a dark side. And it's the reason we take pleasure in a movie like Bad Santa, about a shopping mall Santa Claus who is actually a serial robber of department stores. Perhaps nowhere do the contradictions inherent in American life come more to the surface than in the holiday season, which is at once the time of giving, of Christian charity, and the season of unbridled retail.
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead is the tale of two brothers, the scheming Andy, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the hapless Hank, played by Ethan Hawke. They're both hard up for money, so Andy tries to rope Hank into a scheme to rob a jewelry store. But not any jewelry store. No, he wants to rob a mom and pop one. In fact, it's the one their mom and pop own. Foolproof, right? And since the insurance will pay out, and their mom doesn't work on Sundays, the day of the holdup, and they'll only be using a toy gun, anyway, it's sure to be a victimless crime, or so Andy reasons.
Of course, things go hilariously, hideously wrong. Part of the movie's appeal lies in its dark humor and the way it keeps you on the edge of your seat. But it all works in part because the brothers have such legible, understandable motives. Andy's marriage is failing, and the only time he's been able to be intimate with his wife was when they took a vacation to Rio. He wants the money to go back there, maybe forever. But if he wants to fix his marriage, he also wants to escape the mess he's making for himself in New York.
Emotionally, Andy's a closed book, just like his dad, played by Albert Finney. In one of the movie's best scenes, Andy rejects his dad's apology, then explodes in the car on the drive home, telling his wife, Gina—played by Marissa Tormei—how sometimes it's too late for an apology. Hoffman and Tomei are both fantastic in that scene, Hoffman showing us how the pain Andy is trying desperately to deny is motivating him, while we see on Gina's face that she understands this better than Andy does, but knows she can't say anything. Andy's also developing a heroin habit, which he tries to keep separate from the rest of his life by using in a high-end shooting gallery. And he's been embezzling money from the real estate company both brothers work for, cooking the books, which are about to be audited.
Hank, meanwhile, is so hard up for money that his own daughter calls him a loser when he can't come up with a hundred and twenty bucks to send her on a school trip to see The Lion King. He's also sleeping with Gina. Hank's just hapless enough to think he's in love. Gina knows better. Far from being a scheming white collar criminal like his brother, Hank isn't even an especially good blue-collar criminal. Unable to face the prospect of holding up the jewelry store himself, he recruits a buddy from the bar to do the dirty work, which is how the dominoes begin to fall.
From the scheming older brother pushing around the younger brother to the longstanding beef between father and son, from the series of unintended consequences that follow the botched holdup to the bar buddy's brother-in-law entering the story to threaten Hank's life, from both brothers' financial desperation to their desire for Andy's wife, from the way the movie comes to center on the father's quest for revenge to how the camera gradually pans back, revealing the depth of Andy's addiction and the extent to which he's compromised himself at work—all these are the ingredients for classic noir. Like a lot of noir, the movie has an adventurous structure, beginning the day of the robbery and looking forward and back from there. Though we likely associate the noir sub-genre with pulp writers, it also has roots in German expressionism, and that collision between high and low is part of what energizes the best work in the genre in any medium.
Not that the movie is holiday-themed. And not that it's a classic noir in the sense of tough guys in fedoras and trench coats in alleyways, either. But whether you call it a neo-noir, a thriller, or a heist movie, it's a great example of how noir tropes can enliven and enrich contemporary work.
Not that I don't love the holidays or America, either. I think noir is one of the great American art forms. Judging by its continued popularity, we continue to see ourselves in it. The traditionally downbeat noir ending has been criticized for being too conservative: people who want too much and seek to rise above their station suffer for it. But from Megan Abbott to S.A. Cosby, writers informed by this aesthetic have complicated those reads of the genre.
Neo-noir is the name we give to the many iterations of this genre since its mid-Twentieth Century heyday, from contemporary crime novels informed by this aesthetic to movies like Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I wanted to teach a course on this sub-genre because I love it. And what this subgenre has given us continues to inform so much American art, and for better or for worse, to tell us so much about ourselves.
Ready to explore this essential American genre in your own writing? Join Tom Andes this January for Writing the New Noir, an 8-week Zoom workshop where you'll study the techniques that make neo-noir so compelling and apply them to your own fiction.
