Recuerdo a Noir

 

What is it with me and bad girls? I used to love Bonnie Parker (or Faye Dunaway, at least). For years, Joyce Carol Oates’s Foxfire was my favorite book. I emulated rebellious, smart, even nasty women—just as long as they were autonomous. I loved femme fatales.

Hitchcock’s fatales in particular were sleek, beautiful, and dangerous. In graduate school, I read about the director’s near-obsession with the costume and makeup of his female stars—he was a tortured, caressing architect of femininity. I learned this at the same time I discovered that Freud genuinely believed that women were incapable of morality because of penis envy. I studied film noir through this brooding filter, suspiciously watching for oedipal trajectories and phallic symbols among the dim interiors and rain-swept streets. Lipstick never seemed so suspect.

But these days, I talk about fatal women and their motives with a 17 year-old Cuban boy with crooked teeth and eyes like chocolate mousse. I’m his high school English tutor. He wants to box, but his mother won’t let him. French is one of his electives, and he writes vocabulary sentences about girls in pretty dresses. Film noir appeared on his teacher’s list of pre-approved research paper topics, and I urged him to pick it. Despite his gentle protestations, I think he still would have preferred to write about the lost city of Atlantis.


I can’t discern what opinion he holds of me. Some days, he appears freshly shaved and a little nervous. He blushes and has a difficult time meeting my eyes. Other days, he yawns, gives one-word answers, and slumps next to me in his school uniform pants, belt undone and dangling. His manners are always inscrutable, however, which renders him opaque.

He and his classmates seem to be part of Miami’s Cuban American elite. His friend’s family, he told me wistfully one day, used to own one of the biggest houses on the island, right on the beach. Fidel seized it and turned it into a hospital. Upon hearing this, I sighed and shook my head—I’m wary of delving into such complexity.

He’s a fan of Double Indemnity, but I’ve been urging him to watch The Lady from Shanghai, too. To tempt him, I pointed out what a knockout Rita Hayworth was. She was married to Orson Welles when they shot the movie, and Welles made her bleach her hair blonde. As a result, controversy ensued. She was (I paused gingerly as I told him this) Latina. My student rolled his eyes, familiar.

The femme fatale engages in a typical pattern: first, she seduces the noir protagonist, betrays him, and then ultimately gets hers. The protagonist generally concludes the story in a state of bitter lamentation. In voiceover, he might say, “oh, what a fool I was.” When the kid and I talked about this, we both smiled. I assume it was for different reasons.

The fatale’s power lies in her sexuality; she arouses men and whips them into clumsy, quivering submission. In general, noir is a world of erratic, ungoverned emotions. Not long ago, I tried to crystallize this idea for my student. “How do you feel when you have a crush?” I asked him one late sun-drenched afternoon, at the fancy dining room table from the old country. “Are you in your right mind?”

No,” he replied immediately, his Spanish accent surfacing a little more than usual. “You think about nothing but her. Your world revolves around her. You ignore everyone else in your life. And then, she’s not who you thought she was.”

I gently explained that the betrayals typically come after a relationship has been established, that we were still discussing the pursuit phase. Internally, I wondered who had hurt him and what I could do to her.

Later, I asked him to tell me how noir was similar to a lush tropical forest. This question was part of an educational technique called synectics, which requires a person to create metaphors based upon other metaphors. He said that both things were beautiful and complicated. “Okay,” I said, “What else do you know that’s beautiful and complicated? It can be anything, an animal, a plant, an object.”

He paused, then answered, “Women are beautiful and complicated.”

I laughed a little and told him that he might not like the next step in the exercise.

“How do you imagine it feels to be a beautiful, complicated woman?” I asked.

He was quiet for a long, long time. He did not come up with anything.

He also did not escort me to the door that day; he shut his bedroom door firmly behind him instead.

He will be Papi someday. I might still be talking to students about love and power.

The noir paper is due next week.