“Do I lie to myself to make myself happy?” asks the character Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) in Christopher Nolan’s critically acclaimed Memento (2000). With Memento and the follow-up Insomnia (2002), Nolan has become one of our most talented and thoughtful directors, preoccupied, as are a surprising number of contemporary filmmakers, with the themes and stylistic techniques of film noir. Of all the styles of American filmmaking, noir most lends itself to the probing of philosophical issues concerning personal identity, the fragility of the quest for justice and love, the attractions and dangers of autonomy, and the role of truthfulness. As the opening quotation from Memento suggests, Nolan’s films dramatize the conflicts between wish fulfillment and truthfulness, and illustrate the cost of conflating fantasy and reality.
Philosophy and film professors might take note, in fact, that Nolan’s films provide dramatic illustration of themes central to the argument of Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton University Press, 2002), the last book by the late famed British analytic philosopher Bernard Williams, who taught at the University of Cambridge and died in June at age 73 after a long battle with cancer. Williams, said an obituary that ran in The Guardian, “revivified moral philosophy.” In his final work, “the greatest British philosopher of his era,” as the obituary calls him, “analyzes the way Richard Rorty, Derrida, and other followers of politically correct Foucaultian fashion sneer at any purported truth as ludicrously naive because it is, inevitably, distorted by power, class bias, and ideology. It explores ‘the tension between the pursuit of truthfulness and the doubt that there is (really) any truth to be found.’” Although it is far from a complete treatment of the topic, Williams’s final book suggests fruitful ways in which we might begin to recover and articulate the significance of truth in our ordinary experience.
Arguing that truth has an intrinsic, and not merely an instrumental, value, Williams writes that “if we lose a sense of the value of truth, we will certainly lose something, and we may well lose everything.” Williams focuses on the constitutive role played by the virtues of truthfulness, especially sincerity and accuracy, in our lives, and in the way vices and certain kinds of “desires and wishes” can “subvert the acquisition of true belief.”
Any connection between noir and truthfulness might seem dubious, given the penchant in noir films for narrative experimentation, even fragmentation, and for stylistic devices that throw the viewer’s perspective off balance. Some scholars of noir, such as Foster Hirsch, at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, see the core of noir in the “mazelike, many-mirrored fun house” at the end of Orson Welles’s film The Lady From Shanghai (1947), a scene that symbolizes “the uncertain, shifting identities” of noir and the “mysteriousness of personality.”
But uncertainty and mystery are not the same as complete skepticism and utter nihilism. Classic noir films seem to have a specific target in mind: the progressive, rationalist, and optimistic strain of American enlightenment thinking. Noir accentuates shadows over transparent clarity; the sinuous and labyrinthine plot over a linear one; dependency over rational, autonomous control; and the tenuous quest for love and communication over confidence in a happy, affirming, all-American ending.
Yet noir films are rarely simply negative. Instead, noir embodies what J.P. Telotte, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, describes as an “effort to speak,” a “pattern of desire ... for a kind of communication,” a “persistent, driving, and finally human force.” Rather than being nihilistic, noir films underscore the gap between our longing for and our realization of justice, truth, and love. However tragically unfulfilled, the quests of the characters in noir are not mocked, but treated as human and noble. Even in films such as Double Indemnity (1944) or Detour (1945), which suggest the presence of a fatalistic force driving characters to their own destruction, the voice-over, one of the key stylistic and storytelling devices in noir, underscores the inexorable desire of the characters for communication and understanding, and thus for truthfulness.
At least that is the case in classic noir, which runs roughly from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958). The more modern period in noir, often called neo-noir, begins with films such as The Getaway (1972), Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), and Body Heat (1981). An explicit embrace of nihilism is evident in many neo-noir filmsfor example, in The Getaway, Body Heat, and The Usual Suspects (1995), which feature characters who get away with lawless, vicious acts. The world of classic noir, a deeply democratic world, was inhospitable to supermen or superwomen, good or evil; no one in classic noir wins. By contrast, characters such as Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner) in Body Heat and Keyser Söze (Kevin Spacey) in The Usual Suspects deploy a variety of disguises and deceptive strategies to transcend the conventional mores of ordinary folks.
One way to see the Williams-like attention to the moral significance of everyday truthfulness in Nolan’s films, beneath their jigsaw stylistics, is to consider, in contrast, David Lynch. In several works, Lynch, while drawing from the same noir vocabulary as Nolan, approaches narrative and moral continuity from the opposite standpoint. Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), and Mulholland Dr. (2002) assume an utter fluidity of human identity and repudiate the nobility of the protagonists’ quests for truth. In Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr., one character abruptly replaces or changes into another. Writing in The New Yorker on Lynch’s films, Anthony Lane argues that, as a filmmaker, Lynch is a “fetishist.” Instead of asserting the primacy of character and plot, Lynch is “willing to stretch and wrench his narrative” to accommodate “his objects of desire.”
According to Lynch, Blue Velvet began as a series of images inspired by blue velvet as a song and a texture. Those, by free association, provoked other images, of green grass, a voyeur, and so forth, from which Lynch constructed the narrative. Blue Velvet has a beginning, middle, and end, but the apparent resolution -- the return to happy, harmonious, suburban American family life -- is clearly sardonic. Beneath the surface, and at the film’s core, is the tale of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), nightclub singer of the song “Blue Velvet,” whose naked flesh -- battered and abused, a reflection of her dislocated and tortured mental state -- is revealed in the most degrading scene of the film. As many critics labeled Lost Highway a self-indulgent fantasy, so too did many critics, among them Roger Ebert, complain about Lynch’s unnecessary humiliation of Rossellini. What those criticisms miss is that Lynch is not failing to produce creative variations on traditional narratives, or to show the redemptive possibilities or normative conceptions of human nature. At least in these films, Lynch bypasses those conventions and conceptions entirely. He leaves us with no clear way to distinguish truth from wish fulfillment, accurate narration from fantasy.
On the surface, at least, Christopher Nolan’s Memento seems to have much in common with those Lynch films. Memento’s reverse-chronology narrative, its unreliable narrator, its concentration on seedy, duplicitous characters, and its refusal to reveal the whole truth seem to mimic Lynch-style noir. Its clues point in various directions, while the peculiar condition of memory deprivation suffered by its main character seems to underscore the constructed nature of personal identity.
It is the story of the quest for a killer. Leonard Shelby is a former insurance investigator who now devotes himself to tracking down the man who assaulted and murdered his wife. He continues, that is, to be an investigator of loss. Injured in the attack, Leonard himself suffers from a peculiar type of memory deprivation; his short-term memory lasts for only a few minutes. As a corrective, he has constructed a method, relying only on “facts,” information scribbled in bits of paper, Polaroid pictures, and -- for the most important clues -- tattoos. The film is shot in reverse narrative in sequences that last approximately as long as Leonard’s short-term memory. The disruption of temporal narrative, the theme of the quest, which always aims at something more than the mere solving of the crime, and the depiction of the main character as trapped in a labyrinth -- all these are noir themes. Nolan saw Memento as an opportunity to “reassess the over-familiar tropes ... of the film noir genre.”
Leonard’s protestations of rational autonomy and his method of relying exclusively on “facts” are undermined throughout the film. Instead of being independent, he is deeply dependent, especially on the good will of those who assist him in his quest. In one particularly revealing scene, the film’s leading lady, Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), a version of the classic noir femme fatale, spells out for Leonard precisely how she plans to manipulate him, then leaves the room for a little while, as he rushes about in a futile search for a pen. Moments later, she returns and continues her ruse; the timer of Leonard’s short-term memory has run out, and he is now oblivious to her plot. Leonard’s most dramatic form of vulnerability and dependence has to do not with deception by others, but with a peculiar form of self-deception. If at any moment he should willingly falsify the “facts,” he will burden himself later with the cascading repercussions of his own lies. Philosophers such as Williams wonder if self-deception is possible and, if it is, how it works and what its consequences are. Leonard’s condition makes self-deception not only possible, but potentially deadly.
Yet Leonard has moments of self-awareness. At one point, he admits that the police found no evidence of an intruder and found only his gun. “I was the only one who disagreed with the facts.” In fact, the film suggests, especially in Leonard’s own fleeting flashbacks of his wife’s death, that he may well have been involved in her murder. In another scene, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), a character who aids Leonard in his effort to find the killer, informs Leonard that he has done all this before -- tracked down a suspect, executed him, and then, forgetting and needing to continue the search, started all over again with the investigation. “You don’t want the truth. You make up your own truth. You’re living a dream.”
This exchange so irks Leonard that he writes false, incriminating information on the Polaroid snapshot of Teddy and states, “Do I lie to myself to make myself happy? In your case, Teddy, I will.” That will lead directly to his execution of Teddy as the killer of his wife. The cruel irony is that Teddy had, in an earlier exchange, insouciantly remarked to Leonard, “So, you lie to yourself to be happy? Who doesn’t?”
Far from eliminating truth in favor of, or subsuming it under, wishful self-construction, the film illustrates the conflict, the incompatibility, between truthfulness and wish fulfillment. The cost of Leonard’s deliberate falsification of the facts is the murder of Teddy and Leonard’s further alienation from reality. Whatever remains in doubt in this story, we know that Teddy is right. Leonard is living a lie.
Despite his fleeting moments of self-awareness, Leonard cannot face his lies squarely. Unable to confront his past, he is borne back ceaselessly into it, deprived of the possibility of living freely or honestly in the present, and forlorn of hope for the future. Yet, he desperately wants to believe that what he believes is true. Leonard exemplifies a set of all-too-human vices, as he succumbs, in those words of Williams, to “desires and wishes” that “subvert the acquisition of true belief.” The film illustrates the importance of the virtue of sincerity -- reliability, trustworthiness, and a habitual disposition to speak the truth, not just in dealing with others, but also, as Williams notes, in “dealing with oneself.”
Memento also illustrates one of Williams’s more subtle theses, concerning the extent to which our beliefs can or ought to be under our control. Although we can cultivate dispositions that conduce to the recognition of truths, we cannot, without courting intellectual and psychological vertigo, make ourselves believe something. Truth, Williams insists, is independent of will. When beliefs are “motivated, the products of wish fulfillment, they are not independent of my will.” By making “truth” dependent on his arbitrary acts of will, Leonard severs his connection to reality. That is the cost of “letting truth drop out,” as Williams describes the position of philosophers such as Rorty. Such a policy, which Williams refutes, risks destroying an individual’s “relation to the world altogether, undoing the distinctions between fantasy and reality.”
If “self-deception,” as Williams pithily puts it, “is the homage that fantasy pays to the sense of reality,” then sleeplessness would appear to be the homage that the deceptive soul pays to conscience. So it is in Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia. The film features an LA homicide detective, Will Dormer (Al Pacino), who is in Alaska with his partner Hap (Martin Donovan) to assist in solving the murder of a teenage girl. The partners also hope to escape from the scrutiny of an LAPD internal-affairs investigation. Suspicions about Dormer are raised in an early conversation in which he tries to persuade Hap not to cooperate. But Dormer is also an experienced, talented, and devoted detective, so renowned that one of the local law-enforcement officers, Ellie Burr (Hilary Swank), wrote her academy thesis on Dormer’s exploits. Dormer possesses what Williams calls the virtue of accuracy, “desire for truth for its own sake -- a passion for getting it right.” As he examines the corpse of the murder victim, with its washed hair and meticulously manicured nails, he draws a conclusion about the killer: “He crossed a line and didn’t even blink. You don’t come back from that.”
It turns out that there are many lines to be traversed. Dormer himself, we eventually learn, has crossed a line by planting evidence on a child torturer who otherwise would probably have gone free. And, after he shoots Hap, apparently accidentally, in thick fog as they pursue a suspect in the Alaskan murder case, he will obstruct the investigation to conceal his responsibility and to make it look as if the suspect shot Hap. At the same time, however, he tells Burr to stay on the case of his murdered partner, not to trust vague, initial assumptions.
Dormer’s habitual cultivation of what Williams calls accuracy, his commitment to his craft, keeps him connected to the real, even as he wishes that his own violations of the law might escape detection. The tension in Dormer, reflected in his insomnia, reveals him to be a character who has crossed a line but who, unlike the murderer of the young girl, remains ashamed of and afflicted by his deceptions.
Insomnia’s setting in the Alaskan town of Nightmute, with its seasonal absence of sunset, effectively reverses the standard noir motif of an ominous, enveloping darkness. Here the threat is the endless light, a brightness that creates in visitors an unnatural state of sleeplessness. As in Memento, somatic disorders intertwine with and symbolize moral disorders. Burr quotes Dormer to himself: A good cop can’t sleep because he’s wrestling with a “piece of the puzzle,” while a bad cop suffers sleeplessness on account of his “conscience.” Dormer’s futile attempts to evade the omnipresent light signify the resilience of his conscience, even in the face of conscious attempts to suppress it. The suspect, Walter Finch (Robin Williams), and Burr embody the basic alternatives for Dormer. Seeming at first a groupie, then the eager student, and finally a formidable detective, Burr figures crucially in Dormer’s destiny. She is present with him at the end, as he slowly expires from a wound suffered in a shootout with the murderer. In the face of death and in the presence of a faithful friend, Dormer confesses the truth about shooting his partner, including his uncertainty about whether he meant to do so. That is not a standard Hollywood happy ending with a public restoration of justice, the good guy triumphant, and love realized. Instead, Insomnia gives us a classic noir ending. Dormer’s final advice to Burr, “don’t lose your way,” is the best that can be hoped for in noir.
As in the key dramatic moments of Memento, in the conclusion of Insomnia we find the interconnections between truthfulness, the self, and others. Of course, stories are not philosophical arguments. Yet, as Williams insisted throughout his career, stories can expand the scope of moral philosophy, enhance our vision of human life, and enrich our ethical vocabulary. Indeed, in the final reflections of his final book, Williams ponders the difficulty of discovering, in our contemporary society, stories that celebrate the “courage of truthfulness” without causing widespread “despair.” Williams might have looked to certain strains of film noir. Nolan’s noir sheds light on the truth about truth, its elusiveness, the obstacles -- both internal and external -- to its discovery, and its crucial role in our lives. Both Dormer’s progress and Leonard’s regress confirm, as Leonard puts it, that “we all need mirrors to remind us who we are.”
Thomas Hibbs is a professor of ethics and culture at Baylor University and the author of Virtue’s Splendor: Wisdom, Prudence, and the Human Good (Fordham University Press, 2001). This essay is adapted from his book on philosophy and film noir, forthcoming from Spence Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 12, Page B14