X-Ray Visions: Radiography, Chiaroscuro, and the Fantasy of Unsuspicion in Film Noir

Hugh S. Manon

Introduction Immediately recognizable even to the film noir neophyte is the lighting technique known as chiaroscuro, the angular alternation of dark shadows and stark fields of light across various on-screen surfaces in films such as Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Dark Corner (Henry Hathaway, 1946). Raw Deal (Anthony Mann. 1948). and many others. Whereas critics have long suggested that chiaroscuro fittingly evokes the postwar milieu, furnishing a backdrop for tales of psychological imprisonment' while creating an atmosphere of claustrophobia and duplicity/ this essay seeks to focus our critical gaze a little less deeply. Instead of arguing about what chiaroscuro is supposed to represent historically (in terms of German Expressionism, the advent of the Cold War, existentialism, and so forth). I attempt a more basic inquiry into what the technique tends to present spatially, calling into question the sources of light from which its intricate pattems emerge and the apertures through which they are traced. More specifically, I arguethat in working to theorize 77o/> style, it isimportani to account for chiaroscuro not solely in terms ofafFect or mood, but as representing a specific kind of optical structurethe structure of the X-rayas well as a particular brand of criminal deception. Not onK

do noir's distinctive lighting schemes frequently resemble a medical X-ray, they also spell out in visual temis the noir criminal's goal of outward unsuspicion-a craftily engineered appearance of normalcy that is perhaps best expressed in lhe noir-era catch phrase "more than meets the eye."' This cliche, when understood not simply as a fuel for paranoia but more pointedly as an invitation to see oneself not seeing, both announces that an X-ray-like insight is precisely what average people lack and helps to pinpoint o;>'s overarching investment in a fantasy of public obliviousness. Whereas critics and scholars have perennially described film noir as a "paranoid universe,"'' this essay argues that in order lo distinguish itself from its close generic others, specifically the gangster film and the classical detective narrative, noir constructs a realm of paranoia on screen only in order to achieve a more proprietary effectan overall resonance, aura, or hype that I call the "buzz of the unsuspected." Unlike classic gangster films such as The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman. 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932), which penetrate a seedy part of town to reveal the gangster's various masks, hideouts, and concealed business endeavors, the deceptive "fronts" o^ film noir involve a flawless mimesis of ordinary reality. The result is a Moebius strip-like arrangement^ in which the underworld dovetails perfectly with our own world and modern crime succeeds because it dares to operate in plain view. Moreover, unlike the classical detective whodunit, which delights viewers with the slow unveiling of a narrative enigma, noir does not primarily involve a clue-based reconstruction of past events but instead suggests that the viewer's own surface-level encounters in the here-and-now are buz/ing with potential intrigue, Far from broad or universal, then, the coordinates of the noir fantasy are preeminently local; the films do not aim to encourage an overall climate of paranoia so much as a series of gossipy speculations by individual viewers about what might be taking place right next door. Stylistically underscoring these distinctions, chiaroscuro lighting envelops both the films' criminals and their potential discoverers, while at the same time pointing to the existence of a Ihird-person perspective simultaneously fictional and real, that looks but fails to seethe vantage point of the unsuspicious public eye. To be clear, 1 view noir as tacitly representing the viewer him- or herself on screen, not in the form of any particular character but in

the barrier-defying, horizontal trajectory oi^ chiaroscuro itselfa line of sight that exists in space and that could by occupied by a beliolder, but which would reveal nothing of the guileful machinations the audience witnesses. In other words, the exterior point of light from which chiaroscuro emerges stands for the perspective of the fihn's viewernot as a cinematic viewer per se. but in his or her past/future role as an unsuspecting real-world passerby. When individual noir narratives deliver viewers behind the scenes ofcrimc and conspiracy, they do so while insisting that such a perspective, however imminent, is categorically denied lo the average citizen on a day-to-day, momentby-moment basis. Chiaroscuro conveys a like message, but in stylistic termsa sense of the immediate adjacency of modem criminal activities, but at the same time a complete blindness as to what is transpiring before one's very eyes. The hallmark of film noir lighting design, I argue, is its emphasis on the semi-permeabiiity of spatial dividesthe on-screen evocation of light passing through an aperture, or series of apertures, figured in precisely the optical/photographic sense. Whether the shadow-casting obstruction is eomprised of slatted blinds, lathed stair balusters, or a window with a private investigator's name painted on it. the striking depiction of light having passed through lo "X" is wholly consistent with the aura of unsuspicion I view as both noir's narrative core and its key generic difference. When understood not as the silhouette of an object but as the shadow ofa veil, it becomes clear that noir's distinctive lighting does more than simply enhance realism and provide visual interest: it underscores the films' desire to thrill audiences with their own obliviousness: a looking-without-seeing that takes place not in the theater, but in one's real-world wanderings and mundane interactions. From Detection to Unsuspicion Although one could identify scores of fiJm.s noirs in which chiaroscuro sets the scene for a hyper-perfect, undetectable deception, a fairly representative example appears in Tension (John Berry. 1950). an underappreciated film that begins as a Walter NefT-style murder scheme and transfonns into a quintessentially noir "wrong man" scenario. Early in the narrative, protagonist Warren Quimby (Richard Basehart) discovers his that his beautiful wife Claire (Audrey Totter) has been cheating on him. When she leaves him for the other man.

a muscular liquor salesman named Bamey Deager (Lloyd Gough), Quimby spirals into a soul-searching depression and finally decides to murder Deager. Quimby's plan is to establish a second identity so he can get away with the perfect crime, and a series of brief scenes depicts Quimby "s transformation from a milquetoast night manager at a Culver City pharmacy into a noir mastermind. At his optometrist's office, the bespectacled Quimby leams about "'invisible plastic contact lenses" that will help to alter his appearance. In his apartment, he chooses a new name-"Paul Sothem"being careful to check the phone book to ensure that no one else in the area has that name. Moving into a new apartment in Malibu. he establishes his false identity through pleasant small talk with the landlady and a next door neighbor. From a phone booth, he makes a threatening call, announcing to Deager's valet that he is Paul Sothem and is going to "get" Deager for "what he did.'" l-lagging down several separate drivers, he gradually hitch-hikes to a spot near Deager's beach house. Each of these scenes represents an unsuspicious action that, to borrow a term from the idiom of noir, decodes as "confidential," thanks in part to the cynical retrospective voice-over of Police Lieutenant Collier Bonnabel (Barry Sullivan). At the same time, each of the scenes features chiaroscuro lighting sometimes subtle, sometimes intense, but always presentreinscribing our sense of having accessed the inaccessible. The setting of Tension is a world of normal-looking drug stores, apartment complexes, bowling alleys, and beachfront developments, yet the interiors of these mundane locates are lined with bold ailemations of darkness and light. As I explain in the next section, it is as if our most banal assumptions about everyday locality have been X-rayed to reveal a dark and undetectable disease. The key is that Quimby's scheme is at once highly sophisticated and ever so close, part of one's own world. Not only are police detectives being deceived by a new breed of criminals such as Warren Quimby, but so are you. dear viewer, and this fantasy of unknowingly brushing up against crime can be understood a^ film noir's biggest audience stake."" Many of noir's most contrived plots insist upon this single key distinction: the notion that, in the modem world, the spheres of criminal and legitimate activity interpenetrate. Trading back and forth across the boundaries of criminal artifice, noir confronts viewers with the impossibility of clearly dividing the world into "places of innocence" and "places of deceit." Structurally, the murderous

conspiracies and heists depicted in film noir can never be as blunt or invasive as the armed robberies, tunneling jailbreaks, and street-front exectitions of the 1930s gangster film. Nor does the perpetrator of a noir crime view his end goal as an intricate puzzlethe sort solved by Sherlock Holmes, Hercuie Poirot, or Charlie Chan in their respective franchises. Counter to both the short, sharp shock of the gangster film and the brain-teasing puzzle of classical detection, noir's deceivers perpetuate an ongoing- meticulously maintained facade, engineering the public's obliviousness in an ever-changing present. Against the backdrop of these waning genres, film noir calls into question the very possibility of detection itself, enthralling viewers with what Jack Shadoian has described as "the paradox that one can look and look and not see what's happening" in real life (169). Shadoian's description of an endless, fruitless visual search begs the following question: li'film noir forecloses the possibility of discovery, then where (if at all) does o/rs enigma appear? Roland Barthes has described the "hermeneutie code" as "the various (formal) terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, suggested, formulated, held in suspense, and finally disclosed" (19). Although certain films noirs. especially those featuring private investigators, may proceed toward the solution of an enigma in a fairly standard way, my contention is that no/r's overriding logic is not hermeneutie in Barthes' sense, but instead hermetic. By this, I mean that a crime narrative becomes noir at the moment it represents a vacuum-like deception at the verv surface of thingsa carefully managed artificial reality that the public sees but fails to detect. Updating the dilatorv mystery plots of the Holmesian detective, /i/m noir aims to produce philosophical contemplation of the thresholds of detectability rather than viewerly puzzlement itself In such an arrangement, the enigma is not a matter of questing discovery but instead bears on the possibility of hiding in plain sight. Even when investigation forms a major part of the narrative, as in Tension, to the extent that an audience delights in noir crime it savors the tenuous ongoingness of the deception over its eventual detection. Thus, the hermetic narratives of noir can continue to satisfy Hollj'wood's demand for problems and conflicts, each resolved in turn by characters in the fiction, while simultaneously positing a contemporary landscape "full" of absent evidencethe wide variety of unexposed conspiracies, clues, and questions that noir. in its paradoxical way, so vividly exposes.

Fihi noir's concern with undetectability is illustrated in a characteristic bit of noir dialogue delivered by private investigator Dan Hammer (Pat O'Brien) in Rijfraff {IQA TetzlalT. 1947). When questioned about his encounter with a recently murdered man. Hammer can say nothing definitive: Look, he comes to my office, says he needs a bodyguard. Maybe he's got a lot of dough on him1 don't know. Maybe he's hot. Maybe anything. All I know is I never saw him before today. Unlike the classical detective, the noir private eye's past experience with criminal deception makes him resigned to uncertainty. He knows as little about the solution to the mystery as the average man on the street, but brings with him a special advantage: he knows that he does not know and plays his cards accordingly. By contrast, as o/r envisions them, ordinary citizens (referred to above as the "public eye") remain categorically unsuspicious of what is going on right in front of them; they do not know that they do not know. Such epistemological hairsplitting, I argue, is precisely noir's point, a thesis that becomes clear when we compare DaJi Hammer's swirling sense of uncertainty to the expectation of certitude avowed by Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) in The Scarlet Claw (Roy William Neill, 1944): Mr. Penrose, for the first time in my long pursuit of crime. I confess that I find myself baffled. I'm a detective. I need tangible clues. What Holmes (and his viewer) desires is what /7/m noir defines as unavailable: clues. Upending the quasi-scientific procedure of the classical sleuth, noir confronts its viewer not with the absent source of an enigma but with the undetectability of crime in the first place.^ This is not, of course, to say that explosive violence, blood stains, murdered corpses, etc., never appear mfilm noir. Rather, such malignant displays, about which public suspicion is both warranted and expected, are themselves to be understood as sites of potential duplicity. In the hermetic epistemology of flo/>, the point is that nothing that is perceivable, including the expected flaws and abrasions of everyday life, will signal the existence of the underlying malady. In this way, old-style gangland heists and Prohibition-era concealments come to function in noir as pure semblance, serving their own veiled, secondary purpose. To the extent that they reach public consciousness, forming part of our received reality, a well-publicized hold-up might

not really be a hold-up: an illegal gambling operation might not be what it seems, etc. Upping the ante on gangster deceptionin which crime is camouflaged by an innocent outward appearance (the machine gun in a guitar case is iconic)films noirs such as Criss Cro^.v (Robert Siodmak, 1949), Kan.sas City Confidential (Phil Karlson. 1952). and Crime Wave (Andre de Toth, 1954) depict crimes concealed by other strategically planned faux crimes. Consider the opening scene of Anthony's Mann"s Railroaded! (1947). in which a beauty shop is a front for a gambling parlor, which is in turn the site of an "inside job" heist scheme perpetrated by phony gangsterswearing masks and sporting bad attitudes, of course. The paradox of such a scenario is self-evident: in noir. even the fronts are fronts. Taking his or her place alongside various conspiratorial deceivers on screen and recognizing the great lengths to which they will go in order to secure the public's obliviousness, the viewer of o/r is invited to contemplate the objects, people, and events of ordinary daily life in a sinister light. The milkman making his daily rounds, the entrance to a local ballet school, or the sight of a bicycle parked in a suburban front yardfrom the perspective of noir, each exists in a flip-flopping state of permanent "maybe."^ When in our day-to-day wanderings nothing appears pointedly curious or odd (which is most of the time, to be sure), everything, at its surface, must be vaguely enigmatic. This fantasy ofunsuspicion correlates closely with a parallel 1940s discourse conceming the pre-emptive power of medical X-rays: the notion that the apparently healthy exterior views people take for granted are the ones they should most acutely suspect. As I shall argue. chiaroscuro is the visual index of this sense of ominous normalcy, a writing on the walls that spells out noir's foremost narrative conceit: a magical/impossible X-ray vision that penetrates the skin of deception to disclose an endless series of shadowy criminal machinations while stressing the ever-so-tenuous proximity of a blithely unsuspicious public eye. Hypodermic Lighting Although film scholars have consistently cited chiaroscuro lighting effects as one means of differentiating noir from other genres, little has been done to connect this aesthetic with noir's peculiar notion of deception. Chiaroscuro, it seems, is a mood-setter and little more, and the adjectives "bleak.'" ''claustrophobic," and "unsettling" 8

are employed so frequently in noir criticism that they have ceased to mean anything. A more useful approach to chiaroscuro is afforded by Marc Vemet in his article ''Film Noir on the Edge of Doom." Working to dispel the notion that Expressionist lighting in Hollywood cinema is solely the province of film noir. Vemet pinpoints a directional imperative in the technique: "Expressionist" lighting is placed low on the set (often on a horizontal axis), sets off a dark space in the upper part of the frame (absence of sun or moon), is partial (it lights only part of the space and of the human figure)andapparentlymonodirectional. Placed to the side of the camera, it isolates the human figure in white against a black background. Placed opposite it, it isolates a silhouette against a white background. Laterally, it creates a delineation of the silhouette by maintaining zones of shadow upon it f. . . ] . (9) Though Vemet convincingly rejects any exclusive connection between noir lighting and German Expressionism, there are nonetheless other objective criteria that set apart o/> lighting from its analogues in related genres. Following from Vernet's assertion thaXfilmsnoirs tend to be markedly horizontal in their lighting design, I argue that chiaro.scuro must be understood not only as lateral but also as predominantly architectural in origin. Unlike horror film, whose iconic shadow is figural (a hand with ominously curled fingers, a strange silhouette, a figure in a cloak, or a frenetically fiapping vampire bat), in film noir shadows almost exclusively refer back to some architectural structure or partition^an effect easily discerned in noir's most distinctive shadow: a name or business title illuminated on a street-facing window so as to project its distended letters across an opposing wall, like an inverted stencil.^ Here, as elsewhere, chiaroscuro is not designed to be spooky, or to remind us of the hidden nooks from which some evil creature might jump out and scare the protagonist and the viewer alike. Likewise, the point of noir'^s shadow play is not at all to hide the identity of a menacing killer from the viewer; indeed, one of our best indicators that a film should not be classified as noir is the sustained hermeneutie device of a face obscured by shadows.'*' Instead of evoking a feeling of horror or mysterious obfuscation, noir's shadows demarcate space into a binary of here versus there, with each invoking its opposite.

Lacking either of its two key componentshorizontality (i.e. sideby-side-ness) and architectural obstructionchiaroscuro would fail to strike us in the same uncanny way: as a writing on (he walls, of the walls. Indeed, in conceiving of the basic shape and structure of chiaroscuro, the student of noir would not be wrong to imagine the blueprint ofa building rendered not in its standard "'font" but with its walls in boldface. Or, in keeping with the diagonally slashing bands of light-and-dark themselves, we could say that chiaroscuro is noir's best means of placing wall boundaries in italics. In both their severity and repetition, the slanting angle of shadows from Venetian blinds represents an ail-too-literal itaiicization of film noir's coneem with contiguity and separation, highlighting the point of interface between the criminal and the legitimate that the general public fails to recognize as such. In this manner, chiaroscuro does not imply a hidden depth as in the secret passages and clandestine rooms of Gothic horror and the classical whodunitbul rather a deceptive surface we fail to see for what it really is." Considering the fact that the mise-en-scene of noir is nol broadly illuminated so much as it is shot through with light, is it not possible to draw a connection between /7/m noir lighting design and a radiograph, commonly called an "'X-ray'"? Although it would be difficult to verify whether the creators of individual films noirs ever consciously intended for their lighting effects to suggest an Xray view into a body sealed in skin, it seems clear that the viewer's own penetration beyond the walls of hermetically-sealed criminal conspiracies forms a major part of noir's mystique. Conceived in this way, as a kind of hypodermic infiltration, noir lighting techniques do more than establish a mood: they idiomatically restate, in shadow and light, Ihe truth-exposing image that results when certain types of radiation are shot through the human body. The meticulous deceptions we witness in such films as Double Indemnity, Tension, He Walked ByNight (Alfred L. Werker and Anthony Mann. 1948). and The Killing (Stanley Kubrick, 1956)^as well as the police infiltrations depicted in T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947), The Street with No Name (William Keighley, 1948), and White Heat{\949, Raoul Walsh)can be likened to an X-ray not simply because their plots reveal invisible subterfuge, but because such penetrative vision is impossible in real life. In her theoretically informed account of the eultural impact of radiography. Lisa Cartwright describes X-Ray technology as "a
10

pervasive and perverse cultural apparatusone that confounds the distinctions between the public and the private: specialized knowledge and popular fantasy" (107). In chiaroscuranoir's patented marker that X-ray vision is now taking placethis perverse fixation on our own public unawareness becomes iconic. Consider, for instance, the classic noir point-of-view shot in which a character peers out a window, gently pushing up one slat in the blinds to allow an adequate view, while carefully ensuring that he or she will not be seen looking out.

Master crimitial Roy Morgan (Richard Basehart) peers through Venetian blinds in He milked By Night (1948)

In such arrangements, Venetian blinds do not constitute a kind of disguise or mask (which any passing viewer would register as an effort to hide something) but instead function as a screen. One can see out slatted blinds very easily, since one stands close to them, but when viewed from a distance outside and given a darkened room within, they disallow the possibility of the look being returned. Although the public view and the private view ostensibly meet at the site of the window, the presence of a screen permits information to pass in one direction only. Venetian blinds are not peepholes so much
11

as moucharabiehs. not windows so much as trick mirrorswith the private domain taking visual ownership over the public.'- At the same time, the resultant chiaroscuro denotes the lone gaze that is capable of seeing into the interior of crime despite an absolute prohibition on such seeing-^the boundary-defying gaze of the cinematic audience itself, but only insofar as the X-ray insight afforded by the film is understood as an impossible viewpoint in the real world outside the theater. Noir positions its viewer as looking in on the realm of conspiracy and crime in the same way that a physician X-rays a human body, with insight made possible only through technological trickery (here, both the trickery of the cinematic camera and fictional narration, including voice-over, fiashback. etc.). It is precisely this tricky, magical aspect of X-ray transgression that is written on the walls in film noir. Indeed, as I shall show, this metaphor of the radiograph is so keen that one cannot help but note the resemblance between the shadows cast by Venetian blinds and an X-ray image of the human ribcage.

A chest X-Ray featured in the Kodak pamphlel X-Rays and You (1941)

12

Although radiographs had been in use since the tum of the century, Cartwright identifies the period between the late 1930s and the mid-1950sa phase that closely parallels the rise and decline of classic/7//M noirwith the mass popularization of X-Ray technology in America. Owing largely to campaigns against tuberculosis, ''the chest X Ray had by mid-century become both a routine and a significant part of everyday life" (152). In this context, a surprising source of enlightenment with regard to both the structure and thematic significance of chiaroscuro are the promotional tracts u.sed to market X-ray technology to would-be American consumers. The following passage, from the 1941 Eastman Kodak promotional pamphlet XRays and You, explains the emerging technology in layman's terms, encouraging the reader to frequently X-ray his or her various body parts to reveal what cannot be seen: Put part ofa man's body against a photographic plate and project the x-rays through him onto the plate and the rays would blacken the plate where they could get through, but not where they couldn't, and they'd blacken it blackest where they could get through most easily. So what you'd have would be a picture of the man's insides. . .in shadows. (6) In a striking correspondence, what is this if not an almost point-forpoint description of chiaroscuro^s painting with light and shadow, except in reverse (dark on light, instead of light on dark)? The ominous, anxiety-inspiring potential of X-ray technology is acknowledged in other parts of the Kodak pamphlet: A good many people are still afraid of the x-rays just because the apparatus that generates them is such an infernal-looking machine. But you might as well be afraid of your photographer because he puts his head under a black cloth. [. . .] As a matter of fact, what you ought to fear if your doctor suggests an x-ray examination is not having it made at once, because the x-rays can tell a tot of things that can't possibly be found out any other way. [... | So if your doctor wants an x-ray examination for any purpose at all, even if only for a clean bill of health, don't ever say. "Ridiculous, Tm perfectly fine," because you don't know whether you're fine or not till the x-rays tell you so. (9) 13

In this excerpt,'^ the kinship between X-rays, chiaroscuro, and the hermetic structure of noir deception becomes clear. The human skin is not only a shell-like container, a screen beyond which vision is barred, but it is also a site where intemal normalcy (i.e. good health) is taken for granted. In short, the skin is a commonplace site ofunsuspiciona viewable surface at which things appear "perfectly fine." Recapitulated in visual terms as chiaroscuro, the behind-the-scenes detour offered by the noir narrative resembles an X-ray because both an X-ray and the noir narrative infiltrate an otherwise sealed interior while insisting that the skin remains unruptured. Moreover, as noir repeatedly makes clear, in the real world outside the theater, a skin-defying X-ray viev^ of our neighbors, co-workers, local businesses, and so on. is most needed in cases where outwardly no symptom appears. Not surprisingly, actual radiographs do occasionally appear on screen in film noir, as if to help decode the hieroglyphic import of the chiaroscuro that surrounds them. Consider, for example, the appearance of an X-Ray in a montage sequence from Nora Premiss (Vincent Sherman, 1947). In the m idst of a series of vignettes depicting the illicit affair between Dr. Richard Talbot (Kent Smith) and Nora (Ann Sheridan), we see the once-dedicated physician swathed in shadows from Venetian blinds as he enters his dark bedroom and lies to his wife (Rosemary DeCamp) about where he has been. The bedroom chiaroscuro then lap-dissolves to a shot of a chest X-Ray on Talbot's office desk. It is a day or two later, and Talbot is again covering up his affair, this time by phone, with the X-Ray serving as a visual parallel to an unsuspected deceit that will soon spiral out of control.''* In another Vincent Sherman film, Bacf^re (1950), Nurse .liilie Benson (Virginia Mayo) breaks into a doctor"s office after hours to retrieve an incriminating file. When she is accosted by a janitor (J. Louis Johnson), she tells him that everything is fine and that there is no burglar. Her excuse: she just needs to retrieve some X-Rays. As she enters the office, the Venetian blinds form an X-Ray-like pattern on the wall, the implications of which could hardly be clearerthe audience is witnessing an X-Ray view into Benson's easily-dismissed, outwardly unsuspicious scheme. In the B-programmer Backlash (Eugene Forde. 1947), two police detectives compare side-by-side XRays in a low-key, horizontally lit coroner's office. Their goal is to prove that a dead man, whose body was bumed beyond recognition in a Mulholland Drive car accident, staged his own death in order to 14

frame his wife for murder. Quite appropriately, given noir's concerns with undetectability, the X-Rays come back Inconclusive, neither proving nor disproving the detectives' hypothesis.'^ Perhaps the most memorable appearance of a medical X-ray in noir comes In D.O.A. (Rudolph Mate, 1950). The radiograph is displayed in yet another chiaroscwo-Unged doctor's office and, as in Backlash, it reveals nothing. Despite his perfectly normal appearance, both inside and out, protagonist Frank Bigelow (Edmond O'Brien) has nonetheless been poisoned and has less than twent\-four hours to live. Such failed X-Ray diagnoses in noir only underscore my thesis. It is not the penetrative revelation of X-ray technoiogy per se, but instead an amplified sense of "perfectly normal appearances" that provides the coordinates foT noir's fantasy. The radiographic impulse in noir is given a more allusive, although equally deliberate treatment in a sequence from Billy Wilder's keystone/77m noir Double Indemnity^afilmthat arguably perfects the chiaroscuro aesthetic and serves as a template for many noirs to follow. The crucial moment comes in the film's opening sequence, in a series of apparently insignificant lines that are spoken just before Walter Neff (IVed MacMunray) embarks on a play-by-play account of his failed perfect crime into the Dictaphone of his boss. Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). Bleeding under his jacket from the gunshot wound dealt him by fenime Jatale Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), Neff enters the lobby of the Pacific All-Risk insurance company; the ofticc building is quiet, dark, and still. The only words spoken in the sequence, and the very first words we hear in the film, pass between Neff and an elderly night watchman (.John PhilUber) whose job it is to operate the elevator during off-hours: NIGHT WATCHMAN. Working pretty late aren't you, Mr. Neff? NEFF. Late enough. Let's ride. NIGHT WATCHMAM. You look kind of ail in at that. NEFF. I'm fine. NIGHT WATCHMAN. How's the insurance business, Mr. NefT? NEFF. Okay. NIGHT WATCHMAN. They wouldn't ever sell me any. They said 1 had something loose in my heart. 15

[Laughs.] I say it's rheumatism. The conversation is clearly something more than empty banter, and beyond establishing NefT's none-too-talkative preoccupation with the bullet hole in his shoulder, screenwriters Wilder and Raymond Chandler seem to have two things in mind. First, an effort has been made to evoke a sense of the mundane routine of the everyman. with the night watchman's pedestrian discourse appearing just before the heartless tale of murder and deception we are about to hear from Neff. Second, the dialogue interjects a touch of political commentary about the cynicism of big business, since the very insurance company that employs the elderly watchman will not insure him. In addition to these two readily interpreted signs, however. I will posit a third meaning for the exchange, one which derives from a conspicuous omission in the scripted dialogue. Again, keep in mind that part of these words' resonance derives from their isolation. They are absolutely the only words we hear prior to the commencement of Neff's famous voiceover, and thus appear in a sort of narrative vacuumin a relation that resembles that of a caption to its picture. Presaging the lengthy "inside view" of murderous conspiracy we are about to hear and see, the watchman's lament can be translated as follows: when confronted with certain perceptual limits (in this case, the limits of the human body) differences in interpretation are inevitable, and lacking any positive confirmation of the internal condition, disagreements between what "they say" and what "I say" must go unresolved. All this is plainly stated by the character. What remains unspoken is what the night watchman so obviously needs the confimiative view offered by an X-ray, a view that could penetrate outward appearances to reveal the invisible truth of the old man's heart condition."" By conspicuously withholding the word "'X-ray" at this moment, the dialogue speaks it even more loudly, anticipating the structure of NefTs voice-over throughout the film. It is precisely an X-ray view of the inner workings of conspiracy that the narrative of Double Indemnity presents, and as soon as Neff begins to speak, the diseased truth of the internal body is brought to light. Amnesiac Attcntivencss Nowhere in film noir is the conceit of X-ray vision, and its impossibility in human terms, given a more literal treatment than in the noir amnesia plot, a scenario in which the public's passive unsuspicion 16

is reconfigured as an active quest. The figure of the amnesiac appears in such films as Slreet of Chance (Jack Hively. 1942). Deadline at Dawn (Harold Clurman, 1946), Somewhere in the Night (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946), /m/jac/(Arthur Lubin, \9A9\ Shadow on the Wall {Pat Jackson, 1950). Beware, My Lovely (Harrys Homer, 1952), and The Long Wait (Victor Saville. 1954). Most notably, in the first major scene of The Crooked Way (Robert Florey, 1949), a radiograph of the skull of Eddie Rice (John Payne), displayed in a doctor's office replete with extreme chiaro.scuro, symbolizes the protagonist's pervasive memory loss. Visible in the X-Ray, the piece of shrapnel permanently lodged in Eddie's brain is no more outwardly apparent than tlie true motives of the various former acquaintances he will encounter as the narrative unfolds. In the above listed/i7/,v noirs and others, the amnesiac's quest to realize the significance of common places and events stands as an especially extravagant example of noir's effort to generate the buzz of the unsuspected. The structure of the amnesiac narrative is strictly dialectical: whereas noir posits that ordinary folks/tJ/7 to suspect the immanence of crime, the amnesiac is that subject who fails to fail to suspect at every point of contact with the world.'' All too aware of his own obliviousnesshypercognizant of the potential importance of each scene, each incidental encounterthe amnesiac spends all of his lime scanning a series of mundane locales in search of that one detail, that one fissure or "tip off," that can verify the source of a crisis only he recognizes. The amnesiac thus underscores noir's thesis about public unsuspicion by enacting its opposite: a widespread, indiscriminate suspicion of everything the average citizen obliviously passes by. Although the 1946 Irving Reis film Crack-Up may not be the best-remembered of the noir amnesia scenarios, it is nonetheless highly representative. Protagonist George Steeie (Pat O'Brien) embarks on a short voyage by train. In the middle of the trip, George's train crashes into a second oncoming engineor so he thinks. The plot's major enigma, crvstallized in the blinding white light George sees before the two trains collide, is not only that the protagonist has come away unscathed (save for a cmcial hour-long memory lapse about the incident) but that there exists no record of any railway collision having occurred that night. At one point, George exclaims. ""I've got to find somebody, something, that tips me off to what's going on"^a sentence we can recognize as the amnesiac's mantra. The protagonist's brief period of amnesia compels him to retrace his steps on the night 17

of the crash with an intensified skepticism. Whereas, on his first train trip, nothing at all was scrutinized, on the second trip, everything is scrutinized. Of course the film's viewer has no choice but to go along on this second pass through a series of scenes. Asking the viewer to gaze skeptically at a succession of normal-looking scenarios, the amnesia narrative rehearses the locked-out perspective noir wants to instigate in its viewer's real-world dealings outside the theater Having been made extra-suspicious of each scene the protagonist drifts into, the viewer of the noir amnesia film confronts a story-world that, in its turn, offers up a series of distressingly ambiguous tableaux.

Amnesiac veteran Eddie Rice (.lohn Payne) receives a confounding diagnosis from militar>' physician Arthur Staccy (Raymond Largay) in The Crooked Way (\949)

The best example of this equivocation in Crack-Up involves a group of card-playing passengers who take a seat behind George on his second train trip. Although the three men were not present on the night of the crash, the protagonist repeatedly looks them over, expecting them to reveal some clue about what happened. At one point, George turns and aggressively stares at the lone card-player who faces him.
18

and after a couple of seconds the man glares back at George, as if to say, "What are you looking at?" The key link to the epistemology of the X-ray, however, lies not in the viewer's affective response to the retum of George's look (this is nothing like the climactic terror of Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film Rear Window, when Lars Thorwald finally looks back at "JefT' Jeffries) but instead in our recognition of the ultimate ambiguity of the card player's seemingly hostile responsethe fact that he promptly returns George's glare with an entirely normal human response to being stared at. By reciprocally staring back, the card player does his part to reinforce the hermetic sea! of deception in true noir fashion, sinee not staring back itself would have seemed out of the ordinar>'. That is to say, an outwardly suspicious clue would have emerged only if the card player refused to look up, signifying a possible attempt on his part to remain covertto appear (falsely) unconcernedthus providing George's inquisitive gaze with a point of entry.'^ Taking this potential error into account. the more complex action that transpires is impenetrably unsuspicious, thus worthy of an X-ray. Ihe card player is neither simply looking at George nor is he not looking at George. Instead, given the protagonist's pre-existing suspicion of everything around him. we get the sense that the card player is pointedly not not-looking-at-George. fhe paradoxical, loop-like logic of this scenario nullifies the very idea of detection.'" George's persecutors are no more or less remarkable than any of the other people on the train, several of whom likewise interact with George while acknowledging his strangely impertinent behavior. Perhaps they all are in on it? This vexingly uncertain, almost Heisenbergian relation between the seer and the seenan uncertainty that comes into play when things do not appear innocent, but rather Just normalis precisely the buzz noir wants to evoke.^" Unlike the average man- or woman-on-the-street. whom )ioir positions as an oblivious passerby, the protagonists of amnesia narratives such as Crack-Up are compelled to look too closely. The amnesiac drifts into and out of various hermetically sealed scenes, risking recognition by unknown past acquaintances, while hoping some object, statement, or locale will spark recollection. In doing so, the amnesiac is forced to gaze suspiciously at the minutiae of everyday lifeexactly the sort of playful speculation/i///) noir wants to incite in its viewer's real-world wanderings. The fact that the amnesiac moves about the world in a complete vacuum, then, should be understood 19

not only as a novel twist on the classical detective's quest to sort out a murky enigma, but also as noir's most emphatic statement about the knowledge-deflecting potential of real world surfaces themselves. Lacking anything like an X-ray, the amnesiac is in the world but locked out of any connection to it; the entire world is an unconfirmative "X." Conclusion: X Marks the Genre According to Marina Roy, the letter X "as an isolated grapheme has always been used in scientific and philosophical discourses to stand in for an unknown or variable quantity, measurement or quality" (13). In his chapter on the letter "X" in Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical KeyM'ords, Tom Conley discusses the "iconic value [of "X"] as sign of the unknown," suggesting that "the beauty of .r owes its force to a rich history of the art of concealment, deceit and magic" (342). Conley goes on to identify a list of the various sites at which "X" typically appears: pirate maps, perspectival vanishing points, lighting design in classical film, advertising gimmicks, and mathematical eqtiations, to name but a few. To this list, we may add the so-called "X-marksthe-spot" murders of the Victorian classical detective, which provide an opportunity for the sleuth to demonstrate his skill, along with the promise that the mystery "X" will in the end be replaced by rational explanations, timelines, motives, and finally the name of the guilty party. However, to the extent that such non-noir mysteries enunciate or imply thaf'X marks the spot where the body was found," their concern is purely logistical, identifying the specific position of the corpse in a matrix of other material clues. With the rise of the gangster genre in 1920s and 1930s America, "X" continues to designate a murdered corpse, but with a distinct new twist. The iconic "X" of gangland is a predetermined space-time coordinate at which a rival mobster or stool pigeon is "put on the spot"marked for death and then systematically gunned down in clear public view. Such executions are not motivated by simple revenge but by publicity itself, with an "X" coldly indicating the place of death on the front page of the next day's tabloids. Mob informants are thus put on the spot as a public notice to other potential informants: keep your mouth shut or this will happen to you! In contrast to these other indexical "X"s in genres of crime and detection, in which two target-like crosshairs pinpoint a horrible past or future event, the "X" of film noir is infinitely more diffuse. Avoir's ""X" is neither the missing solution to a cryptic past homicide nor a
20

promise of future retribution, but instead a blanket designator of our impossibly irresolute relation to what is present-the strange insight that in any given circumstance there may or may not be something to it. To return to a quote from the Kodak booklet X-Rays and You, film noir imagines a familiar landscape full of "things that can't possibly he found out," except by way of an X-ray vision we do not possess. Written on the walls in striking chiaroscuro, the conceptual X-ray accomplished by the noir narrative encourages a distinct world view, a fantasy in which the heart of crime remains at once adjacent to our own lives and perfectly sealed up. Or, to paraphrase Walter NefFs gut-spilling dictation to Barton Keyes at the beginning of Double Indemnity, we can say that noir is detennined to set us straight about something we can't see because it's smack up against our nose. Celebrated today for its remarkable aesthetics and sordid themes, it is all too easy to forget that noir was first of all a form of commercial entertainment, actively seeking viewers' engagement in conventionalized and reproducible forms of pleasure. In 1940s and early 1950s America, the paradox of the unsuspected crime was anything but box office poison; indeed, it was no/r's most marketable formula. Simultaneously invokinganddenyingthe inside-out viewpoint afforded by the X-ray, noir sets itself apart as that brand of American crime film that thrills viewers with the promise of a possible secret, not a possible answer. As such,^/m noir does not seek to raise public awareness about the prevalence of modem crime or the need for skilled detection, but rather to cultivate an awareness ofimsiispicion itself. In my view, this is the most unified statement we can hope to make about the notoriously diverse corpus of film noir. Counter to commonplace assertions about its '"paranoid universe." noir does not aim to engender actual audience paranoia but rather a playful trompe I'oeil effect in which we momentarily trick ourselves into believing that the world around us is full of undetectable intrigue, only so as to readjust our perspective, now seeing through to the absurdity of such unfounded, imaginary conjecture. In this way. film noir's fantasy ofunsuspicion can be understood as both straddling and attempting to negotiate a larger culturaiyhistorical shif^ at mid-centur\'the movement away from traditional desires for community, familiarity, and neighborly contact, and toward a more modem ethic in which proxemic distantiation. noninvolvement, and private speculation become goals in themselves.

21

Notes I would like to thank Lucy Fischer, Todd McGowan, Brian Price, and Meghan Sutherland for their incisive comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of Film Criticism for their very helpful suggestions and advice. ' A passage from Foster Hirseh's The Dark Side of the Screen epitomizes this line of thinking: "No white wall in any noir drama is free of shadows. [...] Horizontal, barred, criss-crossed lines on walls create a prison-like aura, underlining the psychological and physical enclosure that is at the core of most noir stories'' (90). - Of the thematic relevance of chiaroscuro. Nicholas Christopher says: 'The oblique lighting and camera angling [. . .] reinforce our implicit understanding that the characters" motives are furtive, ambiguous, and psychologically charged; that their innermost conflicts and desires are rooted in urban claustrophobia and stasis: and that they tread a shadow>' borderline between repressed violence and outrighl vulnerability" (16). 'Beyond its everyday use. the phrase appeared in various 1940s advertisements including campaigns for Kellogg'scereal (c. 1944) and Newsweek (beginning in 1949), which touts the penetrative insight of its news analysis by stressing that "There's always more than meets the eye!" " * Although the phrase "paranoid universe" appears in Bick (199), Gunning (301), and Koepnik (181). virtually all existing scholarship on film noir makes some reference to "paranoia" as a predominant mood. Notably, only Joan Copjec invokes the phrase "paranoid universe" in order to rethink it: "[Wlhile this paranoia is usually assumed to indicate an erosion of privacy that permits the Other to penetrate, to read one's innermost thoughts, yi/m noir helps us to see that the opposite is true. It is on the public level that the erosion has taken place" (190). ' A Moebius strip is a topological figure in which a flat, two sided tapeis twisted and then looped, joining its two ends. The result is a three dimensional object with only one surface, confounding the binaries of front/back, exterior/interior, surface/underside, and by extension the binary of public/private with which we arc concerned here. My thanks to Todd McGowan for suggesting this very useful way to conceive the
22

topology of unsuspicion in noir. ^ Later in the film. Quimby's success at remaining unsuspected is bluntly voiced when police lieutenant "Blackie" Gonsales (William Conrad) asks an officer at headquarters to trace his only lead in the murder case, the name "Paul Sothem." Upon receiving the report, he voices his frustration to his partner Bonnabel: "Get a load of this." Not in the phone directories. Has no car ownership. He's not on any payroll or hotel registry. No hospital cards on him. No charge accounts. Never took out any insurance. He doesn't take milk from a milkman. Doesn't have a newspaper delivered. And he's got no police record. "All we've got to do is find him.'' What the police initially cannot comprehend is precisely what the entire film has worked to establish for the viewer: that "Paul Sothem" does not exist as such and is living a completely normal-appearing life under a different identityhis utterly quotidian true identity as a pharmacy night manager. The paradox of this scenario is self-evident: Quimby's deception is perfect, and perfectly noir, because in practice it is no deception at all. After all, in seeking to get away with murder, what could be more convincing that simply acting like oneself? This vacuum-like unsuspiciousness is underscored when Quimby/Sothem, on the verge of stabbing Deager in the neck, discovers that he cannot go through with the murder. The next day, his estranged wife Claire returns to him. Having leamed of his aborted plan, she has killed Deager herself, thus framing Sothern, a man who does not exist, for a crime he did not commit. ' For a succinct structuralist account of the classical detective story and its difference from the suspense thriller, see Todorov (47). '' These are not my own rhetorical inventions, but examples of criminal facades within the narratives ofactualfilms noirs: He Walked By Night, No Que.stiom Asked (Harold Kress, 195 1), and The Desperate Hours (William Wyler, 1955), respeetively. ' The "inverted stencil" I describe appears in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941). Murder. My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944), Ihe Dark Corner, /v-am^ty (Richard Wallace, 1947), C-Man (Joseph Lemer, 1949), The Crooked Way, The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls. 1949). Angel Face (Otto Preminger. 1950). Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis. 1950), and The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1953). Although we tend to think of noir's striking shadow effects as appearing mostly at night, there are surely just as many daytime scenes in noir that
23

feature chiaroscuro. Consider Tension, The Chase (Arthur Ripley. 1946). Backlash, Nora Prentiss, Out of the Past (Jacques Toumeur. 1947), and Pitfall (Andre De Toth, 1948) as just few examples of films with striking daytime chiaroscuro, ^ Offen labeled as noiralthough in my view incorrectlythe films Cornered (Edward Dmytryk. 1945) and more recently The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer. 1995) provide interesting noir test-cases, since each presents some form of hermeneutic shadow-effect in order to conceal the identity of a mastermind figure. " While I agree completely with Joan Copjec's assertion that chiaroscuro in noir must be understood not as a "genuine illusion of depth," but instead as an "ersatz representation of depth" (192), I am led to this conclusion by a different route. Whereas Copjec's brilliani l,acanian analysis of film noir emphasizes the postwar transition t(^ a culture of private jouissance in which "nothing can lie hidden, everything must come to light." she does not explicitly address the site at which noir's illumination of the private impacts the viewer: the ordinary-seeming real landscape outside the theater. One consequence of this omission is a tendency to foreground the "lonely room" motif (189) as a marker of generic difference while discounting the numerous scenes in which criminal deceptions take place in full view of a gaggle of innocent bystanders. For instance, when Copjec says of Phyllis and Neff"s meeting place in Double Indemnity, "Jerr> 's Market is a private space I- . .J empty except for a few shoppers who take no interest in their existence'" (190), we need to be clear about two things. First. Jerry's Market is in facX full of people. In the first of two scenes at the market, I count no less than thirteen shoppers in five tiny aisles, two of whom have speaking parts, which is to say nothing of the dozen or so people treading the sidewalk outside the supermarket in the scene's establishing shot. Second, this plenitude of non-witnessing passersbyboth here and in other films noirs~does not invalidate Copjec's thesis, but entirely supports it. The key is to recognize Jerry's Market as precisely the sort of mundane spot that the cinematic viewer might patronize on the way home. The shoppers that Phyllis and Neff ncar!\ bump into are the viewers* own correlates in the realm of the fiction and their obliviousness is precisely what the viewer sees. Understood in this way, as a marker of the viewer's own inability to see what is right in front of them, the message implicit in chiaroscuro's "ersatz
24

representation of depth'" becomes clear. Borrowing Copjee*s terms, if the "depth" of noir deception resides in the banality of surfaces, then one way to 'Mie hidden" is precisely to "come to light"^the two are no different. For a Lacanian reading of the shoppers at Jerry's Market in terms of desire a.nd th& objet a, see Manon, 21-3. '^ In the noir espionage drama The House on 92nd Street (Henry Hathaway, 1945), a two-way or "trick" mirror is used in the FBI's surveillance of a Nazi spy ring. Repeatedly, the narrator refers to this aperture of observation and concealment as an '*X-ray mirror." Such discourse signals that "X-raying" was recognized in the 1940s as a gcneralizable concept, and not as specialized technical jargon or as a trade name (e.g. "Xerox" or "Kleenex"). '-' Cartwright discusses a number of late-1930s and 1940s promotional films that similarly extol the benefits of routine radiography, including Highlights and Shadows (1937), They Do Come Back (1940), and Target TB{\95^){\A1-59). '" Despite its initial similarities to a "women's picture," the conclusion of Nora Prentiss delivers the markedly noir paradox of a living dead man. Owing to a series of seemingly impossible plot twists revealed in fiashbacka fatal incident of surgical malpractice that allows the two-timing Talbot to switch identities with his dead patient, followed by Talbot's facial disfigurement in an automobile accidentwe leam that not only is Dr. Richard Talbot still alive, but that he is about to stand trial for his own murder. So fiawless is the line of his deception that it loops back on itself, re-intersecting with an earlier point in his trajectory only to deny Talbot readmission to his prior, nondissimulated self. In such conundrums, noir virtually defines for the audience what the word "hermetic" means, setting the conceit of the audience's impossible X-Ray vision in high relief. '^ The film ends with a classic declaration of no/>'s hermetic logic. Detective Tom Carey (Richard Benedict) tells a group of gathered youngsters, it was a "perfect case. . .the trouble was it was too perfect and that's what made me suspicious." '^ In the first half of the twentieth century. X-rays provided a major advance in the diagnosis of heart ailments, and the Kodak booklet X~Rays and You is particularly emphatic on this point: "Sometimes it isn't the heart but the big artery leading away from it. which doctors
25

call the aorta, that is enlarged. An enlargement like this means, 'Take it easy, old man,' almost as much as an enlargement of fhc heart itself, and the only way to know for sure whether there is enlargement is again by means of the x-rays" (15). '^ Bringing together noir's fantasy of unsuspicion with the sIowK unraveled mystery of tbe classical whodunit, the amnesia film can be rightfully considered a hermetic hermeneutic narrative. '^ Such simple, straightforward deception is the province of the gangstera logic brilliantly captured in a comical exchange between two mob thugs in Martin Scorsese's neo-gangster film The Departed (2006). Delahunt (Mark Rolston) says to Fitz> (David O'Hara). "See that guy over there. He's a cop. He's not paying attention to us. He's a cop." The joke is that, in such an arrangement, virtually every passerb> must be a cop. '^ The connection between the hermetic structure of noir amnesia and radiography is only reaffirmed when we finally leam the reason for George Steele's memory loss. An outspoken lecturer at the "Manhattan Museum," George innocently requests to use an X-Ray to examine the brush-strokes of one of the Museum's paintings, unaware that in doing so he would uncover both a forged artwork and a web of conspiracy in the museum's administration. Before any X-Raying can take place. George is lured onto the train, kidnapped, and subject to narcohypnosis in order to make him seem insane. He retums to his place of work a madman, raving about a train wreck that never occurred. When no one can confirm his slor>; George's entire waking world is turned on its head. Suddenly everything appears questionably counterfeit. - It is no coincidence that the Coen Brothers' neo-rto/> film The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) references the popular notion of the "uncertainty principle" deduced by Werner Heisenberg in 1927 the idea that "looking at something changes it." The aggressively intersubjective logic of noir deception amounts to something like an uncertainty principle, with the ver>' presence of the looker guaranteeing his or her own inability to see anything for what it is. Noir's magical/ impossible X-Ray view can be understood as both obviating and reaffirming this sort of uncertainty.

26

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. S/7.. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Bick. lisa J. "The Beam That Fell and Other Crises in The Maltese Falcon.''' The Maltese Falcon: John Huston, Director. Ed. William Luhr. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995. Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. Christopher. Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Conley, Tom. "X." Glossalalia: An Alphabet of Critical Keywords. Ed. Julian Woifreys. New York: Routledge. 2003. Copjec, Joan. "The Phenomenal Nonphenomenal: Private Space in Film Noir." Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1993. Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: BFl Publishing, 2000. Hirsch, Foster. The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2001. Koepnick. Lutz. The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood. Berkeley: U of California P. 2002. Manon. Hugh S. "Some Like it Cold: Fetishism in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity.'' Cinema Journal 44.4 (2005): 18-43. Roy. Marina. Sigfi After the X. Vancouver: Advance/Artspeak, 2001. Shadoian. Jack. Dreams and Dead Ends. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977. lodorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. Vernet, Marc. "Film Noir on the Edge of Doom." Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1993. A'-^a^.v and You, Rochester: Eastman Kodak Medical Division, 1941.

27