Dark Passages: Liminality in Space and Identity - Research Paper Example

Dark Passages: Liminality in Space and Identity Part I: Introduction and 1360 Montgomery Street When 1360 Montgomery Street was remodeled in 1996 and put up for sale, someone put a cut out silhouette of Humphrey Bogart in the window. It’s interesting to consider how this edifice itself needs no living human, but attracts attention itself. Perched at the top of an interminable staircase in San Francisco, Bacall’s character Irene’s art deco hideout for Bogart’s character Vincent Parry has taken on a life of its own. The very title of their film noir, Dark Passages, speaks of the physical and psychological route that Parry must navigate in order to assuage his anger and confusion over the past as well as establish a new life for himself as a free man. Using the vast architecturally stimulating setting of San Francisco, Delmer Dave’s 1947 film employs subjective points of view, shadows, and sympathetic underground characters to protect and aide Parry on his rites of passage from escape convict to a free man living in exile. The first hour of Dark Passages literally keeps audiences in the dark regarding what Perry looks like thus obscuring his identity. Every angle either subjectively illuminates Perry’s point of view or shadows him from identification simultaneously using Parry as the subject and object of this film. Every shot is framed with a sense of voyeurism as Perry peers through bushes to view the far away city across the bay. Name 2 Audiences are baited with revelation at each possible pass of a mirror or pass under a streetlight. Irene’s home precariously rests on the corner of a street poised impossibly at the crest of a mountainous slope. The Montgomery structure is composed of clean lines established in a multi-level square shape. The light color and deceptive simplicity of design forms a backdrop for the double dealings and stress of the characters inhabiting the space. The brightly lit elevator slowly announces visitors who may or may not reveal the stowaway. The art deco detailed interior design used within the film off sets the simple lines and open spaces of the house. The windows are covered in wavy lined blinds for Irene and Parry to peer out at the city. The entryway is famously designed with a cut glass minimalist landscape-like pattern of clouds and mountains. Part II: San Francisco Noir: Reflecting Alienation The noir world of San Francisco represents a coalescing network of three types of worlds, the police filled meta-city with shops and families, the underground world filled with the wrongly fully accused and the alienated, and the other sinister underworld filled with blackmailers and femme fatales. The blackmailer Baker forms a strong contrast to Parry just as Madge contrasts Irene. Baker, who thinks of San Quentin prison as filled ith smart men who could teach him, foils Parry’s upright character who risks himself to protect Irene from Baker’s blackmailing scheme. While Irene is not a convict herself, she is still marginalized as the daughter of a man accused of murdering his wife. She also feels wronged by the legal system meant to protect people as she operates outside of the Name 3 legal framework guided by her own sense of right and wrong. Yet, she is a saving force within this underworld opposing Madge’s “femme fatale character-type (who) is built around her ways of manipulating the male characters in the films using her sexual advance” (Taylor para. 2). Parry’s journey of re-identification emerges through the liminal spaces of San Francisco. As he succumbs to the anesthetic administered by the dubious plastic surgeon, Parry enters the transitory portal where past and present merge. He envisions his enemies and the doctor cackling and threatening him in his vulnerable state. But, the desperate, driven Parry is willing to abandon his birth face to accept what the doctor creates—plastic surgery creates the ultimate mask and vehicle for Parry to achieve his desire. The title of Dark Passages refers to the alleyways, staircases, and back rooms of the city itself as Parry embarks of his own identity passage. Reflecting the film noir rejection of meta-social concepts of clearly defined right and wrong, innocent and criminal, Parry exhibits no desire to clear his name by bringing his false accuser to public justice. Instead he uses the liminal shadowed, transitory spaces of the city to secure his own form of justice and self-satisfaction. Parry’s overall psychological journey to become the free man living underneath his new face occurs throughout the realm of the dark city. Like many film noir sets, Dark Passages sends Parry on various perilous journeys where every encounter with others risks re-capture or complications with selfish underworld persons. Parry moves throughout San Francisco as a stowaway in an oil drum, a hitchhiker, an escape con under a blanket, and an anonymous man shadowed in the back of taxis. Parry must be Name 4 invisible and soundless as he hides in Irene’s apartment waiting for the first layer of his new identity—a fine suit to appear like a rich man so as to avoid notice and questions. Parry’s plastic surgery hospital rests at the end of a creepy ally in a private apartment. He crawls up the staggering Filbert steps to re-enter the safety of Irene’s home that offers a bird’s eye perspective on the city below. Part III: Exclusion and the Dark City As Parry attempts to discover the person responsible for his imprisonment, he lives amongst the outcasts in the windy, uninhabited night streets of the Fillmore district and Japantown. The entire architectural nature of the city, whose buildings designs forge striking patterns of light and shadow, threaten to reveal Parry or promise to shelter him. Eating alone in a brightly lit dinner pulls Parry out of the protective noir chiaroscuro and right into the clutches of a detective who notices Parry’s fish-out-of-water state of incongruity. Everything bright and lovely, indicative of financial prosperity and stability, becomes a blinding world of brightness. When Parry confronts the snake-like Madge who commits suicide by jumping from her apartment window, Parry must navigate the interminable fire escape. The fire escape evolves from being a mere structure on the side of a building, to become the method of Parry to maintain his physical freedom just after securing his emotional freedom. Parry has exacted Madge’s confession and she is now dead, thus he has a sense of justice and revenge defined within the subaltern perspective on right and wrong. But, the new man Parry’s evolution is still not complete for he is without Irene. Name 5 As Irene initiates herself within Parry’s life on the lam, she immediately helps establish the audiences trust in Parry as a good man in a bad situation. When she continues to coolly protect him at her own risk, audiences support her feisty nature. And, as she lights Parry’s cigarette, the 1940s symbol that indicates sexual foreplay and desire, audiences understand that these two are meant to be together. Within Dark Passages, this marginalized couple becomes the new duo audiences root for and assign a positive label to. They are not the idealized American family living in a brightly lit home, but the outsiders who establish themselves as the new north of underground world’s moral compass. Their love and dedication to protect each other redefines the warm, breezy, softly lit city in Peru as the new center they rightfully inhabit. They have survived the “impersonal modernity” to establish this type of film noir happy ending (Palmer 74). San Francisco is home to the greatly popular annual Film Noir festival held in beloved, atmospheric Castro Theatre. This genre seems tailor made for this American city filled with dense fog, strenuously rising and falling roads, the vast presence of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Quentin and Alcatraz, and the separating bay of treacherous waters. Iconic films, such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, have all benefited from this rainy city filled with art deco sky scrapers. . “Liminality also memorably plays out in noir mise-en-scene. The action of many noir films plays out in a version of contemporary urban America that also contains its nightmarish mirror image” (Palmer 68). These simple lines and designs highlight the psychological complexity of the struggling characters navigating a sexualized world often riddled with violence. Name 6 Works Cited: Taylor, Kevin. “Censored Sexuality in Film Noir.” 1 Jul. 2008. Associated Content. Web. 11 May 2011. Palmer, Barton R. “The Divided Self and the Dark City: Film Noir and Liminality.” Symploke 15: 1-2 (2007) 66-79. Web. 11 May 2011. “Dark Passage Film Location.” Intelligent Designing. Web. April 2011. Dark Passages. Dir. Delmer Daves. Perf. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Warner Bros.1947. Film. Read More