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Phantom Bodies: The Missing People and Empty Streets of Film Noir

Many places and settings that were depicted in wartime and postwar America film noir were often framed within darkly menacing and desolate urban topographies. We might think of Walter Neff in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), arriving alone to his Los Angeles office on a dark night, wounded, rapping on the glass doors to attract the attention of a lone watchman, then hobbling through the vacant building toward his office to record his last confession of deceit and murder. Or we might conjure Alice Moore in Jacques Tourneur’s The Cat People (1942), walking alone at night, through the dark, depeopled streets of New York City. Sensing that she is being followed she quickens her pace to a nearby bus stop where a newly arrived bus opens its doors. Seeing her pale, ashen expression, the bus driver says to her, “You look as if you’d seen a ghost” to which she responds, looking over her shoulder to the rustling leaves in a tree, “Did you see it?” What is striking in both scenes is the haunting emptiness that pervades in each film: as the protagonists move through the dark vacant streets, they encounter only a few nocturnal souls. We might ask here: why are these images of urban topography in wartime and postwar American film noir so empty, so seemingly abandoned? Where are the people? Initially identified by the French after the Second World War, critics and historians have since then speculated on what would have made the group of American films we now know as historic film noir to be perceived as so starkly different from their prewar predecessors.1 To the postwar French critics the noir world seemed to be a place where dangerous, seductive women, criminal, deviant men and loner detectives had replaced Hollywood’s prewar scenarios of productive, well-meaning citizens, or, at the very least, cautionary tales where “crime did not pay.” Earlier Hollywood films, with their evenly lit interiors and balanced exteriors, seemed to give way to those with dark, deserted streets and deeply shadowed rooms in a world permeated by loneliness, fear and distrust. The moral certainties of good and bad, right and wrong so present in prewar Hollywood films seemed to have transformed into wartime and postwar scenarios of pessimism, moral ambiguity and unease. Raymond Chandler, whose own pulp fiction novels often served as narratives for many film noir, seemed to sum up the noir sensibility in 1950 when he wrote that it depicted a world that had “gone wrong;” a world, “where the streets were dark with something more than night.”2 Film noir seemed to narrate both seen and unseen threats; it was a world,