Film Noir

Film Noir and the Imaginary

The Significance of the Telephone in Film Noir

Table of Contents

I. Introduction

II. Telephone-Conversations as Turning Points of the Story

III. The Significance of the Telephone in Sorry, Wrong Number

IV. Conclusion

Bibliography

I. Introduction

In the tangled networks of a great city, the telephone is the unseen link between a million lives. It is the servant of our common needs - the confidante of our inmost secrets. Life and happiness wait upon its ring - and horror - and loneliness - and death!1

Film Noir, with its claustrophobic, dark and estranged atmosphere, often explores the themes of secrecy and longing. Noir characters long for something they think they need, either to fill a gap in their lives or to break out of the normality of their everyday routine. The means to achieve this outbreak are usually found in money or, just as often, in wild romance and danger. The Noir hero is bored or unsatisfied with his existence and easily falls for the temptations of the femme fatale and for the potential easy (but dangerous) money in the Noir world. In trying to overcome the `normal′ life (thereby violating the morals of society), the Noir hero resorts to secrecy, eventually tripping over his own crimes and becoming the victim of his own greed. If he is `lucky′, he gets a new chance and is embraced back into society by a loving girl and/or forgiving friends (which, of course, could be seen as an even bigger punishment!). If he is not so lucky, he becomes entangled in an even larger web of lies and deception, doomed, if not to lose his life, then at least to experience real physical and emotional pain. Indeed, everyone in Noir is betrayed. Nobody in this dark and threatening atmosphere can be relied on, and yet the fate of the Noir hero in this world of secrecy is dependent upon his relationships to those people around him. These, the crucial but mostly dysfunctional relationships of Noir characters, are revealed not only by the narrative of the film, but often become visualized by the camera-view, by the lighting, or by other cinematographic means.

One of the most effective means with which the classic Film Noir achieves its desired effect is through the use of the telephone. The medium of the telephone can perform four major functions within the logic of the Noir plot: First of all, it suits perfectly the demands of showing two opposing environments, in other words of displaying the underlying alienation between people :

In itself, the urban telephone system is an invisible labyrinth: of voices, disembodied emotions, projections, manipulations, and deflections, of connections and cross-connections as intimate - or impersonal - as one desires; and it is also a tangible labyrinth of lines, cables, and wires, above and below the city streets. Telephones can be used to make confessions or probe for facts, to inform or misinform, to persuade or be persuaded, to intimidate.2

Although they talk to each other and are actually connected over telephone-wires, Noir characters are spatially separated, a fact which, in the Noir world, symbolizes the all-to-present threat of relating in a virtual and thus uncertain manner. In films like Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948), the entire plot is recounted with the help of sixteen telephone conversations and through the various flash-backs of the people talking in these calls. The main character, Leona Stevenson, is unable to leave her bedroom and is therefore not able to take part in the lives of the people related to her. The only way she can get connected is over the phone but, as she is soon to find out, this connection is a mere technical one. Relationships and friendships she thought she had do not really exist, and she is doomed to the realization that hers is only a virtual power that can be taken away at any point. The telephone asserts its function as a deceptive connector against whose ultimate power the leading lady is helpless.

In addition to its role as a symbol of dysfunctional relationships, the telephone and its incessant ringing can also serve to represent a real threat to the characters in the Noir world. In other words, the telephone′s presence implies a permanent source of potentially bad or shocking news. An intentionally unanswered phone-call or a telephone ringing unanswered in an empty room can cause more terror in the audience than a grim face or an explicit murder-scene. Indeed, in the same manner as a piercing fire alarm signals a fire out of control, the shrill and sudden sound of a phone ringing carries with it a message of doom. The sound of a telephone is designed to draw immediate and urgent attention to itself, and in the already haunted atmosphere of Film Noir, this usually means trouble for the leading men and women.

The telephone performs a third distinct function, most notably in those Noir films featuring a hard-boiled detective solving crime cases completely on his own. In movies of this kind, the telephone appears to serve as a means of real communication and the exchange of information. And yet, as it is depicted in films such The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), it is in fact not an interaction between two persons having a telephone conversation, but rather a single person (mostly the hard-boiled detective) receiving information that he must then process on his own. The telephone, again, is not connecting people but ultimately leaving them on their own.

The final and most important function of the telephone in Film Noir is its role in bringing about crucial turning-points in the plot. In the first half of my paper, I will explore this fourth function and show how the telephone is used to precede and motivate major plot twists and turns in several major Film Noirs. My goal is to demonstrate that the telephone in Film Noir is used not only as a means of symbolizing the alienation of characters, of portraying a potential threat to Noir characters, and of providing a means of (often unsuccessful) communication of information: The telephone is in fact most important in its function as an essential part of narrative development and of effective story-telling in Film Noir.

In the second half of my paper, my analysis will focus on the ultimate example of a Telephone Film Noir, namely Sorry, Wrong Number, which effectively combines all four above-mentioned