Grant/Oeler/NakedCity

Today I finished Cathryn Grant’s The Demise of the Soccer Moms. In many ways, this is one of the bleakest novels I’ve read in a long time and I mean that as a compliment! Grant builds on her jaundiced portrait of suburbia in the second half of the novel by having her central character, Amy Lewis, become more and more disturbed as her fear and paranoia intensify until the inevitable catastrophic event that the book has been haunted by since its opening pages finally takes place. What’s impressive about Grant’s writing is that even though Amy is a character who could easily become an overblown caricature, there is enough justification for her fear, no matter how over the top it becomes, that she never becomes unconvincing. By the end of the novel, one has a horrifically cloying sense of the emptiness and superficiality of suburban life and culture that is just close enough to reality to be truly haunting. The threat of violence permeates the book to such an extent that there’s a good chance you will feel as paranoid as the characters.

I also read the next fifty pages of Karla Oeler’s A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form. Having thus far concentrated overwhelmingly on Eisenstein and montage, Oeler now discusses the film criticism of André Bazin and the work of Jean Renoir in the context of writing about realism. As Oeler points out, “Bazin’s realist theory takes shape, to a significant extent, around murder scenes” and it seems much the same could be said about Renoir’s films of the 1930s. Why? According to Oeler, “Murder, an act that is so often partially elided in film form, and an act that instantiates, within the refracted story world, the starkest forms of elision, is a paradigm of realist narrative.” I wonder, as an aside, and with this comment in mind, what Oeler would make of the myth of the snuff film. In the second part of the book, “Murder and Genre,” Oeler shifts focus dramatically by now concentrating on how genre films, such as the western and the crime drama, represent murder. Oeler defines the fundamental relationship/tension between these two things in the following words: “The murder scene…starkly reflects the predicament which the genre film shares with the mass culture out of which it emerges: any claim to a precarious singularity and indispensability must be made within a system based on disposability and sameness.” Oeler provides an interesting close reading of Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948) to demonstrate this tension between sameness and singularity.

Thanks to Oeler, I also watched, surprise, surprise, Jules Dassin’s The Naked City. You can see why she chooses it to talk about the tension between sameness and singularity. On the one hand, as the closing lines of the film put it, the events that form the focus of the plot are just one story in a city of eight million people. Nothing makes these events stand out in any particular way from any other story and in this regard they are the epitome of routine. On the other hand, by virtue of the fact that the film pays attention to these particular events, thereby giving us the opportunity to get to know these particular characters, it individuates these events, making them stand out from their background. To put it in generic terms, The Naked City is in many respects a standard crime drama, but at the same time it is particularized not only by these particular actors and these particular characters, but also by the use of unusual techniques—principally the voiceover that bookends the film and that we hear sporadically throughout the rest of the film. Producing an interesting blend of documentary and crime drama, the voiceover sets The Naked City apart.