Cornell Woolrich, 'The Black Curtain' (1941)

Alfred Hitchcock’s fondness for Cornell Woolrich’s work, most famously evidenced by Rear Window, is well known, and Woolrich’s The Black Curtain (1941) takes for its subject one of Hitchcock’s favorite subjects: an innocent man plunged into a frightening situation, wrongly accused of a crime, and struggling to prove his innocence. Like Hitchcock, Woolrich finds this subject appealing because the situation of the innocent man at the heart of such a scenario resembles so closely (albeit in an intensified form) Woolrich’s view of the human condition more generally: any sense of happiness one achieves is temporary and fragile at best because it is always subject to being destroyed by the forces of random chaos that can sweep away all security, certainty, and knowledge in a moment. That moment comes for Woolrich’s protagonist, Frank Townsend, when he recovers from a three-year bout of amnesia. On the surface, the beginning of the story resembles a happy ending, in that he is restored to his old life, including an adoring wife and his job, but when he starts being hunted by a threatening man whom he does not recognize, Townsend must go back into the mysterious past to find out who he was and what he did that is now threatening his life and security. This being Woolrich, the happy ending is eventually secured, at least in a formal fashion, but is unsatisfying to the reader for a couple of reasons. First, the resolution of Townsend’s problems occurs rapidly at the end of the novel in a manner that (I would argue) is deliberately unconvincing in the sense that it does little to allay the reader’s discomfort. In other words, the vast majority of the novel is dominated by Townsend’s incomprehension and fear, and it is the suspense generated by these emotions that dominates the reader’s reaction to the novel, not the happy resolution. Second, even if we take the resolution at face value, the message of The Black Curtain remains that one’s life can be destroyed in the blink of an eye by a cruel and random chance act; imagine living life with that knowledge at the front of your mind every day and you get some sense of the bleakness of Woolrich’s view of the world.

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013)

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears is a 2013 neo-giallo written and directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. It tells the story of a businessman (played by Klaus Tange) who returns home from a business trip to find his wife is missing. As he tries to find her by speaking to other residents of the strangely opulent apartment building in which they live, he hears some of their stories, and gets dragged into an increasingly hallucinatory series of events in which the border between reality and (erotic) fantasy becomes more and more blurred. Like the classic giallo, Strange sticks to the most basic structure of the mystery (there is a crime and then an investigation) and it is also typical of the giallo in that the mystery is as much a question of perception as it is an ontological fact. In other words, we can’t be absolutely sure that a crime has even taken place, let alone whom the perpetrator might be. It should be noted, however, that this is not at all a weakness in either this film or in the genre as a whole; indeed, it is this mix of the gestural respect paid to ratiocination along with the overwhelming presence of the surreal the defines the giallo. In this regard, those who criticize Strange for having no discernible narrative structure are missing the point entirely. With that said, the vast majority of Italian gialli do contain some kind of resolution to the mystery—it may be outlandish and unconvincing (in fact, all the better if it is!) but it’s usually there. Strange lacks even a weak resolution and no amount of visual style (with which this film is packed) can quite compensate for this absence.

Cornell Woolrich, 'The Bride Wore Black' (1940)

Cornell Woolrich’s first crime novel, The Bride Wore Black, was published in 1940, after Woolrich had already published several jazz-age novels in the style of his literary model F. Scott Fitzgerald, and after he had established a reputation as a prolific and talented writer of stories for pulp magazines. Like so many other crime fiction writers who came to the genre after writing other types of narratives, Woolrich found in crime fiction the perfect means of expressing his bleak view of the world in a manner that is simultaneously lyrical and chilling. Bride is a revenge narrative, with the twist that the avenger is a young woman whose husband was killed moments after they were married. She then devotes years of her life to tracking down and killing the men she holds responsible for her husband’s death, assuming a different identity each time, and always trading on her ability to read the men’s weaknesses. As such, Bride is not only a powerful exploration of the extremes to which melancholic revenge can push one, but also an utterly unsentimental and insightful analysis of contemporary American masculinity. In this regard, the fact that the plot hinges on an incredible coincidence and is filled with various other examples of the unlikely does nothing to diminish its power. Not only is Bride still effective as an anatomization of male vanity and stupidity, but the role of random chance in Woolrich’s fictional universe is the perfect objective correlative for the animating principle of that universe: meaningless chaos.