From Death Drive to Entrepreneurship of the Self: Film Noir’s Genealogy of the Neoliberal Subject

December 23, 2020 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 29, Number 3, May 2019

Tamas Nagypal (bio)

Through the comparative analysis of Double Indemnity (1944), Body Heat (1981), and The Usual Suspects (1995), this paper argues that what Michel Foucault called the neoliberal entrepreneur of the self has its prototype in the subject constructed by the classical discourse of film noir. While in the genre’s early form the individual’s attempt at existential self-valorization remains death driven, incommensurable with the ideological values of classical liberalism, neonoir reframes its isolated protagonist’s unique mode of being as a reservoir of human capital beyond the limits of shared social norms.

In film noir privacy establishes itself as the rule, not as a clandestine exception.
Joan Copjec1

In neo-liberalism […] homo oeconomicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.
Michel Foucault2

The Neo-Noir Hero as an Entrepreneur of Himself

At the end of Bryan Singer’s neo-noir mind-game film The Usual Suspects (1995), Verbal—the limping, stuttering small-time crook who narrates the story from police custody—is revealed to “be” legendary criminal mastermind Keyser Söze, allegedly the man behind a series of high stakes robberies and drug deals whom the FBI had never been able to identify because he killed every witness to his crimes. After the authorities cluelessly release him, his disabilities are revealed to have been faked, and the name Söze turns out to be nothing but an empty signifier he made up to manipulate others to do his bidding—in much the same way that the film deceives viewers and puts them to cognitive work through this unorthodox narrative device. As J. P. Telotte observes, Verbal remains “unknowable, at least in the manner of classical narrative: as a figure who is marked by easily observable traits, whose motivations are readily understood, and who sets the plot in motion along a straight line” (17). By going against expectations about character and narrative form (even deploying an unreliable flashback sequence), the film compels the viewer to reflect on classical Hollywood conventions as nothing but arbitrary constructs (Telotte 19). The postclassical narration informs both the carefully calculated unfolding of the hero’s fabricated persona, which is designed to eliminate Verbal’s rivals within the diegesis (as generic character types transparent to him and to the viewer), and the revelation of film’s fabrication, which is designed to compete with conventional Hollywood products on the extra-diegetic marketplace. The key to its success on both levels is the preservation of the Söze-myth: the accumulation of social and economic capital through this enigmatic brand name, the signifier of a unique hero with the potential to be everything in the eyes of others because he never allows himself to be pinned down. Just as Söze kills those who can identify him, the film undercuts the viewer’s attempt to construct a coherent narrative by flaunting its unreliability.3

Verbal’s narrative self-mobilization is that of the neoliberal homo oeconomicus in the Foucauldian sense: the subject turning his mental and physical traits, abilities, and skills into human capital to invest in and improve upon. Profiting from the inflated reputation of his manufactured identity, Verbal is an “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings” (Foucault 26).4 Besides neoliberalism’s creative dimension, however, Verbal also reveals the dark underside of such neoliberal selfhood: the noir subject thrown into a Hobbesian world where capitalist competition, rather than the liberal platform of meritocratic self-affirmation, becomes a struggle for life and death. As Marx notes, classical liberalism relied on a split between its subject’s public and private personas: the bourgeois pursuing his private self-interest in the unequal domain of capitalist economy and the citoyen sharing equal rights with others in the public sphere (“On the Jewish Question” 34). Both neoliberalism and classical noir break this balance in favor of an all-encompassing private domain, but they attach different values to the shift (Copjec 183; Harvey 3). The characters of classical noir suffer from an existential malaise; they “have no place of refuge in [noir’s] cruel naturalistic world, this life-as-a-jungle setting. Alone and unprotected, they are truly strangers, to themselves as well as to others. The world is littered with pitfalls against which the individual has, at the most, meager defenses” (Hirsch 4). Neoliberalism, by contrast, presents the expansion of the private sphere as an opportunity for increasing individual freedom and self-empowerment. Verbal is a case in point, insofar as he is a successful self-made man whose refusal to depend on reciprocal relationships with others makes him stronger rather than more vulnerable: he triumphs by cutting his ties to fellow criminals. A flashback even shows him (as Keyser Söze) killing his own wife and children to avoid being cornered when they are taken hostage—an escalation of Gary Becker’s notorious neoliberal economic model that sees family members calculating cost-benefit ratios while investing into being with each other (108-135).

Verbal’s path to victory is not without its own noir pitfalls, however. His amoral autonomy as a neoliberal subject is strangely machinic, chasing an ideal of freedom that paradoxically coincides with absolute unfreedom: his successful management of his life through rational choices leads to the total subordination of himself to an efficient algorithm of capital accumulation. Thomas Elsaesser points out a similar contradiction in the way contemporary mind-game films address their viewers. The increasing amount of cognitive labor required to untangle the narrative puzzles of films like The Usual Suspects, Memento (1998), or The Matrix (1999) reflects a neoliberal ideal of becoming active, self-conscious, self-improving media users rather than merely passive consumers. At the same time, what the new interactive viewers are invited to discover and enjoy is not their unconstrained freedom but their containment by the predetermined “rules of the game”: Hollywood cinema’s formal techniques of capturing and manipulating audience attention (34-37).5 This shows another key difference between classical liberalism and neoliberalism: unlike classical liberalism, which posited the spontaneously emerging equilibrium of the free market against the pre-established hierarchies of feudalism, neoliberalism is not at all antithetical to technologies of domination and social control as long as these technologies, like mind-game films, enable their subjects to actively and freely participate in their own subordination.6 I will argue that, parallel to this neoliberal shift in the idea of freedom, film noir has moved from being a limit-discourse of classical liberalism (exploring the point where bourgeois individualism turns anti-social and unproductive) to reveal radical individualism as an efficient neoliberal technology of control facilitating new forms of capital accumulation.

From Generic to Genetic Human Capital

Pushing the ideal of the self-programmed entrepreneur to its sociopathic, “noir” conclusion, The Usual Suspects is symptomatic of what Lauren Berlant calls the contemporary “waning of genre,” the increasing difficulty of applying social imaginaries of a “good life” to the conditions of neoliberal capitalism (6). The script of the ensemble crime genre (men cooperating to break the law) reaches a crisis in the film, collapsing into a noir story of an isolated individual whose very voice-over is a genre-destroying weapon (weaving the fable about Söze killing off the team of hard-boiled criminals he hired one by one). Insofar as genres are ideologies in the Althusserian sense, mapping an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 162), the film offers a post-ideological perspective of the world where individuals can directly access the real of the capitalist market without the mediation of now outdated imagined communities like family or brotherhood. As Foucault suggests, under neoliberalism “wage is nothing other than the remuneration, the income allocated to a certain capital, a capital that we will call human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer” (Foucault 226). Lacking a generic measure of value beyond the individual, neoliberalism makes no clear distinction between innate and acquired human capital. The abilities determining one’s market value, such as mobility, flexibility, educational investment, or creativity, appear now as components of the simultaneously intrinsic and engineered, but always unique genetic makeup of the neoliberal subject (what Foucault calls genetic human capital) (Foucault 228-233).

This neoliberal notion of value, Foucault observes, represents a radical break from Marx’s influential theory of value as socially necessary labor time—an abstract category constructed with the economic totality in mind, and therefore detached from the concrete, tangible labor of individual workers (Foucault 221). For Marx, market exchange, by making commodities appear outside their socially interdependent production process, obfuscates the social relations between their producers (hides the fact that their different products contain commensurable units of abstract labor) while also giving these abstract relations of production a concrete, if distorted, expression as “social relations between things” exchangeable with each other for money (Marx 165-66). This is why Marx talks about the “twofold social character” of labor: the abstract “element of the total labor,” and the concrete, “useful private labor,” one of the commodities exchanged on the market insofar as it satisfies particular social needs (166). The same duality appears in the distinction between the (abstract) value and exchange value of commodities in general—a dialectical tension in which Marx locates the source of commodity fetishism: the false attribution of intrinsic value to exchanged things.

From a Marxian standpoint, Hollywood genres are fetishistically distorted expressions of the social relations between the totality of producers; they are ideological formulas mapping the social relations between (human beings as) exchangeable things, where the source of common measure is not abstract labor but what can be called generic value. Film characters have generic value for viewers insofar as they successfully mediate between two contradictory social functions of generic narratives. On the one hand, as Rick Altman emphasizes, genre plots appeal to audiences by suspending the reality principle of the hegemonic social order in favour of the pleasure principle. “[Generic] pleasure,” he maintains, “derives from a perception that the activities producing it are free from the control exercised by the culture and felt by the spectator in the real world. For most of the film, then, the genre spectator’s pleasure grows as norms of increasing complexity and cultural importance are eluded or violated” (156). In other words, viewers are set up to root for the villains of various genre plots and take pleasure in seeing the social order of a family, a city, or a nation disrupted by internal and external threats. On the other hand, Thomas Schatz asserts, “as social ritual, genre films function to stop time, to portray our culture in a stable and invariable ideological position” (573) by offering symbolic resolutions to the multitude of social conflicts that play out between a genre’s familiar character types. This ideological outcome is reached through a process of reduction whereby characters antagonistic to the dominant culture (such the Indians and outlaws of classical Western films) are eventually either eliminated or integrated into the social order (Schatz 574). Genre plots are therefore examples of ideology’s “inherent transgression” in the Žižekian sense: they offer illicit fantasies of enjoyment that temporarily suspend the explicit rules and norms of the social symbolic order, but these generic pleasures are themselves governed by the “unwritten rules” of genres preventing the transgression from going too far, which is why in the end they help to sustain the status quo (Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies 24-37). In classical Hollywood, this tension is most effectively mediated by the ideal white, heterosexual, male hero described by Robin Wood as “the virile adventurer, the potent, untrammeled man of action,” whose indirect support for the social order genre plots tend to privilege over the “dependable but dull” “settled husband/father”—over the rigid representative of patriarchal law and order incapable of inherent transgression (594). In the classical Western, this hero is the lone cowboy often with a history as a criminal, who saves the community of settlers from bandits/Indians, then rides away into the sunset, like Ringo Kid in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). As Žižek puts it, “an ideological identification exerts a true hold on us precisely when we maintain an awareness that we are not fully identical to it, that there is a rich human person beneath it: ‘not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person’ is the very form of ideology, of its ‘practical efficiency'” (27). What I call the generic value of Hollywood’s familiar character types is then the degree to which they can serve as vehicles for inherent transgression—for an ideological identification with the “good life” animated by the genre. Far from being a monolithic concept, the “good life” is the name for the lived contradiction between the reality and the pleasure principle—often mapped as the conflict between community and individual—temporarily stabilized in the resolution of the generic plot. In this framework, the ideology of classical liberalism is revealed as generic in nature, its split form establishing the private as the inherent transgression of the public sphere.

In classical Hollywood genre films, the ideal male hero embodies what Marx calls the general form of value: a commodity expressing the value of other commodities (163), namely the generic value of various character types, who, through the narrative range of inherent transgression set by the white male protagonist, become commensurable with him insofar as they traverse the continuum between the written and unwritten rules of the generic community. In Stagecoach, for instance, Ringo Kid, after redeeming himself from his criminal past by helping to save the white settlers from an Apache attack, lends his generic value to the prostitute Dallas by proposing to marry her, retroactively turning her sexual deviance into a transgression inherent to the Western’s normative community. If, as Richard Dyer observes, whiteness in classical genre films functions as an invisible social norm connoting “order, rationality, [and] rigidity” (47-48), generic masculinity can be seen as the variable that adds the ideologically acceptable deviation from this norm. On the other hand, characters who are eliminated in the plot’s final resolution offer transgressive pleasures for audiences that are excessive, beyond the ideological range of the genre, that is, beyond the measure of generic value. In The Ususal Suspects, Keaton represents the trajectory of the classical Hollywood hero: he is a former crime boss who has turned into a legitimate restaurant owner with the help of his uptown New York lawyer girlfriend. Predictably, he is the police’s number one Söze suspect; they misread him playing the classical gangster’s game of inherent transgression, using his legal businesses as a front for more lucrative criminal enterprises. By contrast, Verbal/Söze is like a classical villain with a potentially unlimited (incommensurable) range of transgressions, which, however, are mobilized through his self-made fiction of a neoliberal entrepreneur rather than the physical action of a classical hero (he remains at the police station until the very end of the film except for the flashbacks he narrates with dubious authenticity).

The Usual Suspects sets up the contrast between neoliberal and generic masculinity via the scene of the lineup, an image that also serves as the publicity poster for the film. The lineup presents the five male protagonists standing against a white wall with a height chart—a panoptic device of the law constructed to measure their (masculine) deviance. They are picked up by the police as the “usual” (or we might say: generic) suspects in an armed robbery where the perpetrators left no hard evidence, and are asked to read the line, “Hand me the keys, you fucking cocksucker!” out loud so the security guard who witnessed the crime could identify their voice. Since none of them (with the possible exception of Verbal) were involved, they treat the questioning as an opportunity to prove their manhood (generic value) to the law, alternating between the performance of cool detachment (Hockney and Keaton) and ridiculously exaggerated macho mannerisms (McManus and Fenster)—two affective extremes of the stereotypical Hollywood gangster demarcating a range of inherent transgression. It is only Verbal who actually produces a tone of voice, both calm and threatening, that could have been used by the robbers. In addition, he accentuates the word “me” in the sentence, providing a clue to the suspect’s “true” identity—and yet he, the “cripple,” won’t be treated as a real suspect (and similarly, the spectator doesn’t pay attention to him because he doesn’t offer the same generic pleasures as the others). To use Žižek’s distinction in “Desire: Drive = Truth: Knowledge,” Verbal thereby lies in the guise of the truth (148): his response could very well be factually accurate, but his visible nonconformity to the generic masks of masculine criminality undercuts the symbolic efficiency of his statement, turning it opaque. The others, by contrast, tell the truth in the guise of a lie: while their posturing doesn’t have a factual basis (they didn’t commit the robbery), their performance reveals their identification with the gangster type. Contrary to his peers, Verbal ignores the fetish of a generic masculinity that he is supposed to express to gain status among the others, and it is because of this that he is able to treat this exercise, like his entire narration, as calculated roleplaying.

Along these lines, one can argue that The Usual Suspects is a post-patriarchal film: by revealing the nonexistence of the hyper-phallic gangster boss Söze, an ideal that none of the protagonists can really embody, generic masculinity is de-fetishized, exposed as a hollow shell—or as Judith Butler would say: a performance with no essential core at its center—and Verbal’s market value is attributed not to his manliness (his generic human capital) but to his entrepreneurial abilities as an individual (his genetic human capital). For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, this is how Empire, the global regime of neoliberal capitalism, functions: instead of ideologically prescribing a particular identity for the multitude of productive subjects, as former paradigms of capital accumulation did, Empire mobilizes the creative potential of human life as such, even in the forms that were formerly considered useless and unproductive (like Verbal’s disabilities). Rather than tying value to previously fetishized forms of western white heterosexual masculinity, now “the construction of value takes place beyond measure,” “determined only by humanity’s own continuous innovation and creation” (Hardt and Negri 356).

A closer look at its identity politics, however, reveals the dissolution of the film’s post-ideological facade. After his release from police custody, Verbal drops the fake limp and stutter he performed to remain invisible among hardened criminals and lawmen flaunting their machismo, and he is driven away in a Jaguar by his chauffeur/lawyer as an able-bodied white man of the American bourgeoisie—a clear exception to the paradigm of entrepreneurial self-reliance. As it turns out, he strategically wore the mask of the social abject not to subvert hegemonic masculinity but to make it more flexible, hybrid, and all-encompassing, deploying it against the limited range of his male peers’ generic tough-guy personas. This synthesis between hegemonic and abject is perfectly captured in the protagonist’s (fake) German-Turkish hyphenated identity: while in flashbacks he is depicted as a dark-skinned, long-haired gypsy from the Balkans (a romanticized nomadic subject in the southeastern border zone of Europe), he has a western name (Kaiser is German for “emperor”). He is an “abject hegemonic”7 subject of a neoliberal Empire that, despite its openness to the productive potential of multiple forms of life, hasn’t quite given up its allegiance to white masculinity as its fetishistic anchoring point.

Verbal’s performance of neoliberal entrepreneurship—and the film’s—is therefore doubly cynical: first, for putting on counter-hegemonic masks without believing in them, and second, for embracing white masculinity after undermining its generic status as common measure. This double cynicism constitutes the film’s neoliberal persona as completely flexible yet utterly rigid. On the one hand, through Verbal’s subjective narration, the film interpellates the viewer as a cynic in Paolo Virno’s sense of the term, as the figure who emerges after the decline of the classical liberal social contract that used to ground the symbolic community of equal citizens who share common values. “From the outset,” Virno argues, cynics “renounce any search for an inter-subjective foundation for their praxis, as well as any claim to a standard of judgement which shares the nature of a moral evaluation” (88). As a cynic, he suggests, one “catches a glimpse of oneself in individual ‘games’ which are destitute of all seriousness and obviousness, having become nothing more than a place for immediate self-affirmation—a self-affirmation which is all the more brutal and arrogant, in short, cynical, the more it draws upon, without illusions but with perfect momentary allegiance, those same rules which characterize conventionality and mutability” (87). Cynics are not bound by the generic range of inherent transgression because they don’t believe in shared symbolic norms—the background against which their transgressions could be commensurable with the transgressions of others. On the other hand, the film is also cynical in the Žižekian sense insofar as its cynicism betrays an unconscious, post-generic ideology on its own:

The fundamental level of ideology […] is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way—one of many ways—to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them. (The Sublime Object of Ideology 30)

Ideologies are effective not (merely) because we believe in them, but because we enjoy practicing them (73). We should add a distinction here between generic and extra-generic enjoyment: while the former is the expression of the pleasure principle as the inherent transgression of the reality principle and therefore remains tied to ideological belief in intersubjective norms, the latter can be understood as what Žižek (after Lacan) calls the surplus-enjoyment (jouissance) beyond the pleasure principle (89). In the case of the film, this beyond the pleasure principle is found beyond the generic range of inherent transgression, and therefore beyond common measure.8 Cynicism undermines ideological investment in the former but not in the latter. In the neoliberal era, cynical reason (not generic belonging) is purported to guarantee the self-governing subject’s market value through entrepreneurial self-fashioning. Ideology returns as the constitutive exception to this paradigm: as the no less cynical enjoyment of one’s socially constructed identity as private property (genetic human capital), beyond its function as the general equivalent of value.

In The Usual Suspects, cynical (post-generic, but ideological) enjoyment is solicited most explicitly in the final scene, when Verbal drops his fake limp, lights a cigarette, and gets into his Jaguar, while the audio track repeats fragments of his unreliable voiceover narration. He silently exchanges gazes and smirks with his driver Kobayashi, whom the viewer recognizes as Söze’s lawyer from Verbal’s narrative—a white man engaged, much like the protagonist, in a symbolic performance of racial drag to lend himself an impenetrable Oriental authority. What is captured here is the moment when the engineered aspects of the neoliberal subject’s human capital are retroactively transformed into innate, genetic capital expressed through signifiers of white affluence—or, to put it differently, this is the moment when the aesthetic of cynical reason is transformed into that of cynical enjoyment. Contrary to classical genre films, whiteness doesn’t function here as the symbolic norm against which generic transgressions can be measured, but as the ultimate transgression, conspiracy against the social order. Unlike generic white masculinity, this genetic white masculinity is not a universal measure of the “good life” but a state of exception from it, a privilege gained through its neoliberal deconstruction. The genetic value of the film, that is, the fundamental, unconscious ideological fantasy offered to the viewer for surplus enjoyment beyond the puzzle-algorithms of Verbal’s tactically changing masks is then white masculinity as the hidden monopoly of human capital, the condition of possibility of successful neoliberal entrepreneurship. Unlike the inherent transgressions of the film’s now obsolete criminals, this new white masculinity is fetishized as the mysterious, innate component of genetic human capital that makes the market value of the neoliberal “abilities-machine” potentially infinite.

The Proto-Neoliberalism of Classical Noir

It is no coincidence that The Usual Suspects uses film noir tropes (voice-over confession, nonlinear narration, homme fatale, deception and betrayal, murder as an existentialist act, etc.) to reflect on the transformation of Hollywood cinema in the age of neoliberal cynicism. Film noir, in its classical form, is the Hollywood discourse of the self-enclosed, alienated modern subject par excellence—a generic anomaly that emerged during the sociopolitical rupture of the Second World War and pushed the film industry’s established visions of the “good life” into crisis. As I have argued, the “good life” offered in generic fantasies is the result of a fragile balance between its characters’ docility and transgression, their abiding by and subverting the abstract law of the land. Film noir, however, tips this balance in favour of a surplus enjoyment (jouissance) that, instead of serving as the measure of inherent transgression, is exhibited as the burdensome property of an isolated individual, an (anti-)hero’s existential excess without generic value. As Hugh Manon notes, noir’s typical male protagonist has a desire for a femme fatale that, despite its ostensibly heteronormative nature, is fundamentally masturbatory. Instead of seeking heterosexual intimacy, the male hero tends to be fixated on fetish objects, the real function of which is to block their access to the woman they merely pretend to pursue. Walter Neff, the homicidal insurance salesman of Double Indemnity (1944), for instance, falls in love with the ankle bracelet of his female partner in crime, Phyllis Dietrichson, only for his already distorted desire for the woman to get further diverted by his male colleague, Keyes, who is investigating them for murder and insurance fraud. Keyes is the obstacle to the heterosexual couple’s official romantic quest and therefore the real-impossible homoerotic love object to whom Walter addresses the final intimate confession of his sins. While in classical narratives, Manon argues, obstacles to heterosexual romance are challenges set to raise the male protagonist’s desire for his partner (they are what Lacan calls objet a, the object-cause of desire), noir’s perverse hero gets fixated on the obstacle, which prevents him from getting the “good life” he is supposed to want (31).

From a Lacanian standpoint, film noir’s fixation on the pervert’s private jouissance signals the crisis of the symbolic order’s efficiency in keeping enjoyment at bay by limiting it to a generic range of illicit fantasies. As Joan Copjec observes, the noir narrative centers on the shameless exhibition of jouissance that overturns the former (liberal democratic) notion of privacy as a “clandestine exception” (183) to public visibility—the balanced dialectic between the reality principle and the pleasure principle that gave form to genre films. When considering the role of the symbolic order in the field of vision, Lacan stresses that human subjectivity is always already a condition of being looked at by the gaze of a presupposed other. This gaze is the real, primordially separated objectal correlate (objet a) to the subject, the reminder of his founding trauma, the constitutive loss of jouissance he suffered when entering the social symbolic order. It is both a testament to his inability to reach completeness by eliminating the other, and the cornerstone of the fantasy that his self-disclosure as a fully enjoying subject is nevertheless possible (Lacan 83). The symbolic order functions here as a mediatory bar between objet a and the subject insofar as, contrary to the (impossible) real gaze, the gaze of the symbolic (big) Other is part blind, and therefore unable to see the supposedly complete, fully enjoying self the subject imagines to have lost. By giving up the attempt to fully recover it, the subject can take partial control over his loss, fill in its place with socially constructed fantasy scenes of desire that cover over the traumatic real of objet a. Symbolically “castrated” or “split” subjects therefore have access to a limited enjoyment in a separate, neither public, nor fully private, but emphatically social sphere (like the one mapped by Hollywood genres) where they imagine that the gaze of a public authority (such as the Production Code censor) cannot fully see them.

However, as Žižek asserts, in film noir’s atomized social landscape (which lacks the mediation of modern symbolic institutions such as the bourgeois family, the workplace, the army, or the church), the isolated male hero becomes terrorized by the hallucinated return of the all-seeing, real gaze of his superego, which, unlike symbolic authority, not only knows about jouissance but even commands it, turning it into a perverse ethical duty, from the call of which there is nowhere to hide (Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! 149-162). Copjec describes this shift as the move from “the old modern order of desire, ruled over by an oedipal [symbolic] father” to “the new order of drive” in which “ever smaller factions of people [are] proclaiming their duty-bound devotion to their own special brand of enjoyment” (182-183). This new noir subject of drive is caught in the libidinal economy that Manon calls perverse, as it suspends the forward movement of generic narratives towards the desired symbolic resolution of their conflicts. Instead, the subject gains satisfaction from what Lacan associates with the topology of drive: the repetitive, circular movement around objet a (Lacan 174-187). As Copjec maintains, the ultimate noir fetish is the masturbatory jouissance of one’s own being, the subject’s own gaze and voice as objet a that, without the mediation of the symbolic, fall back on him. The noir protagonist is driven to make his inner excess seen and heard, paradoxically, beyond the possibility of reciprocal communication and acknowledgement, to the point where it clearly undermines his belonging to any generic community of common measure and risks sliding into madness (Copjec 188).

There are two clarifying remarks to make here. First, for Lacan “the drive […] is profoundly a death drive and represents in itself the portion of death in the sexed living being” (205). Second, this portion of death is immanent to the symbolic order, not some enjoyment-substance separate from it. As Alenka Zupančič puts it, “it is by means of the repetition of a certain signifier that we have access to jouissance and not by means of going beyond the signifier” (158). She argues that Lacan describes this unconventional deployment of the signifier with his category of the “unary trait,” a contingent semiotic marker, like a nervous tick or a unique tone of voice, that becomes libidinally invested by the subject, standing for his singular being in the world. “The uniqueness of the trait,” she argues, “springs from the fact that it marks the relation of the subject to satisfaction or enjoyment, that is to say, it marks the point (or the trace) of their conjunction” (157). As a contingent stand-in for objet a that carries no meaning, the unary trait is part of a non-signifying semiotic; as the gravitational center of the subject’s libidinal economy it perpetuates the repetitive jouissance of the death drive, the surplus enjoyment that is the useless but necessary byproduct of the social symbolic order (Zupančič 159). It is this nonsensical death drive that comes to the fore in film noir’s fetishization of the unary trait through formal devices such as the voice-over, extreme facial close-ups, skewed camera angles reflecting the fantasy of being looked at from a unique perspective, and flashbacks to traumatic or emotionally charged past events like the male hero’s first encounter with the femme fatale, whose intense presence is often condensed into a piece of clothing or jewelry. The death drive is the Lacanian name for the unproductive excess of life, for life threatening to throw itself off balance. It doesn’t so much kill the organism as infinitely prolong its agony, like that of the noir hero stuck in a lonely place, between social life and biological death, with the self-enclosed enjoyment of his voice, which “bear[s] the burden of a living death, a kind of inexhaustible suffering” (Copjec 185).

Walter Neff is a case in point insofar as he narrates his perverted crime story as a flashback while fatally wounded; the deadly bullet in his body fired by Phyllis Dietrichson marks his singular encounter with jouissance. Driven by death, he then records his confession of murdering both Phyllis and her husband on a dictaphone, addressing Keyes as if he were his all-knowing, obscene, machinic superego demanding proof that Walter had been enjoying properly—a pervert’s projection that undermines his homosocial friendship with his colleague. As Žižek insists, the paralyzing relationship to such a hallucinated all-seeing gaze in film noir should not be simply identified with illicit homosexual desire, nor should it be reduced to the power of rebellious femininity: whoever comes to occupy the place of the superego is there as the noir hero’s fetish, masking the fundamental breakdown of the social symbolic order (Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom 160). It’s important therefore to distinguish this psychoanalytic notion of the fetish from Marxian commodity fetishism. As Žižek explains, “in Marxism a fetish conceals the positive network of social relations, whereas in Freud a fetish conceals the lack (‘castration’) around which the symbolic network is articulated” (Žižek, Sublime Object 50). In classical Hollywood films, commodity fetishism is responsible for the generic value of characters, while the psychoanalytic fetish signifies the unary trait as an exception from and an existential threat to the regime of generic value. It is the fetishistic taming of the void of the real in the psychoanalytic sense that Copjec identifies in the noir hero’s desperate attempt to impose rational limits on his surplus enjoyment by establishing it as matter of exchange with an all-powerful specter of the femme fatale. This is why, she argues, in Double Indeminty Walter accepts Phyllis’s proposal to murder her husband for his life insurance money, then blames her in his voice-over confession for his own death drive that eventually destroys them both. “Having chosen jouissance,” Copjec argues, “the noir hero risks its shattering, annihilating effects, which threaten his very status as subject. In order to indemnify himself against these dangers, he creates in the femme fatale a double to which he surrenders the jouissance he cannot himself sustain” (193-94).

Critical readers have argued that Hollywood’s “noir anxiety”9 about the boundaries of traditional gender roles and its panic-ridden attempts to re-establish them were responses to the Second World War, during which many women in the US had to enter the workforce. As a result, after the war the returning GIs were faced with a double loss; not only did they have to abandon the enjoyment of wartime male bonding, but their formerly homosocial workplace back home also lost its phallic status, that is, its clear separation from the feminine household. As life returned to “normal,” a large number of women were eventually fired from their jobs, and the femme fatale, representing the threat of female labor power, also gradually disappeared from film noir (Boozer 23). At the core of film noir is therefore a conflict inherent in the capitalist mode of production that the Wertkritik (value criticism) school of Marxism refers to as value dissociation. Contra Marx, Wertkritik argues that fetishism is already at work at the level of production, not merely in commodity circulation. In other words, the classical Marxian notion of value is itself a fetish (Trenkle 9). As Roswitha Scholz asserts, Marx’s concept of abstract labor, far from being the objective measure of value in capitalism, is an ideological construct created through the devaluation of non-productive activities seen as the gendered opposite of “commodity-producing patriarchy” (Scholz 125). What Wertkrtitik calls “value dissociation,” Scholz argues, “means that capitalism contains a core of female determined reproductive activities and the affects, characteristics, and attitudes (emotionality, sensuality, and female or motherly caring) that are dissociated from value and abstract labor” (127). The theory of value dissociation can explain why capitalism’s transformation of all human life into wage labor threatens to undermine its own condition of possibility: an effective organizing principle of “abstract” labor is always already distorted by an ideology of sexual difference. This is the contradiction American society had to face during the Second World War when the use of a female labor force both strengthened and weakened the nation: it increased production but destabilized the masculine identity of workers—a tension that could be resolved through the re-exclusion of femininity from the productive community.

Nevertheless, such a reading of film noir as an allegory for fetishized labor relations ignores the ways in which the noir universe is fundamentally antithetical to both productive and reproductive labor (the fact that it is primarily the psychoanalytic, not the Marxian fetish that drives the noir narrative). In Double Indemnity Phyllis is a bored housewife plotting to kill her husband, fatally distracting Walter from his respectable job as a salesman. As Vivian Sobchack argues, the noir narrative operates under a spatiotemporal suspension she calls the chronotope of “lounge time,” where the protagonists idle their life away in hotel rooms, dining lounges, night clubs, gambling joints, and cars, cut off from the stability and safety of work and home alike, forever stuck in a transitory moment without arriving anywhere. From the standpoint of Wertkritik, noir’s atmosphere of unproductive, anxious idleness signals the crisis of not only masculine labor but productive labor as such, that is to say, of capitalism’s real abstraction, guaranteeing the common measure of value in different human lives that served as the economic base of the ideology of classical liberalism. This is why in film noir the capitalist market turns from benevolent invisible hand co-measuring the economic endeavours of equal-born citizens into a “life-as-a-jungle setting” where individuals seek to express their life’s value as genetic human capital beyond a general equivalent. This is the stake of the final confrontation between Walter and Phyllis in Double Indemnity: while both protagonists have chosen their private jouissance over the ideological pleasures of the dominant society when they murdered Phyllis’s husband (the film’s symbolic father figure), to fully express their individuality (to have full control over the insurance money) they each have to become independent from their partner in crime. Such a drive for individual self-fetishization is the drive to reveal one’s objet a to the real-impossible superego gaze of the market beyond the mediation of liberal democracy’s symbolic order. This is the properly proto-neoliberal dream of classical noir: to valorize the idiosyncratic jouissance of one’s unary trait, the fundamentally unproductive dimension of the subject, emancipated from any socially mediated generic value.

Classical noir’s proto-neoliberal project, however, fails when it hits the bedrock of patriarchal value-dissociation. In Double Indemnity, both protagonists bring a gun to their final meeting; Phyllis shoots first, wounding Walter. Surprisingly, she does not kill him with a second shot but confesses her love for him instead. As Robert Pippin writes, “We have come to expect from her what she clearly expects from herself—unremitting self-interest, her destiny—and her own genuine puzzlement at what she does not do, what in effect gets her killed, figures the puzzlement of the viewers” (104). Phyllis, for a brief, tragic moment, seems to realize the internal contradiction of her death drive: while it is a drive towards fetishistic self-valorization, it simultaneously undermines the social condition of capitalist value under commodity-producing patriarchy, that is, membership in masculine community. By contrast, when Walter, skeptical of her sudden change of heart (“Sorry baby, I don’t buy it”), shoots Phyllis dead, he does it as a man reacting to the feminine jouissance (love) that threatens to de-quantify his life’s market value (the insurance payoff he got for his murder). Through this act, he establishes a minimal distance between his socially mediated gender role and his death drive. In Lacanian terms, he symbolically castrates himself by setting up a bar between himself and his objet a in order to project the latter on Phyllis, disavowing the woman’s autonomous subjectivity so she could be reduced to her role as femme fatale (a villain to be eliminated) in a generic patriarchal fantasy. This is why his subsequent voice-over confession can be finally overheard by Keyes, even though the earlier addressee of Walter’s message had been the real-impossible gaze of his own superego. And this is how, although his colleague officially condemns him by calling the police, their brief exchange can restore patriarchy as the dominant generic institution of capitalist value production:

Walter:

“You know why you couldn’t figure this one, Keyes? I’ll tell you. Because the guy you were looking for was too close. He was right across the desk from you.” Keyes:

“Closer than that, Walter.” Walter:

“I love you too.”

The film then ends with Keyes lighting Walter’s cigarette.

From Death Drive to Stubborn Attachment

In Double Indemnity, the death-driven excess of the male hero’s singular jouissance is therefore ambiguous: it’s condemned but also indirectly valorized over the femme fatale‘s, reflecting the gender hierarchy of commodity-producing patriarchy based on the exclusion of feminine life from masculine value-producing labor. It reveals the conjunction of the ideological operation of value dissociation (Walter’s killing of Phyllis) with a generic regime of labor (the homosocial work-relationship between Walter and his colleague Keynes) while also repressing it by enforcing the symbolic norms of the Hollywood Production Code (Walter is punished for his crime). In other words, masculine jouissance appears here as patriarchy’s unforgivable yet necessary original sin, something beyond measure that sets up (white) masculinity as a general equivalent of value. With the advent of neoliberalism proper in the 70s, production becomes increasingly decentered and deterritorialized, extending the regime of capital accumulation to hitherto devalued spheres of human life, like that of femininity. In this mode, traditional value-dissociation starts to lose its efficacy. While in classical noir the femme fatale‘s death-driven narrative trajectory serves as a cautionary tale about the impossibility of generic human capital outside patriarchy, in neo-noir she returns as an entrepreneur of herself, representing the vanguard of the new economic paradigm precisely because of her subversion of the now outdated commodity-producing patriarchy.

In Body Heat (1981), a Reagan-era, post-Production Code reimagining of Double Indemnity, not only is the female protagonist, Matty, allowed to get away with orchestrating the murder of her rich husband, she then successfully emancipates herself from her partner in crime, Ned, whom she dupes into taking the fall for her. In the film’s denouement, when Ned discovers that his femme fatale lover is planning to kill him with explosives rigged to the door of a boathouse, he asks her to prove her love to him by opening the door herself. The woman calls his bluff and starts walking towards the building while the camera remains static, giving us Ned’s point of view. Before she disappears into the darkness, she stops and turns back for a moment, her white dress and blonde hair lit up by moonlight, uttering with a soft voice: “Ned, no matter what you think, I do love you!” Once her image fades into black, a reverse shot shows the growing doubt on Ned’s face. He starts running after her, but it is too late: the boathouse goes up in flames. We then cut to Ned in prison a few months after, yet again suspicious about Matty’s real intentions. He manages to get ahold of a copy of her high school yearbook that proves she stole the identity of one of her classmates after most likely murdering her. Matty’s real name is Mary, nicknamed “The Vamp” by her fellow students—a serial homecoming queen whose declared ambition (unary trait) was “to be rich and to live in an exotic island.” The close-up of her yearbook photo then transitions to show Matty lying on the beach of an actual tropical island, but instead of satisfaction her face is fraught with melancholy. A local man by her side asks, “Is this what you’ve been waiting for?” referring to the cocktail that was just served to her. “What?” she asks without looking. “It’s hot,” he says, to which the distracted woman answers “Yes…” with an empty tone. The camera tilts up from her profile, settling on the clouds covering the blue sky while the credits start rolling.

This new femme fatale both differs from and fundamentally resembles her classical predecessor. On the one hand, as a neoliberal entrepreneur of herself she now manages to outmaneuver the generic patriarchal gaze by consciously masquerading as the stereotypical spider woman fetishized by classical noir’s male protagonist. By performing her femininity for a symbolic (part blind, ignorant) rather than a real (all-seeing) gaze, she tames the classical noir femme fatale‘s death drive and avoids being discarded as the devalued double of the male hero: the clueless Ned is duped into “excluding” a mere simulacrum of the historically fetishized fatal woman while Matty slips away. At the same time, her singular jouissance (expressed through her unary trait), the reward for her separation from the regime of generic masculinity, is depicted as melancholy, sutured together through continuity editing with the gaze of the man she pushed away, remaining obsessed with her femme fatale persona. Butler calls this phenomenon stubborn attachment, arguing that subjects would rather maintain their subordination to a power apparatus in an unhappy consciousness than have no attachment at all, which leads them to desire unfreedom even when their masters are gone (Butler 31-63). Butler sees a melancholic stubborn attachment, an inability/unwillingness to mourn a lost libidinal cathexis, at the core of all gender identities (132-51). While she focuses on the child’s affections for the same-sex parent, which are ungrievable in heteronormative societies, her theoretical framework can be extended to the subject formation involved in Body Heat‘s neoliberal identity politics where the mourning (letting go) of the generic white male patriarch would leave the femme fatale‘s entrepreneurial scheme without an anchoring point against which to direct itself. Cutting this umbilical cord would jeopardize the woman’s indirect membership in a productive community, risking the loss of her life’s generic value for capitalism.

The film offers a dialectical image of neoliberalism where the immobile white man (Ned, stuck in prison for murder) and the feminine nomadic subject (Matty, travelling alone for pleasure) are conjoined in a unity, allegorizing the mutual dependence of patriarchal law and the feminine flight from it, generic and genetic human capital, territorialization and deterritorialization. In a temporal synthesis of past and present, America’s mid-century regime of commodity-producing patriarchy is pushed away but also evoked with nostalgia. As Fredric Jameson observes,

Everything in the film […] conspires to blur its official contemporaneity and make it possible for the viewer to receive the narrative as though it were set in some eternal thirties, beyond real historical time. This approach to the present by way of the art language of the simulacrum, or of the pastiche of the stereotypical past, endows present reality and the openness of present history with the spell and distance of a glossy mirage. (30)10

This nostalgic tone of the film makes Matty’s neoliberal jouissance the inherent transgression of commodity-producing patriarchy, valorizing her singular affect only as the melancholy she feels over leaving generic masculinity behind.

From Stubborn Attachment to Cynical Self-Affirmation

Contrary to Double Indemnity and Body Heat, The Usual Suspects presents a neoliberal subject who is neither death driven nor melancholic but is, as we have seen, cynical. In the historical trajectory of American neoliberalism, the film can be productively read as a backlash noir, part of a conservative response to second wave feminism’s emancipation of women from the constraints of the household. As Margaret Cohen argues, since the late 80s a series of neo-noirs like Internal Affairs (1990), Bad Influence (1990), and The Silence of the Lambs (1991) had started replacing the femme fatale with an homme fatale figure resembling the Freudian primordial father as a patriarchal reaction against the growing female presence in the neoliberal job market. The specter of the non-castrated man (like The Silence of the Lambs‘s cannibal-psychiatrist or Internal Affairs‘s sexually overpotent policeman-godfather) is conjured up as an ideological guarantee that real power will remain with those who not only have the symbolic phallus (the signifier of power) but also an actual penis, as Margaret Cohen argues. The Usual Suspects reproduces this backlash masculinity but with a cynical twist. Verbal doesn’t actually embody characteristics of the primordial father; he rather mobilizes the narrative of such demonic masculinity (“Keyser Söze is the Devil!” cries one of his victims) as an efficient device of capital accumulation, part of the neoliberal “abilities-machine” inseparable from his opaquely ordinary white male body. The return of this ordinary manhood as the exceptional rather than the generic index of a now hybrid, decentered, and deterritorialized capitalist apparatus—abstract and unmappable, like Keyser Söze himself, in its multitude of incompatible language games—provides the final twist of the film. It is as if the earlier unconscious attachment of the female-driven neo-noir suddenly came back to life, breaking from his quarantine as an impotent remainder of a past regime of production (Ned in Body Heat) to stabilize the new, increasingly abstract rule of neoliberal capitalism. Unlike Walter or Matty, whose attachment to commodity-producing patriarchy contradicts and thereby weakens their flight from it, Verbal’s enjoyment of his white male identity doesn’t undermine his cynical masquerade because white masculinity changes its status from general equivalent to genetic exception. If generic white masculinity was the ideologically distorted manifestation of abstract labor’s principle of equivalence, the genetic white masculinity of Verbal is rather the fetishistic expression of another one of capitalism’s real abstractions: the creditor who is exempted from the universal paradigm of abstract labor and accumulates capital passively by making others work for him through debt bondage. Crucially, it is their debt to Keyser Söze that connects the five male protagonists in Verbal’s narrative, a debt that disrupts the criminals’ generic life of inherent transgressions while also parasitizing it as the basis of their prolonged repayment process (the men keep doing assignments for Söze until they are dead, and viewers continue to enjoy the generic value they thereby create until the end of the plotline).

Viewed through the lens of the creditor/debtor relation, the classical noir hero’s death-driven, impossible quest to put value on his real self (his unary trait) appears as an attempt to pay back an unpayable debt to a hallucinated real superego-other beyond the liberal democratic symbolic order. To put it differently, classical noir depicts the creditor/debtor relation as a perversion of the private sphere, an unproductive excess to the genres of commodity-producing patriarchy. By contrast, the neo-noir cynic turns the creditor/debtor hierarchy into a productive social relation, positioning himself as a creditor in the real by giving the impression that he is always more than the sum of his symbolic masks. Significantly, Keyser Söze is not Verbal’s own superego, but a superego he created for others (generic men) to indebt and control them, a meta-generic device to extract the generic value out of their lives, much the same way finance (the creditor/debtor relation) comes to overdetermine the sphere of production in neoliberalism, undermining the classical liberal fiction of equal citizenship.11 Söze, the neoliberal fetish of absolute individual sovereignty, is like the feudal monarch in Marx’s example: “king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king” (Marx, Capital 149). In a striking contrast to both Double Indeminty‘s Walter and Body Heat‘s Matty, The Usual Suspects‘s Verbal lacks any unary trait, a unique point of conjunction between his enjoyment and the signifier he would be anxiously fixated on. At the end of the film, we learn that he randomly used signifiers from his interrogator’s office (e.g. newspaper clippings attached to the wall in front of him or the brand name Kobayashi displayed at the bottom of his coffee mug) to embellish his fake Keyser Söze narrative. It is thus not Verbal as an individual but capital itself that is, to use Marx’s term, the “automatic subject” of this masquerade, “constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement” (Marx, Capital 255). Verbal’s (and the film’s) jouissance lies somewhere else entirely, revealed, as I have suggested, at the very end of the film when he stops being the facilitator for capital’s shifting automatisms and momentarily stabilizes himself as a white man, exceptional and enigmatic in his very ordinariness. Only then can he enjoy the creditor’s privilege of not having to be the entrepreneur of himself, and the viewer can likewise finally rest from the cognitive labor of puzzle solving.12

The Usual Suspects manages to reconcile the tension between searching for the real-impossible exchange value of the subject’s singular life and the generic apparatus needed for its valorization—the tension at the core of classical noir. It finds a way to represent uniqueness as productive without letting it slip into death-driven madness (the problem with classical noir) or normalizing it only as unhappy consciousness (the shortcoming of melancholic neo-noir). The film’s solution is a theological one, following the New Testament injunction, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God” (New Living Translation, Mark 12.17). Singularity is externalized on the Capital-God (Keyser Söze), whom Caesar (Verbal, the neoliberal cynic) unleashes on the multitude as credit, thereby freeing himself from the burden of death driven self-valorization, mandating the indebted others to do it for him (instead of doing it himself) and exploiting the productive potential of their generic identities until they dissolve in the process. For the white male neoliberal subject of The Usual Suspects, the key to a successful entrepreneurship of the self therefore isn’t self-realization but self-splitting (self-castration), not the pursuit of authenticity but the cynical installation of a bar between one’s always shifting social symbolic masks and the jouissance of belonging to an exceptional, unchanging, and unproductive creditor community that manages the capital accumulation of others from a distance. If the classical noir subject’s unproductive jouissance was a pathological, death-driven excess of the generic regime of commodity-producing patriarchy, in cynical neo-noir this jouissance returns as the genetic human capital driving neoliberal finance to parasitize the generic value of the indebted multitude.

Footnotes

1. Joan Copjec, “The Phenomenal Nonphenomenal: Private Space in Film Noir” 183.

2. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France (1978-79) 226.

3. In his analysis of Cosmopolis (2012) and Nightcrawler (2014), Kirk Boyle similarly observes that the protagonists of contemporary neo-noirs can defy realist character representation and act as allegorical stand-ins for the political economic abstractions of neoliberal capitalism.

4. Going a step further, in his commentary on Foucault’s theory of neoliberalism, Byung-Chul Han suggests that “Today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves” (1).

5. For a detailed conceptualization of the way the cinematic apparatus turns viewer attention into capital, see Jonathan Beller (88-150).

6. As Tiqqun suggest, neoliberalism is therefore best understood as a cybernetic project of “producing social self-regulation” through “the visible production of what Adam Smith called the ‘invisible hand.'” Similarly, Han argues that freely turning oneself into a neoliberal project is “a more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation” (1).

7. For an analysis of how self-abjection can be an efficient tactic of hegemonic masculinity, see Claire Sisco King, “It Cuts Both Ways: Fight Club, Masculinity, and Abject Hegemony.”

8. The Lacanian separation of pleasure and (surplus-)enjoyment (jouissance) recalls the Deleuzian distinction Steven Shaviro makes (after Brian Massumi) between emotion and affect: “affect is primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified and meaningful, a ‘content’ that can be attributed to an already-constituted subject” (3). However, while it’s tempting to identify jouissance with affect in this narrow sense, the crucial difference between the two categories is that for Shaviro, affect escapes social subjection, while for Žižek, jouissance, however unconscious it may be, is nevertheless the core component of any ideological subject position.

9. For a study of anxiety as a quintessential film noir affect, see Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo, Noir Anxiety.

10. For Jameson, the aesthetic forms of postmodern cinema can offer a cognitive mapping of our global capitalist situation through allegory, representing local power dynamics in relation to the sublime forces of the capitalist totality. For more recent examples of Jamesonian film theory used as the cognitive mapping of neoliberal capitalism, see Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, and Clint Burnham, Fredric Jameson and the Wolf of Wall Street.

11. On the centrality of the creditor/debtor hierarchy in neoliberalism see Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. In popular cinema, the horror genre has been the most studied as an allegory for the political economic abstractions of the neoliberal creditor/debtor relation. See Fred Botting, “Undead-Ends: Zombie Debt/Zombie Theory,” and Mark Steven, Splatter Capital: The Political Economy.

12. Interestingly, the white male Verbal’s dis-identification from capital’s automatic subjectivity is the exact opposite of what Shaviro sees as the afrofuturist strategy of absolute identification with capital in Grace Jones’s music video Corporate Cannibal (2008). There, Jones’s digitally altered body becomes “an electronic signal whose modulations pulse across the screen,” embodying the versatility and flexibility of neoliberal capital (Shaviro 16).

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