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Brick
Directed by Ryan Johnson
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Film Noir: you know it right away. Dark shadows across black-and-white empty city streets, hard-boiled detectives muttering in oddly-phrased lingo about gams and rods and dames, lanky femme fatales with bella donna voices and deadly intentions, and a brooding pessimism that lets no one off the hook because not only is the world pretty rotten, but it's also nothing more than a crooked racket in which everyone loses. Noir was a Hollywood manifestation of late 1930s and postwar despair, only they didn't call it film noir, it was just a darker side of Tinsel Town. It was French film critics-- steeped in Gallic existentialism and the lingering nightmare of Nazi collaboration-- of the 1950s and 60s that decided that noir was a distinct genre with its own look and philosophy. For them noir was not just a genre, but a worldview in which fate and the ununderstandable mechanics of life and history were yoked together to suggest profound hopelessness.

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In the past three decades a noir revival has manifested itself in fashion ads, TV commercials, and animation-- Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) is nothing more, or less, than cartoon noir for savvy adults. Hollywood has re-filmed the classic ideas of noir in color with contemporary settings and characters-- Chinatown (1974), Miller's Crossing (1990) Red Rock West (1992), and L.A. Confidential (1997)-- or reinvented it through a post-modern lens in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) or his TV's mini-series Twin Peaks (1990). But even when new Hollywood does old Hollywood noir well-- as in Body Heart (1984)-- it never feels original, or rather, original enough.

It's not like social or political life in the 1980s, 90s, and noughts wasn't desperate enough to generate good noir, but there was always a spark missing. It's impossible to do a new noir without a sense of history-- and probably parody-- but too much would be, well, too much. That's why Brick-- written and directed by Rian Johnson-- is so successful. Johnson has found a path to parody and homage that's both playful and moderately original. Brick isn't a total success-- it's a little too long, a little too self-knowing, and a little too pleased with itself. But in unexpected ways, the film surprises, and delivers basic film pleasures.

Brick is a Cuisinart full of classic noir plots-- The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1947), The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers (1946), The Blue Dahlia (1946), The Black Angel (1946)-- with more contemporary references tossed in. Its last scene is a direct quote from Goddard's Breathless (1960). And while Brick acknowledges these reference points, it never belabors them, but skates right through them on its way to something bright and fresh.

Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a California high school student, is your perfect noir hero a.k.a. fall guy. Sweet, sincere, determined, and a little clueless, he is essentially a naif in a world of deadly grifters. His ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin), is murdered two days after she calls him for help. On his journey to find out who is responsible for her death, he meets slackers, drug dealers, femme fatales, murderous thugs, and a conspiracy so confusing that it makes the plot of The Big Sleep (which even screenplay writer William Faulkner is said to have not really understood) seem lucid.

Smells like teen spirit

One of the things about Brick that makes it original-- aside from its invented, faux 1940s pulp-novel argot (a patois of Hammett-speak and Saturday Night Live parody)-- is its moving the noir into the bright California sunlight and populating it with teens. Granted, these are not Southern California beach boys-- the entire high school seems to be just this side of serious goth. But it is more than just a gimmick, as with the creepy Busgy Malone (1976), with its pre-teen gangsters talking tough and shooting each other. Brick reinvents noir as a teen genre, while articulating the usual adolescent angst about misunderstood love and cliques. All this helps highlight the basic American-ness of the form, as the seedy underworld of postwar America readily translates into the sunny fields and parking lots of an upper-middle class high school.

But Brick does something else as well.

Noir's male heros were not straight-arrow John Wayne types, but often perplexingly shifty, but there was always something explicitly queer about the films: the explicit homo relationship between Glen Ford and George Mcready in Gilda (1946), Clifton Webb's Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944), Peter Lorre's Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941)-- as well as dozens of others-- all drip with sexual ambiguity that fueled the basic discomforting, and anti-normative sensibility. (No surprise that Cornell Woolrich, whose novels became popular noir films-- from Val Lewton's The Leopard Man (1943) to Hitchcock's Rear Window (1956) to Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968)-- was haunted by his queer sexuality in his life and writings.)

In the contemporary world of Brick American masculinity has undergone enormous changes-- being a "man" in 2006 is a lot different than in 1946. But the queerness of noir has only seeped to the surface. While there are no overt gay characters here-- similar to how Waldo Lydecker was coded in Laura-- they all seem queer. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Brendan feels dangerously close to his characterization of Neil in Mysterious Skin-- sure he had a girlfriend, but he hardly seems heterosexual. The same is true of the other male characters-- Lukas Haas's The Pin (the drug dealer), Matt O'Leary's The Brain (the nerdy kid), and Noah Fleiss's Tugger (the thug) all seem to be based on gay types. Part of this is just classic noir-- Rian Johnson is so acutely aware of this history it is unimaginable that he would have missed that. But part of it is also the result of the queering of American youth culture. Queer-- from gay to non-masculine to hyper-masculine to non-normative-- guys are hotter, more alluring.

In many ways, it's the flipside of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," making gay men more dangerous not more normative. And it is certainly a lot more interesting.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com