Often the scariest moment in a film noir or thriller isn’t the surprising double cross, the hideous betrayal, gruesome violence or shocking denouement. Rather it grows subtly early in the film like a demon seed when you recognize someone quite familiar in one of the emotionally damaged characters – yourself. As the plot moves along the fear that develops for the character goes beyond being a witness or an intellectual exercise. It becomes visceral plunging you to the primal level of raw identity.
Perhaps you recognized yourself in the all too trusting victim caught up in a maelstrom of a conspiracy, or the character who must relentlessly uncover the truth at all costs including ruining relationships and friendships because of a promise or self-promise, or even the darker side of yourself as the character whose insatiable greed and ego have broken its chains and escaped from its cage to wreck havoc on everyone everywhere.
The first step to understanding, and at least in some measure psychological recovery, is realizing that everyone has their flaws and foibles. The challenge is to mitigate them so they don’t sabotage your dreams or get you in trouble. Most of these problems are self-inflicted when you inadvertently and sometimes deliberately carry them over from your earlier years.
Ambition is a critical driver to success but when you cross that ethical, moral and legal line then it becomes a problem. The challenge is to immediately identify where those borders are. Red lights mean ‘stop’ yet confused and lost souls fail to recognize its meaning and blow past them leading to a nasty wreck. Complicating matters is that often the borders are difficult to identify because they’re more of a zone that a distinct line, becoming gradually darker gray like walking through a fog – hard to focus – even a willful inability to distinguish between right and wrong. It’s an imperceptible incremental change when privilege crosses over into entitlement, a favor performed becomes a regular obligation or duty, a special one-off first-class treatment becomes the new minimum standard.
And in those exceptionally good film noir flicks you recognize those flaws and foibles in multiple characters which make the film even more engaging and memorable. For me it’s The Counselor (2014) when each of the characters in their own way engage in over-stretch – a.k.a. greed for money, power, sex - when several of them openly admit beforehand that this high-risk deal shouldn’t be undertaken and climaxes with disastrous results.
The seductive yet dangerous component is that victim that gets sucked in and somehow escapes by the skin of his teeth and learns his lesson and lives happily ever after. Most people don’t. In real life they’re scarred after such an experience. The trick is to avoid getting into that jam in the first place by pushing away your demons – everyone knows whose theirs are – lurking the deepest recesses of our psyche. It’s the human condition that allows them to exist and sometimes thrive. Just make sure they don’t get too hungry to over-ride your good judgment.
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