Weird Sex: The Most Persistent and Censored Theme in Film Noir (this contains some spoilers for CHINATOWN)

(Some Chinatown spoilers ahead...you've been warned)

            It is hardly revelatory to point out that sex is a persistent theme throughout film noir and its antecedents in prose. What is interesting is the regularity in which not only sex but also sexual deviance and bizarre sexual relationships appear as central themes in the genre. What is of further interest is how the films produced under the Motion Picture Production Code (the Hays Code) attempted to suppress these themes but was only partially successful. The Hays Code forbade nudity (or even the suggestion of nudity), sexual perversion, prostitution and mixed-race sexual relationships. It also cautioned against revealing the technique of committing murder, the use of firearms, rape, and “excessive or lustful kissing” (Lewis 301). It is also worth noting that there is no definitive understanding provided for “sexual perversion,” although it most assuredly refers, at least in part, to homosexuality.[1] Although homosexuality and mixed-race relationships are not in any way deviant or perverse behavior, the Hays Code and many audience members would have held them as such because of antiquated, bigoted views created by the cultural climate of the post-Victorian, Christian West. With such stifling, yet vague, controls, one wonders how any noir films were made while maintaining fealty to the source material.

            Sadly, this discussion does not permit the space required for a reasonable survey of crime fiction of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s that served as the source material for many film noir features. These pulp novels were driven by graphic depictions of crime, loose women, and were adorned with lurid covers that typically featured a scantily clad woman in a vulnerable pose. They were also filled with incest, rough sex, and rape—the weird sex that would have been too taboo to even consider just a few decades earlier. In place of a broader overview, consider the following major works that were later translated into films under the Hays Code:

1.)   Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep: this story features young women who get caught up in a seedy sexual underground that involves drug use and is operated as a part of a pornography ring that serves a particularly “deviant” clientele. At one point Phillip Marlowe, the novel’s protagonist, poses as a homosexual to gain access to the secret pornography underground.

2.)   Dashiell Hammet’s The Thin Man: negative portrayal of homosexuals

3.)   Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon: portrayal of a homosexual (possibly mixed-race) relationship between criminals—this portrayal was also negative.

While this list is exceptionally (and almost embarrassingly) brief, it illustrates two significant points: first, it helps to demonstrate the sexual themes that permeated the hardboiled crime fiction novels that Hollywood began to rely on; second, it helps show the failure of the Hays Code to completely eliminate these factors. In Howard Hawk’s version of The Big Sleep, Marlowe still poses as a homosexual to gain entrance to a dubious bookstore. In John Huston’s adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, the homosexuality of Joel Cairo may not be explicitly mentioned but is made clear by his stereotypical mannerisms—mannerisms that were prescribed by Hammet’s source text to identify Cairo as homosexual.[2]

Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon

            To be sure, there’s nothing actually weird about homosexuality, but in the context of when these films were made and the novels were written, any portrayal of homosexuality would not only challenge audiences but unsettle them. Further, the film adaptations of these works show the relative impotence of the Hays Code. Even the inference of “sexual perversion” was decried by the Code (Lewis 301). The Hays Code would have banned homosexual behavior, but each of these instances were circumvented by clever screen plays and directors that slipped these actions in while simultaneously making the protagonist appear more heterosexual, “masculine” and virile.  To illustrate this, consider the following scene from Hawks's The Big Sleep: Marlowe is accosted by an overly flirtatious young woman who works at a shop across the street from the (now implied) pornography front, and what is significant about this scene is that it appears near the scene where Marlowe pretends to be gay. This scene with the young girl does not exist in Chandler’s novel, but it does allow the film audience and the censors the assurance that Marlowe is very much a heterosexual man—the type that attractive young girls just have to throw themselves at. This more dominant moment in the film would have satisfied the code and allowed a certain segment of the audience to escape with their worldview unchallenged.

            While homosexual characters and themes may have been subdued under the Hays Code, the rape and rough sex of many pulp crime novels remained intact in film versions. In fact, in some cases instances of rough sex were, ironically, emphasized or even added as a result of the Code. The sex scene in Wilder’s Double Indemnity is a key example of this. Walter Neff forcefully grabs Phyllis and is squeezing her so hard that he hurts her; she alerts him to this fact, but he does not ease his grip. Instead, she submits, they have sex, and then plot the murder of her husband. This tense sexual relationship did not exist in James Cain’s novel. It was a product of Wilder and Raymond Chandler’s script, which was written to placate the Hays Code. This sort of double standard demonstrates not only the strangely flexible nature of the Code’s application, but it’s willingness to specifically be flexible in instances where heternormative sexual behavior is rewarded and women are either forced to submit themselves to men, or “cannot resist” the male protagonist.

            While the Hays Code may have necessitated some toning down of the source texts for many of Hollywood’s most famous noir films, later films were not bound by such restrictions. Films like Roman

Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes in Chinatown

Polanski’s Chinatown were a direct descendent of film noir and hardboiled crime fiction. Moreover, because the Hays Code did not restrict Chinatown, it was free to remain true to the sexual themes of the pulps. Chinatown was not based on a pre-existing novel, but Robert Towne’s original script held true to all of the tropes and themes of the hardboiled detective story. As a result of the pulp influences and the absence of the Code, Towne’s script did not have to hint at sexual deviance, it made it plain and disturbing. Chinatown offers viewers not just a bland, sexual relationship between the detective protagonist, Jake Gittes, and his femme fatale/damsel in distress, Evelyn Mulwray; it complicates that relationship with the introduction of Katherine Cross. The character of Katherine drags the viewer down into a disturbing world of incest, rape, and pedophilia amongst Los Angeles’s most powerful people. The incest subplot, while unsettling in the film, is precisely in keeping with the tropes of the hardboiled crime story and secures Chinatown’s place as child of hardboiled crime fiction and the noir genre—if not a noir film properly.

Hardboiled stories were often written for an audience that was increasingly disillusioned with the world around them, and the audience was also one that craved stories of sensational crimes—a trend that newspapers had been capitalizing on for nearly a century. These were also the same readers who would gobble up crime and horror comic books from newsstands before Estes Kefauver and the Comics Code Authority had them eliminated. The pulp audience was certainly a literate and thoughtful one, but not one that would be inspired by the then ancient mores of Victorian literature. While the demands of this audience would not be fully accommodated by Hollywood and the Hays Code, the Hays Code was simply not respected enough to be fully enforced. Hollywood would not allow audiences to fully experience film versions of the violent and sexually driven novels and pulps they were reading, but Hollywood could not completely deny audiences of their demands either. There was too much money to be made. Instead, directors like Wilder, Hawks, and Huston, worked around the Hays Code to give audiences what they demanded while at least feigning fealty to the suspect Code. It is not necessarily troublesome that audiences were drawn to sensational crime stories or sex, even “unusual” sex—these are themes prevalent in all forms of literature and storytelling throughout history. What is troublesome, at least for modern viewers, is that audiences were drawn to stories that carried themes where homosexuality was treated as deviant behavior and women were treated as nigh-succubae or vessels for male sexual desire or perpetual victims of rape or other sexual violence. The Hays Code not only looked past its own guidelines regarding these issues, but also in many cases, encouraged them.

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[1] This is further supported by the fact that the code was popularly referred to as the Hays Code because of William Hays, who was a Presbyterian elder. In the 1920s ‘30s, Hays’s Presbyterianism would have assuredly led him to consider homosexuality sexual perversion. Furthermore, until 1974, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) held homosexuality as a mental disorder, again assuring that the “sexual perversion” of the Hays Code included homosexuality.

[2] It is worth noting that many cite Cairo as the first clear homosexual character portrayed in American film.