MURDER IN HOLLYWOOD: Connecting Hardboiled fiction, Film Noir & the Black Dahlia
How Los Angeles’ most gruesome unsolved murder relates to female disembodiment in American cinema
This is an adaption of a graduation thesis written for The Piet Zwart Institute. It contains spoilers for The Black Dahlia, True Confessions, American Horror Story: Murder House and Sin City. It also contains graphic forensic photographs that some may find disturbing. Discretion is advised.
Introduction
In the summer of 2012, my stepmom hung herself. She had separated with my mom for almost a year then, but naturally, her premature death came a big shock to me. I was eighteen at the time, and had just graduated high school. I vividly remember watching Sin City with my mom, just a few months after the funeral. Halfway through the film, Bruce Willis’ character is strung up by his neck, and just barely stays alive by tiptoeing on a stool (figure 1). When the scene came up, my mom burst in tears and didn’t stop crying for hours. It is perhaps no coincidence that I can still clearly remember this particular scene… its brutal violence amplified by the noir-inspired contrast and stark shadows.
When I was a teenager, I mainly used films and videogames to escape from my harsh home situation in which an alcoholic and verbally abusing stepmom created a unsafe environment. While she projected her frustrations about her personal struggle with identity and gender norms on me, I fled to my room and — ironically — watched films in which outdated gender norms were celebrated. I particularly enjoyed the simple but compelling narratives in classical thrillers, in which a detective had to solve a crime. I didn’t go to the funeral my of stepmom in 2012. Afterwards, my sister described the visible marks she’d seen on her neck, which the mortician had, apparently rather unsuccessfully, tried to cover up. Although I hadn’t seen my stepmom’s body with my own eyes, I could picture it easily. The image that formed inside my head was based on the numerous bodies I had seen laying in coffins and mortuary tables in thriller and horror films. Therefore, the ‘reality’ of death and violence had already mingled with the Hollywood images in my mind. Fictionalised crime helped me escape my personal horrors and perhaps even assisted in surviving it. But they also distorted and warped my views the world. Popular crime writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett gave rise to the so called ‘hard-boiled’ crime genre in the 1920s, in which rough private eyes shot their way through Los Angeles’ underbelly in order to get closer to the truth. Hollywood quickly caught on and morphed these dark stories into film noir. This gritty type of film was in high regard and its influence is still noticeable today. Sin City is a fairly recent example of how Hollywood still can’t seem to let go of its noir past.
There is an obvious male fantasy at work in the detective genre, one that’s has progressed from the literary world to the silver screen and is still predominant in contemporary media culture. A few years ago, my therapist asked me to describe the inner figure that had protected me during my youth. I told her it was a he, and that this man was very masculine and wore an old fashioned raincoat. I stated that he was reminiscent of Philip Marlowe, the moody, no nonsense detective often played by Humphrey Bogart. Much later I found out that Woody Allen wrote a film about an insecure man who seeks help from Philip Marlowe, much like myself at a younger age (figure 2). This proves that, however Philip Marlowe popularity has long since faded, the masculine fantasy that he represents, still lingers.
In this thesis, I want to explore how the masculine fantasies shaped by the hard-boiled crime genre has come off the page and live on in film. Furthermore, I want to show how a notorious Hollywood murder from 1947 correlates with the disembodiment of women by men in cinema. This thesis is about men cutting up women. Literately and figuratively. As case studies, I’ll dissect two pictures — True Confessions and The Black Dahlia that are based on the real murder case of Elizabeth ‘The Black Dahlia’ Short — one of Hollywood’s most notorious unsolved crimes — in which a woman was found cut in half. The films I’ll analyse both created a male-driven fictional story around the crime. Through exploring the history of the hard-boiled crime genre and how this genre relates to the Black Dahlia murder, I hope to demonstrate how women are disembodied on the silver screen and how this affects me as an male artist.
I Hard-boiled: forensic disembodiment and objectification in crime literature & cinema
As a teen, I read and watched detectives for the purpose of entertainment. In the current day, I look more critically and recognize many of the tropes, characters and narratives that were established in American crime literature from the 20th century. In this chapter, I’ll describe how this particular genre bled into film, and how its male-driven narratives and forensic processes manifested a tradition of disembodiment and objectification. Hard-boiled crime fiction Writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain gave rise to ‘a specific type of crime literature, known as the ‘hard-boiled’ crime genre, which often takes place in the Los Angeles of the first half of the 20th century.’ (Moore, 2006) In most of these novels, that were most popular between 1920s — 1950s, a male private eye is hired to solve a problem or a crime. ‘The hard-boiled private detective is among the most recognizable characters in popular fiction since the 1920s-a tough product of a violent world, in which police forces are inadequate and people with money can choose private help when facing threatening circumstances.’ (Moore, 2006) The crime stories are action-packed, contain explicit language and have easily recognizable and recurring archetypes; such as the femme fatale, corrupt cops and sleezy journalists. Chandler wrote that the ‘smell of fear’ generated by such stories was evidence of their response to the modern condition: ‘Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine-gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power.’(Chandler, 1950) The best hard-boiled crime writers used a recurring protagonist in their novels. The example that is most close to my heart is Chandler’s Philip Marlowe; the weary private eye that starred in over thirty stories and was later famously portrayed by Humphrey Bogart on screen. ‘Marlowe, Chandler’s virtuous and chivalrous “would-be-hero”, finds himself violating his own knightly codex on his impossible quest for a better world. Thus, Chandler renews the detective genre by violating the rules of the knightly hero and disrupting social stereotypes.’ (Biro, no date) Before the hard-boiled crime genre came into fashion, detective stories were constructed to follow the classic pattern established by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with ‘the application of a heroic puzzle-solving detective like Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin or Sir Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.’ (Biro, no date) Chandler’s Marlowe broke with the classical, well-mannered European detective established in the nineteenth century. The hard-boiled protagonist isn’t afraid to use violence as well as his connections to get to the truth. For me, Marlowe was the ideal vessel for my personal fantasies of traditional masculinity in a household that consisted solely of women. ‘Chandler’s private eye is not only an anachronism in the detective genre but also deviates from our expectations concerning the heroic. Chandler thus paradoxically violates both the norms of the detective genre and defamiliarizes our view of the society he is describing. […] Marlowe moves through Los Angeles constantly searching for ladies to rescue.’ (Biro, no date) As a teen, I didn’t realise yet thatin most of these hard-boiled stories, female characters are shallow victims that give the male protagonist purpose. The premise of The Lady In The Lake reads as following: ‘A couple of missing wives — one a rich man’s and one a poor man’s — become the objects of Marlowe’s investigation.’ (Chandler, 1943) The wives are fittingly described as objects, since they are plot tools that give the hero purpose.
Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle established a narrative where evidence is isolated — set apart, dissected and objectified. In their stories characters and the evidence became placeholders for a narrative, they produce a process of (forensic) dissection and disembodiment. Although the hard-boiled protagonist differs much from the well-mannered, scholar-like detectives in earlier crime novels, the process of forensic examination and dissection of evidence remained intact. The disembodiment of female characters is perhaps even more prominent in the hard-boiled genre, and often displayed quite literally. On the cover of The Lady In The Lake (Figure 3), note the disembodied hand sticking out the water. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe didn’t age well. I realise now that he is often homophobic, xenophobic, sexist and racist. I consider many of the stock characters that take a prominent place in the hard-boiled crime genre as problematic stereotypes. The femme fatale, for example, is a one-dimensional, devious woman that merely exist to create sexual tension and obstruct the main protagonist. ‘These novels simmer with resentment over perceived encroachment and a desire to contain female power.’ (Bancroft, 2018) Despite this, I always found a voyeuristic pleasure in watching the (erotically charged) interplay between the femme fatale and the hero. The male protagonists in the hard-boiled crime genre often lived my personal fantasies: playing into conservative ideas of masculinity and heroism, continuing in narratives in which there is little room for the female perspective. In many of these stories, the glamorous and wealthy inhabitants of Los Angeles mingle with its lowlifes. For me, these aspects fuelled my imagination of a darker and more enticing surrounding, for nothing remarkable happened in the small place that I grew up in. In the hard-boiled crime novels, however, the city’s dark heart is brooding with ‘dope fiends’, organised crime and gambling rackets. In many of these novels, the questionable history of Los Angeles is a viable part of the story. Shady deals, blackmail and political scandals get in the way of the investigation. These stories were written a time of social progress, enlightenment and social and industrial advancement. The Chandler characters feel like the messy biproducts of these developments and a counter to optimism. ‘These stories share a cold morality, a bleak view of a cruel world and guns.’ (Jordison, 2014) Perhaps this crime genre came into fashion because it’s morbid and pessimistic undertone reflected a recognizable part of American society, which struggled with poverty, crime and drugs. ‘Those novels and the subsequent movies were born of an especially downbeat era — an age characterised and shaped by first the Great Depression and then World War II. The spirit of those stories perfectly fit the zeitgeist and summed up […] a real, resonant sensibility felt in both America and around the wider world.’ (Clayton, 2014)
Film Noir
Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep and In A Lonely Place are just a few of the hard-boiled film adaptions that used Los Angeles’ dark side as their backdrop. The French called this particular type of American genre ‘Film Noir’ (Eggerston, 2019), A name earned for the genre’s dark subject matter and gloomy visual style. The cinematography of film noir is said to be derived from German expressionist films (Bergstrom, 2014) and is characterized by grainy black and white imagery, stark contrasts, and a playful emphasis on shadows and light. The aesthetics resonate with the sombre tone of the plots,
which play out in seedy motels, dark back alleys and dusty gangster holdouts. The editing techniques of film (cutting, splicing, assembling and disassembling) closely resemble the procedures that the male protagonist uses in hard-boiled narratives in order to separate evidence from singular reality, and therefore these narratives translated naturally to the silver screen. Film noir existed in a time when the deeply conservative Hays Code was still active. Between 1934 and 1968, American films had to abide to a strict list of moral ‘don’ts and be carefuls’; which included the prohibition of scenes with ‘profanity’, nudity or an implied sympathy for criminals. (Adebowale, 2020) Over the course of its existence, the rules became less strict or were stretched. During the forties and early fifties, however, the code still heavily influenced Hollywood and censored an industry that thrived on films in which sex and violent crime were key factors. These films lack explicit scenes, but often make use of cinematography and suggestive dialogue to imply violence or eroticism. The narratives in the genre were always centred on the male detective. Female characters merely existed as victims or served as romantic interest for the protagonist. In many noir films, the female character has to be rescued by the knight-like protagonist, embodying male fantasies of heroism and projections of female victimhood. To further build upon these fantasies, the camera — operated by men — was a tool used to further objectify and disembody its female subjects. Through close ups and the (re)assembling of images, film noir ‘cut up’ and rearranged female bodies in the studio and editing room (figure 4). Only now, in the post-me-too era, do I see how these traditional narratives and film techniques have distorted my personal view on masculinity and women. Film noir was one of the most prominent Hollywood genres of the forties and fifties. The numerous catalogue of hard-boiled crime novels lend itself perfectly for filmmaking, prompting major Hollywood studios to release multiple noir productions a year. Many authors in the genre were also screenwriters at the time and became a vital force in male-dominated Hollywood. The influence of film noir reached far and wide, and sparked successful European imitations, like Carol Reid’s The Third Man (Guardian Film)
In the late fifties, the golden age of film noir passed with the rise of Technicolor and the end of the classical Hollywood studio system. ‘Even so, the angles, aesthetics and beats that characterised those essential crime movies informed the genre films that followed in the post-studio system, post-Hays Code period.’(Clayton, 2014) Examples are Point Blank, The Long Goodbye and Chinatown. The 80s and 90s gave rise to a revival of so-called ‘neo-noir´ films. Movies like Body Double and Basic Instinct continued many classical noir traditions, although warping tropes and characters to serve a new audience. After the turn of the century, ‘neo-noir’ had become a genre that stood on its own, thus passing on the legacy of the hard-boiled crime into a new millennium. Examples of recent ‘neo-noir’ pictures are Inherent Vice and Motherless Brooklyn. The most remarkable thing about film noir is that it never seems to get out of fashion. ‘The best noir stories could have been written today, even if they’re 50, 60, 70 years old. […] Men in power taking advantage of the weak and getting away with murder — that’s the stuff of headlines today.’ (O’Callaghan, 2016) However, I think there is a deeper reason for the everlasting appeal of film noir though; every generation, the genre seems to reinvents itself, although the underlining power of Los Angeles crime fiction is the way it captures the dread and anguish of urban existence. ‘Aside from the aforementioned aesthetic allure, film noir is all about dwelling in — or at least dipping your delicately painted toes in — darkness.’ (Clayton, 2014)
In the next part of this thesis, I’ll briefly explore the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short and analyse two modern movies that were based on the case in order to demonstrate how this particular crime — and its fictionalised adaptions — display the interrelation between the hard-boiled crime genre, the disembodiment of women and the apparatus of film.
II Murder in Hollywood: The Black Dahlia
If there is one crime that feels like it comes straight out of a hard-boiled crime novel, it must be the murder of Elizabeth Short. Like numerous internet sleuths before me, I got captivated by her case when I first came across it and spend hours looking at the theories and evidence that is circulating online. Significant is that this 1947 murder has multiple tie-ins with Hollywood and the apparatus of cinema, which I will point out in this chapter. The Murder of Elizabeth Short ‘On the morning of January 15, 1947, a mother taking her child for a walk in a Los Angeles neighbourhood stumbled upon a gruesome sight: the body of a young naked woman sliced clean in half at the waist. The body was just a few feet from the sidewalk and posed in such a way that the mother reportedly thought it was a mannequin at first glance. Despite the extensive mutilation and cuts on the body, there wasn’t a drop of blood at the scene, indicating that the young woman had been killed elsewhere. […] The young woman turned out to be a 22-year-old Hollywood hopeful named Elizabeth Short — later dubbed the “Black Dahlia” by the press for her rumoured penchant for sheer black clothes and for the Blue Dahlia movie out at that time.’ (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
The murder would go down in history as one of the most notorious unsolved crimes in the history of the United States. An ensuing media frenzy followed, thanks to the ‘brutal, misogynistic and ritual nature’ of the gruesome killing. [BBC, 2017] ‘The murder was never officially solved, only adding to the crime’s mystique. ‘There was also the connection to the glamour of the area. She lived in Hollywood, had aspirations to be an actress.’ (Martin, 2017). These aspects fuelled my personal fascination with the case and elevated it to a crime of mythical proportions in pop culture. ‘The slaying of Elizabeth Short launched one of the most celebrated manhunts and crime-related media spectacles in history. The Black Dahlia case has come to symbolize a sordid and politically corrupt aspect of mid-century Los Angeles that coexisted, and sometimes commingled, with the Hollywoodwealth and glamour.’ (Nelson, Baybliss, (2006) As the Los Angeles Police Department almost completely consisted of men at the time, the murder was mainly investigated from a male perspective. At the time of the murder, ‘Los Angeles had a rich newspaper and tabloid culture. All of these papers had underworld columnists… crime reporters. Crime was central entertainment in a pre-tv world, when people still got morning and evening newspapers.’ (Buntin, 2019) Early crime reporters from the Herald dubbed it ‘The Werewolf Murder,’ says John Gilmore (1994), as to further sensationalise on the gruesome details that slowly leaked out. According to the 2019 podcast Root of Evil (Gentille, Y & Pecoraro, R, 2019) there was a Black Dahlia cover story in the LA Times for thirty-one straight days (figure 5). In his book Hard-boiled Hollywood, Jon Lewis (2017) claims that ‘the tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood’s glitzy façade, exposing the city’s ugly underbelly of corruption, crime, and murder.’ To me, the gruesome tale of Elizabeth Short symbolizes LA’s dark heart and embodies my personal fascination with the interwovenness between Hollywood, misogyny and (true) crime. Exquisite corpse Steve Hodel, who worked as an LAPD homicide detective for years, wrote a book called The Black Dahlia Avenger, in which he claims that his father — George Hodel — is Short’s killer. This book prompted writers/historians Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Baybliss to investigate the murder and its possible links to the surrealist movement; which has a long history of portraying women dissected at the waist or ‘in pieces’. In their book Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, they propose the theory that the murderer was familiar with surrealist art and that the crime might have been a macabre version of an ‘exquisite corpse’; an artistic method of collectively assembling words or images. The book connects surrealist collage, and its ideas of dreams with the apparatus of film. Luis Bunuel’s famous surrealist 1929 film Un chien Andalou starts with a scene in which a man seems to slice a woman’s eye but then quickly cuts to the slicing of an animal’s eye. The scene plays with the idea of splicing as an editing technique and the metaphysical suggestion of a cut. Surrealist artists had a fascination for female mannequins; which they often used in art pieces and exhibitions and presented as ‘readymade’ art pieces (see figure 6). These objects can often be detached or dismantled into pieces. Aside from this, the surrealism movement is known for its interest in the subconscious and dreams of erotized violence. ‘These themes provide a meaningful backdrop against which to consider the Black Dahlia murder.’ (Nelson & Baybliss, 2006)
Feminist author Adriana Cavarero coined the term ‘horrorism’, which is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Elizabeth Short, mutilated and cut into pieces, fits perfectly into Cavarero’s theoretical framework. ‘What is unwatchable, above all, for the being that knows itself irremediably singular, is the spectacle of disfigurement, which the singular body cannot bear.’ (Cavarrero, 2008) However true this statement rings in real life, it doesn’t explain why people like me can’t seem to get enough of fictionalisations in which female victims are cut up. This ‘spectacle of disfigurement’ and an interest in the macabre seems to be the main reason why so many writers, filmmakers and artists find the need to explore or fictionalise the murder or Elizabeth Short. Multiple novels, motion pictures and shows were based on Elizabeth Short’s death, and the case was featured on countless true crime shows and documentaries. In American Horror Story: Murder House, Elizabeth Short’s ghost (Mena Suvari) cries and exclaims that that she had dreams of becoming famous, but was found ‘naked, on display for the whole world to see.’ Another spirit (Kate Mara) responds; ‘You were the front news of every paper for two months.’ Elizabeth Short lightens up and utters; ‘I really did become somebody,’ The dark scene perfectly captures the morbid irony that is found in Hollywood’s most notorious murder case, and the way the media have exploited Short’s death for profit. In the following two chapters, I’ll analyse two films based on the hard-boiled literature based on Black Dahlia murder, in order to explore how fictionalisations of this crime make use of the forensic process of disembodiment as described in chapter I. For each film, I’ll analyse three scenes which involve a part of forensic examination: the discovery, autopsy and the examination of the crime scene. Finally, I’ll discuss the movie poster for each film.
III Case study 1: True Confessions (1981)
True Confessions is centred on a LAPD detective Tom Spellacy (Robert Duvall) that tries to solve the case of young woman that is found cut in half, while reconnecting with his brother Des (Robert DeNiro), an ambitious monsignor. The screenplay was written by John Gregory and Joan Didion, and was based on Gregory’s novel of the same name. ‘It is a Los Angeles more or less familiar from dozens of other movies […] small town, really, where the grafters and the power brokers know each other.’ (Ebert, 1981) The detective that is put on the case checks all the boxes for a classical hard-boiled crime protagonist. He is everything that I am not; rational, hot-tempered and conservative. The only thing we have in common is the obsession for the case; a desperate need to solve it.
Discovery
The scene where the body is discovered, differs little from how Elizabeth Short was found. The body parts of the female victim (called Lois Fazenda in this adaption) are found in a vacant lot at the edge of a shabby LA neighbourhood, laying naked and torn in half, amidst rubbish. In the film, the two halves are found far apart. Simone Weil (1940) wrote that ‘violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing’. On the set of this film, this statement rang true quite literally, for the victim’s halves are artificial props on a set. (figure 7) As the photographs of the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s corpse prove, the scene was teeming with reporters and police men. (figure 8)
In the adaption, the discovery of the murder plays out in a similar way. The only ‘woman’ on the scene is the cut-up corpse. What remains of her is subjected to the male gaze; the police men swarm the premises around her naked remains like hungry gulls looking for food. In both figure 7 and 8, the discovery looks like a spectacle. The detective briefs the protagonist while a photographer takes photos of the victim’s lower half, further reducing Lois’ remains to pieces of evidence. ‘Photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.’ Wrote Susan Sontag (1977). This scene displays the cinematic distortion of the male gaze, as enabled by a forensic process. Lois Fazenda is no longer a human being, she has been reduced to two forensic objects of evidence at the mercy of the men that investigate them. Autopsy Investigator Tom later visits the morgue to learn more from the coroner. As a viewer, I am present in the room; taking on the role of observer, or an assisting detective, perhaps. The most striking difference between the forensic photos and fictionalised victim (Amanda Cleveland), is the absence of the facial wounds; especially the ‘Glasgow smile’ (see figure 9). The movie victim’s face appears somewhat angelic, almost statue-like. The wound of her dissection is neatly stitched up and a table conveniently covers the part where her body was severed. The bruise on her head is the only sign that violence was inflicted upon her.
‘All images that display the violation of an attractive body are, to a certain degree, pornographic. But images of the repulsive can also allure,’ (Sontag, 2003) In light of this statement, I think it’s important to consider that Amanda Cleveland, who played the ‘corpse’, was a Playboy model. A detail that illustrates the link between violence and erotica that is established in this scene. Perhaps the harsh reality of death is too graphic for the filmmakers to show, for the gruesome autopsy photos of Elizabeth Short (figure 10) contrast sharply with the romanticised way the victim is presented in the autopsy scene. In the forensic images, short’s eyes are halfway closed, her face is heavily battered and there are several cutting wounds visible on her breasts and lower body. Even I flinch as the sight of these photographs; the cold display of a senseless death.
In True Confessions, the press labels the victim as ‘The Virgin Tramp,’ for they find out that Lois was a Catholic and a prostitute and thus use this information to the murder into a sensational spectacle. Although Elizabeth Short was never proven to be a prostitute, the victim in the adaption is subtly blamed throughout the entire movie for hanging with the wrong crowd and being a ‘party girl’. ‘There’s not a foolish line in it [the film], nor a bland character,’ Canby (1981) writes, but he obviously forgot the dead girl. She, as a character, is hollow and almost functions like a prop; for I never learn anything about her personality or interests. Lois Fazenda is, quite literally, disembodied as soon as she enters True Confessions in the form of two props, and then, over the course of the film, what remains of her in memory is criticized and defiled.
Examination of the crime scene
Detective Tom eventually discovers that a sleazy porn producer is involved. Lois stars in a ‘stag film’ that is a recurring trope in fictionalisations of the Black Dahlia case, despite the fact that such a film was never found. Aside from True Confessions, a porn plays a vital role in The Black Dahlia, which I’ll discuss later. It was also a plot point in the videogame LA Noire. In one scene, I watch along with two detectives as Lois Fazenda undresses (figure 11) The fact that many fictionalised stories based on the Black Dahlia case involve a porn, says something about the male fantasies that are so easily projected on this crime story, and further links eroticism with violence; assisting in the eradication of the victim’s personality. Because the film portrays the victim based on Short as a prostitute, which, in the eyes of the protagonists as well as the media, means she had it coming. Post-mortem, Lois is constantly belittled, blamed and given a mocking title by sensationalist media. Throughout this misogynistic process, Lois Fazenda’s humanity is erased.
After discovering new evidence in the stag film, Duvall’s character follows up and discovers an abandoned movie set: the place where Lois was tortured and killed. Tom opens a backdoor and finds a bloodstained matrass. A trail leads to a bathtub where the victim was drained of blood. Nor the camera nor the detective linger longer than necessary at the crime scene, and after I’ve seen the bathtub for two brief seconds (figure 12), the detective leaves the room and draws his final conclusions. What’s notable, is that the detective finds the scene on his own. In contrast to discovery site, riddled with reporters and detectives, there is an absent space… no body. The crusty red blood that trails from one horrific scene to the next is the visual manifestation of the violence that remains invisible. With a face of anguish, Tom visualises the horrors that occurred. I see a the man coming to terms with the violence that another man has inflicted upon a woman. What he sees is the rampage of a monster… and it reminds him a little bit of himself.
This cathartic scene intelligently borders between discomforting realness and the notion that it’s all just make-believe… Staged. This particular scene has basis in reality: the murder spot was found two years after the murder in Los Angeles (Rosen, 1949) although it was a house instead of a movie set. The examination of the crime scene in True Confessions is an addition that merely serves the redemption of the protagonist. He cracks the case through clever detective work, and therefore plays out my fantasy of solving the murder. The film is not about the victim, but uses a real life murder as basis for a tale about two brothers. Two clever but emotionally incapable men, both powerful in their own way, but each dictated and restrained by hierarchic powers and societal rules.
Poster
The poster for True Confessions (figure 13) shows a picture of the two stars. A female leg is put over it. It represents the victim as perceived through a male gaze; her stockings (which the victim in the film doesn’t even wear) are added to create associations with prostitution and eroticism. There is no face, no body. Just a leg; an object of desire. Only when looking closer, I notice a splash of blood. The rest of the victim’s body is excluded from the poster, as is the identity of Lois Fazenda in the film; where her murder is merely treated as a compelling puzzle for the male protagonist and me, the viewer, to obsess over. The poster couldn’t be more fitting, for the movie cuts the horror into digestible parts while the actual violence is never shown; excluded. The victim is anonymized and sexualised; her death little more than a masculine fantasy of eroticized violence. The poster, like the film, uses the ordering of images to encourage dissociation with the female victim so the focus stays on the male heroes; the two brothers that are centred in the image. As the tagline suggests, the men are trapped by a murder… imprisoned in the wire-like stockings of the victim. The metaphor removes the victim as central figure and beacons the message that this film is more about the struggle of the protagonists than her victimhood.
IV Case Study 2: The Black Dahlia (2006)
In Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia, two policemen see their personal and professional lives fall apart in the wake of the Elizabeth Short’s murder investigation. The film was based on the 1987 novel of the same name by James Ellroy; a heavily fictionalised account on the case. Despite being based upon the critical acclaimed novel, the movie was received badly, both critically and commercially. The only thing critics applauded was Mia Kirshers performance, who plays Elizabeth Short in audition tapes that are scattered throughout the movie. In one of these scenes, she crawls towards the director that’s giving her instructions. De Palma himself voices the director; implying himself as a culprit of her abuse. In these dreamlike fragments, Elizabeth Short is a melancholic but pathetic figure… desperate for fame and not afraid to use her body to get what she wants. A hybrid between a femme fatale and an insecure, wannabe starlet with spooky blue eyes. The scenes amplify the idea that the victim is held on a leash by Hollywood; a male-dominated world of powerful men. The detective on the case watches these pieces of film with a mixture of fascination and disgust. At the heart of this film are two buddies/co-workers Dwight ‘Bucky’ Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) and I would argue an homosexual element to their relationship is implied. In the first part of the film, the two men fight each other bare chested under their boxing aliases Mr. Fire and Mr. Ice. This violent physical confrontation marks the beginning of their companionship in both work and private life. Later, they even share a wife — Kay (Scarlett Johansson) — a scarred beauty that functions both as an object of desire as well as a symbol for 1940s domesticity. She dresses in white for most of the film, in contrast with the Dahlia, known for her dark attire (figure 14). Both are victims of (sexual) abuse, but Kay is eager to put her dark past behind to play out the traditional role of housewife, while Elizabeth gets murdered for her promiscuous behaviour. Female characters are literally and figuratively perceived through the gaze of men in this film and the two most important women are visually rendered as polar opposites. They both conform to 1940s Western beauty standards, but aesthetically represent dark versus light. The women are allegories — either victim or survivor; but always suffer by the hand of men.
Discovery
The film spends its first twenty-five minutes establishing the ‘buddy-cop’ relationship between the protagonists; experienced LAPD detective Lee Blanchard and rookie Josh ‘Bucky’ Hartnett. While on a raid, they conveniently notice several cops rush over to a corpse. (figure 14). Not much later, reporters breach the perimeter and flash their cameras at the gruesome discovery. As in True Confessions, everything happens similarly to the actual discovery of Elizabeth Short’s remains. But instead of lingering his camera on the corpse, ‘De Palma defies typical mystery/horror conventions by not displaying her mangled body in its entirety. Instead, he basically only shows the enthusiastic crowd of men […] hovering over her, taking notes and photographs, muttering about the case.’ (The Film Stage, 2016) De Palma seems aware of the male gaze and mirrors it back to me; showing the muttering cops from a Short’s perspective. ‘A single shot is dedicated to showing Elizabeth Short’s face — when a hungry crow pecks away at her cheek. An apt metaphor.’ (The Film Stage, 2016)
Autopsy
When Bucky and Blanchard later visit the morgue, again, a group of men eagerly hovers over the body, taking notes (figure 16). The scene is shot from above and slowly pans down, implying me as a spectator, who — almost like a Peeping Tom — takes a closer look at the many inflictions on the dead girl’s body, which are almost complety consistent with the ones Elizabeth Short suffered. The scene feels perverse and invasive… as if De Palma is mocking the victim through this forensic process. ‘One of the cops asks, “Is it okay if I smoke?” The doctor jokingly replies, “She won’t mind!” Elizabeth Short is already no longer a woman, no longer someone to be courteous and considerate of.’ (The Film Stage, 2016).
Instead, she quickly becomes a canvas upon which the male characters project their fantasies. During the investigation, Bucky gets involved with troubled rich girl called Madeleine (Hillary Swank) that gets a kick out of impersonating the Black Dahlia. Bucky starts an affair, but this cheap impersonation of the ‘real’ Elizabeth Short can’t compete. Housewife Kay, patiently waiting for him at home, is no match for the necrophiliac fantasies he tries to play out with Madeleine. Meanwhile, his partner Lee slowly loses his mind as he subjects the guilt he feels about the vanishing of his younger sister to the case. Ellroys story unapologetically mocks the men that are projecting their fantasies upon the victim, and forces me, the (male) viewer, to reflect on my own complicity. ‘In many respects, the corpse of a woman is the ideal vessel for the hopes and desires of the men burying her. She can be anything they want her to be — a dream girl (Bucky’s ideal), an opportunity to retroactively be a hero (Blanchard’s take), a slut who had it coming (Elizabeth Short’s father’s opinion), on and on. The ultimate fantasy.’ (The Film Stage, 2016) The media are just as guilty… exploiting the crime; further objectifying and disembodying the young woman that wasElizabeth Short. In this movie, almost everyone is complicit. The only one that isn’t, is Kay; the obvious allegory for the suburban dream wife.
Examination of the crime scene
Detective Bucky drags the audience through the film with a narration of his thoughts. As De Palma is known for exhausting certain genre tropes through exaggeration and reference, I can only speculate if he deliberately turned the protagonist into such a film noir cliché. He mutters quasi-poetic one-liners while doing what gumshoe detectives do; going over clues while drinking whiskey, breaking the law and shooting people that get in his way. Just as in True Confessions, a stag film is found, and Bucky finds the scene of the crime because he connects a clue from this film to Madeleine. That further leads him to unfold a complicated plot. It turns out that Short was killed inside a barn on Hollywood(land), owned by the father of Madeleine; a crooked estate magnate called Emmett Linscot. Bucky breaks the lock and finds an improvised torture chamber (figure 17). As in True Confessions, a bloody mattress is the central piece of evidence. But here there is also a strand of black hair and an eerie clown painting, explaining the Glasgow smile. The movie then explicitly shows the torture and murder through flashbacks for shock value. Later, Bucky finds out that the unhinged Ms. Linscot murdered Short out of envy. I find it notable that a woman is the culprit; for the actual suspect list consists solely of men. Writer Ellroy stated that he wrote the 1987 book in order to cope with the unsolved murder of his mother, that was found dead in a vacant lot when he was still a kid, much like Short.
According to Ellroy, the book ‘Is an attempt to honour two women who had died too young: Betty Short and Jean Hilliker. (Ellroy, 2020). Ironically, Ellroy earlier claimed that Short pawned his ‘lifelong dialogue with misogyny.’ (Ellroy, 2006). The female characters in The Black Dahlia are either a pathetic failure (Short) or a crazy degenerate (Ms. Linscot, Madeleine). The only sane person is Kay, that escaped her abusive past to become a nuclear housewife with the wits and curves of a femme fatale. Unfortunately, Kay is a living fantasy, and rather than feast on it, the male protagonists grow obsessed with the mythical Black Dahlia. They chase her ghost in order to find redemption or fulfill their darkest desires. But they all fail and eventually succumb to their fantasies.
Poster
The poster for The Black Dahlia shows Short (Mia Kirshner) looking vacantly at the sky, the dripping lipstick in the corner of her mouth referencing her ‘Glasgow smile’ (18). It hints at the brutality of the murder without actually showing the violence (and thus gets around strict laws for theatrical posters). Short is pale and expressionless; almost like a mannequin or a waxlike doll. The profile of Kirshner’s pale, model-like face contrasts starkly with the black background. Just as is the case with her pseudonym, Elizabeth Short is turned into an object that functions as a symbol, or a representation of the victim and her mythical place in pop culture. On the poster she lingers somewhere between dead and alive; she is still attractive enough for me to be compelling, but her glazy eyes eerily signal that she is likely dead. I find an almost necrophiliac quality in this the image; treading a line between disturbing and intriguing. To put Elizabeth Short solely on the cover was a daring move, though, even more so because Mia Kirshner was not an established actress at the time. Perhaps the lack of prominent Hollywood stars on the poster amplified the movie’s poor box office results; The Black Dahlia earned back half a million dollar short of its budget. On the cover of the DVD/Blu-Ray release, however, the three main stars were put prominently in the center, while the Dahlia is absent. As with the poster for True Confessions, the victim’s face is excluded from the image.
Conclusion
Over the course of the 1920s, the hard-boiled LA crime genre broke with the conventional crime fiction by introducing a new type of rough protagonist against the backdrop of Los Angeles underbelly; reflecting the downside of modern developments and America’s problems with crime and corruption. This type of narrative broke with many tropes from earlier detectives as made popular by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, but replaced the classical detective for a rougher antihero, while further building upon a forensic process of objectification and disembodiment. With the rise of Hollywood, this process, as well as character tropes, naturally transcended from the hard-boiled crime genre into film. Stories of hard-boiled crime writers turned into film noir: a movie genre with a dark visual language, derived from German expressionist film. The genre reinvented itself over the years, but its source in the hard-boiled literature genre is still noticeable in contemporary cinema. Film, with its editing techniques and cutting, embodied the forensic processes of investigation; in which men isolate, disembody and objectify evidence.
The murder of Elizabeth Short — better known as The Black Dahlia — was committed in 1947, when the popularity of hard-boiled crime fiction was at its peak, mirrors the exploitative, misogynist nature of post-war Los Angeles, in which the police force was an male-driven force and sensationalist media capitalized on crime stories. The mutilation and the display of Elizabeth Short correlates with the themes found in surrealist art and the apparatus of film. The murder perfectly fits into Adriana Cavarero’s theoretical framework of ‘horrorism’: a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration. In order to further understand the connection between the forensic disembodiment, the Black Dahlia murder and modern cinema, I analysed two films that were based upon the case. True Confessions takes a classical approach to the LA crime genre. The central murder merely operates as a plot motif in the story of two brothers. The detective functions as a flawed but righteous antihero through which the viewer can solve the case that is based upon the Black Dahlia murder. It first dehumanizes the female victim by portraying here as a promiscuous, so she can become a forensic object of evidence; a puzzle for the protagonist and viewer to solve. The film establishes a link between eroticization and violence, which is underlined by the poster, in which a bloody female leg in stockings is shown over the faces of the two male protagonists. In The Black Dahlia, two men are also starring, but here masculinity is defined through obsession and projections of guilt and sexual desire. Elizabeth Short is a mythical victim; prompting the two male protagonists to project their obsessions and (necrophiliac) desires upon her. Just as in True Confessions, this film uses both the camera as well as the narrative to disembody the female characters and metaphorically cut them into pieces; turning them into forensic objects. While True Confessions carefully anonymises the victim through narrative denigration and cinematic objectification, as to make room for the male narratives, The Black Dahlia does something else. Here Elizabeth Short is given a voice through audition tapes that the detective watches throughout the film. These fragments, however, reveal that Elizabeth Short — as in True Confessions — is a promiscuous and pathetic figure, an image that conflicts with the fantasies the male characters project on her. In both films, Elizabeth Short is revealed to have starred in a stag film, even though this has no basis in reality. Both films eagerly portray Elizabeth Short as a desperate starlet willing to everything for fame. She starkly contrasts with the character of Kay; a love interest of both the protagonists that is portrayed as a suburban dream wife. In the eyes of the male protagonists, the fact that the victim is promiscuous, justify her gruesome fate. The Black Dahlia further puts emphasis on her as a victim of Hollywood; a male-dominated world that makes a living through the abuse and objectification of young women. Sontag’s theory of the erotization of horror is appliable here, for the female victim is sexualised through the necrophiliac fantasies. These fantasies echoes in the poster, in which Short is portrayed in a mannequin-like way; she is visualised as a necrophiliac fantasy of mythical proportions, lingering somewhere between dead and alive. Both films are centred on the relationship between two men, which are played by famous actors. In both pictures, the men share an intimate bond. There is a homosexual element to these relationships; especially in The Black Dahlia.
The two films, in their own way, alter historic events in order to fit their narrative; to play out masculine fantasies projected on the Black Dahlia. The main difference is that True Confessions displays masculine investment in female victimhood as a means to find redemption for both the protagonists and the audience. The Black Dahlia merely uses the murder case as a way to explore and cynically comment upon men’s delirious stake in the case; the detectives lose their sanity while chasing the ghost of the female victim. What’s important in the fantasies played out True Confessions, is that the ideal masculinity is defined by a classical, stoic rationality, defiance of rules and a resort to violence. Violence is shown as necessary and cathartic, while female victimhood is merely a plot motif. In order to (re)gain relevance, the male characters have to solve the case. The female characters are either dated stereotypes (such as the femme fatale or the hysterical mother) or objects that are disembodied or dissected by men through a forensic tradition, which they can process and obsess over. After examining the hard-boiled tradition and analysing two films based on hard-boiled fiction in which the Black Dahlia murder plays a key part, I can clearly recognize the interrelation between the hard-boiled crime genre, the apparatus of film and the Black Dahlia murder. Through cinematic analyses of two movies based on the case, I have shown how the hard-boiled crime fiction is a carrier for traditional masculine fantasies and allows the eroticization of violence through forensic investigation. The fictionalisations of the Black Dahlia case show that the apparatus of film is complicit in the anonymization, objectification and disembodiment of women.
[For a references list, check out the full thesis, posted on Academia.]
