Penn: Night Moves (1975)

For the most part, film noir subsists on your awareness of a narrative you can’t quite piece together – a series of flash-points suspended in a sea of urban sprawl and atmospheric murk, it often makes you feel as if you could glimpse a city, a country, an entire system, if you could just ask the right questions. That’s taken to its logical conclusion in Night Moves, which despite being made in the mid-70s, feels more aligned with the original sprit of film noir than the nostalgic revisionism of, say, Chinatown – this is perhaps how Howard Hawks or Billy Wilder would look if they’d reached their peak thirty years later. At one level, that makes it more pessimistic and disorienting than even the bleakest moments in 40s noir, as Gene Hackman plays Harry Moseby, a P.I. who’s hired to investigation the disappearace of a wealthy L.A. socialite’s daughter, and quickly finds the case expanding to levels that he never glimpses until it’s too late, or, in some cases, never glimpses at all. That makes for an incredibly downbeat, depressive mood – too diffuse and distended to even offer the catharsis of despair – as well as a kind of distributed paranoia; by the end it’s clear that everyone Moseby has met has been implicated in some way, but the connections feel so intangible and speculative that it’s hard to build enough of a sustained conspiracy theory to really make the paranoia feel cathartic either. Although Moseby spends more time in New Mexico and Florida than Los Angeles, it doesn’t feel as if this criminal conspiracy really has a centre and a fringe, or more or less implicated parties – Miami and the Southwest just feel like outer suburbs of L.A., collapsing any distinction between film noir and film soleil. Like earlier noir directors, then, Penn takes the detective’s peripatetic amblings as an opportunity to trace out the fringes of that most uncontainable of American cities, if only through continually displacing them, taking us through a series of spaces that are as incongruous as they are continguous. Except that L.A., and whatever it stands for, has now spread out to colonise the entire country – the film doesn’t just climax at the edge of the continent, it climaxes at the edge of the continental shelf – meaning the flash-points are even fewer and farther between, while the intervening murk devolves into a series of spectacular underwater segments. In classical noir, mapping the city also meant mapping the movie industry, so it’s no coincidence that Harry’s case is all held together by the odd community of stunt doubles, which he briefly considers joining - and the trauma of the film is that not even its grungy realism can quite save it from that simulacral fate, just as Harry’s deepest, most private elegies for the Kennedy assassinations are finally co-opted into the conspiracy, part of a plan neither he nor the film can fully fathom.