Film Noir and Queer Utopias

Film Noir and Queer Utopias: in Cat People (1942) and Crimes of the Future (2022)

A thorn in the side of film criticism for its entire history, the designation ‘film noir’ has become one of the most indefinable yet influential concepts across screen studies. While film noir has been conceptualised disparately as genre or style, its most potent rendering is as affect. Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker “defin[e] noir in terms of negative affect” (2020, 4), arguing that noir should be thought of as a “deformation (a willful darkening or perversion) of other genres” (2020, 8). While most prominently noir affect is applied to detective and crime films, this essay focuses on horror films which incorporate noir affect. Horror films are always already preoccupied with negative affects; fear, abjection and disgust are their primary affective functions and as such, the genre lends itself to noir stylings. While it may be argued that all horror films incorporate a noir affect, the stylistic markers of film noir such as chiaroscuro lighting or canted camera angles are certainly not omnipresent across the genre. The designation of a horror film as ‘noir’ thus acts as a deformation of the already deformed, an act which opens up fertile ground for unconventional reading. 

In their focus on negative affect, noir and horror films often become reference points for marginalised communities for whom representation is lacking. For Breu and Hatmaker “noir becomes a way of staging various forms of social antagonism” (2020, 10), particularly issues related to sexual inequality. In his early and influential piece ‘Homosexuality and Film Noir’, Richard Dyer makes the claim that “some of the first widely available images of homosexuality in our time were those provided by the American film noir” (1977). The foregrounding of gender and sexuality as key themes in film noir necessarily raises questions of queerness and non-standard sexuality, questions which often yield unsatisfying answers. Dyer’s argument revolves around how the presence of queerness in classical American film noir “indicates the complex, ambiguous ways in which heterosexual women and men are thought and felt about in that culture” (1977). This conception is apt yet frustrating in the way that it fails to locate queerness at the centre of film noir. The overbearing influence of the Hays Code meant that explicit depictions of queerness in classical film noir were forbidden. Certain films, however, have come to be read through a queer lens. Jacques Tourneur’s horror/noir film Cat People (1942) is a film which deals explicitly with questions of non-standard sexuality. As such, the film has taken on a cult status with queer viewers who read the film's depiction of Otherness and ‘monstrous’ sexuality as a coded representation of queerness. Liberated from the strictures of the Hays Code, contemporary noir cinema is free to make more explicit associations between noir and queerness. Films such as Bound (1996) use noir stylings to portray explicitly queer relationships and stories, often foregrounding queer sexuality as a key theme. While explicit queerness is no longer strictly prohibited, allegorical representations of queerness have not entirely disappeared. David Cronenberg’s film Crimes of the Future (2022) is a graphic exploration of non-standard sexuality framed around contemporary political and environmental concerns. While the film does not feature explicitly queer characters or relationships, its ambiguous central conceit of bodily transformation has been popularly read in queer terms. 

José Esteban Muñoz writes that “queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (2009, 1). In his book ‘Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity’, Muñoz foregrounds hope as “both a critical affect and a methodology” (2009, 4). Muñoz’s methodology of hope was a critical intervention which responded to the antirelational turn in queer studies led by scholars such as Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. Antirelational theory rests on the negation of queer futures, in an “embrace of the death drive as jouissance” (De Lauretis 2011, 255). Muñoz refutes this negation, arguing instead that “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope” (2009, 11). Jack Halberstam also embraces radical queer utopianism, but is interested instead in exploring negativity as politically generative. Halberstam leans on ‘low theory’ and “popular knowledge to explore alternatives and to look for a way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations” (2011, 2). Halberstam embraces failure as a generative force, arguing that “failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well” (2011, 3). Halberstam’s project is one of rethinking possibility and about finding “alternative ways of knowing and being that are not unduly optimistic, but nor are they mired in nihilistic critical dead ends” (2011, 24). Teresa de Lauretis contends with both Muñoz and Halberstam while writing on Lee Edelman’s book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). De Lauretis is interested in exploring the political implications of queer futurity and considers the question of affect quite closely. “Negativity”, de Lauretis writes, “is not an attribute of politics or one kind of politics among others but an inherent character or structural aspect of society” (2011, 256). Film noir takes this negativity for granted and is uniquely concerned with depicting it. To consider queer utopias within noir horror is thus a matter of questioning whether noir affect can sustain an imagined queer future. The coded representations of queerness in film noir provide points of identification for queer spectators which can be generative. Identifications with ‘monstrous’ characters such as Irena in Cat People produce radical new modes of perception for the queer spectator which may challenge the negation of queer futurity. Furthermore, the possibility for queer utopias within noir horror rests on its ability to “imagine spaces of possibilities that don’t yet exist or are in the process of becoming” (Abdi and Calafell 2017, 362). The dystopian science fiction world of Crimes of the Future is one ravaged by environmental disaster and rebellious evolutionary advances, but Cronenberg does not approach his queer allegory without hope. Rather than resigning the world to its dystopian fate, Cronenberg’s film chooses to imagine the possibility of a queer future even in its dystopian constructions.

Cat People was the first in a string of low-budget horror films directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton for RKO Pictures in the 1940s. Others – such as I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and The Leopard Man (1943) – have also endured as cult films however it is Cat People which attracts the most critical attention from queer audiences. Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner make the contention that Cat People is one of the “earliest, most refined and elemental examples of transness as metaphor captured onscreen” (2024, 190). Their reading is specifically trans feminine and pays particular attention to how “trans women can have a particularly potent response” to Irena’s sense of anxiety towards her non-standard, Othered femininity (2024, 191). Maclay and Gardner note the image of Irena weeping in the bathtub as one that trans women specifically can relate to. The moment follows a tense scene where Irena stalks Alice, her romantic rival whose traditional femininity Irena is deeply jealous of.

The image of Irena in the bathtub, weeping at her inability to achieve the femininity that Alice represents is one which transgender women can find relatable and even comforting. This identification with characters who are treated as ‘monstrous’ is a sentiment which echoes Susan Stryker’s influential call for an embrace of transsexual rage and monstrosity: “I assert my worth as a monster in spite of the conditions my monstrosity requires me to face, and redefine a life worth living” (1994, 250). In identifying themselves in the anxious ‘monster’ Irena whose desperation for a ‘normal’ womanhood is unfortunately relatable, trans women are able to regain control over their own perceived ‘monstrosity’; ‘monstrosity’ becomes a generative force which works towards the creation of queer utopias, rather than a limiting, grotesque designation in the present. Furthermore, Alex Zivkovic identifies a sense of ‘queer wildness’ in the film, arguing that the film's representation of “animality is intimately tied with representing sexuality” (2023, 236). The notion of queer wildness in the film is linked to the insufficiency of “static representation … to capture internal characteristics like wildness or queerness” (Zivkovic 2023, 241). Zivkovic argues that Tourneur and Lewton construct queer wildness through sustained fluid representations such as the use of darkness and shadows. The use of noir lighting here becomes the key method of conveying queer wildness; the darkness within the frame creates a sense of the unknown in the viewer. “The unknowability of darkness enables the imagination of spectators” to create images of wildness which may not even be present (Zivkovic 2023, 241). The scene where Alice is being stalked does not feature a live cat, yet the darkness of Alice’s environment operates as an optical illusion to allow the viewer's own fear to create the monster.

This portrayal of wildness is queer in its refusal to adhere to straightforward representations, drawing a connection between noir filmmaking techniques and queer readings of the film. 

David Cronenberg's most significant contribution to cinema is pioneering the subgenre “body horror”, a mode of cinema whose images possess a latent queerness which is ripe for reexamination. Maclay and Gardner propose that in their shared affinity for particular cinematic modes, transgender cinephiles create their own cinematic language of representation. They frame body horror films as “films that focus on the monstrous transformation of the body as a means of metaphorizing the experience and process of gender dysphoria” (2024, 177), writing at length on the possibility for trans readings of Cronenberg in particular. Cronenberg's films often defy generic classification, incorporating elements of horror, noir, science fiction, romance, action and even comedy. The influence of noir is particularly prominent on the structure of Cronenberg's body horror films which frequently revolve around a protagonist slowly unfurling a vast technopolitical conspiracy. In Crimes of the Future, protagonist Saul Tenser becomes entangled in political machinations involving police, fetishistic bureaucrats and subversive transhumanist organisations revolving around the rapid evolution of the human body caused by environmental disaster. Maclay and Gardner note the influence of noir in the “nocturnal aesthetic” of the film and in Tensers “coolness and ambivalence towards the authority figures he meets”, arguing that “the film presents how the status quo is often reinforced by those who operate as the agents of change or help enact it in the form of private enterprise, and government bureaucrats” (2024, 188). While a tagline as loaded as “surgery is the new sex” surely raises questions of the link between transness, surgical intervention and sexuality, the film's queerness is not limited to a superficial equivocation between its surgical focus and the lived realities of gender affirming care. Saul Tenser’s struggle against the rebellion of his own body is a familiar feeling to the trans spectator who has often had to grapple with their own bodily changes in a similar manner. When asked about his consistent removal of his novel organs by Timlin, a mousey bureaucrat, Tenser simply responds “Who wouldn’t?”

Tenser’s exasperation with bureaucracy is shared widely by transgender spectators whose avenues for healthcare are labyrinthine and kafkaesque, but his quiet refusal to succumb to his bodily transformations is another, more positive point of identification for transgender spectators. Tenser spends much of the film coughing, spluttering and writhing in pain, seemingly only finding relief while performing his live surgery art. Steffen Hantke argues that Cronenberg’s trademark use of special effects has been his “contribution to a strikingly postmodern concept of the self suspended between dystopian loathing and utopian transcendence of embodiment” (2004, 36). The highly eroticised live surgery scenes in Crimes of the Future serve this function well, using special effects to portray not only the grotesque impact dystopian society has had on the human body but also the transcendence – through artistic expression, surgical transformation and sexual liberation – of standard forms of embodiment. Cronenberg presents the surgery scenes in a highly aroused and sexual manner, drawing a connection between the surgical violence and a heightened, grotesque sexuality; as Timlin puts it: “surgery is the new sex”.

This embrace of the grotesque and the transcendence of standard modes of being and sexuality configures Crimes of the Future as a highly liberating allegory which not only questions how the present impacts queer bodies and lives, but which also places hope in the possibility of creating ways of being which may look like queer utopias.

The final scene of Cat People sees Irena unleash her animalistic sexuality in a confrontation with the caged panther she has been visiting throughout the film. The caged panther is the film's primary visual metaphor for Irenas repressed sexuality. Her final act in the film is that of freeing the panther, a symbolic act of acceptance of her queer wildness which ultimately destroys her. The final shots of the film focus on Irena’s corpse – a hardly identifiable human/cat hybrid shrouded in darkness – as Oliver and Alice look over it. Oliver remarks that “she never lied to us”, a moment wherein she is afforded some narrative sympathy and is “redeemed by the other characters” (Zivkovic 2023, 254). Irena’s death reads as an example of Halberstam’s ‘queer failure’;

while Irena fails to save herself from her own wild sexuality, the newly free panther becomes an image of liberated sexuality which represents new possible queer futures. While it may seem to be a pessimistic ending, there is hope to be found within it.

Crimes of the Future ends on an even more explicitly hopeful note. The end of the film presents a familiar scene of Saul Tenser struggling to eat, writhing in pain and anguish in his feeding chair before his assistant Caprice offers him one of the purple plastic synth bars consumed by the transhumanist characters in the film. The final shot of the film is a black-and-white close-up of Tenser which slowly zooms in on his face as he sheds a single tear, a shot which recalls Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). While Tenser’s expression is difficult to interpret, it is familiar to trans spectators as euphoria. In eating the synth bar, Tenser stops fighting against his body's rebellion and instead surrenders himself to it. Tenser’s single tear is one of bliss, a bliss not unlike that of gender euphoria. As Maclay and Gardner note, “many of [Cronenberg’s] films conclude in images of death, but Crimes of the Future offers an ellipsis, and in doing so finds something generative in contradiction” (2024, 190). There are extremely radical possibilities held within this ending – the euphoria of self-acceptance, transhumanist potentialities, liberation from denial – and hope for a queer utopia can be found in all of them. In the final moment of the film, Saul Tenser opens his eyes; one can only imagine that he sees the future.

While noir affect is that of negativity, there is nonetheless a distinct possibility for queer utopias which can be observed within its darkened, deformed frames. Noir horror films such as Cat People and Crimes of the Future offer allegorical representations of marginalised queer identities. These representations function as points of identification for queer viewers which are generative of new queer potentialities. There are queer utopias within these films; there is hope to be found even in the darkness.