Noir Lightening!

Film noir seldom has the patience for unhurried romance. Plots are convoluted, emotions intense, and the flames of passion must ignite fast and furious. Not the long and tortured road of When Harry Met Sally or the “slow burn” of Pride and Prejudice. “When it hits you it’s like a two-ton truck,” says a nightclub singer in The Strip. "You feel like that."

Perfectly sensible people are victims. Brilliant and beautiful but sexually repressed psychoanalyst Ingrid Bergman falls head over heels for handsome and genteel but mysteriously troubled Gregory Peck in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound. Beholding his countenance for the first time, she is smitten as never before, and never imagined, and then drawn into his suite that night.

“Why am I here in your room?”

“Because something happened to us.”

“But it doesn’t happen like that, in a day.”

“It happens in a moment sometimes. I felt it this afternoon. It was like lightening striking…It strikes rarely.”

(They embrace. Her mind’s eye beholds a cascade of doors flinging open.) “I don’t understand how it happened.”

Film noir thrives on this visceral contact - a sudden compelling force that makes you act like a fool, leads you down dark alleys never contemplated. The things we do for crazy love. From the moment he beholds The Lady From Shanghai, Micheal O’Hara (Orson Wells) loses control:

Rita Hayworth in what came to be called the "Shanghai Dress.

“When I start to make a fool of myself, there’s very little can stop me. If I had known where it would end, I would not let anything start, if I had been in my right mind, that is. Once I seen her, once I seen her, I was not in my right mind for some time.”

Lighting can be mutual or a one-way, dead-end street. What if the object of affection is a narcissistic schemer? You become victim of a fool’s love. For you, it’s infatuation at first sight; for the other, manipulation at first sight. This is the grist of many a noir, and the culprit can be male or female. Vixens pull the puppet strings in Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice; evil, conniving men ruin innocent women’s lives in Gaslight and Sudden Fear.

Should you suspect - even when you know dammed well - someone is bad for you, it can be hard to break the bonds.

“If you don’t trust her, get rid of her,” a gangster advises a gangster.

“It’s a funny thing. Tory is a like a high-tension wire. Once you grab on you can’t let go, even if you want to. And I don’t want to.”  ~ Larceny

A woman confides to a confidant how a boyfriend mistreats her.

“Why didn’t you pull out?

“I don’t know. I just couldn’t. Sometimes you get in so deep you can’t get out. It got to be like a bad habit. Like drinking. You know it’s no good for you, but you want it just the same…Pretty soon the train is going so fast you’re afraid to jump.” ~ Outcasts of Poker Flats

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We still cling to lightening! and “the one.” We await magic. But has social media turned that passion into a fruitless, love-at-first-algorithm odyssey? Ironically, apps make love more difficult by transforming us into mass commodities, a buyer and seller simultaneously. The physical distance makes misrepresentation easier; the volume of choices induces paralysis. Perhaps we’ve become so attuned to the process we don’t recognize “the one” when we accidently bump into them on the street.