I just finished this book, Perplexing Plots, by David Bordwell. It’s excellent. I don’t know that most of you would like it, but it was right in my sweet spot. The book came out in 2023, and I was sorry to learn that the author has recently died. He was already retired, and none of us live forever, but it still made me sad. Reading the book made me want to have a conversation with him.
Another way of looking at it, though, is that it’s wonderful that Bordwell managed to finish this book before he exhausted his allotted time on Earth. Also, he and his wife, Kristin Thompson, had a blog. Which I’ve added to the “Not currently active” section of our link page. Which I guess is where all blogs will eventually end up.
Experimentation
Regarding the book itself: Bordwell treats crime fiction and noir film in parallel, not comparing the two so much as considering them as a single entity (along with the now-minor field of crime/mystery stage drama). He draws connections between these popular forms (generally considered “lowbrow” or “middlebrow”) and “highbrow” modernist fiction.
One connection is the idea of experimentation. Modernist fiction is famously experimental. Bordwell argues that popular crime fiction and film have been able to get away with a lot of experimentation too, in part by working within familiar forms–he gives many examples, including the heist movies The Killing (Kubrick) and Pulp Fiction (Tarantino).
Rigor
Another connection between crime fiction and modernism, which I don’t recall explicitly mentioned by Bordwell, is the air of rigor. Modernist fiction, poetry, art, and architecture are associated with following strict, often unnatural-seeming rules, and there’s a sense that, to appreciate them, you need to give into their constraints. To say that you don’t like a modernist story because it makes no sense, or that you don’t like a modernist chair because it’s uncomfortable, that would be missing the point, as a key aspect of modernism is the rejection of traditional expectations and comforts.
Detective stories, and crime fiction more generally, have their own areas of rigor, from the “fair play” rules of the so-called golden age, to later expectations regarding characterization, point of view, and suspense. As with modernism, constraints can facilitate experimentation.
Thank you for this recommendation!! This is a book that I was not familiar with and it looks to be right in my area of interest. I recently discussed California noir fiction by discussing Raymand Chandler and Ross Mcdonald. Mcdonald has long been my favorite mystery writer because of the psychological twists in the books, usually centered on uncovered truths. It’s strange that, unlike Chandler, his books have not translated well to the screen.
Alan:
I recently read a book by Dennis Lehane and I was struck by how much it was a throwback to the Chandler style. The lead character was an unambiguously good guy, a tough guy who is always ready with the wisecrack and keeps getting beat up, etc.
I’ve read some of Lehane is the books are good. I don’t know if you have read Tana French’s two ‘Cal Hooper’ books, “The Hunter” and “The Searcher”. Hooper is a former cop from Chicago who moves to Ireland as a getaway spot. He ends up in an Irish Noir world.
I’m just happy that there are still good Noir writers around!
Please say the title of the book. I think I would enjoy reading that story.
Prayers for Rain. It’s the fifth in a series, and I haven’t read any of the others yet–I just happened to come across it in a bookstore. I don’t want to oversell it, but I liked it for what it was.
David Bordwell was a regular customer at a used book store in Madison where I worked in the 1990s. He was always very cheerful, always cracking jokes. Not surprisingly he bought a lot of film books, as well as cultural criticism. The one title I remember selling to him was The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste by Jane and Michael Stern.
WRT the fact that it’s a bummer Bordwell died, but a good thing that he got to write this book: a friend just sent me the quote “You can complain that roses have thorns, or you can rejoice that thorns have roses.” (He cites this as coming from ‘Ziggy’, so I guess that would be Tom Wilson or perhaps Tom Wilson II. But whoever it was, they seem to have appopriated it: according to quoteinvestigator.com prominent French journalist and author Alphonse Karr published a book in 1853 that included this poem (without attribution):
De leur meilleur côté tâchons de voir les choses:
Vous vous plaignez de voir les rosiers épineux;
Moi je me réjouis et rends grâces aux dieux
Que les épines aient des roses.
Which can be translated:
Let us try to see things from their better side:
You complain about seeing thorny rose bushes;
Me, I rejoice and give thanks to the gods
That thorns have roses.
“One connection is the idea of experimentation. Modernist fiction is famously experimental. Bordwell argues that popular crime fiction and film have been able to get away with a lot of experimentation too, in part by working within familiar forms–he gives many examples, including the heist movies The Killing (Kubrick) and Pulp Fiction (Tarantino).”
Valid point, but the still quite experimental Reservoir Dogs followed the conventions of the heist film much more closely.
The nearly silent heist in Rififi needs to be mentioned here as well.
Block’s decision to start aging Scudder produced one of the most notable portraits of a recovering alcoholic in American literature while his Burglar books have gone increasingly meta, culminating with The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown.
Speaking of playing with the medium, you need to read Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying. I can’t tell you anything more about it. Don’t try to find out anything more about it.
Just trust me (and Stephen King) on this.
Westlake also had fun with meta-fiction, particularly with the novel Jimmy the Kid.
I’ve not read the book, but I know Bordwell’s work fairly well. I followed the blog he and his wife Kristen Thompson wrote, packing it with long detailed entries. And I’ve read his book The Making of Meaning (1989) which is a loose cognitive account of how movie critics arrive and the meaning they impute to movies. He shows how different interpretive theories (e.g. Freudian, Marxist) lead critics to notice certain things about films and not others. Bordwell himself was interested in form, and studied it with rigor. He was a major force in contemporary film studies.
I’ve also had a bit of correspondence with him over the years. Some of it was on a particular kind of narrative form, known as ring-form or ring-composition, which I have also explored with the great anthropologist, Mary Douglas. He told me that same famous critics, whose name escapes me at the moment, had suggested that the original “King Kong” (1933) might be ring-composition. I took a look, and it is, which I explain in this post: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/10/beauty-and-beast-king-kong-as-ring.html
This idea of an “air of rigor” and the parallel between modernist constraint and the formal demands of crime fiction were so interesting. I can’t help but think about how that same aesthetic sensibility of controlled formality masquerading as truth permeates the way we tell stories with data in the social sciences and policy world.
Statistical models, like detective plots or modernist texts, are often structured within rigid conventions, and there’s a similar reverence for coherence or methodological elegance. But I wonder if the unyielding myth of rigor sometimes discourages us from questioning the deeper assumptions.
What might be the cost of relying too heavily on stories that feel rigorous, especially in fields like policy, where those narratives carry real-world consequences?