The Courthouse Monologue of a Quintessential Noir Hero
Robert Blake’s murder trial ended Wednesday with a touch of Hollywood. Standing before the Van Nuys courthouse, Blake gave a rambling monologue that echoed Raymond Chandler and the tough guy lingo of 1940s film noir. “I used to be a rich man,” he said. “Right now, I couldn’t buy spats for a hummingbird.”
Then, he talked about his plans. “I’m going to go out and do a little cowboyin’,” he told reporters. “You know what that is? Cowboyin’ is getting in a motor home or a van or something like that and you just let the air blow in your hair and you wind up in some little bar in Arizona someplace. You shoot one-handed nine-ball with some 90-year-old Portuguese woman who beats the hell out of you, and the next day you wind up in a park someplace playing chess with somebody -- and you go see a high school play where they’re doing ‘West Side Story.’ ”
Spats for a hummingbird? Cowboyin’? One-handed nine-ball? The language would be amusing if it weren’t so absurd. Is there a community on the planet -- was there one even before he was indicted? -- where Robert Blake might motor up and shoot a game of pool without inciting a media storm? No, this is a Hollywood fantasy, told in the vernacular of B-movies, of noir, with its black-and-white dialectic, its romantic idea of a small-town Americana that exists in counterbalance to the corruption of the city, by definition, degraded and depraved.
In many ways, Blake comes by these illusions honestly. A former child actor, he arrived in Hollywood in the 1930s, where his father, bitter at having to rely on a small boy for financial support, spent years terrorizing him. It’s a background not dissimilar to that of Perry Smith, the real-life killer Blake played in “In Cold Blood,” and its influence appears to have lingered. Why else would Blake carry the gun he famously forgot the night of his wife’s murder, or pal around with the kind of two-bit losers who ultimately turned on him: stuntmen and dopers who were only too happy to discuss a killing as if it were as ordinary as setting up a movie shot? Even the victim herself was a character from such a universe: A grifter with numerous ex-husbands and aliases, she ran scams on would-be lovers for years before she decided to up the ante by getting involved with Blake. She was, in other words, a femme fatale -- in the mold of characters played by Barbara Stanwyck or Lana Turner -- whose dream, friends said, was to marry a celebrity.
On the one hand, this is the stuff of personal psychology -- a defense mechanism or an Achilles’ heel. More to the point, though, it suggests something of how we live. The aesthetic of noir is, at the core, one in which nobody is innocent, and even the mighty can be taken down. That is a key part of its attraction -- not schadenfreude exactly, but a knowing cynicism, the sense that everything is degraded if you look closely enough. It’s what Blake meant at the courthouse when he said, “People drift from one side to the other every five minutes and you never know who’s on your side and who’s not on your side.” And he’s not just talking about his associates, but the audience. For us, cases like this offer a perverse reassurance, proof that celebrities can be as sordid as the worst of us, that there is nothing elevated about their lives. From O.J. Simpson to Phil Spector to Michael Jackson -- who seems increasingly noirish the more we know him, like a creepier version of Matthew Teran in Walter Mosley’s “Devil in a Blue Dress” -- the higher the profile, the more compelling the story, as if in the exposure of these public figures we are seeing things as they really are.
Such a notion cuts both ways; certainly, it gets at the heart of Blake’s courthouse monologue, in which he cast himself as a quintessential noir hero -- a man who, much like the protagonist of David Goodis’ hard-boiled classic “Dark Passage,” stands accused of a crime he did not commit. That’s a powerful trope, and it resonates at the deepest level of our collective psyche, as does the larger saga of the trial. It also serves as a reminder of the narratives that move us, of how far we have and haven’t come.
In recent years, it’s become fashionable to dismiss noir as a filter, to see it as outmoded, a cliche. Yet if the Blake trial has anything to tell us, it is that noir remains as relevant as it ever was. Like life, noir presents a morally ambiguous universe, in which betrayal and redemption are two sides of the same scarred coin. This may not help resolve the question of what happened the night Blake’s wife got murdered, but then, as any aficionado will tell you, noir has never been about plot so much as attitude.
