The Goyishness of Noir

2,675 words

Down these mean streets, a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

He might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.

If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.”

— Raymond Chandler

As an American nationalist, I find myself frequently wrestling with the Hollywood Question. In my opinion, the American movie is the United States’ greatest contribution to world culture, even more than pop music. Sure, we invented rock and roll, but then the British took it and did it better than us. The bastards! But the American movie has almost always been considered second to none. No one makes better movies than America.

Some might say that America has certain structural advantages over other nations: more money for bigger budgets, a larger pool of talent, etc. But I think there is more to it than that. American movies have always had a certain fun factor that other countries have struggled to emulate. Americans have a knack for pacing and storytelling that Europeans don’t have. You might make a case that European filmmakers have more artistic flair or a better sense of aesthetics. Eh. Maybe. But European movies aren’t fun like American movies are fun.

And yet, when you are talking about Hollywood, you are talking about something that is fundamentally Jewish and has been from the beginning. I would not argue with someone who says that Hollywood has been a net negative for Western civilization. I can understand American white nationalists not wanting anything to do with Hollywood.

And yet, I don’t think you can completely wash your hands of Hollywood without writing off a lot of extraordinary gentile talent. I’m not going to just let the Jews take 100% of the credit for Gone With the Wind. The blood, sweat, and tears of my race are all over that movie. And I’m not going to dismiss the movies of John Wayne as just a bunch of Jewish bullshit, because they aren’t. 

This is the Hollywood Question. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.

Until the collapse of the Production Code in the mid-1960s, gentiles had some control over Hollywood via the Hays office and regional censor boards. Up to then, Hollywood had to produce films that pandered to gentile sensibilities, although they had been pushing the envelope for a while. But after the collapse of the Code in the 60s, Hollywood didn’t just go back to being pre-code risqué. No, they immediately went full Jew. One minute, everything is all Leave It to Beaver, and then overnight, it’s Midnight Cowboy and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

I’ll let the Jews have everything from the late 60s on. All of it. Even the stuff I like. Star Wars, The Godfather, they can have it all. But in the future, I intend on writing some articles making the case that American nationalists can — and should — claim some aspects of Old Hollywood.

I think a good place to start with this is to look at film noir. Film noir has cast a pretty long shadow. There’s no one out there still trying to make movies like Frank Capra, and you get maybe a handful of Westerns per decade anymore. But you still see the influence of film noir all over the place in contemporary films.

I would argue that film noir as a style and as a genre is fundamentally gentile. Now, Jews have put a lot of effort into trying to claim film noir for themselves. They’ve written books about it and have staged film festivals claiming the film noir is Jewish. They do this by pointing to the directors: Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang (whose mother was a Jewish convert to Catholicism), and others.

They are wrong. Film noir is totally gentile. I say forget the directors and instead look at the writers. If you look at the best, most iconic, particularly the oldest film noirs and smash the Early Life on the writers, you will see that almost all of them were written by gentiles.

• The Maltese Falcon (1941): Screenplay by John Huston, based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett
• Shadow of a Doubt (1943): Screenplay by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, based on a story by Gordon McDonell
• Double Indemnity (1944): Screenplay by (((Billy Wilder))) and Raymond Chandler, based on a story by James M. Cain.
• Mildred Pierce (1944): Screenplay by Ranald MacDougall, based on a novel by James M. Cain.
• Murder, My Sweet (1944): Screenplay by John Paxton, based on a novel by Raymond Chandler.
• The Lost Weekend (1945): Screenplay by (((Billy Wilder))) and Charles Brackett, based on a novel by Charles R. Jackson.
• Detour (1945): Screenplay by Martin Goldsmith (actually a gentile, believe it or not)
• The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946): Screenplay by (((Harry Ruskin))) and Nevin Busch, based on a story by James M. Cain.
• The Big Sleep (1946): Screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman, based on a novel by Raymond Chandler.
• The Killers (1946): Screenplay by Anthony Veiller, based on a story by Ernest Hemingway.
• Sunset Boulevard (1950): Screenplay by Charles Brackett, (((Billy Wilder))), and D.M. Marshman.
• The Asphalt Jungle (1950): Screenplay by John Huston and Ben Maddow, based on a story by W. R. Burnett’.

That list is pretty goddamn goyish, particularly when we are talking about Hollywood. That said, I should probably address the issue of Billy Wilder.

I won’t deny that Billy Wilder was a talented director, but I wonder how much writing he actually did. He moved to the United States in 1933 and his first language was Hungarian.

I have a hard time believing that Billy Wilder had much to do with the writing of this scene:

Nah, that scene above is pure Raymond Chandler.

Or this? You wanna tell me that a Jewish Eastern European immigrant who had only been speaking English for 12 years wrote something this distinctly American?

Of course not. That was Charles Brackett. Or maybe it was Charles R. Jackson. I’ll admit that I haven’t read the book. All I know is that it definitely wasn’t Billy Wilder.

Or what about this?

Yeah, I’m thinking that’s Brackett again.

I have a feeling that at most, Billy Wilder suggested story and plot elements and that his collaborator was doing all the real grunt work of hammering out the script. But Wilder would get more money if he can list himself as a writer as well.

Raymond Chandler

If there is one person I associate with the genre of film noir, it’s not an actor or a director. It’s a writer: Raymond Chandler. He wrote five film noir screenplays and six of his stories were adapted to the screen during his lifetime and more after his death. I think he influenced film noir more than any director. I’ve always felt film noir as a genre was largely an attempt to translate the feel of his novels to the screen.

Film noir was about more than an aesthetic. The film noir aesthetic existed before film noir in the form of German Expressionism. Film noir has a particular vibe and a certain spirit. There’s also a style of dialog that we associate with film noir which is earthy and street smart, strangely poetic and yet unpretentious. Raymond Chandler could capture the spirit of noir with just the written word. That’s why I began this article with a quote from Chandler. The quote does not describe every or even most film noir protagonists. A lot of film noirs are about dishonorable men.

But I started with that quote because illustrates a deeper point. Sure, there is a film noir aesthetic and there is a style of acting that we associate with film noir, but at heart, good film noir is all about the writing. And gentiles wrote all the best film noirs.

Granted, gentiles did not write every film noir or even every “classic” film noir. You have a few Jew Noirs like:

• Gilda (1946): Screenplay by (((Jo Eisinger))), (((Marion Parsonnet))), with uncredited work by (((Ben Hecht))), based on a story by E. A. Ellington
• The Lady from Shanghai (1947): Screenplay by Orson Welles, (((William Castle))), (((Charles Lederer))), and Fletcher Markle, based on a novel by Raymond Sherwood King.
• Force of Evil (1948): Screenplay (((Abraham Polonsky))) and (((Ira Wolfert)))
• The Naked City (1948): Screenplay by (((Albert Maltz))) and (((Marvin Wald)))

But it’s worth noting that Jews jumped in the game only after the film noir style was already established, and by then, they were attempting to emulate a distinctly gentile form of artistic expression that was popular. Oftentimes, I feel like Jews really didn’t understand what noir was supposed to be about. Jew noirs were more cynical and psychological. Goy noirs were not only better, but they had more heart.

Billy Wilder is actually a pretty good case study for this. You see a radical shift in style and tone in Wilder’s work after he switched from working with gentile co-writers to Jewish co-writers. He collaborated with gentiles on all his early cool noirish films up until Ace in the Hole. Then he switched to collaborating with Jews, and all his movies afterward were either sex comedies or anti-Nazi movies. The noir elements of his films all but vanished after he ditched the goyim.

Why can’t Jews make good noir?

I think I have established that gentiles are better at making film noir than Jews. Now we have to ask why. Jews do know how to write, but for some reason, they suck at writing noir. I think the answer is that film noir deals with themes that Jews struggle to grasp and requires ingredients that fall outside of Jews’ natural skill set. Here are some I can think of.

Film noir is masculine and Jews are not masculine. Film noir has an unmistakably masculine flavor to it. Even the femme fatale will have a sort of masculine toughness if not ruthlessness. The male noir protagonist is an individualist, often a loner. This is a very gentile thing. Jews are rarely loners. There are exceptions (Bobby Fischer comes to mind), but for the most part, Jews are parasitic by nature. You can’t be a parasitic loner. So the archetypical male noir protagonist is alien to Jews.

The way film noir presents women is antithetical to the way Jews see women. Jews like to glorify the strong independent woman who doesn’t need no man. This is probably because non-traditional and independent women are more likely to have sex with them. Jews are incapable of seeing women as more than sexual objects.

However, film noir presents independent women as extraordinarily dangerous. They are frequently the most dangerous person in the whole movie, far more dangerous than any of the tough guys. Yeah, they will have sex with you, but it usually is not worth it in the end. They will lead you down a path of sin and then betray you for your trouble.

A variation of this you see in some noirs is that the woman is not a femme fatale, but a nice girl. But sometime near the end of the film, the guy will have the cops after him and the gangsters out for his blood. He could easily skip town and run off to Mexico, but no. The baddies have captured the girl and he has to go back and save her, only to be killed in the process. The woman ends up being his downfall that way. See, a Jew would never do that. He would just run to Mexico and leave the girl to her fate.

Film noir is cool and Jews are not cool. There’s a Woody Allen movie called Play It Again, Sam where Woody plays a neurotic Jew (No! Really!) who has as his imaginary friend the noirish Humphrey Bogart. The movie is an interesting peek into Jewish psychology. Woody Allen, who is awkward around women, spends the whole movie wishing he could have the effortless cool of Bogart. It’s basically the whole movie: Allen, the Jewiest Jew that ever Jewed has a huge inferiority complex to the noirish Bogart who is as gentile as Allen is Jewish. It is almost like an admission that the opposite of noir is Woody Allen. In other words, that noir cool is intrinsically gentile.

Jews are neurotic and neurosis is not cool. Now, angst can be cool. A lot of rock stars build an image around being angsty, but there’s a big difference between being angsty and neurotic. A noir protagonist is angsty, but never neurotic.

Film noir has a poetic quality and Jews cannot write poetry. I mean, that’s just a fact. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. You can think of tons of Jewish novelists, playwrights, philosophers, journalists, humorists, comedians, biographers, and screenwriters but you probably can’t name any Jewish poets. Jews just can’t write poetry. The only poem written by a Jew that anyone has ever heard of is the one on the Statue of Liberty and it sucks. And you probably can’t name any of her other poems.

I don’t mean to say that film noir contains literal poetry. Raymond Chandler said that good writing is all about rhythm. This is a big part of the film noir style: the dialog should have a certain rhythm to it even if it is just a couple of tough guys talking trash to each other.

Film noir deals in moral ambiguity and moral ambiguity presupposes morality. Jews can’t do moral ambiguity. They can moralize or they can do straight-up nihilism.

Film noir is about sin, the wages of sin, and occasionally, it’s about light and shade and spaces in between. I don’t think Jews really grasp the concept of sin. Sin is not mere degeneracy or hedonism. Sin is consciously choosing what one knows to be evil. In Farewell, My Lovely, Phillip Marlow says he likes “smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.” I don’t think you have to be a Christian to understand what he means by that, but you do have to be a gentile.

Film noir is sometimes about redemption. Usually, the guy meets the girl and she sends him on the road to hell, but there are the noirs where they reverse the formula. Like in This Gun for Hire, Alan Ladd is a hitman who is already on the road to hell and Veronica Lake inspires him to be decent for once in his life.

Most noirs are morality tales of some form or other. You don’t look to a Jew for a tale about morality.

So that’s my article on film noir. White identitarians can feel OK about placing at least this one chapter of Old Hollywood into our Wins column. Jews will try to claim film noir, but don’t let them. That was us. They never would have come up with it on their own.

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