Objects relate to people in that they mimic their desperation at moments of studious indecision. The objective to be denounces the object, ridicules it of its being, denudes it effectively - of this being that it was - because the object already is, is somewhere, being something. The real objective is to have none - to look rather into the angles that describe us & our contagions in a plurality effected by an intercourse with strangers and molls. Every intercourse plots a site that leads to other constellations of rhythm and silence, an unopened box of golden light and death by gun or radiation.
A film noir relays its narrative through a continuity of fixed scenes and menacing objects in correlation to the characters hemmed in by the prisonhouse of angles that is in effect created by the scene's chiaroscuro texture and the either half-hid or exaggeratedly large objects that punctuate it with malevolent insight. The manner in which the hero (or the victim, or the villain) negotiates the navigation through this prisonhouse of angles (in many cases a madhouse of angles) determines the character's ascent to grace & knowledge, or the descent to death. As a result of this black-and-white reasoning, a good number of noir anti-heroes are by definition hardcracked & pragmatic, and capable of breaking down walls in the prison of camera angles by virtue of their craftiness and capacity for hard-edged disillusionment. The hero's confined motion through a plot made murky by the shadows that carve out the minimal light left to view the killer's path, and by the meanness & disinclination of leery strangers to talk, to reveal, to expose the finer circumferences of murder and deceit, suspends the narrative's dramatic arc over a chasm that at every instance threatens to swallow up the whole nasty affair, along with the delicate mystery-seed that lies at the heart of the matter, in the heavy impenetrable blackness of the big sleep. Glimmering dimly, like a small yet precious gold coin in the shallow deep of a stormy river, is the hope of not merely learning the secret that had instigated the entire movement forward of the noir's framing - a movement that straitens the already narrow crooked path with every passage - but also the knowledge that hope can exist at all in a world circumscribed & pulled tight by embittered indifference and youth-shattering worldliness. The poetic substance of a film noir manifests in the implosion of the prisonhouse of angles as the hero skirts the unavoidability of unknowing (the knowledge of what lies after death remains occult) only to reach instead a self-knowledge: that he is alive and that he can do no better than a long hard goodbye in the dark that recedes little by little like an inebriate dream. When the prisonhouse crashes in on its periphrasis of angles, in much the same as a complex house of mirrors eventually collapses into an unreality of space, the hero & his prize escape with only their lives to value, rather than with a possession of the coveted secret that sinks back down to the abyss. Since the final & most essential secret in every noir plot is the mystery of death itself, the hero cannot return to the surface with it, and he cannot even look back to see his Eurydice behind him following. All is lost in a glance; he has no choice but to move forward, and leave that hades & its mystery seed to rot in the depths...
Mike Hammer, a private dick, knows very well who he is, and what he does, and that he carries a stink around. The stink's good for him cause it gives him no cause for reflection. A man whose stolidity and fists reserve his salvation, enjoys 'the mysteriousness that reigns everywhere.' He walks into shabby unknown apartments & luxuriant mansions with his fists pumped, using his stature as a skeleton key and his cynicism like a loaded weapon. He doesn't love any woman, not even the most faithful or sexually alluring, but he'll take any kiss when it's given him without asking. He doesn't ask, he just takes; he slaps the sense into hesitant informers since to Mike Hammer sense lies in a hard stare and a pair of large knuckled hands.
Mike Hammer doesn't read poetry, hardly reads at all in fact, so when he's abruptly halted by a barefoot Christina Rossetti on a night highway, barely swerving away in his sleek roadster to avoid hitting her, he knows for the first time in his life what confusion means: "Remember me," she says. As quickly as he gets to know her, she's gone, leaving only a greater stench than he's used to: a tortured dead body and the solitary remembrance of the shoes and voices of villainous men. His only lead is a poem:
Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day.
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
The 'vestige of the thoughts' that once she had never occurs to Hammer as he rides down the night highway with a strange half-naked girl in his convertible speedster; the credit titles flow in reverse with the breathless sobs of CGR, and the film unwinds this way, not backwards by necessity, but in a negative fluctuation like a speedcar on a night trip to an unknown destination. The beginning of the film does not prepare us for the weirdness of the end, nor can anything preceding the recovery and opening of the mysterious box for which Christina died hint at the enormity of its atomic revelation: a vestige of corrupt nameless thoughts pervades the mission that Hammer takes up without an inkling of the leviathan beneath the glass, or a hint of the mystical gold radiance that scalds his wrist upon opening the pandora's box that, besides upsetting the hero's range of knowledge by subverting his usual sense of corruption - a corruption well beyond his understanding -, seems to transform the film's conventions of noir texture by hybridizing elements of sci-fi along with those of supernatural horror. For this reason, paired along with its unique lateness in the noir chronology, "Kiss Me Deadly" introduces the last great invention of the genre by directly referring to its very principle of mysteriousness.
The box (or as Hammer's secretary Velda calls it, the 'whatsit') represents more than the sense of doom that filmgoers felt in the mid-1950s faced with the prospect of instant annihilation; the box symbolizes within the noir genre itself the city-wrought subconscious from which sprouts the tremors and forebodings that shape the noir's aesthetic impact on the viewer. The box as an object does not exist except as a terror, a mental phenomenon that externalizes the hero's inner sense of dread, from either not 'remembering' Christina's meaning, or from forgetting the value of the only woman (Velda) who loves him. Faced with an objectless object, Hammer loses his objective, discovers nothing; he is left rather emasculated at the end, with only the secretary whom he ignored for too long to save. Faced with the inexplicable, Mike Hammer is out of his element, and he is humbled back to treasuring the dame as his real object, not of love, but of a form of lasting knowledge available to him.
...
Cf. Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction"; which references the film in its use of the mysterious glowing suitcase that Travolta and Jackson find in the car trunk.
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