Everyday People

Before soap operas, then talk shows and now our twenty-four seven news cycle amplified by social media, broadcast television would shut down from 1 a.m. to about 6 a.m.

The stations that didn’t air static or display a signal TV test card of color bars would fill empty hours with reruns, including film noir.

Too young to stay up, I caught my hard-boiled antiheroines and antiheroes summer weekdays on WGN’s Morning Movie. Surreal, grey and iconic, these works of art examined the human condition in a manner that is still relevant today. ¹

With the Great Depression (1929 to 1939) as a backdrop, film noir was the anti-myth. There is no “happily ever after” was the response to the severe global economic downturn.

But as time would have it, most of the greats that were written in the 1930s were upstaged by WWII propaganda and Hollywood’s push to have all artists do their patriotic duty. Noir would be put on hold.²

When the war ended, noir came back. Double Indemnity is one of the greats that is credited with bringing noir’s sense of consciousness and morality to the silver screen.

How do societies fail? How do everyday people fail each other? Why?

Double Indemnity took two huge, clean-cut stars and cast them as the villains. LA’s bright and shiny image as a place full of wealth and optimism was exposed as a dark shadowy corrupt world where people are capable of doing anything.³

More than a half century later, Bad Company, starring Ellen Barkin and Laurence Fishburne, was released as the cult classic that pushed these questions of when, why and how to an extreme.

Don’t be fooled. Noir’s inherent beauty and mind-blowing aesthetics aside, the genre drags sociopolitical and economic issues out into the light, whether screaming and kicking, as an elusive guest sure to be long gone before you can figure it out or in a body bag.

A Place in the Sun (1951), Deep Cover (1992) or Gone Girl (2014), the characters are just dying to meet you. So, allow me to introduce you to a gem of a person or two, starting with Bad Company (1995).⁵

BAD COMPANY TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf6dFhAfTuE