The Face in the Crowd: Film Noir’s Common Excess

Abstract

When a portrait takes the spotlight in a nineteenth-century novel, it is generally to signify a constricting tradition or an individual’s subversive potential to break free from such confinement. Similarly, both of the twentieth-century novels that I have discussed so far, by Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier, adapted this Victorian visual symbolism to represent forms of stifling authority from their own eras, whether it be defined by race, class, age, gender, sexuality, or something else. Moreover, they continued to use the rhetoric of portraiture to challenge that authority. Through a Gothic ekphrasis, a melodramatic excess that often spills into camp, and an interrogation of visuality’s own cultural biases, the authors invite readers to envision and sympathize with less common sex- and gender-based identities such as those of the bisexual and the adult, female boy. As Potter’s and Hitchcock’s adaptations make apparent, the use of these techniques also translated into cinema. During the first half of the twentieth century, the popularity of Gothic and sensational literature was all but usurped by that of the related genre of noir and it is here that one finds some of the richest cinematic applications of the techniques I have been discussing.