from Somewhere in the Night by Nicholas Christopher:

The city as labyrinth is key to entering the psychological and aesthetic framework of the film noir. As the German historian Oswald Spengler wrote in The Decline of the West, speaking of the megalopolis or “world-city” of the twentieth century: “The city is a world, is the world.” He went on to characterize twentieth-century man as one who “is seized and possessed by his own creation, the City, and is made into its creation, its executive organ, and finally its victim.” The city as a closed system. A beast with a life of its own, into whose guts the hero’s quest is undertaken.

The city is a labyrinth of human construction, as intricate in its steel, glass, and stone as the millions of webs of human relationships suspended within its confines. It is a projection of the human imagination, and also a reflection of its inhabitants’ inner lives; and this is a constant theme — really, a premise — of the film noir. In these films, the framing of the city, our visual progression through the labyrinth, is as significant an element as plot or characterization. The oblique lighting and camera-angling referred to, in both studio and location scenes (especially the night-for-night shoots), reinforce our implicit understanding that the characters’ motives are furtive, ambiguous, and psychologically charged; that their innermost conflicts and desires are rooted in urban claustrophobia and stasis; and that they tread a shadowy borderline between repressed violence and out-right vulnerability. Hence the obsessive emphasis on urban settings that are precarious and dangerous: rooftops, walkways on bridges, railroad tracks, high windows, ledges, towering public monuments (a Hitchcock favorite), unlit alleys, and industrial zones, not to mention moving trains and cars.

The dictionary’s definitions of “labyrinth” all strike home for us: 1. a place constructed or full of intricate passageways and blind alleys; 2. a tortuous, entangled, or inextricable condition of things, events, ideas, etc.; an entanglement, a maze; 3. a tortuous anatomical structure. For the concept of the labyrinth operates on three corresponding and interlocking levels in the film noir.

First, the actual physical maze of the city: streets, sidewalks, bridges, automobile and subway tunnels, underpasses, docks and piers, airport runways and, in the postwar years, the expressways that crisscross (and ultimately fragment) the metropolis, and the highways that radiate from its noisy heart, like arteries, and disappear into the misty, silent, nonurban darkness. A maze of relatively few square miles, it is packed with millions of unique warrens: office buildings, apartment houses, department stores, and tenements; warehouses, hospitals, prisons, and parking garages; casinos, nightclubs, cafe;s, and bars; museums, theaters, concert halls, and galleries; train and bus terminals, stadiums, and even factories and refineries on the fringes of the city limits.

Second, the labyrinth that is, in the broadest terms, the human condition or situation in which the characters intersect and interact in the city, a labyrinth constructed of plot twists and stratagems, metaphysical conundrums, or bewildering and inscrutable enmeshments of time, space, and chance. A set of conditions that produces amazement.

And, finally, the labyrinth of the hero’s inner workings — mental and physiological — subjected to brutal stresses and strains that mercilessly reveal his flaws. His anatomy is a kind of corollary to, and reflection of, the city’s inner workings, in all their rich complexity. And when we speak of the workings of a city, the catalogue seems as if it must be endless. There is organized crime, social conditions at once fluctuating and polarized, the ebb and flow (and muck and mire) of politics and finance, ethnic clashes, cultural crosscurrents (and shocks), a Babel of languages and all their permutations (from street talk to salon niceties), and a psychic atmosphere in which nightmares and dreams, the fantastic and the mundane, collide at every turn. And, perhaps most elementally — organically — there is the way the city literally works, in terms of sewers, water mains, gas pipes, electrical and telephone cables (all subterranean), as well as the processes by which fuel, food, and other goods are supplied it from the outside, the other world, that cloaked, silent countryside beyond the suburbs that might as well be on another planet.

In film noir, the hero’s penetration of the external labyrinth, the city, mirrors — often through a funhouse mirror — the transforming path he follows along his internal labyrinth. The farther outside himself he goes, the deeper he may find himself to be on the inside. Until inside and outside merge. If not his moment of epiphany, this certainly becomes ours, as witnesses.

“Labyrinth” derives from a pre-Hellenic, Lydian word, labrys, meaning “double-headed axe,” which was an emblem of sovereignty in Minoan Crete, shaped like a waxing and waning moon fused together back to back and symbolizing the moon goddess’ creative as well as destructive powers. In ancient Crete, as in Babylon (and other places as far-flung as Wales and Siberia), the labyrinth’s maze and spiral configurations were directly associated with the internal organs of the human anatomy and the spiritual underworld, the one seen to be a microcosm of the other. The earliest labyrinths are associated, always, with the underworld, often called “The Land of the Dead.”

In the labyrinth mythology of ancient Australia, a man must enter the maze to dance (paralleling the labyrinth at Knossus in Crete which was originally organized around a ritual dancing-pattern marked out in mosaic on the pavement, a line of girls leading a line of boys along a complicated series of spirals). The man’s journey, undertaken at a critical point in his life, often as a spiritual test, is always related to death and rebirth. And the presiding personage at the labyrinth, who leads him into it, is always a woman, often veiled. The labyrinth consists of multiple spirals and concentric circles (resembling, among other things, both human intestines and the stellar swirls of the Milky Way) that serve illusory and deceptive functions. The latter adjectives, as becomes clear, are verbal touchstones of the film noir city. Also, as James Hillman has written of the ancient Greeks in The Dream of the Underworld, “‘Entering the underworld’ refers to a transition from the material to the psychical point of view. Three dimensions become two as the perspective of nature, flesh, and matter fall away, leaving an existence of immaterial, mirrorlike images, eidola.” Which could also serve as a definition of film.

Hillman stresses the “shadowy or shade aspect of the underworld.” Skia, he says, “was another word the Greek imagination used for underworld figures. The persons there are shades. So, we must imagine a world without light in which shadows move.” Perhaps surprisingly, yet another such word is “hero,” for according to Hillman, “the hero was actually an underworld figure…even the term heros has been considered ‘chthonian’…denoting a power of the lower world.” He goes on to specify that the underworld is “the mythological style of describing a psychological cosmos. Put more bluntly: underworld is psyche. When we use the word underworld, we are referring to a wholly psychic perspective….To know the psyche at its basic depths…one must go to the underworld….It is in the light of the psyche that we must read all underworld descriptions.” He writes that “underworld fantasies and anxieties” and “underworld images” are all to be seen as “movements towards this realm of death, whether they be fantasies of decay, images of sickness in dreams, repetitive compulsions, or suicidal impulses….” And this could easily serve as a functioning definition of the film noir, in which the hero’s descent into the labyrinth of the city inevitably parallels (indeed, is) a descent into the self.

On the Melanesian island of Malekula in the New Hebrides, near Fiji, a woman similar to the one in Australian mythology, known as a female guardian, draws an elaborate blueprint of the labyrinth in the sand before the cavernous entrance to the underworld. When the soul of the man who seeks to enter it arrives, the woman erases half of the blueprint and the man must know how to recreate it exactly with a stick or wand before she permits him entrance to the cavern. Similarly, at the cavern-entrance to the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas finds a diagram of the Cretan labyrinth engraved upon the rockface. According to the classicist W.F. Jackson Knight, who places “circular and labyrinthine movement” among the Aeneid’s most recurrent images, the very wanderings of heroes like Aeneas and Odysseus, emanating from Troy (whose name itself can mean “the wanderings of a maze”) are symbolical labyrinths, projected onto a largely hostile world. Virgil also envisioned Rome as a twofold city, using the oddly grafted metaphors of beehive (the harmonious golden city) and labyrinth (the subterranean, unsymmetrical, shadow city). When specifically applied to the underworld, Knight goes on, Virgil’s conception of the labyrinth is “the very picture of restraint, obstruction, and bewilderment” for the descending hero. Pliny the Elder, in writing of the oldest labyrinth in the West (fourth century B.C.) at Heracleopolis, paints a more terrifying picture of the labyrinth as a baffling, treacherous, nocturnal city in miniature, filled with dead-ends, fake doors, trap-passageways, and fierce images of gods and monsters, a place always in darkness, with halls so constructed that when their doors were opened, a spine-chilling rumble of thunder greeted the visitor. Mircea Eliade in turn has described the labyrinth of prehistoric times as “a theater of initiation” — a place where lost souls wander blindfolded in the company of a veiled woman in a phantom-life on the other side of the mirror of this life. In Hawaiian mythology, such souls are said to tumble from the tree of life and free-fall for many nights before they land in the great labyrinth that leads to the underworld.

In writing of maze symbolism, Knight observes that in the labyrinth “the overcoming of difficulties by the hero frequently precedes union with some hidden princess.” Labyrinths, as galleries of stone, are in fact still the staging grounds, as they have been since ancient times, for “a game or race in which boys compete to rescue a girl from the center of a maze.” The film noir often takes these conditions and gives them an ironic spin, imposing destruction upon the hero rather than union, and allowing him to think he is rescuing a woman who in truth is not only in control of the situation, but is imperiling his own life. This hero, the film critic Richard Dyer writes, “has the double quest of the film noir — to solve the mystery of the villain and of the woman.”

In every labyrinth, as in every film noir, a woman plays a critical role. When she is a Beatrice-type, she is almost too good to be true. Nurturing to a fault, loyal beyond the bounds of common sense, she is like the faithful guide who appears suddenly in a nightmare, or in the “dark wood” in which Dante found himself. As the Greek scholar E.R. Dodds points out, “The very word oneiros in Homer nearly always means dream-figure, not dream-experience.” When the chips are down, this Beatrice can be wily and ingenious, or so pure-minded as to be rendered nearly powerless in the Hobbesian moral grid of the film noir. For this, perversely, she often provokes us to anger, even contempt. When she is a Circe, or spider woman, on the other hand, we may find ourselves admiring her; for then she is indeed powerful, dangerously so from a male point of view. And her power and intelligence, though presented in terms of destructive potential, are always fueled by her sexuality. As in Out of the Past, sexuality is an active, high-octane force — as active as a man’s, if not more so — and this is a revolutionary phenomenon in American cinema, a bridge to the more liberated women of later films whose power, sexual and otherwise, is also presented in the service of nondestructive urges.

So the spider woman of the film noir is a formidable personage. Freud tells us that spiders can inspire a deep, primal (and castrating) fear in men, and that the spiral web, in many cultures, is a fear-releasing (and female) sign. Hillman writes that “spider images have generally been woven into a great mother web of spinning illusions (Maya), paranoid plots, poisonous gossip, and entrapping…” The spiral of the spider’s web mimics the spiral of the labyrinth. The density of the web reflects the complex circumstances into which the hero is plunged, and then manipulated. Is there a thread for every labyrinth, tenuously laying out an escape route, like the thread Ariadne left for Theseus at Knossus?