The Structural Significance of the Flashback in Detour and Out of the Past

Edgar G Ulmer’s Detour and Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past are two pieces of film noir that are at times both prototypical and daringly original and were produced at the height of the styles output in the mid-1940’s (1945 and 1947, respectively). The two films also couldn’t of come from farther ends of Hollywood. Detour was a true B-picture in all senses of the term; made for the poverty row production studio Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) for around $100,000 and shot in six days utilizing mostly rear-projection car sequences and cheap diners and motels as sets. The films almost perverse pessimism was accentuated by its two leading roles, B-starlet Ann Savage in one of the most viscerally nasty and biting performances of the film noir period and despondent Tom Neal who would go on to face his own murder charges later in life after he was accused of killing his third wife. Meanwhile, Out of the Past was made for a significantly larger budget for RKO studios with an A-list cast in tow including Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, and Rhonda Flemming, as well as far more resources at their disposal.

Even with these noticeable financial and creative differences, both films propel one of the most common structural techniques of film noir to new levels of aesthetic and thematic significance, the flashback. Both films unfold mainly in flashbacks told by the leading man in a current day predicament that is a direct consequence of the story they are telling. In Out of the Past Robert Mitchum’s Jeff tells his story to his current love interest, Rhonda Flemming’s Meta Carson while in Detour Tom Savage’s Al Roberts talks directly to the viewer in voice over narration that further accentuates his current mindset of panic and despair. Both Out of the Past and Detour’s use of the flashback as a structural, thematic, and aesthetic technique reestablish the film noir commonality as a device used to examine post-WWII America and the despair echoed in its national cinema.

An important element to highlight when analyzing the structural concepts of both films from this perception is that neither director was born in America. Edgar G Ulmer was born in Olomouc, in what at the time was Austria-Hungary and Jacques Tourneur was born in Paris, France. Both directors multinational perspectives allowed for a more detached yet nuanced examination of Nuclear Age America from within the confines of its own studio system.

The first, and initially most resounding, effect of the flashback is the structural component it added to both films and would be a staple of film noir throughout its existence. Neither film revolutionized the use in the genre (many film noirs pre-1945 used the device extensively) but the tone it instilled throughout the picture with the impending doom looming over the story that has already been established was utilized to dizzying heights. In Detour, Al sits in a diner and retells his tale of infortune in a direct voice over narration to the viewer with an unshakeable sense of melancholy. This isn’t before a song put on the jukebox by a trucker passing through ignites the very thought in his mind, bringing him all the way back to the beginning of his story when he use to play the song in a dingy night club every night. Noah Isenberg comments on the importance of this signifier as exposition to the flashback,

“Al’s voice-over articulates his heavy nostalgia for a lost past when his girlfriend Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake) used to sing the son, their song. Al’s sweet memory of the event, when Sue serenaded him, caressed his shoulder, and looked longingly into his eyes, is as rosy as only a memory can be. For the duration of the film, this memory represents a kind of paradise lost for Al, who finds himself sliding down a slippery slope towards ruin,” (Film & Television Quarterly, p. 16).

This initial moment not only foreshadows the unavoidable random occurrences prevalent in film noir that become indicative of current affairs but the genres relationship between past and present and Roberts utilization of both.

This random occurrence perpetuates the telling of the entire story but not the mood of Al himself, who already appeared physically distressed and downtrodden upon the opening image. The random occurrence as signifier creates a definitive language about the noir trope establishing the chance possibilities and uncertainty of reality that put the leading men in those situations to begin with. As Morgan Fisher states,

“… While Roberts is describing something that will happen in the future, the very thing he is describing as a future event that is certain to occur is taking place in the scene, before his very eyes. He can’t react in the interior monologue to what is happening to him at the time we see in the shot, even though we see that he sees what we see, because he is speaking of it as happening in the future. That is, from the perspective from which he is speaking, the future that we, with him, see happening on screen has not yet happened to him, even though we see him in the scene,” (Cinema Scope, p. 72).

While this quote is in direct response to the final scene of the film, its perspective relates to the entirety of Roberts flashback point of view. By creating a foreshadowing of not only the perceived physical outcome of our main character Al Roberts but also the use of a tangible element, such as the song/record, to create a scenario in which the viewer and character are thrown back into a dastardly and at times seemingly impossible tale of coincidence Detour is establishing how the state of immediate post-war America is a product of the uncontrollable consequences of theirs and others actions in the direct years prior.

This same expositional set-up happens in Out of the Past but in very different fashion and, consequently, to different effect. The use of the framing story structure is expounded upon far more in Out of the Past than in Detour (one has to imagine a major factor in this was time and resources allotted by the larger budget) as Mitchum’s Jeff must deal with the ultimate consequences of his story in the present as he has run away to a rural town without resolving the matter at hand. Because of this open-ended factor to the original story, Jeff recounts his tale of deceit and misfortune to his then-love interest Meta, not directly to the viewer. To this effect, there is considerably less voice over narration used, rather his expositional statements expound more upon his own interpretation of the events while the story is still in the present then a series of uninterrupted flashback sequences that bring the story racing to the present.

Once again, the catalyst that caused the leading man to tell the story in the first place was a seemingly inevitable event completely out of the characters hands but this time that action was a direct consequence of Jeff’s decision to run and not complete the mission handed to him, rather than the cosmic coincidence of Detour’s breaking moment. This time, a man named Jim (played by Richard Webb), who was an associate of the man who hired Jeff at the stories outset, Whit (played by Kirk Douglas) to track down his missing girlfriend, Kathie (played by Jane Greer), has tracked him to his new identity in the rural town of Bridgeport, CT. By simply showing up in the town, Jims presence creates the structural and ideological situation within the exposition of the story that necessitates Jeff’s telling of the story to Meta and ultimately to the viewer. As Robert Pippin says in his essay on Out of the Past,

“Even doing nothing about what one feels still alters everything, because doing nothing now becomes an event that then shadows everything else one does. One cannot now act in complete indifference to how one’s fate has been altered, where “cannot” in this one of its many fatalistic sense means that such indifference would make no sense in one’s life; one could not recognize oneself in such a picture of indifference and so cannot act indifferently,” (New Literary History, p. 524-526).

Within this context though the flashback serves as the intermediary event rather than the ultimate outcome of the characters mental and physical state, creating an allegorical interpretation akin to the optimism of the American public to overcome the effects of the nuclear outcome of WWII rather than the pessimistic tones of Detour seeing the event as the insurmountable reasoning behind the current state of culture and perception amongst the general population.

As mentioned above, the flashback structure in Out of the Past doesn’t run throughout the entire film but only up to a certain point, allowing the characters and events to ultimately come to their conclusions in present day, giving the perception of far more opportunity and personal capability to make decisions than the almost oppressive pessimism of Al Robert’s story. In Detour, the flashback structure permeates throughout the entirely of the film which also means the entirety of events have already unfolded, leaving the viewer and main character helpless to their inevitable outcomes. Even with these differences, both films utilize what Maureen Turim delineates as the confessional flashback structure, one of the two archetypal flashback structures for film noir along with the investigative.

This confessional flashback structure allows the viewer to directly correspond to the full story, whether completed or not at the time of telling, establishing a unique precedence in crime film that is highly representative of film noir – the building of suspense through story rather than mystery.

While neither film utilizes a specific aesthetic device that runs throughout the flashback sequences to juxtapose itself from the present day framing story (with the arguable exception of the dense fog at the beginning of the Detour flashback, but that isn’t a trait that persists throughout even that scenes entirety), the availability of character development and varied settings further augment not only each films noir sensibilities but also their implied thematic connotations by allowing the viewers gaze to accept the image on screen as perception rather than absolute truth, or reality. Directly a result of its budgetary restrictions, Detour’s characters mainly inhabit cheap motel rooms and a convertible car with rear-view projection of the south western United States, but this financial hindrance actually visually highlights the needed awareness of the fact that the viewer is being told the story by what is possibly a highly unreliable narrator in Al Roberts. The possibility of him altering any of the seemingly endless unfortunate events that happened to him by mere coincidence from the death of the man who picked him up on the side of the road to him accidentally picking up the only woman within 500 miles who could of identified him as not the owner of the car to paint a better picture of himself is now never lost on the viewer as the unrealistic and rough hewn screen image is representative of this conundrum. Alternately, Jeff’s story in Out of the Past takes the viewer from lavish seaside mansions in the United States to seedy Acapulco bars and back alleys in search of a woman whom Jeff not only doesn’t know but is perceived to be armed and dangerous, initially. Even with the clearly more high-end visual capabilities afforded by the setting and lighting, this nonetheless also highlights the plausible unreliable confession of the character; although this time it is to convince the woman he’s in love with of his intentions rather than directly appeal to the sensibilities of the viewer.

These two contrasting uses of the flashback device highlight the tendencies not only of film noir but of much of the American crime cinema up to and including the 1940’s where specific aesthetic devices were used to varying degrees to elicit varying thematic and emotional implications out of the viewer whether it be the flashback (highlighted throughout this essay or also in the early talkie gangster pictures of William Wellman and Howard Hawks, among others), the use of lighting from the intentionally stylistic (chiaroscuro in film noir) to the paradoxically perceptive real lighting of late-30’s to early-40’s epics in both Technicolor and black-and-white, or the static vs. moving camera to imply emotive responses through aesthetic manipulation within the frame. The wide range of aesthetic motifs used in juxtaposition throughout the American crime genre further highlights the thematic capabilities of a singular device even when transported across various decades and styles of filmmaking.

WORKS CITED

Fisher, Morgan. “The Last Shot In Detour And Some Earlier Moments.” Cinema Scope            38 (2009): 70-80. Film & Television Literature Index With Full Text. Web. 14         April, 2015.

Isenberg, Noah. BFI Film Classics: Detour. London: British Film Institute, 2008. Print.

Isenberg, Noah. “Perennial Detour: The Cinema of Edgar G. Ulmer and The    Experience of Exile.” Cinema Journal 43.2 (2004): 3-25. Film & Television        Literature Index With Full Text. Web. 14 April, 2015.

Pippin, Robert. “Philosophical Film: Trapped by Oneself in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of           the Past.” New Literary History 41.3 (2010): 517-548. Print.

Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks In Film: Memory and History. New York/London:             Routledge, 1989. Print.