Newspaper Noir

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s print edition is likely to
be gone by mid-March, courtesy of desperate cost cutting by the Hearst
Corporation. The Seattle Times could soon be in Chapter 11
bankruptcy. Around the country, more than 2,300 newspaper employees
have been laid off or given buyouts this year, according to Paper Cuts, a
website that tracks the hemorrhaging. Last year, more than 15,600
newspaper employees disappeared in similar fashion. A broken business
model is to blame—a combination of the internet changing
everything and newspapers being slow to realize this—and this
business model is currently so broken down that even the venerable
New York Times is among the death-watched, with Michael
Hirschorn of the Atlantic recently predicting the paper of
record could be insolvent by May.

Each news cycle, it now seems, brings even more stories about this
sad decline of the modern newspaper—and, with them, a ritual
gnashing of teeth over the implications of the trend. A way of life is
ending. A culture of hard-bitten truth tellers is being replaced by
bloggers and other new-media entrepreneurs, who succeed precisely
because they don’t play by the old “objective journalism” rules.
Democracy may be suffering as a result.

Maybe.

There are other viewpoints, naturally, and this month SIFF Cinema
offers a number of opportunities to forget about the angst and loudly
cheer the demise of the modern newspaper—or, at least, lament the
demise a little less—with Noir City, a series of dark films about
newspaper life, most of them from the 1940s and ’50s.

Perhaps the darkest of these is Ace in the Hole, a 1951
indictment of mass storytelling starring Kirk Douglas, who plays Chuck
Tatum, an unforgivably dishonest newspaperman who knows what the people
want. The people, mindless cattle that they are portrayed as in this
film, do not necessarily want journalists to “tell the truth,” as the
quaint needlepoints hanging in Tatum’s Albuquerque newspaper office
instruct. They want, above all, a classic tale—preferably
unspooled over many days, with heroes and villains and dramatic
suspense and a thrilling ending. If that requires Tatum to keep a man
trapped inside a mine shaft for six days so that he can spin a serial,
proto–Baby Jessica yarn about a mountain that is cursed by
ancient Indian spirits, a devoted wife who is praying for the man’s
rescue, and a desperate multiday bid to drill a hole through the top of
this cursed mountain (Tatum’s idea, the trapped man could have been
pulled out in a day if other methods were used)—if that’s what is
required to hook the people, boost subscriptions, and revive Tatum’s
career, then so be it.

This being noir, everything ends badly for everyone involved,
including the mindless cattle-people who, having read Tatum’s
dispatches in papers all over the country, descend upon the dusty plain
in front of the cursed mountain and while away their days of suspense
with the help of speedily arrived circus entertainers and carnival
rides. In one of the final scenes, Tatum stands on the
mountaintop—a disheveled, alcoholic anti-Moses—and speaks
his commandments to the people through a microphone. It will not spoil
anything to say that these commandments are simple, grim, and
ultimately not very likely to drive up newspaper circulation. There is
no mass story, this film teaches, and therefore no credible mass
media—only human frailty and mass manipulation.

Just as depressing, but far more entertaining, is The Big
Clock, which features a rotund, time-obsessed media mogul named
Earl Janoth (Charles Laughton), who presides with ruthless efficiency
over a Hearst-like media empire. His building’s lobby boasts—in
addition to the big clock itself—many smaller clocks telling the
time in Janoth’s 43 foreign bureaus (bureaus that stretch “from
Reykjavik to Cairo, Moscow to Buenos Aires”) as well as a statue of
Atlas, weight of the world on his shoulders, muscles straining at the
difficult task of carrying around reality as humans know it. But, oh,
what a profitable task this carrying of reality to its proper
destination can be! Style Ways, News Ways, Crime
Ways—these and other popular titles have brought Mr. Janoth a
considerable fortune, although a new “recession” in circulation is
worrying him. “Dynamic angles!” he barks during a meeting early on in
the film. “We live in a dynamic age, gentlemen, with dynamic
competitors—radio, newspapers, newsreels. We must anticipate
trends before they are trends. We are, in effect, clairvoyants.”

Murder and mystery ensue, and both are well worth the time it takes
to resolve, but the most delightful part of the movie has already
passed. It is, quite simply, the sad absurdity of the proposition that
any lumbering, giant, Hearst-like institution, then or now, could ever
be dynamic enough for a truly dynamic age.