The pastoral and the city in Carl Franklin's One False Move

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Charles Scruggs

American film noir depicts a city as dark and labyrinthine as the fate of its protagonists, but the promise of rus in urbe is often present, hinting of a possible way out. Bisbee, Arizona, in L.A. Confidential (1997), the miniature village and tabletop electric trains in Clockers (1997), the sunlit pier and ocean in Dark City (1998), the deus ex machina conclusion of Blade Runner (1982)--all suggest an escape from the urban maze. But as a general rule the pastoral within the urban context of film noir is almost always treated ironically, as the grim ending of Seven (1995) illustrates. This pattern is fairly consistent: Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) dies in a horse pasture when he tries to return to his boyhood farm in Kentucky; Jeff Markham in Out of the Past (1947) loses his idealized small town (and the golden girl within it) when the false pastoral in Mexico catches up with him; and in the first movie version of Hemingway's short story, The Killers (1946), the city invades the country, implying that in twentieth-century America there is no longer any place to hide.

In One False Move (1991), African American director Carl Franklin uses the pastoral motif within film noir in a unique way, one that has ties to African American cinematic and literary traditions. In Franklin's extraordinary film, the pastoral becomes the site of a primal crime, as it does in Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1920) and John Singleton's Boyz N the Hood (1991). In Singleton's film about contemporary L.A., we remember the chilling moment when the eerie quiet of the black urban neighborhood is bathed in a menacing, pastoral sunlight. Although this scene is indebted to Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), its effect expresses a distinctly African American theme. Polanski's "sunshine noir" traces the primal crime back to American greed, specifically to the theft of the Owens Valley water. Singleton's pastoral moment suggests that the snake in the urban landscape is the legacy of slavery. His scene gives special poignancy to Julian Murphet's recent argument that film noir, especially the films of the 1940s, is often about noirs (Murphet 24-35). Franklin's technicolor thriller goes a step further than Singleton's work in that the urban crime occurs in the film's opening scenes, but its explicit origins lie in the American South and, by extension, in the history of the Republic itself. (1)

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) eloquently links our nation's origins with the pastoral impulse. Nick Carraway, we remember, imagines a time when Long Island first "flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world" (189). Yet in Fitzgerald's novel, the pastoral contains within it the seeds of its "uncanny" opposite, for the attempt to escape or transcend history inevitably triggers its return. Gatsby's "ghostly heart" (101) yearns to recapture a past unencumbered by mutability, but that imagined past is itself corrupted by history, indeed by those very Dutch whose desires for Paradise cannot escape the carnality of the Incarnation. The New World soon undergoes a series of transformations, from a trading port called New Amsterdam, to the modern metropolis of New York, to the old money of East Egg and the fast money of West Egg, in which pastoral innocence shrinks to the deadly dimensions of Gatsby's swimming pool. As the ending of Gatsby reminds us, the enchantment of the New World's "green breast" also "pandered in whispers" to the basest of human desires, thereby bringing the first Dutch slave ship to Paradise in 1619. Perhaps that African presence is hinted at in Nick's memory of the East as "a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses at once conventional and grotesque" (185) and in the link Tom Buchanan continually makes between Gatsby and African Americans (137, 138). Nevertheless, Fitzgerald seems to have it both ways: If the past is corrupted by the slave ship, it also exists without corruption in Nick's memory of the Middle West--the Union station at Christmas time, the train home to the small towns of Wisconsin and Minnesota when he and his friends were "unutterably aware of our identity with this country before we melted indistinguishably into it again" (184).

Nick's reverie upon this past is a variation on Frederick Jackson Turner's famous Frontier thesis, as is the novel's famous ending in which pastoral space exists "somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city" (189). African Americans, as James Baldwin reminds us, did not have the luxury of imagining that pristine past: "To overhaul a history, or to attempt to redeem it ... is not at all the same thing as the descent one must make in order to excavate a history" (Just Above 428). Baldwin's point is that the American pastoral is the attempt to "redeem" a history, to elide the brutal facts of a slave system that divided a nation at its inception. And, as Toni Morrison also reminds us, that dark reality continued to haunt American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Playing 65). In this paper, I want to explore how Turner's thesis of the West as "open space" and how the American South's conception of itself as an enclosed garden are not only exposed by Franklin in One False Move as false pastorals but are used by him to create a gothic subtext in which history is "excavated." Both versions of the pastoral play an important role in he film's narrative structure, for One False Move is part urban film noir, part road film, and partly a send-up of Hollywood's fascination with the American small town. Most importantly, the mixing of genres is appropriate to Franklin's theme of miscegenation, the "crime" that unveils the primal crime.