Noir is instantly identifiable, even if you don’t know the genre definitions. The heavily stylised aesthetic, black-and-white imagery, Art Nouveau design influences, fedora hats and overcoats for gruff tough men and long flowing dresses for beautiful (and often dangerous) women are instant markers of a noir sensibility, along with smooth jazz. However, it is in the themes which characterise noir that Team Bondi have come so close to, yet so far from, achieving authentic noir in a video game.
Noir is often concerned with secrets from the past coming to haunt the protagonist, for example in Jacques Tournier’s Out of the Past (1947). We see this in the haunting legacy of Cole Phelps and Jack Kelso’s wartime experiences, which shapes both men’s character as well as the narrative around former Marines attempting to break into the LA drug business (with fatal results). However, L.A. Noire pursues this theme with the most simplistic narrative device possible: the info-dump of exposition. Flashbacks from the war beat you around the head with their blunt portrayal of the past, in clear contrast to the subtlety and mystery of a noir masterpiece like Out of the Past. To really pursue this essential noir theme, developers will need to embed character legacies as emergent narratives, not merely a tacked-on supplement to the real deal.
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In L.A. Noire we have a close approximation of these character types, but Cole Phelps is just too insipid and, frankly, too much of a goody-two-shoes to do any justice to the men of noir. He slips all too easily from committed family man to lover and protector of damaged German jazz singer Else, and he just doesn’t experience the mental and moral trauma we expect from a noir protagonist. He never takes a good beating. Jack Kelso is much closer to the mark with his impatient but grubby sense of honour, but he is only a secondary character who cannot redeem the game’s limitations on this point.
Finally, noir often deals with corruption, both public and personal. This is certainly evident in L.A. Noire: Vice Squad detective Roy Earle is despicable as the crooked cop who sells out his own partner (Phelps) to protect his paymasters, and the shrink peddling morphine to rich clients vies with the paedophilic porn director for top honours in the slime stakes. We have a much more profound sense of deep corruption based in human greed with the Suburban Redevelopment Fund scam, which involves insurance fraud tied up with suburban development to paint a dark picture of postwar economic affluence, the embryo of the American Century.
However, the sense of contamination and mental distress from such corruption is not effectively portayed in L.A Noire. Think of Sam Spade’s refusal of temptation at the end of The Maltese Falcon, his indignation at the femme fatale’s attempts to lure him with his emotions into her web of deceit for profit. Even more so, “Bucky” Bleichardt from James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia (1987 – an obvious and strong influence on L.A. Noire) enters into a labyrinth of temptation, obsession, self-recrimination and profoundly self-destructive behaviour as a result of discovering public and personal corruption at the heart of the brutal murder of a woman. If we’re talking neo-noir, Lawrence’s Block’s sharply-rendered Matt Scudder is a deeply ambivalent man, morally speaking. This is a private detective who not just bends but breaks the rules to put a violent misogynist behind bars; a man who lets a paedophile and a thief go free because murder is the one crime he cannot abide.
Given these powerful blurrings of the moral divide in film noir and hardboiled detective fiction, the machinations of power and corruption are little more than plot devices in L.A Noire. There is little of the deep soul-searching, the profound moral disorientation we might expect from a true noir: instead we have poor but heroic Phelps given a hard time by the big boys, and a narrative vehicle for some highly innovative gameplay and animation. Perhaps we’re not ready for the real stuff of noir in an interactive fiction, or perhaps games as a cultural product just have some way to go to approach the heady heights of the noir greats. Can’t wait till that day comes, though.