7. The Televisual Amalgamation of Noir

Poncie Ponce and Connie Stevens entertain in Hawaiian Eye

Symbols, Myth & TV in Hawaii

7. The Televisual Amalgamation of Noir
During the Cold War era duplicitous incursions perceived and real seemed to beckon from every corner of the globe as anti-capitalist factions gained global space and ideological converts. More than ever the mapping of the world revealed the spread of Communism from Russia, to China, South East Asia, South and Central America, and interior, to the very foundations of American industry, politics and communications. It seemed America more than ever needed covert policing, both real and imagined, to retain and legitimate its colonial holdings, hierarchies and autonomy. In this atmosphere, TV happily reflected the ideal American Security State, where enlightened civilians work hand in hand with government institutions to protect domestic space and international interests.

If the TV Western sketched out the frontier heartland of domestic space and American ideology, the detective and police melodramas would protect and secure not only urban space and capitalist hierarchy, but international borders and democratic compliance as well. In this sense the 20th century paramilitary genres can be seen to work hand in hand televisually, checking domestic space from interior incursion while forestalling exterior intrusion by patrolling the fringes and outposts of American Empire.

By the late fifties the paramilitary television series had become the most popular form of fiction programming on television. Tales of urban violence, private eyes and federal agents, proliferated. Dragnet (1951-59) had been a ratings winner since its debut. Man Against Crime (1949-54) with Ralph Bellamy and Martin Kane, Private Eye (1949-53) were even earlier examples of popular urban crime thrillers. The issues such shows addressed included traditional noir themes and aesthetics. International espionage seemed to threaten the moral, military and scientific fabric of the nation from every quarter. Murder, blackmail and sabotage were the means of counter-insurgence. The security state of the 1940’s did not disappear in the fifties, but was transformed televisually from the alleys and diners, motels and bus stops of hard-core film noir, to the lighter, more commercially salient environment of sparkling kitchens, family bathrooms and the luxury resort. Noir did not so much disappear however, in the TV incarnation, as undergo a transformation that repackaged it as an eminently consumable, and thus, recoupable product.

Noir would pay, even on TV. But to achieve this sell on a weekly basis, to audience and merchants alike, it employed the framework of noir while divesting it of its ideological ambivalence and stylistic ambiguities. The intense stylization of German Expressionism that conveyed psychological angst and uncertainty in the twenties had by the late fifties become a highly stylized vehicle of realism, a mode that packaged connotations of a certain interior conflict no longer operative in the cathode world of television transmission. Like the paramilitary programs from the late forties and early fifties, the Warner Bros. cycle of private eye series as well quoted noir in its mise-en-scéne, hard-boiled lighting, night-time denouements, use of the femme fatale, underlying emphasis on carnal sexuality, and in its privileging of cosmopolitan politics. But the threat was ultimately contained on television by its commercial framing and cyclical redundancies.

The self-awareness Hawaiian Eye suggests by its parodic tone does not constitute the kind of social critique typically associated with political satire. Rather, Hawaiian Eye, like Magnum some twenty years later, revels in its ad hoc mixture of high seriousness and lowbrow entertainment.

Yet, whereas Magnum breaks the vaunted fourth wall of realism with direct-address glances, winks and raised eyebrows and often irony-laced, self-deprecating voiceover narration, Hawaiian Eye, with its privileging of a cabaret musical number each episode by the voluptuous Cricket Blake (Connie Stevens) and the antics of local sidekick Kazuo Kim (Poncie Ponce), imbues the series with a light-hearted, carnivalesque atmosphere.

In this sense it fulfills a benchmark of Cawelti’s notion of generic change: it achieves humorous or burlesque transformation of the generic form. The mocking sneer of hard-core noir seems fluffed and gilded in this televisual metamorphosis. While the two primary heroes remain true to hard-boiled form, the sidekicks Connie Stevens and Poncie Ponce supply comic relief and spectacular entertainment. Cricket is nothing like the femme fatale of noir mythology, however, but neither is she entirely a goody two-shoes. Rather, she strikes a balance between a strictly conservative aesthetic, and that of the emerging culture of racial tolerance and brotherly love.
The legéreté of the TV incarnation is the polar extreme of the depression and ambiguity of noir. Cricket’s effusive state of prepubescent grace, for example, seems otherworldly next to the sordid sexuality embodied by fellow lounge singer Rita Hayworth more than a decade earlier in Gilda (1946), or the spiderwoman sensibility of Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944). Cricket is certainly no spiderwoman. She chirps but she has no real bite.

Such televisual effervescence was not ubiquitous in popular American culture of the time. Generic articulations on the big screen could still deliver scathing and negative indictments of predatory capitalist ethics by using again the liminal position of law enforcement to explore social corruption.

Thus the legéreté found on network TV—wherein the status quo is vigorously recuperated no-matter how far-flung the narrative—finds its negative parallel in the highly cynical films of late fifties noir like Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). In these baroque examples of film noir, corrupt agents of law enforcement cross the line and never come back, never are recuperated by the status quo. A push and pull dialectic between film and TV becomes evident. The narrative convolutions and ambiguities of such films are ironed out on network television in terms of both the iterative treatment of themes and characters, and in the insistence on finality and clarity. If film noir of the forties and fifties exploited the lounge, the night club, the motel, the bus stop, the dark alley, the click of concrete on the metropolitan beat, as many suggest, Hawaiian Eye in its luxury resort setting and with the titillating yet utterly wholesome Cricket Blake, takes its noir framing to the limits of parody. Such a framing jubilantly reaffirms the hegemonic power grids noirish films often seemed to question.