Noir-Ing The Homecoming Narrative: Guy Maddin’S Keyhole

In "Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir, ” Vivian Sobchack identifies film noir as a genre which dwells in the “quasi places” of postwar America. “Although there are occasional houses in film noir, there are hardly any homes, ” notes Sobchack; instead, film noir locates its characters within "cocktail lounges, hotel bars, diners, roadhouses, and motels. . . spaces that resist individual particularity and are made for transients and transience". In apparent contradiction to Sobchak's thesis, Guy Maddin’s Keyhole (2011) appropriates the essential generic signifiers of classic film noir and reinserts them into an experimental retelling of the ancient myth of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca, the prototypical narrative of homecoming. This essay attempts to reconcile Keyhole’s thematic and aesthetic interest in film noir with its Ulyssean homecoming narrative by reading the film as an anti-domestic homecoming narrative and as a piece of anti-nationalist Canadian cinema.

The film undermines its own narrative conceit, refusing an ideology of either domestic or national identity through its close adherence to the disorienting conventions of film noir. I locate the film’s most potent critique of these ideologies within its particularly noirish representations of amnesia. Sobchack suggests that the classic entries in film noir can be read as a response to a wartime breakdown in “the phenomenological coherence of the domestic life of family and home Spence 2 which was shattered, dispersed, and concretely re-membered elsewhere”. Keyhole delivers us this phenomenological incoherency, but it remains firmly within the space of the home: concentrating in one place, rather than dispersing, the “re-membered” fragments of this lost domestic life (while concretizing them as spectres). The film focuses on a group of gangsters under the leadership of a one Ulysses Pick, whose on-the-nose name clearly parodies the hyper-masculine naming conventions of hardboiled crime fiction.

Following a cinematographically fragmented shootout with the police during the opening credits, the group takes refuge inside of Ulysses’ old family home, a space haunted by the ghosts of his wife, his children, and his wife’s father. The narrator, Ulysses’ ghostly father-in-law, first describes the home in contradictory terms, as “a strange labyrinth with a small quadrangle at its centre. An indoors outdoors open to the elements. . . containing a dark and depthless bog. ” The presence of this “indoors outdoors” courtyard, ruptures the boundaries of the house, which would obviously be unable to contain such a massive space. The film, overloading the screen with information, is constantly working to prevent us from familiarizing ourselves with the layout of this space. Our view of the house’s interior is usually frustrated by bad lighting (the spaces appear to be lit by a swirling police searchlight), dirty or broken windows which invade the foreground, and superimposed images of seemingly random objects or other, spatially distinct areas in the house. Andrew Spicer’s Historical Dictionary of Film Noir contains a section on the subgenre of “amnesiac noirs, ” a tradition that Spicer traces from early 40s noir to Christopher Nolan’s popular neo-noir Memento (2000). Spicer describes amnesia as a condition that works to psychologically de-link the protagonists of film noir from the spaces they inhabit: as a Spence 3 plot device, it “intensifies. . . the sense of alienation in a strange and hostile world that characterize films noir as a whole”. Maddin himself has identified “amnesia as the natural state of mind for film noir’s post-war PTSD protagonists” and as “an especially cinematic affect because one is already almost completely forgetting the real world when settling into seats inside a dark movie theatre, or in front of a TV screen”. This affective “amnesia” particular to the experience of watching movies places audiences into a position similar to that of the amnesiac heroes of film noir, abstracting and alienating them from the reality of our cultural surroundings. It is little wonder, then, that the amnesia-obsessed Maddin has a “reputation… with an international rather than a national base”.

On a formal level, Keyhole itself ends up resembling one of Sobchak's de-particularized “quasi places. ” The movie, otherwise an emulation of classical Hollywood cinema, discloses its Canadianess only through the presences of a sex worker who exclusively speaks French, a taxidermied wolverine that the hero carries over his shoulder, and a Northern Electric radio “tuned between stations. ” The movie enacts an almost-complete forgetting of Canada, its productive point of origin, but it scatters these totems of national identity across the diegetic space of the film in order to remind us of what is being repressed. Keyhole is an amnesiac neo-noir, but its narrative is one of remembrance. Ulysses enters his old house as an amnesiac: he is unable to recognize his own son who has been tied to a chair and gagged by the gangsters; and the narrator, from space outside the screen, addresses Ulysses with the word “remember” over and over again throughout the entirety of the film. Ulysses does eventually recover his old memories. The gangsters betray their leader, strapping him to a Spence 4 makeshift electric chair and zapping his head with “20, 000 volts” of electricity. Execution is a common end for the heroes of film noir, but the shock, rather than killing Ulysses, clears away what he describes as his “memory rust. ” The act of remembering that Ulysses then performs is not one of recalling the historical past, but of recalling physical space. “My memory is improving” Ulysses narrates “I can feel the presence of every item in this house right now… You know what? I'm gonna tell you all what is in this drawer. No peeking. ” Ulysses then proceeds to recall and name, correctly, every item enclosed in the drawer. The scene is anticlimactic: no shocking secrets are revealed and Ulysses’ journey towards remembrance turns out to be nothing more than a journey towards the refamiliarization of a family patriarch with his property. The homecoming, and the remembrance itself, has proved trivial.

In the penultimate scene, a flashback in which Ulysses is reunited with his wife and son, Ulysses returns home to find that the contents of his house have been shuffled around by his family in his absence. “Let's put this back the way it was, ” Ulysses tells his family, “let's make a game out of it, you'll tell us what's missing and we'll try to put it back in place. ” The film thus ends, not with the emotional reconciliation of the Ulysses myth, but with the reassertion of an originary spatial order, with merely a reinstitution of “the phenomenological coherence of the domestic life” and patriarchal rule. The ending affirms the narrator’s earlier suggestion that “forgiveness… is much more frightening than revenge, ” that the alienated amnesia of film noir is preferable to its alternative: normative domesticity.

Keyhole, an act of cinematic remembrance in itself, clearly does not intend to deny the value of all the forms which remembrance can take. David L. Pike has described Maddin’s methods of filmmaking in terms of “a voracious and omnivorous consumption of the cinematic Spence 5 past that has the potential to liberate his viewers from time-worn categories of cinematic quality”. Keyhole’s conceit is that a return to the amnesias of the past can liberate us also from those “time-worn categories” of domestic and national identity which demand our constant remembrance.