Like any other kind of art, cinema never existed in a vacuum – on the contrary, it always displayed a clear and evident connection to social and economic issues of its time. The portrayal of urban landscapes in film noir is a notable example of this interrelation, as it reflects in the issues of control, surveillance, and policing in a big city. This connection has a long history: since even the first steps of cinematograph already coincided chronologically with the advent of surveillance innovations, such as fingerprinting or criminal typology (Dimendberg 2004, 26).
As the cities grew in size and density of human traffic alike, surveillance technologies and procedures evolved as well. With this in mind, it should not come as a surprise that film noir of the 1940s continued to reflect on spatial organization, regulation, and policing of the urban spaces. In particular, The Naked City, directed by Jules Dassin in 1948, represents New York City as a tightly regulated space separated into smaller areas closely monitored with scientific precision and unyielding efficiency.
While The Naked City focuses heavily on the representation of New York City, it is still a film noir and, as such, a story of a police investigation first and foremost. The plot follows two main characters, a veteran detective Dan Muldoon and his rookie partner Jimmy Halloran, solving a mysterious murder of the model Jean Dexter. The immense extent of a modern urban landscape is, perhaps, the central theme of the entire movie, and the creators never cease to emphasize it.
The opening sequence demonstrates aerial shots of Manhattan, and the voiceover for the final shots points out that the film shown is one story out of the eight million there are in the naked city. This emphasis poses a question that permeates The Naked City from the beginning to the end. The viewer reasonably wonders how does one control, regulate, and survey the space where eight million stories are happening at the same time. The movie answers this inquiry with the idea of a strict spatial organization that separates urban landscape into small territorial units, each controlled and watched over by a designated officer of the law.
There is a particularly telling scene near the end of the film where this answer manifests visibly and in a pronounced way. After a rigorous investigation, Halloran identifies Willie Garzah as a likely suspect and confronts him, but the latter knocks him unconscious for a short time and escapes. The flowing sequence depicts Garzah’s fervent attempts to disappear, as well as the obstacles he immediately encounters in the urban landscape.
He traverses a backyard and thinks about entering a street, but then sees a police officer right outside the gate. Unwilling to be seen, Garzah takes another way, climbs over a brick wall, and crawls through a hole in a fence – only to see yet another officer on duty. Although Halloran does not catch his suspect just yet, the difficulties experienced by the latter are quite characteristic: whatever turn he takes, there is always a policeman at the end of the road. The depiction of urban in The Naked City reflects “the general trend toward spatial segmentation within the modern metropolis” (Dimendberg 2004, 27). The city consists of small territorial units, and each includes a watchful officer to oversee it.
The film as a whole and, in particular, the scene described above portrays the urban landscape of New York City as a tightly regulated and closely monitored space. The Naked City emphasizes the advances in surveillance practices and their detached and impersonal nature in a modern metropolis. None of the officers whose very sight prevents Garzah from entering the street are actually searching for him – in fact, as the narrator points out, Halloran is yet to report in. Yet their careful positioning illustrates the underlying principle of surveillance in a big city: the “scrutiny of a collective, the crowd, as a place for a malfeasant to evade the law” (Dimendberg 2004, 22).
None of the officers actively seeks Garzah out, but each of them monitors his assigned section of the urban landscape – and this proves enough to limit the criminal’s options for escape. The Naked City highlights the tension between chaos and control in city policing but resolves this conflict in control’s favor. While the streets bustling with automobiles and pedestrians may appear chaotic and unregulated, this is an illusion, as avoiding surveillance in a monitored cityscape proves nigh impossible.
Yet the movie does not merely depict surveillance as a defining feature of a modern urban environment – it also highlights the machinelike precision with which it operates. This tendency is entirely consistent with a characteristic feature of film noir as a genre: a faithful depiction of “scientific techniques of crime detection” (Dimendberg 2004, 66). A tight network of observant police officers is as far from a romantic image of Sherlock Holmes or Sam Spade as one can imagine, and achieves results through thorough pragmatism rather than brilliance. Yet when properly organized, the system functions with almost effortless efficiency: the police do not even have to know about the criminal to limit his options.
Instead of relying on an individual’s insight and intuition, surveillance rests on carefully developed and empirically tested procedures – the narrator emphasizes it by advising Halloran to follow the routine after Garzah’s initial escape. Surveillance of New York City, as depicted in the movie, is not only omnipresent but engineered with scientific thoroughness and precision as well.
As one can see, The Naked City portrays a modern urban landscape as a strictly organized and monitored space, where surveillance is present at every corner and benefits from the scientific organization. The depiction of New York City as a segmented and controlled space is especially evident in the scene of escape attempted by Willie Garzah, the film’s antagonist. As the criminal tries to enter the street and merge into the crowd, he encounters police officers on duty who will likely see and remember him.
While none of them is actively searching for him, they still manage to limit his options, albeit unwittingly. Separating the urban landscape into small territorial units and assigning an officer of the law to watch each of them proves sufficient to control the chaos of a sprawling metropolis. The film also emphasizes that such effective surveillance does not require outstanding effort – only a scientifically developed and experimentally proved routine. While the film only tells one story that could have happened in New York City, the system of urban surveillance, as portrayed in The Naked City, looks efficient enough to trace all eight million of them.
Reference
Dimenberg, Edward. 2004. Film Noir and Space of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.