Out Of The Past: Investigating Film Noir

In the murder of Elizabeth Short, novelist James Ellroy found a means to grieve over the rape and murder of his own mother. In the novel THE BLACK DAHLIA Betty is at once a symbol of the post-war era torn apart by its passions, and a symbol of Bucky Bleichert's/James Ellroy's search for meaning. Likewise, but dissimilarly, Betty serves a double function in De Palma's film. She seems to be an embodiment of cinematic history split between classic and post-modern eras, and of De Palma's search to assemble the perfect visual experience from pieces of his own filmic corpus. Stripped of her historical referent by De Palma, the Dahlia no longer evokes the same horror--and what is true for her is true for the film as a whole. It's various components--fine cast, clean screenplay, competent cinematography--are stitched together with near-surgical precision, but never suture us into a position where we feel we're part of the story. When the struggles of the players cease to be anything we can relate to, we can only wond