Subverting tropes is no easy task, especially in genre fiction.
I’m a crime writer. My new book BAD BLOOD is firmly noir. There’s a PI, femme fates, gangsters, all the trappings. The rules are mostly straightforward, and to move away from them is tricky business.
When you think of the quintessential private eye, it conjures up images of a square-jawed man, bathed in shadow, wearing a trench coat and a fedora. You think of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1939) or Robert Mitchum in the film Out of the Past (1947).
These guys are cool, calm, collected. You can’t hurt them because their armour is impenetrable.
Often, when you read the hard-boiled classics, the PI is a fully realised person who doesn’t need to go on an emotional or psychological journey.
Philip Marlowe knows who he is and is consistently himself throughout the series. He doesn’t need to go on a profound journey of the self. The femme fatale is a two-faced, murderous seductress.
So, how can you subvert the genre and make it true to form? Let me tell you, it is easy to miss the mark. The audience will have certain expectations, and they won’t be happy if those trappings aren’t there. Readers of hard-boiled fiction will want the protagonist to win, at least on some level. They’ll want the femme fatale, the gangsters, the murder and intrigue.
So, finding ways to meet audience expectations while subverting tropes is like walking a tightrope.
Tzvetan Todorov, in his essay ‘Typology of Detective Fiction’ (1977), argues if you write in a genre, you must respect its rules. If you aren’t following them, you aren’t writing that genre. It’s something else. So, how do you subvert and respect genre?
There is no better example than the film Chinatown (1974), written by Robert Towne.
Now hold on… there will be spoilers. You’ve been warned.
The film is about Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a private investigator specialising in matrimonial cases hired by Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) to find her husband’s lover.
Jake Gittes’s character is full of subversions. Breaking the stereotypes, he’s not whisky-soaked or frumpy. He doesn’t live paycheque to paycheque. Gittes is slickly dressed and clean-shaven. He works out of a nice office. He is conscious of his image and wants to look good and be presentable.
The story then subverts this, and slickness is thrown out the window when Gittes’s nose is slashed, and he spends the majority of the film dishevelled, wearing an unattractive nose bandage.
It doesn’t stop there!
Typical noir tropes suggest the PI knows how to handle himself in a fight. Chandler’s Marlowe or Hammett’s Spade might take a punch, but they’ll always get the upper hand! Towne writes it differently.
Gittes tries to fight but never wins.
He can’t even get away in a car chase. He loses physically every step of the way. But he retains that classic noir dogged determination that keeps him going and tells the audience—he’s still the character you expect.
In the ultimate act of subversion, Gittes is the biggest loser. Well, maybe the second biggest. Despite knowing Evelyn’s father, Noah Cross, is responsible for killing her husband and is determined to take Evelyn’s daughter away from her, Gittes can’t do anything about it.
Cross is too rich and too powerful. The cops won’t touch him. The hero doesn’t win, and the culprit gets away. Gittes is told to ‘Forget it’ and walk away.
In the annals of noir fiction, few pack a subversive punch like the ending of Chinatown!
Towne doesn’t just subvert aspects of the PI. He turns the femme fatale archetype on its head. Throughout the story, you suspect Evelyn Mulwray to be lying and manipulating Gittes somehow. And on more than one occasion, the facts suggest she is.
Traditionally, the femme fatale (an embodiment of male fears of empowered women) is two-faced. She’s beautiful and enticing, but she’s also a murderer, a seductress, a manipulator. The tradition began with the first real femme fatale, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930).
But Evelyn is anything but typical. She plays the femme fatale role, but she is anything but a seductress or a murderer. Gittes confronts her upon discovering she is holding her deceased husband’s mystery lover hostage.
That’s IT, the audience thinks! The PI has unmasked the villainous femme fatale. Not so fast. Evelyn confesses that the girl is her daughter. Her deceit and misdirections have been to protect her child from her father, Noah Cross.
Evelyn is seen in a whole new light. She isn’t a villain; she’s a tragic victim of sexual abuse. Few revelations across literature and film stun like Towne’s twist on the femme fatale.
What I tell genre writers is to think of subversion as adding a new dimension to an existing archetype. How do character’s vices or virtues, or life experiences clash with the tropes?
If a character is on a colour chart, find its opposite and swirl that into the mix. Subversion isn’t about abandoning what we know but remixing it. When you do, you’ll find new and interesting ways to make your characters pop and shake up the norm for your readers.
BAD BLOOD is out now in the U.S. and the U.K.
Luke Deckard is an author, scriptwriter, and podcaster. He has a Masters and PhD in Creative Writing from Kingston University. He also co-hosts Mean Streets – The Film Noir Podcast, and his Debut BAD BLOOD is OUT NOW.
