Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

In Out of the Past, former detective Jeff Markham, like Swede, cannot escape the
claims of the past. Unlike the traditional hard-boiled detective story where the reader
discovers the action through the perceptions of a detective, who remains an observer of the
action, Jeff loses this position as, when we first see him, he has already abandoned his
detective role, which he formerly assumed only in a compromised manner: he is disloyal to
his client, Whit (Kirk Douglas), by falling in love with Kathie (Jane Greer) and concealing
her from him. Out of the past comes one last assignment, a job that he knows is dangerous
but also unavoidable. On the way to his fatal meeting with the ruthless gangland czar, Whit
Sterling, he calls on his new fiancée and discloses his past, by means of an extensive
flashback. Like that of Swede, his fall from grace in his “other” life resulted from his
infatuation with a woman, Kathie Moffett. Then, the deals that follow between Whit and
Jeff, like the narrative flashbacks, only serve to fail to undo the past (namely, when Kathie
shoots Whit, or to get hold of the incriminating tax records, to blame Kathie for the death
of Jeff’s ex-partner, etc).
Reconstructing the past in fragments containing contradictory information,
dramatising the impact of the past on present action through the means of flashbacks is,
from a semiotic perspective, a way of asking the spectator to gauge the action represented
on the screen in relation to an overall judgement which is concurrently present with the
action. In standard gangster films, the straightforward, third person approach to the action
asks us to project the end of the film (the death of the gangster, as we have seen in Chapter
1.2 of Part II) in the action he sequentially institutes. In the case of Out of the Past, as in
the other archetypal noirs, like The Killers or Citizen Kane, the leaps back into the past
only reinforce its elusiveness, and the film noir hero, in contrast to the gangster, not only
appeals to us through first person address, but speaks from a point where the action has
nearly or already reached its end, with its painful consequences laid bare.
The flashback structure, therefore, permits us to underline various elements.
Sometimes they might be perceived as a way of confusing the viewer with their multiple
categories of image status (dream, memory, reality) or by interrupting the continuity of the
primary narrative, but in fact they also require our power and concentration to explain and
identify visual and verbal references, thus complementing missing information. Regardless
of the coherence of what appears on the screen, the viewer will instinctively shape it into a
representation of something familiar to him or her. In this regard, the several clues that are
352