Film Noir - Analysis

A noir that refuses to solve itself

Central claim: Film Noir stages the desire for a clean, morally legible story and then repeatedly denies it, replacing certainty with a drifting, communal paranoia that still ends in a strange, tender wish for shelter. The poem borrows noir’s atmosphere of implication and suspicion, but instead of delivering a culprit, it delivers a series of half-explanations: hope appears in something as lowly as washing of the floors, dignity arrives furious and then evaporates, and memory itself becomes something people do conveniently. The result is a world where you can feel meanings pressing in, but whenever you reach for them, they slide away like a train that still stayed on the platform.

Hope from maintenance, prestige from a flaw

The first lines propose an upside-down ethics: the washing of the floors is cause for hope. Hope isn’t born from revelation or justice; it’s born from upkeep, from someone cleaning up after something. Then the poem makes an even stranger claim: If there was a flaw / in something precious, that flaw proves people have already been inducted. Corruption becomes evidence of belonging, as though the stain on the jewel is the membership card. That’s a classic noir logic (the “system” is dirty, therefore real), but Ashbery twists it into something social and intimate: the rich background ends up being you, your space, and that illusion gives a furious dignity you can breeze right through. The tone here is brisk, faintly satirical, but also seduced by the feeling of moving through a world that seems to recognize you.

The poem’s first ghost: being remembered, but only “conveniently”

The first section keeps insisting on remembrance and then undercutting it. After when you died, they remembered you chiefly, yet the image of that remembrance is distant and small: two / lights on a rowboat half-mile off shore. It’s beautiful, but it’s also a removal: memory becomes tiny lamps receding over water while an evening breeze arrives to cement relationships. The breeze is doing the work people don’t have to do; it seals the bonds like a mood setting in. And then the poem delivers a hard, comic cruelty: they always heard you, loud you, in a way that ensures nobody remembered except conveniently. The tension is sharp: the speaker wants the “you” to matter, but the world turns even grief into a usable soundbite, a remembered voice that is less person than function.

The hinge: “I looked to you” and got confirmation

The poem turns on the sentence When the inevitable abrupt change arrived. Noir is full of inevitable turns, but this one is personal: I looked to you for reflected confirmation of what was happening to me, and unfortunately got it. The tone shifts from public aphorism to private dread. What the speaker receives isn’t comfort; it’s confirmation, as if the “you” is a mirror that tells the truth too accurately. Then the environment begins to confess: afternoon windows released their secrets in a flood, as though no one had ever had any. That paradox matters. Secrets are supposed to be possessed; here they are treated as an atmospheric condition, suddenly everywhere, making individuality feel like a mistake. Even bodies appear as parts: distinct noses and adam’s-apples can be determined in a mounting hush of congratulation. People are reduced to identifiable protrusions, as if the world’s “recognition” is really a kind of surveillance.

The train that won’t leave, the ending that’s “discouraged”

The poem’s most noir-like frustration arrives with the train: a whistle is about to shatter the hush, the doors slid shut, and yet this one still stayed. Motion is promised, then withheld; the scene becomes a waiting room for fate. Out of that stasis comes one of the poem’s bluntest admissions: Too bad suicide is discouraged because it makes such a neat ending. The speaker doesn’t romanticize death so much as envy its narrative cleanliness. That’s a key contradiction in the poem: it longs for a neat conclusion while suspecting that neatness is exactly the lie noir exposes. So the speaker chooses the only available alternative: nevertheless we will brush on, clinging to separate ideas as though they made a pattern. The phrase brush on echoes that initial floor-washing: continuing is a kind of cleaning, a way of pushing debris forward when you cannot solve it.

Beyond “dried beans,” beyond apology: what the poem refuses to redeem

When the poem says all shall be insulted at the end, it sounds like a curse and a forecast at once. The ending is described as sticky, beyond any apology, and the list that follows is deliberately unglamorous: dried beans, casual sex, and even the neighbor’s girl in a schoolyard half a century ago. This isn’t moralism; it’s an insistence that embarrassment and the banal won’t be transcended by aesthetics. The poem glances at a time when things seemed pretty modern, and admits underlying motives were the same, just not yet subjected to the dark, intricate working out we now endure. Modernity here isn’t progress; it’s complication, the sense that motives have become over-processed, like a plot with too many cross-cuts.

A sharp question hiding in the “subliminal variation”

If suicide is envied because it offers a neat ending, what is the poem offering instead: a mess that is more honest, or a mess that merely goes on? The line clinging to separate ideas implies both resilience and self-deception. The poem seems to ask whether our patterns are discovered or fabricated, and whether that difference matters when the train won’t move.

Strangers in a hole, Americans as a rumor

The third movement drops us into a surreal landing: Say we just landed, like strangers in a hole. The diction of etiquette and equipment replaces psychology: what manner of manners will be cut out of us, what sails trimmed for the descent into the matter of the sun. The descent is toward light, but it feels like drilling into substance, as though illumination is heavy and difficult. Then comes a sudden cultural aside spoken as breath: Are Americans sexier. The question is comic, but it’s also diagnostic: identity becomes an aesthetic rumor, a subliminal variation on an often rehearsed enterprise. Even compassion is bureaucratized: someone runs around to instruct the clerks of it, teaching rules and rhetoric like office procedure. Feeling is managed, standardized, turned into a department.

“We and they,” and the little smiles that permit going home

Near the end, the poem returns to an ordinary curb on a residential street where the locals shrug off any connection to the scenery. After the flood, the train, and the sun-matter descent, we land on the bluntest division: We and they, and It’s not much more simple. That flatness is a kind of exhausted clarity; noir’s moral fog collapses into a basic social split. And yet the speaker still approaches the master switch for instructions, admitting the need for guidance, for a mechanism that tells you what to do next. Instead of instructions, the world offers little smiles of recognition in unlikely places: curdled clouds, reluctant shore. Recognition is everywhere, but it’s impersonal, weather-like, not a human embrace. Still, it is enough to tell us it’s safe to go home.

The last wish: hiding people under the bed

The closing lines strip away the noir talk and leave a small, nearly childlike hospitality: I hope they can come. They can sleep under my bed. After a poem full of induction, convenience, clerks, and dichotomies, the final gesture is a private asylum offered at floor-level, in the shadow-space beneath a bed. It’s not the neat ending the speaker earlier envied; it’s messier and more human: making room for whoever they are, even if the only place available is hidden and humble. In that sense, the poem’s hope returns to where it began, with low, domestic surfaces and what happens beneath them.