Alex Israel: Noir

An LA artist who doesn’t reckon with noir is a flickering bulb that lures no moths, and maybe is no bulb at all. So I was glad to hear that Alex Israel, who was born and grew up here, who lives and works and belongs here, was doing the native reckoning where else but Warner Bros., or what’s left of it, where John Huston and Humphrey Bogart (and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet) made The Maltese Falcon for six summer weeks in 1941. If anyone called it the first noir, I wouldn’t fight them.

As for the last noir, that’s trickier. What makes this reckoning—Alex’s, mine, maybe yours—so tricky is that very few of us agree on a definition of film noir. Some say it’s a genre, to which I would argue, there are noir musicals; others have said, with better evidence, that noir is a style, but it takes more than shadowed light through venetian blinds to do the dirty deed. I’ve heard it said that noir is a mood: doom, but Titanic (1997) is no Criss Cross (1949).

Part of the problem is that no filmmaker in the 1940s or ’50s set out to make a noir. Writers and directors of comedy knew they had to be funny, and John Ford and Anthony Mann, when they embarked on their Westerns, knew they had to deliver the West, but film noir—a phrase coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946 and popularized by critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton in 1955—was named later, a tendency identified in retrospect, as if by detectives trailing a serial killer.

Like the filmmakers before him, Israel is defining that tendency in his own way, through images. These are painted streetscapes. They began, though, as photos and sketches, visual ideas that Israel enhanced with reference material—the purplish-blue gradients he wanted for the night sky, for instance, or specific Mexican fan palm silhouettes to dot their horizons—in order to create blueprints for what would at first become digital renderings and then ultimately finished paintings. Beginning in 2021, these blueprints went back and forth between Israel and a pair of animators. Years of additions and subtractions produced renderings that were then painted in acrylic on canvas by an artist in the Sign & Scenic Art department at Warner Bros.

Which is where I first saw them. Though Israel had told me in advance that the subject was noir, my first reaction upon stepping into them—for these paintings are to me more like spaces than images—was delight. Their DNA shared anime and a noir touchstone for our—Israel’s and my—generation, Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit. For those of us who saw it on the big screen in 1988, the film’s alluring blurring of worlds real and animated would never be upended in our imaginations, so naturally did the toons and the city coexist. Virgins to noir at the time, we will always have Roger Rabbit, which owes so much to Chinatown (1974), one of our city’s noir myths, as an unconscious reference point. Though at the time we may not have coded the film as marking a loss of innocence, part of its enduring power, I think, is that it did—the moment cartoons, in other words, went bad.

None of this, for me, was conscious yet. Stepping into Israel’s paintings, all I knew, at first, was that I felt nothing but swirled in the safe and good. The Troubadour, the Cadillac dealership in the Valley, the Bruin Theater in Westwood . . . I was home. The combination of their CinemaScope proportions and my memory—our memory, if you’re one of ours—put me there in the virtual reality of a beloved present/past. Or is it “past/present”? The locations Israel picked for his pictures are undeniably of their time—the 1940s car dealership, the ’50s diner, the ’60s gas station, the ’70s lingerie shop, the ’80s yogurt spot—but still a part of the present. When you add to that your own memories, the temporal effect on the brain is kaleidoscopic. Not where am I, but when am I?

I got lost. I looked for signs. I looked up at the billboards. They were blank—save for two, Apple iPod and Angelyne, an anachronistic impossibility, outside the Chateau Marmont.

Outside the Bruin, I looked at the movie posters behind the box office. They were generic, out of time. These spaces seemed suddenly less honest than I had originally thought, and felt, when I walked into their immersive and embracing detail; stepping in closer or stepping back, I could see that certain perspectives were not as they were in real life, or at least not as I remembered them. Wherever and whenever I was, I was not where I was first delighted to be.

Nor was I delighted, not anymore.

The streets were impossibly empty. The apartments, despite the occasional light, gave no sign of life. There were no cars on the streets.

I could not say it was a nightmare but it certainly was turning out to be a dream, or one of those video games where the player wakes up somewhere strange and has to figure out how he got there—a player whose “crime” is unknown and whose mystery is his past. This feeling is essential to the thing we call “noir,” the haunting that crept into Hollywood with World War II, its visual and psychological disorientations of time and space the cinematic analogues to a world suddenly without trust. This mood belongs most to Angelenos and predates the movies. Sold to the rest of the country as the city of citrus, sun, and opportunity, Los Angeles began its life as a promise. As no city before it—and maybe no city since—ours in the early decades of the twentieth century was so professionally and effectively commodified as the cure to all American ills that those who came and were not cured, prosperous, or saved as advertised could easily scapegoat Los Angeles as the city with no soul and run back home to the old religions and traditions of the East. But how many did? Trapped—a noir title from 1949—is what they were. They were also Caught—a title from the same year—and at the last stop on the continent, right Where the Sidewalk Ends, a title from the year after.

If Israel’s pictures are seductive, they should be. Femmes wouldn’t be fatales if they weren’t. Their rich, pulpy candy colors and nostalgic lure, their slick, sensual surfaces that say come hither . . . these are not the girls next door. Something of this duplicity, the uncanny appeal of each building’s facade, is, as I had discovered, conscientiously layered into Israel’s process. The photographs and references of Israel’s blueprints are not retouched but redrawn, and in this redrawing they are heightened by local myth and redescribed through the lens of Israel’s memory in dramatic, theatrical lighting and exaggerated perspective. These places only seem natural. They are to be loved, but not trusted.

And I remember: Israel has written to me about the “post-truth, augmented, AI-enhanced, blockchain-coded reality we now call home.”

Even before blockchain, this is, of course, how much of the world sees us in Los Angeles. Stepping into Israel’s un/real places, I thought immediately of him as a production designer charged with building “Los Angeles Street” on a studio backlot. Of course, no studio ever needed to build a Los Angeles Street, but they did build their “Main Street” and their “New York Street,” which were—as Israel’s places are—often more perfect than their originals. As Ernst Lubitsch famously put it, “I’ve been to Paris France and I’ve been to Paris Paramount. Paris Paramount is better.”

Is it any wonder (I wondered, looking at this work for the first time) that Israel was working where I was standing, at Warner Bros., a noir locale now that the studio of Huston and Bogart has, save for David Zaslav and a few TV shows, all but emptied? I know Israel wants to evoke the Hollywood past; he told me so and I felt it in the work. That’s partly why I am so comfortable here inside these paintings. He and I agree: we know—as the World War II noir filmmakers did—that the better world is gone. And there are those of us who remember, who keep flashing back, keep finding ourselves seduced, disoriented, lost, caught, trapped out of the past. But what a past. “How could I have known,” asks Walter Neff, flashing back, in Double Indemnity (1944), “that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”

Being with Israel’s work, I am reminded that too often in our contemporary reckonings of noir, we lose that smell of honeysuckle. But we shouldn’t. If the breakdowns of the noir tradition still devastate, still force us to ask ourselves if we are still sane, it’s because, burnished by the most romantic years of the twentieth century, when lovers were torn apart by a war worth fighting (or was it?), they began with the romance, with the beauty and the yearning, of the dream come true.

By definition, those of us who love Los Angeles share Israel’s and my view that our city can be beautified by illusions and dying dreams. We know that “Hollywood Liquor”—to borrow from a cheery, brightly lit sign on Israel’s Hollywood Boulevard—is better than no liquor at all, and that those who don’t dream don’t know they’re already dead. Look at Israel’s skies: it’s night, yes, but what a night.