Making Terms with the Bad:
Welles' The Lady from Shanghai

April 9, 2006

The Lady from Shanghai is a noir tale told from the perspective of an Irishman named Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles). The character depends on two contradictory character traits: someone with bluster who exudes knowledge of the seamy side of life, and then someone not sharp enough to avoid being tricked. The world around O'Hara is characterized by him as a teeming tank of sharks, maddened at the scent of blood, and ripping each other to shreds.. surely one of Welles' more memorable rhetorical set-pieces.

A pair of dialogue passages stand out to me, the first one comes almost 40 minutes into the movie, as Rosalie (Rita Hayworth) tells Michael:

R: Everything's bad, Michael, everything. You can't escape it or fight it. You've got to get along with it. Deal with it. Make terms. You're such a foolish knight errant, Michael.

If you missed the brief passage, then you might be caught by surprise at the end, where Rosalie lies dying and Michael stands behind:

M: You said the world is bad. We can't run away from the badness. And you're right there. But you also said we can't fight it, we must deal with the badness, make terms. And let the badness deal with you and make its own terms in the end...
R: You can fight, but what good is it?
[Michael starting to walk away]
R: Goodbye...
M: You mean we can't win?
R: No, we can't win... Give my love to the sunrise.
M: Then we can't lose either. Only if we quit.
R: And you're not going to...
M: Not again...
R: Michael, I'm frightened... Michael, come back here... Michael... I don't want to die!
[Michael stops and looks back at her]
R: I DON'T WANT TO DIE!
[Michael walks away for good]

First, I should point out how enjoyable Orson Welles is as a writer of dialogue.. what could be more perfect than: "Give my love to the sunrise", delivered by a beautiful dying woman? In the book of interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles tells a story of meeting Truman Capote, and being surprised to find that Capote could reel off whole pages of dialogue from The Lady from Shanghai. I wish I could do the same.

The customary place for the noir hero.. the modern "knight errant".. is in the midst of a world in which there is no clearly defined right and wrong. By convention, the police may be corrupt, or just plain stupid, and just who the real bad guy might be is always a question.. for the audience as much as the hero.

The danger in film noir often stems from trying too hard to beat the bad. In The Lady from Shanghai, Michael thinks he sees an opening to cooperate with the bad and thereby gain a new life.. but this is a miscalculation. The later Roman Polanski film Chinatown feels like a development of these same questions, and there the hope of beating the bad.. actually putting it "behind bars".. is critiqued. Ultimately this effort is fruitless, and destoys those one wants to save.

The another dead end for the noir hero is escape.. actual flight to another place. That is Michael's dream, the reason he gets involved with the shady plan to fake a murder. With $5,000 he thinks he can take Rosalie and find a new life. But Rosalie has no such illusions: "Running away doesn't work. I tried it." This is a theme mined over and over in film noir. Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum, stands for me as the definitive statement of the inability to ever get away from the past.

Orson Welles, through his dialogue in The Lady from Shanghai, comes up with more than just a pessimistic statement concerning any fight against the bad, but seems to strive at an actual ethic. We could call this "the noir ethic." OK, so there is no idealistic defeat of evil. No escape to start a new life.. certainly no redemption. Instead there is simply the necessity of making terms with the bad. But how to settle those terms? One can either passively allow the bad to seep into life, or actively define one's own position in relation to the bad, finding a place of relative honor.. from which one can still hold up one's head. Orson seems to side with an active pushing back against the bad. That, at least, seems the point of the end of The Lady from Shanghai in which Michael walks away from the funhouse and toward the beach.