Following the TIFF world premiere of Carol Morley’s fourth feature-length film, Out of Blue (2018), the director, seated adjacent to the film’s star, Patricia Clarkson posited that she “wanted to explore the female investigate gaze”. This compelling term, applied to her labyrinthine performance as New Orleans detective Mike Hoolihan, offers many refractions of how a “female investigative gaze” might not only look, but breathe and take shape through the body.
Despite having its basis in Martin Amis’s novel Night Train, Morley’s ‘adaptation’ significantly departs from its source text. The narrative world of Out of Blue unfolds from dazzling, sweeping shots of the cosmos. The camera swoops down from this celestial field to a New Orleans rooftop observatory where acclaimed astrophysicist Dr. Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) is lecturing about her work on the star matter from which all human beings are composed. The next morning, Dr. Rockwell is found dead: her face shot into unrecognisable chaos, objects scattered around her body. This aestheticised murder bares markers of an evasive, dormant serial murderer nicknamed the ‘0.38 Caliber Killer’. Mike (Clarkson) is placed on the case. The main suspects? Jennifer’s romantic partner Dr. Duncan J. Reynolds a young Black physics professor (Jonathan Majors in my new favourite performance of an academic), Professor Ian Strammi, and Jennifer’s father Colonel Tom Rockwell, a former POW. As it evolves, Out of Blue’s murder plot is increasingly captivating, and might be described as a much needed camp parody of Hitchcockian proportions, told from a female perspective. Morley and her cast know exactly when to ham it up and when to build genuine emotive tension as Mike gets closer and closer to uncovering the details of Jennifer’s murder. At times, in its humour, shooting style, and narrative approach, Out of Blue recalls another meta-noir film: Wim Wenders’s Highsmith adaptation The American Friend. Yet Morley’s film also escapes a reliance on comparison, as she establishes her own commentary on the noir genre, anticipating and then sidestepping its cliché to produce a unique, feminist detective story.
Despite its singularity, I went into this film with concerns, namely that Out of Blue would serve up its “female investigative gaze” by way of a simple gender reversal of the hardboiled (male) detective and misogynistic noir tropes. I became nervous when, in the first ten minutes of the film, Mike surveys the bloody crime scene and becomes nauseous, which causes her male colleague to express concern. Mike’s female partner retorts that Mike never gets affected by a case. Mike confirms that a burger from the previous night just wasn’t sitting right. At TIFF, this got a lot of laughs. Momentarily, I anticipated that the feminism of Out of Blue might be the equivalent of the photographs of Hilary Swank eating Astro Burger after her 2005 Oscar win – a woman who devours burgers being, of course, the height of subversion.
These fears, however, were soon abated as Out of Blue continually satisfied my hope of offering something more complex. This is not to say that Out of Blue rejects the shooting traditions of noir and hardboiled genres: Mike is often bifurcated by wire gates, caught in shadows of venetian blinds, cast in watery lights filtering through a dashboard window, or pulling up to the spectral terror of an abandoned house. In terms of character, Clarkson – much like Krysten Ritter in Jessica Jones – also embodies many traditionally ‘masculine’ tropes of the hardboiled detective: hungry (for food in a literal sense), aggressive, willing to transgress relationships with her suspects, a heavy drinker (in Out of Blue, Mike is a recovering alcoholic who relapses in a moment of peak stress related to the case). And while I scoffed initially at the burger joke, the gut remained integral to understanding Clarkson’s extraordinary performance, who, reflecting on the process of developing her character remarked that: “we kept it visceral”. It is this very viscerality and attunement to the her character’s body that informs Clarkson’s (and so Mike’s) “female investigative gaze”. This concept renders Out of Blue much more than any inversion or tropish reversal. Mike’s approach to the case is characteristic of many hardboiled detectives: somehow this case is the one that affects her repressed trauma irrevocably. We know, from watching other films in this genre, that there is something significant about Mike’s trauma that is connected to Jennifer’s case and will eventually be disclosed. As Mike becomes obsessive – to the point that her partner worries if she is “back on the sauce” – Morley analeptically deploys colour and light to reveal fragmented flashbacks of objects and shadowy corners of space that visualise repressed memories that Mike admits she cannot access, a cinematic device that makes the audience wonder if Mike has a firm handle on distinguishing truth from reality. As Mike strikes up an intimate friendship in AA with Stella Honey (Devyn A. Tyler) – a TV reporter also assigned to Jennifer’s case and whom we’re never quite sure is or is not a figment of Mike’s imagination – we are asked to distrust Mike. In a challenging moment of relapse at a strip club, Mike dances onstage and kisses one of the dancers, taking off her top, and collapsing drunkenly in front of one of her murder suspects. The fact that Morley and Clarkson do not present this as shameful is crucial. Out of Blue makes the claim that women can be hardboiled detectives and unreliable noir narrators. Yet it also calls the audience into question for considering Mike to be unreliable. Why does her status as a trauma survivor, recovering addict, or middle aged woman delegitimise her as a detective? After all, Mike solves the case despite these moments of collapse, despair, and fear.
Clarkson’s expression of Mike is remarkable: visceral, as she and Morley intended. Mike’s brunette, leather clad, darkly made up, Joan Jett aesthetic and harsh disdain for intellectualism works dissonantly with a deeply tender, care-driven engagement with the world around her. Mike touches the faces of her suspects tenderly or grabs their shoulders as if searching for the truth through her hands and holds objects (clues) with a haptic intensity. In a powerful final scene that reveals the murderer to us, Mike returns to the site of her trauma. Morley merges flashback and present, so that Mike comes into literal contact her past. The visuals are hauntingly emotive, hovering on the border of melodrama and realism: a strength that could be attributed to the film as a whole. Instead of playing out a ‘showdown’ between cop and killer, the confrontation that occurs in this scene is one between Mike and the viewing audience. The confrontation is this: Mike stares directly at the camera, which recedes through this abandoned house on a dolly. Her hair hangs limply, her makeup is smudged, her expression one of exhaustion. This is the female investigate gaze: a fully lived subject who looks back, daring us to doubt her reliability and command of self again. Here, Morley presents the potential of feminist noir: one that does not idealise its investigator’s body and energy, or fully resolve their trauma.
There were aspects of this film that perhaps deserved more consideration from its director. In particular, conceptualisations of race in Out of Blue are deserving of critical interventions (especially from writers who are not me), especially one courtroom scene that addressed the removal of racist or colonial monuments: a topic that was never revisited. An additional aspect of Out of Blue that threatened to baffle me was the film’s cosmological exploration. Its opening line – “There’s much we can’t see, detect or comprehend, yet we spend our lives trying to get to the heart of this dark energy”, is delivered by Jennifer Rockwell the night before her murder and becomes repeated many times throughout the film. This line, which contains the kernels of an unfortunately chosen graduating epigraph in a high school yearbook, worked against its pretention to establish more interesting thematics. Morley’s philosophical and scientific fascination with the external vastness of the night sky complimented the interiority of Clarkson’s character study. Moreover, it felt, in the end, to be part of Out of Blue’s feminist project: one that reminds us of the dangers inherent in narrative resolution or believing that plot points can perfectly “add up”. The night sky – ultimately unknowable to human subjects – we access in fragments, or small pockets in which it opens itself up to us. I felt similarly about this film, which wraps up its thrilling murder plot yet simultaneously refuses to grant clean and tidy resolution to the trauma of its main character. The cosmos in Out of Blue does not stand as a symbol of fate, heavenly justice, or divine retribution, but instead an investigative gaze as complex as Mike’s: one that, as we search it, searches back.
Katherine Connell is a PhD candidate at York University, Toronto
