There’s something the matter with Dix Steele—the protagonist in Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 novel In a Lonely Place and in its 1950 adaptation of the same name directed by Nicholas Ray—and the women around him sense it.
You could call it feminine intuition. The detective in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” does so when Grace Kelly’s Lisa voices the idea that a woman would never leave home without her purse and valuable jewelry. “That feminine intuition stuff sells magazines, but in real life it’s still a fairy tale,” the detective says. But Lisa is right: the woman across the courtyard didn’t leave; she was murdered by her husband.
Ray and screenwriters Andrew P. Solt and Edmund H. North do an excellent job of translating this “intuition” that Hughes carefully kneads into her novel, despite its adherence to Dix’s perspective. It’s an intuition, or gut feeling, that few remark upon when talking about Hughes’ masterwork, and Ray’s adaptation of it. And what a shame that is, for Hughes’ understanding and articulation of feminine intuition has impacted not only noir as a genre, but also how “bad guys” have come to be represented in American stories.
At one point in Ray’s film, Humphrey Bogart’s Dix nearly beats to death a young man whose car he crashes into. At the crossroads of love and fear, his girlfriend Laurel (Gloria Grahame) heads to Dix’s friend Brub Nicolai’s home. She’s there not to see Brub (Frank Lovejoy), who is a detective, but his wife, Sylvia (Jeff Donnell).
Dix is a screenwriter who is suspected of murder. His sardonic sense of humor, along with his understanding of how a murderer’s mind works, courtesy of his writerly imagination and sensibilities, has not done him any favors in persuading others that he is innocent. Laurel has mostly been convinced of Dix’s innocence, but doubts begin creeping in as Dix becomes increasingly violent and paranoid.
“There is something strange about Dix, isn’t there?” Laurel says with hesitation. “I keep worrying about it, I stay awake nights trying to find out what it is.” But after every one of his outbursts, Dix overcompensates with love, showering Laurel with gifts, making her feel guilty about her thoughts. Sylvia tells Laurel to tell Dix how she feels. “What can I say to him, ‘I love you, but I’m afraid of you’?” Laurel asks incredulously.
“You should go away for a while, I really think you should,” says Sylvia, regretting the words as soon as they’ve been uttered. “I came here because I wanted to say these things out loud and be laughed at,” Laurel responds. “But you’re not laughing.” Sylvia isn’t laughing because she senses what Laurel senses, what is incomprehensible to Brub: Dix’s violence. Sylvia has sensed it from the start. And Sylvia, like Lisa, is right: Bogart’s Dix, though cleared of murder, almost chokes Laurel to death when she tries to leave him.
On the face of it, Hughes’ story is told from the perspective of, and about, Dix, a young man who found life’s greatest joy during WWII as a fighter pilot. Flying allowed him to rise above the “crawling earth,” the desperately ordinary folks whom Dix feels superior to. Dix hates women most of all: “They were all alike, cheats, liars, whores. Even the pious ones were only waiting for a chance to cheat and lie and whore.” After the war, Dix yearns for something more dynamic than purpose, he is looking for “that feeling of power and exhilaration and freedom that came with loneliness in the sky.” He finds it in two places: standing at a promontory overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and in raping and murdering women.
Dix reconnects with Brub, a friend from the Air Corps, and when he learns that Brub is a detective investigating the murders that Dix has been committing, Dix is elated. He endears himself to Brub because the feeling of being close to the man hunting him excites him. Brub falls into an easy friendship with his old Army pal, scarcely suspecting him of being a murderer, but his wife is a bit more guarded. (Ray’s adaptation differs from Hughes’s story in one essential aspect: Bogart’s Dix is innocent of murder.) On the face of it, Hughes’ story is about a modern Raskolnikov. But faces often mislead.
Hughes was writing In a Lonely Place at a time when postwar America was reckoning with the fact of men returning from combat and the rise of McCarthyism. At the moment of its cultural immediacy, noir best and most often commingled like strands of DNA, articulating or commenting on two ideas. The first is the repossession of public space by men returning from war, what scholar Christopher Breu describes as more a “cultural reassertion of male power and privilege” than what is typically described as white men’s anxiety around women in the workplace. A reassertion is more violent, active, and intentional than an anxious response or reaction, Breu convincingly argues. This reassertion and repossession pushed women back into the private realm. The second idea that noir articulates is “the privatization of public life and suppression of collective political activity produced by the anticommunist purges” of the time, Breu writes.
Dix is a criticism in negative relief, through logical extension, of both the misogyny of the time and the encroachments that law, represented by Brub, and surveillance culture made into civilians’ private lives. Hughes achieves this dual criticism through her third-person narration: we are both understanding of Dix and repulsed by Dix. We learn his thoughts, we understand his paranoia, his hatred of having his life intruded upon by the surveilling eyes of others, and we clearly see that he hates women.
Bogart does a tremendous job of humanizing Dix, carrying in his furrowed brows and defeated eyes the look of a man disappointed by his friends, who suspect him, who might sell him out to the authorities. And we’re also afraid of Bogart’s Dix—I would not want to be alone with him when he is drunk, when he white knuckles at words that hurt his fragile feelings, when he violently careens his car over switchbacks, when he beats up a man he already almost killed. I understand, viscerally, why Laurel wants to escape him in secret, for to break things off with him would, and indeed does, incite a lethal rage.
But though Dix is the story’s protagonist, it is not simply through his figure (his criticisms of the society around him and his hatred of women) that we receive a scathing criticism of the world Hughes was writing in.
Dix doesn’t like Sylvia; he doesn’t like how she looks at him. Her gaze is always changing on him, one moment she’s warm, the other she’s distant. Unpredictable. “Behind her civilized attention, her humor, her casualness, he wasn’t certain [about her],” Hughes’ narration reads. “Something was there behind the curtain of her eyes, something in the way she looked at Dix, a look behind the look.” Sylvia doesn’t look at Dix so much as she sees him, studies him, “probing him with her mind.” Brub tells Dix later that Sylvia has a knack for seeing people, seeing what lies beneath their layers of propriety. Dix doesn’t like Sylvia because he can’t seem to manipulate her, because she looks back at him.
Hughes has us see women as Dix sees them. Dix’s gaze is violent, just as obsessive and invasive as the state’s; both extreme and real in its proportions, his look is a blistering criticism of misogyny’s endemic violence. Often, women are seen as objects of Dix’s desire or wrath. Laurel is seen, not allowed subjectivity. But the same cannot be said for Sylvia, because through her, Hughes does something subtly revolutionary: she allows a subjectivity to persist despite Dix’s objectifying gaze.
This is why Hughes makes sure to detail Dix’s discomfort around Sylvia. In her resistance to his outward charm, in the frustration and discomfort she causes Dix with her looks, Hughes allows a feminine subjectivity to exist in a novel that is otherwise entirely a study of a masculine subjectivity. Hughes writes a gaze that, long before Laura Mulvey posits the objectifying masculine gaze, objectifies the objectifier. A reaction to the repossession.
Ray seems to understand Sylvia’s role acutely. The first time Donnell’s Sylvia appears on screen, she doesn’t say anything for the longest while. As Bogart’s Dix playfully accuses Brub of not watching enough whodunits, Sylvia smiles, but keeps her eyes locked onto Dix, and Ray’s lens remains locked onto her gaze. “We solve every murder in less than two hours,” Dix says off-frame, and Sylvia just watches. A concerned, considering expression furrows her brows as Dix poses her and Brub on chairs to enact the murderer’s last moments with his victim, so that Brub can get into the killer’s headspace.
As Dix passionately recreates the physical and psychological mise en scène of the murder, and as Sylvia’s expression becomes more and more concerned, Brub, enthralled by Dix’s narration, almost chokes Sylvia. Sylvia is the only one to remain outside of Dix’s story. “Brub, stop it,” she gasps finally.
Sylvia’s presence isn’t like Brub’s in that she is not a representative of the state; she is a mere housewife. Megan Abbott, in her afterword to the New York Review of Books edition of In a Lonely Place, describes Sylvia’s role within the book as an upturning of noir convention, detaching archetype from expected gender. In traditional noirs, the protagonist is a Philip Marlowe, a cantankerous character but also morally clean, a good guy who solves the crime.
In In a Lonely Place, the protagonist is morally murky, and it is the women who save the day. “As [Hughes’ story] unfolds, we gradually understand that the danger is not without but within,” Abbott writes. “And it is Laurel and Sylvia who prove to be the real detectives here, the hard-boiled ‘dicks’ uncovering Dix’s secrets, while Dix himself is the threat, the contaminant. The femme fatale turns out to be an homme.”
While it is the case that Hughes plays with archetypes, I would argue that she also presents us with something delicate and intuitively familiar: a leaning into the lessons accrued from the experience of a gendered being-in-the-world. The role reversal that Abbott describes suggests a masculinization of the women characters, which is not exactly what happens in both the book and the film. Laurel becomes suspicious of Dix not as a result of a lay detective work, but from observation of his violence, tallying it up against her experience of abusive men. Sylvia, too, doesn’t go after Dix; rather, she watches him in her home. Dix’s destructiveness is manifest, but only the women around him sense it with certainty.
Mid-century women were expected to stay within the domestic realm. In Ray’s film, Laurel’s is the story of a woman becoming domesticated. Grahame’s Laurel practically moves into Dix’s apartment as he writes his next screenplay, looking after him like a mother. And as she leans further into the femininity expected of her, she becomes more and more frightened and suspicious of Dix, and on the night of their engagement, she decides finally to run. As she becomes more and more feminine, she sees what Sylvia, the epitome of femininity, sees: a violent man.
Most women learn at a very young age how to move around men. Patriarchy allows toxic masculinity to run unchecked, leaving everyone else to figure out how to survive. Sylvia is apprehensive of Dix because he is the kind of man a woman, with her lived experience and understanding of what men are allowed to get away with, has learned to be wary of. Most women learn to be wary: the girl Dix stalks at the very beginning of the novel, the one he kills at the novel’s end, feels Dix following him. As he is following her, she hears him: “He knew she heard him for her heel struck an extra beat, as if she half stumbled, and her steps went faster. […] She was afraid.” The only thing that stops Dix in his hunt is a car that lambasts him with its beams.
The detective in “Rear Window” might describe the girl’s hastening pace as feminine intuition, her sensing that someone is behind her, but it is more aptly described as what women learn to do to survive under patriarchy. We learn to be wary of certain types of men, and we teach each other the signs that hint at violence, clues pointing to danger.
This is not to say that we always survive, but it is to say that being a woman in this world is exhausting and dangerous. It is to say that Sylvia and Laurel are first and foremost women under patriarchy, and have learned how men work. These are characters who, even as they take on masculine narratological roles, also embody the negative side of womanhood: the necessity of vigilance. Even as they take on masculine archetypes, they also, in a beguiling contradiction, lean into the requirements of womanhood.
In her seminal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” scholar Laura Mulvey describes the kind of “looking” that is performed in many films. The viewer identifies with the protagonist, who often and only looks at women with an objectifying and fetishizing gaze, which in turn has us as viewers colluding in flattening feminine figures. But Hughes, through Sylvia’s gaze that makes Dix squirm, and then Ray through Laurel, who grows uneasy as she watches Bogart’s Dix, offers us women who look back as they are being watched, who put forth a subjectivity that yearns to turn away from the protagonist that we as audiences have grown intimate with.
This subjectivity glistens in Donnell’s eyes as she watches Bogart’s Dix at her dinner table; this subjectivity is the sadness in Grahame’s Laurel’s voice as she looks at Sylvia, saying, “You’re not laughing.” This is a subjectivity that complicates our understanding of traditional noir and the workings of cinema itself, because Hughes, in 1947, showed us what it looks like for women to look back at the men looking at them.
“From Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson to Bret Easton Ellis and Thomas Harris, nearly every ‘serial killer’ tale of the last seventy years bears [In a Lonely Place’s] imprint — both in terms of its sleek, relentless style, and its claustrophobic ‘mind of the criminal’ perspective,” writes Abbott. We see it in “The Cell” and in “The Silence of the Lambs,” where Jodie Foster’s Clarice looks confidently and unwaveringly back at Hannibal Lecter, making his heart race and skip. We can see Hughes’ influence in pretty much any film that features an antihero explaining his psyche to his pursuers, thereby endearing us to them even if for a moment. It’s there, too, in “Rear Window,” a film in which women save the day through action and psychological understanding.
Ira Levin’s 1953 novel A Kiss Before Dying feels beholden to In a Lonely Place. Levin uses third-person narration to make us intimate comrades of Bud Corliss, a homicidal protagonist who is an ex-GI and who hates women and yearns for wealth. And even as he is misogynistic, we are still made to sympathize with him because we understand him, his feeling of being an outlaw working against a state that sends young men to war, kindling a taste for killing, and that unequally distributes wealth. Most importantly, though, it is in homing in on Bud’s flailing—he sweats a lot—in moments of detection, specifically detection by women, that harkens back to Hughes. The power of a woman’s look can crumple a man.
In a Lonely Place is an endlessly complex work, a story through which Hughes tackles many beasts, the most bedeviling of which is the monster that is womanhood under patriarchy. Few works explicate as intricately as In a Lonely Place does the work of femininity, the feminine intuition that is really gut feeling that is really survival tactics. Hughes wields this grim understanding of gender and spins it into something empowering: the female gaze. When it comes to poignant or culturally resonant noirs, I wonder if we forget to credit Hughes for her defining work, for showing us how to look back at the scary men who objectify us.
