Border Noir: Guilt, Shame and Uncanny Sexuation in Ride the Pink Horse

Abstract

Although Orson Welles’s 1958 Touch of Evil is the most critically and commercially recognised film within the border noir submode, this essay instead examines Robert Montgomery’s often overlooked 1947 film noir Ride the Pink Horse because of its close attention to the borderland setting. The article utilises a psychoanalytic understanding of affect and a border-influenced reverse anthropology to examine how the deterritorialised effect of the border zone and the uncanny atmosphere of the carnival environment in the film distresses the traditional noir antihero. Specifically examined is the relationship between two major manifestations of anxiety, two major affects: guilt and shame. This attention illustrates how the relocating of the noir universe out of the confines of the conventional dark urban streets to the liminal border zone uncannily transforms the guilt usually associated with the noir protagonist into a type of shame and a stronger encounter with anxiety as, appropriately, a borderless enigma. While guilt usually provides a distance from this enigma for the conventional noir antihero, shame produces a flight into being, as illustrated in the film’s narrative details. Ultimately, Montgomery’s cocksure character (Lucky Gagin), through his encounter with the deterritorialisation of the uncanny border zone, is transported from the conventional noir hero’s masculine position (psychoanalytically conceived) into an abject position that aligns more precisely with the feminine discursive position.