Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) New York Black Comedy Punk Noir

"A Punk Screwball Noir hiding in plain sight" (Noirsville)

Directed by Susan Seidelman (Smithereens, Sex And The City TV series).

Written by Leora Barish. Cinematography by Edward Lachman (Carol, Far From Heaven), Music by Thomas Newman. 

The film Stars Rosanna Arquette (After Hours, 8 Million Ways To Die, The Wrong Man, Pulp Fiction, Crash) as Roberta Glass, Aidan Quinn (Blink. Legends of the Fall) as Dez the projectionist, Robert Joy (Atlantic City) as Jim Dandy, Susan's boyfriend, Mark Blum as Gary Glass, Roberta's husband, Laurie Metcalf (U Turn, Blink) as Leslie Glass, Roberta's sister-in-law, Will Patton (After Hours, No Way Out, Romeo Is Bleeding) as Wayne Nolan, Madonna (Evita, Dick Tracy) as Susan Thomas. 

Rosanna Arquette as Roberta Glass

Aidan Quinn as Dez

Madonna as Susan Thomas

With Anna Levine as Crystal the magician's assistant, Peter Maloney as Ian, the magician, Steven Wright (Natural Born Killers) as Larry Stillman D.D.S., John Turturro (The Big Lebowski, Barton Fink) as Ray, the master of ceremonies at the Magic Club, Shirley Stoler (The Honeymoon Killers, Seven Beauties, Miami Blue) as a jail matron, Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad TV, Fearless - Perfect Crimes Showtime TV) as Street Vendor. 

Here is another film like The Pawnbroker, In The Heat Of The Night, A Street Car Named Desire that are critically acclaimed as...

 "first produced entirely in the United States film to deal with the Holocaust from the viewpoint of a survivor." "Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised Jewison for crafting "a film that has the look and sound of actuality and the pounding pulse of truth." He further praised Steiger and Poitier for "each giving physical authority and personal depth" to their performances." "The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther stated that "inner torments are seldom projected with such sensitivity and clarity on the screen" and commending both Vivien Leigh's and Marlon Brando's performances. Film critic Roger Ebert has also expressed praise for the film, calling it a "great ensemble of the movies." (Wiki)

... well deserved praise that overshadows, understandably of course, that fact that they are also Visually "Dark "Noir Stained" Story Film Noir.   

Desperately Seeking Susan came out back in a time when I wasn't really laser focused on Film Noir, but I was always a Western and Crime fan. There was a stretch between 1972 - 1981 where we didn't even have TV (there was no cable in Western Montana) and when we did pickup some broadcast it was at best 2-3 channels and one of them CBC out of Canada. 

Westerns of course are easily identifiable, obviously time period and landscapes. After the Classic Hollywood Era Noir, and post Black and White film production, the cutting edge of the Film Noir Style dispersed into various genres besides Crime and also into different mediums. 

But you have to be tuned in to it to detect it. The more Noir you watch the better. Obviously in some homage films it obvious and sometimes hits you right over the head, in others Noir is more subtle. 

I've put it this way - Once you get your Noir-dar activated and on you'll find that there is no going back. You watch enough Noirs and you literally get to the point where, I've heard it put this way, that "you know them when you see them." I'll go that one better. Noir, for me is a pan generic dark story told in a stylistic way that phototropic-ly creates a "mood" or "atmosphere" that triggers a vibe that you tune to, almost akin to a drug/alcohol high. You get a Noir buzz. But its a strange type of high that is actually topsy-turvy to a drug/alcohol high in that it works like this. 

For Noir neophytes they will only get that high from the hard boiled hardcore Noirs with Detectives, Femme Fatales, and murder. They are the Noir junkies, the mainliners. But with the more Noirs you get exposed to you'll find that there is an endless variety of stories that shuffle and spiral away on different tendrils that provide enough of the elements that make a film a Noir. Your personal life experiences will also inform your affinity to the types of stories that will tip Noir for you. So your tolerance level to Noir goes down, you don't need the hardboiled, hard core stories to get the fix and you recognize the noir in all the various tragedies and picaresque situations that plague the human condition. Noir expands out to an ill delineated, fuzzy "on the cusp of Noir" point where a film can tip either way for an individual. A good example of this effect is the the film Somebody Up There Likes Me that has a few very noir-ish sequences sprinkled through out its length.

When I was a kid in the 1950s I was glued to the TV. Seeing the Hollywood Classic Films Murder My Sweet, The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Out Of The Past, The Lost Weekend, Sweet Smell of Success, Cat People, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, The Thing From Outer Space, Blood On The Moon, Pursued, The Outcasts of Poker Flat, etc.. on the local and national channels as TV Premiers. But nobody was calling them Film Noir.  They were called Detective films, or Crime, Thrillers, SiFi, Suspense, Horror, Westerns and Dramas. At the same time TV Crime programs proliferated, with often noir-ish episodes of Peter Gunn, Mike Hammer, Naked City, and Johnny Staccato. Anthology series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents along with The Twilight Zone mixed dark stories in all genres with quite a few of their episodes being also quite Noir-ish. Also in the mix were TV produced drama series like CBSs Playhouse 90, Four Star Playhouse, General Electric Theater, with their often dark stories with noir-ish "stage play" stylistic lighting effects. 

So I got my pan generic "Noir-dar" turned on and tuned in long before I even knew what it was, or even remotely though of making a written out list of them. I've known them when I've watched them ever since. 

So now I have this back catalogue in my brain of past films that had tripped that phototropic vibe of Visual Noir and they sit in cobwebby back corners of my brain. It's not as if they are right there in some kind of inventory ready to analyze, they just randomly come back into memory triggered sometimes by the remembrance of another film, a visual sequence, a song, or by the memory of a certain actor's cinematic baggage.

Black Comedy Noir have been around since the beginning. Deadline at Dawn (1946), Manhandled (1949), Entre onze heures et minuit (1949), His Kind of Woman (1951), Shack Out On 101 (1955), and even Lady In The Lake (1946), has some of this quality, there are probably a few others lurking in the Classic Noirs. Neo Noir contenders are Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Seven Beauties (1975), The Late Show (1977) After Hours (1985), Down By Law (1986), Delicatessen (1991) The Big Lebowski (1998), and now add Desperately Seeking Susan now into the mix. I'm sure that their are others to discover.

This was a very influential film. It introduced Madonna's Punk chic style to the world.

Desperately Seeking Susan is noted for its impact on 1980s fashion, especially among the young female audience at that time. The movie's costumery was influenced in part by Madonna's own early style. 

"Punk chic - The style has been described as a thrift shop and "flash-trash" look.[Currie, Dawn (1999). Girl Talk: Adolescent Magazines and Their Readers. University of Toronto Press.] It typically incorporated many beads, lace tops, bleached hair, ratted hair, rosaries, crucifixes, skirts, bracelets, bustier, and other underwear as outerwear elements, fingerless gloves,[Mansour, David (2011). From Abba to Zoom: A Pop Culture Encyclopedia of the Late 20th Century], as well as ribbon or bow-shaped headbands or tiaras in the hair, called Madonna bows."

The film was also noted as a representation of yuppie culture and feminism. Some critics labeled Desperately Seeking Susan as one of the best US films of the year, including Vincent Canby from The New York Times, and eventually, of the decade by publications such as NME and Rolling Stone. Many others have labeled it a cult classic of the 1980s. In 2023, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[Tartaglione, Nancy (December 13, 2023). "National Film Registry:] (Wiki)

Ok, so with all that out of the way we have in Desperately Seeking Susan a story that combines Film Noir's amnesia trope and the mistaken identity trope with a jewel robbery and murder tale. It also has an abundance of  Noir's Visual Stylistics with your Neo Noir Pallet of all the usual dingy, and nausea inducing contrasting primary colors. Those colors in this film however, are ratcheted up into a Punk-ishly high saturation that flood everything, the characters, the interiors, and the locations shots. This is juxtaposed with the pastels of blah suburbia.

Ft. Lee, New Jersey. 

Roberta Glass. Housewife. A very bored housewife. Married to Gary Glass the Spa & Tub King of "Gary's Oasis." 

Roberta when not doing house wifey things or watching TV spends her more exciting days at the beauty parlor with Leslie her sister-in-law gossiping. 

Roberta is sexually unsatisfied, and she fantasizes about a couple of "desperate" lovers that post hook-up locations in the personal ads of the Daily Mirror. She empathizes with the word "desperate." Roberta longs to be mercurial and capricious like this mysterious Susan. The latest "meet' is at Battery Park, Manhattan.

Atlantic City. 

Susan Thomas.  Après Party. A free spirit punkette. Currently shacking up with Meeker a jewel thief. He's still crashing out on the bed. Susan all dressed has found a polaroid and is snapping shots. She's in full Flash-Trash attire, the lace top, rosary beads, leotard, the "pyramid / all seeing eye" jacket.  

She holds out her arms and takes a selfie of herself laying on a hotel carpet that's strewn with playing cards food trays and candies. She hops on the bed and pokes Meeker who in reaction rolls over exposing some of his face. She snaps another polaroid of him and when it comes out looks at it and drops it on his still sleeping form. 

When room service arrives with breakfast and the newspaper Susan spots Jim's ad in the personals for the meet in Battery Park, Manhattan. 

"Desperately Seeking Susan

 Keep the faith.  Tues 10 a. m. 

 Battery Park, Gangway 1.

Love Jim"

Susan draws a heart around the add, finishes eating and decides to split, She combs through Meeker's jacket pockets emptying his wallet and finding a folded handkerchief that contains two antique, exotic looking, earrings. 

She puts them in her round black hat case painted with white skeletons, along with her other personal items. She scoots out of the room and down at the elevators the case opens spilling the contents just as the elevator door opens. Susan yells out to hold the elevator.

Will Patton as Wayne Nolan

Out of the elevator emerges Wayne Nolan who passes by Susan who is bent over scooping her clothes back into the hat case. Wayne pauses to look back at Susan and is bathed in red light. All that is prominent of Susan is her blonde hair and the pyramid with its all seeing eye. 

New York, New York

Cut to the George Washington Bridge. 

A bus arrives from Jersey at The GWB bus station. Susan picks up her bag from the luggage department and heads to the ladies room. She washes up, changes, takes out one of the earring and puts it in her ear. 

She stows what she doesn't want back in her bag. She heads to the lockers and checks it jimmying the mechanism with a nail file. 

Susan heads down to The Magic Club on Broadway looking for her friend Crystal. Crystal works at the Magic Club as Ian the magician's assistant. Ian doesn't allow her to wear her glasses so she has a hard time with the illusions. 

Susan finds Crystal backstage and asks her if she could crash at her place. While in the dressing room Susan spots the headline in the newspaper about a murder in Atlantic City. Meeker was thrown from the hotel window and the police are looking for earrings stolen from a Queen Nefertiti museum exhibit and a blonde that was last seen with him. Susan.

John Turturro as Ray

Anna Levine as Crystal

The next day Roberta, decides to drive to Manhattan, head down to Battery Park and stake out Gangway 1 at 4:00PM to see if she can scope out Susan and Jim. 

She spots them, and tails them, eavesdropping on their conversations. Jim brings them to a parking lot where Jim's punk rock band and their van is idling waiting. to pick him up. Jim explains that the band scored a last minute gig in Buffalo and he has to split. Jim gives Susan the phone number of his friend Dez a projectionist at the Bleecker Street Cinema. 

Susan heads off into lower Manhattan followed by Roberta. At a shop on 2nd Ave. Susan sees a pair of boots she just has to have so she trades the pyramid jacket for the boots. Roberts also in the shop watches the whole transaction and buys Susan's jacket as soon as she steps out of the store. 

Giancarlo Esposito as street vendor

When Roberta gets home she takes off the jacket and a key falls out of a pocket. She searches the jacket and also finds a photo and a phone number on a scrap of paper. 

Roberta takes a bath and decides to put a personal add in the New York Mirror.

She calls and places her ad. "Desperately Seeking Susan - meet me a Battery Park, Thursday, 4:00PM. Regarding key." A Stranger.

Jim in Buffalo also reads the same add and call's his friend Dez who is running a film at work. Jim asks him to do him a solid and go down to Battery Park at 4:00 and check on Susan. 

When Dez tells Jim, how can he do that since he doesn't know what she looks like, Jim replies that she has blonde hair and wears a jacket with a pyramid topped with an all seeing an eye. Dez borrows a scooter from the Dragon Noodle Chinese Restaurant and heads for the Battery. 

Susan reads the personals also and decides to check out the Stranger, too. She hops in a cab and heads down to the Battery.

Coincidentally, sitting on a park bench in Battery Park is Nolan who has a copy of the Mirror open to the personals.  He also has a polaroid of Susan, apparently taken on the boardwalk by Meeker, looking at her from behind and wearing her pyramid jacket. 

When Roberta reaches the park she is immediately spotted by Nolan. Nolan saunters over and starts chatting up her up. She's looking for Susan and basically ignores him and starts walking away. 

Susan meanwhile, tries to skip on the cab fare when she gets to the Battery and the cab driver makes enough noise to get the attention of a cop. Just before the cops pull Susan away she spots Roberta wearing her jacket and sees Nolan accosting her. 

Theft of services

Nolan, grabs Roberta forcefully as she is walking away from him, just as Dez gets to the scene spots the jacket and calls out her name. Nolan, startled, dashes off while Roberta falls smacking her head against the concrete sidewalk knocking her out. At the same time her handbag goes rolling into New York harbor.

"want a piece of candy?"

"Susan"

"Susan"

It all goes Noirsville when Roberta comes to and doesn't know who she is. Amnesia.

Noirsville

Susan Seidelman, Rosana Arquette, Aidan Quinn, Madonna and everyone involved created a Screwball Noir Masterpiece. It fits right in with other Black Comedy Noir like Dr. Strangelove,or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Seven Beauties (1975) The Late Show (1977) After Hours (1985), Down By Law (1986), Delicatessen (1991) The Big Lebowski (1998.

Seidelman shoehorned in lots of underground music cameos in the film. Read all about them here.

It definitely should be on your view list. Its a hoot. 10/10