Zero Effect (1998), directed by Jake Kasdan. It is a film that blends classic and modern sensibilities, noir and neo-noir. The film focuses on Daryl Zero, a private investigator who is hired by a wealthy businessman, Gregory Stark, to uncover the identity of the person blackmailing him. However, this through-line is merely a skin-deep machination. As the unfolding plot reveals, the real mystery is of Zero’s duality of self.
Classic noir.
Private investigator. The character of Daryl Zero, played by Bill Pullman in one of his best performances, portrays one of noir’s ubiquitous character types, the private investigator, otherwise known as a P.I. In A Panorama of American Film Noir (1941-1953), Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton inform on this long-standing requisite, noting, “The private [investigator] has been the standard character of the 1940s film noir. Arriving from the novels of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, he moved around in a twilight world, on the borderline of legality. Accepting of dubious clients [and] mixed up in suspect affairs” (158). Zero is equal not only in the aspect of profession mentioned by Borde and Chaumeton, but he is also in a “twilight world,” the morally gray area between right and wrong. The character of Stark, played by Ryan O’Neal, is, as the opening of the film conveys, a person of suspicion. It is not known what Stark has done, but a feeling leads to presumption of guilt. Zero is aware of this, but he claims neutrality. As he says in the movie, “There business equals their business. We’re not involved. It has nothing to do with us.”
Mystery, extortion and crime. Stark, played by Ryan O’Neal, solicits the heralded detecting abilities of Zero in an attempt to procure the identity of his blackmailer. Blackmail, a form of extortion and a crime within itself, is also a necessity of noir. However, that is not the only crime. Murder, also a charge of noir, is linked to the decade’s old crime committed by Stark, that crime being the cause of the blackmail. He must continue to pay the blackmailer or risk being exposed. Passion motivates the blackmailer, as Zero says, “All crime is passionate. It’s passion that moves the criminal to act that disrupts the static inertia of morality.”
Neo-noir.
Zero’s split identity. Zero, who refers to himself unabashedly as, “The greatest private investigator in the world” is committed to his profession to the point of isolation. During the film, he narrates, “My work relies on my ability to remain absolutely, purely objective. Detached. I have mastered the fine art of detachment. And while it comes at some cost, this supreme objectivity is what makes me, dare I say, the greatest observer the world has ever known.” Clearly, he is a skilled investigator, however he lacks interpersonal connections and social graces and therein lies the split. His employee and intermediary, Steve Arlo, played by Ben Stiller, speaks about Zero at an early point in the film, saying, “I’m telling you he never leaves the house, okay? I mean, he’s like some kind of recluse. A complete freak. No social life. In fact, no social skills. It’s a strange [. . .] thing, when he’s working, the smoothest operator you’ve ever seen. Brave, slick, cunning. . . do anything. Soon as he gets off work, it’s all gone. Afraid to go to the dry cleaners. Literally. Too uncomfortable in his own skin to go out and eat.” Zero, who has obvious difficulty balancing his two-sided persona, therefore lacks a sole identity, a true identity. Added upon this, as a part of his profession, he is a chameleon, presuming many alternate identities which, akin to his aforementioned divide, begs the question, who is Daryl Zero?
Self-reflexive. In Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir, author Foster Hirsch, explains, “But in this truly new noir, it isn’t the mystery, framed as the ‘other’ text that is the focus, it is the investigator himself. The mystery plot exists only to mirror and reinforce [the main characters] noir vision of the world and of his place in it” (171). As the film progresses, the central preoccupation becomes Zero’s own inwardly focused questions of selfhood. This enigma is thrust to the forefront by his involvement with this film’s femme fatale, Gloria Sullivan (Kim Dickens). Sullivan is discovered rather quickly by Zero to be the elusive blackmailer. However, it is not her identity that consumes Zero but her motive. He becomes entangled with her, literally and figuratively, losing his objectivity for the first time in his career. At this point, it is clear the real resolution lies not in the text but in the subtext, the mystery of Zero and Sullivan. As Richard Gilmore in “The Dark Sublimity of Chinatown” states, “There is something more going on, something of which one cannot quite get a glimpse. It is the sense of the pervasive ambiguities that have not yet made themselves explicit. It emerges with the burgeoning sense of a counternarrative to the narrative” (The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, 130).
Reformed femme fatale. Sullivan, who is a femme fatale quite unlike her past counterparts, as she is not sexually explicit, devious or vindictive, rather, she is a character of good moral standing albeit mysterious, who seeks her own form of actualization. Donald R. D-Aries and Foster Hirsch in The Philosophy of Neo-Noir refer to this new femme fatale, citing, “[She] is a damaged yet sympathetic character who does whatever it takes simply to get by within a world of limited possibilities. A lost soul” (“ ‘Saint’ Sydney: Atonement and Moral Inversion in Hard Eight” 93). Her blackmail of Stark was never about greed, rather, it was of vengeance. By film’s end, she has the opportunity to commit this sin yet she is not like classic femme fatales, she is reformed, not narcissistic and cold-hearted but is morally bound. She has the chance to take Stark’s life but chooses the moral high ground and, in fact, saves his life.
