Coffee and Noir: SHOCK
every instance of coffee in noir: 046
You can learn a lot about a character by how they take their coffee: sugar? cream? more whiskey than caffeine?
I’m cataloging every noir scene where coffee plays a role — rote and ritual, soul-dark or cream and sugar, served from dingy diners to shiny penthouses.
Shock is part noir, part ‘issues picture,’ and more than a little camp. In the opener, Janet (Anabel Shaw) witnesses a murder. When Janet exhibits extreme distress, people with motives ranging from compassionate to outright nefarious commit her to an institution for ‘treatment.'
One small detail: Janet’s treating physician Dr. Richard Cross (a deliciously dastardly Vincent Price) is the murderer! and the head nurse is Dr. Cross’s Lady Macbeth-esque mistress Elaine Jordan (Lynn Bari, sprinkling glee amidst her nefarium).
You need that backstory to best appreciate deeper undercurrents in our titular scene, where Nurse Jordan serves some coffee to a doctor while warding off his ‘playful, jk!’ advances.
I left in some of the in-between horror sequence because it’s good and scary, but also because it gives stark contrast and context to the coffee moments.
Transitions between the two scenes are aesthetically fun: when nurse and doctor rush to the window and look to the sky, their eyes prompt the camera to drift upward to the patient’s room; later, as the patient tries to settle himself, we get a thunderous smash cut back to the coffee room.
The wandering, scared patient and the casually chummy coworkers create a distinct juxtaposition, two moments of faux domesticity bookending a sequence where a horrified patient fights his own (medically manipulated) imagination.
But the coffee scene has a hidden horror of its own:
Shock centres around the practice of dosing people with substances (mostly against their will), so these two medical professionals are hyper-aware of the effects of drugs on the nervous system. But only we the audience know how far Nurse Jordan is willing to go to get what she wants.
We’ve already seen Nurse Jordan at ease with murder, manipulation, and drugging, so when she pours coffee into an already-there cup, we understand the subtext: she could poison him as smoothly as you please! The endcap scene shows her ability to cover her tracks and easily wipe evidence away. Casual, homey, and chilling.
The doctor is hardly some paragon of innocence, though — does he so casually insinuate sex as co-worker fraternal joking, because he knows Nurse Jordan is sleeping with Doctor Cross, or because he thinks his position of power allows him to leer and suggest without consequence? Perhaps all of the above.
The doctor is well aware he’s in control of the social power dynamic, and doesn’t let stop him. Of course, we know there’s a different power dynamic he isn’t aware of, involving Nurse Jordan’s willingness to use poison.
Nothing in the scene is overt or aggressive, but we know this is a woman comfortable with murder, a man comfortable with drugging vulnerable people for profit . . . and we may rather think they deserve to off each other.
Subtext and grey areas and double entendres abound in this scene, and all three — in movies as in real life — go down smoother when casually delivered over a ‘friendly’ cup of coffee.