Nighthawks and The Killers
11:40 PM
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| Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942. |
The door of Henry’s lunch-room opened and two men came in.
They sat down at the counter. … Outside it was getting dark. The street light
came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the
other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George
when they came in... ‘That’s the dinner,’ George explained. ‘You can get that
at six o'clock .’
George looked at the clock on the wall behind the counter.
‘It’s
‘The clock says twenty minutes past five,’ the second man said.
‘It’s twenty minutes fast.’
‘Oh, to hell with the clock,’ the first man said.”
- Ernest Hemingway, The Killers
Only a dim
street light and interior lighting of a diner illuminate the shadowy
recesses of Hopper’s street in his painting, Nighthawks. An accurate
portrayal of American culture in the 1940s, Hopper’s subject matter was influenced
by Hemingway’s 1927 short story The
Killers. The quiet atmosphere and serenity of the night mutes the subtle,
predatory current that taints the tranquility of the scene.The painting’s indifferent protagonists, a white-clad
barman, two fedora’d men and a woman who resembles a starlet rather than a
common streetwalker, avoid eye contact with the painting’s audience. Their
ignorance effectively emphasizes the barrier that Hopper creates as means of
separating his audience from the dangers residing in Nighthawks.
Hemingway, in The Killers, sets his tale in another 24 hour diner. As a small town’s local restaurant serves its steady flow of clientele in the post-afternoon snack and pre-dinner mealtime, two hit men disrupt the business’s peace. Their superiority spark the staff’s tentative frustration and Nick Holden’s downplayed courage. In his attempts at defending the diner’s negro employee, Nick finds himself tied to the cook, while the two hit men impatiently plan their impending murder. Dramatizing the suave brashness of a mafia, Hemingway initially introduced the two hit men as common trouble makers who refused to adhere to the diner’s menu policies. Of course, their innocence was quickly strangled by their mission to “kill [a Swede] for a friend. Just to oblige a friend.” To make matters worse, the diner’s broken clock confuses the hit men and the reader, creating a timeless quality to the dangers that Nick and the restaurant staff face. Hopper mimics this same infinite, through paranoia, by isolating and ostracizing the diner from any mechanism that alludes to the passage of time. His painting does not include a clock that assures the sun rise in few hours. Instead, the blanket of shadows that shroud the abandoned streets push the viewer closer into the diner’s radiant interior -- closer to danger.
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