By Matthew VanWinkle

In the noir classic Kiss Me Deadly (directed by Robert Aldrich, 1955), the big break in the case arrives in an unusual way. Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) has been wearing out shoe leather, punching hoods, kissing dames—time-honored investigative techniques by the standards of the genre, but he hasn’t made a lot of headway with them. The lead that puts him on track is an excerpt from a Christina Rossetti sonnet, haltingly read by Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers), who’s mixed up in the business somehow.

   Remember me when no more day by day
       You tell me of a future that you plann’d.
   Only remember me; you’ll [sic] understand[.]
        But [sic] if the darkness and corruption leave
   A vestige of the thoughts that once we had [. . .]

Lily is picking her spots in the poem pretty haphazardly. She’s vocalizing lines 5-7 and then jumping ahead to the eleventh and twelfth lines. Something in her improvised edit clicks with Mike, though; he asks to hear those last two lines again. He and Lily head out, hot on the trail to somewhere cold.

Mike’s looking for something but he’s not sure what. He just knows that it’s big, and that it has something to do with Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman), a hitchhiker he’d picked up in the movie’s opening sequence. She’s in trouble, barefoot and out of breath on the highway blacktop. After a stop at a gas station—Christina heads into the bathroom while an attendant unwraps a tree branch from the front axle—she informs Mike that she’s named after Rossetti. She keeps looking over her shoulder as he drives, expecting the worst. Just before she’s proven right—they’re run off the road and she’s tortured to death under interrogation—she tasks him with her last wish: “remember me.”

It’s an innocuous two-word tag, and in 1955, prior to the concerted feminist recovery of nineteenth-century women writers, Christina Rossetti would have been a pretty deep cut for a general audience. Those two words do start one of her most famous sonnets, though, and it’s an appropriate one for Christina Bailey to have in mind as she realizes her time is short. The sonnet’s speaker is bidding farewell to her sweetheart as she anticipates her passing: “Remember me when I am gone away, / Gone far away into the silent land.” She takes him through what he will miss about her before concluding with a rueful acceptance of his likely fallibility as a mourner: “Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad.”

Mike Hammer is neither the smiling nor the forgetting type. He’s also pretty literal-minded. When a sonnet says darkness and corruption, he hears it as directions to the morgue. Bailey’s body is still there, unclaimed. He turns everything over in his head:

   “[I]f the darkness and corruption leave / A vestige of the thoughts that once we
   had.” But if the thought is dead because she’s dead, it’s got to be a thing. Something
   small, something she could hide. But where would she hide it? She didn’t have time
   at the gas station. She swallowed it.

This isn’t exactly closely read, but somehow it works. She has indeed swallowed something, a key, and the coroner still has it. The key opens a locker in a gym, and in that locker is a metal box, blistering hot to the touch. It consolidates some ominous hints that have been dropped throughout: Christina and her partners in crime were looking to capitalize on the newly minted atomic age. What Mike’s just found is Armageddon in a bag. In its primly morbid way Rossetti’s sonnet rests assured of a world where we mostly die one at a time, survived by those who miss us. (Even if they might also miss the point of really missing us.) What everyone in Kiss Me Deadly is courting to various degrees is indiscriminate obliteration, with only seared outlines as proof that anyone was ever here at all.

Noir as a genre made its bones on indirections that only add up off the books, when a Holmesian logic is swapped out for a Dutch angle. Even making allowances for this, though, a bit of lacy Victorian rhyme as a map through L.A.’s racy streets to radioactive paydirt seems a bit much. Why, for example, would Christina not just mail Mike the key instead of the two words “remember me” when she asks for a stamp from the gas station attendant?

One answer might be that the movie is playing high culture / low culture games. Christina Bailey might have had class, but class doesn’t keep you from getting killed. Street Smarts 1, Book Smarts 0. Except (somewhat unexpectedly) Mike seems to straddle this ostensible divide. He smirks when Christina asks him if he reads poetry, but he does follow up on it after she’s gone. As he’s shaking down one of his other leads, he also betrays a more than passing knowledge of opera. It’s going too far to say that the movie is interested in levelling cultural distinctions, but it also doesn’t seem to be making that big a deal about the intersection of aesthetic preferences from opposite sides of the tracks either.

Another possibility: the poem is providing a character beat in addition to a plot device. When Mike first asks Christina who she’s running from, she replies, “I wish I could tell you that. I have to tell someone. When people are in trouble they need to talk. But you know the old saying . . . .” Mike fills in the blank: “What I don’t know can’t hurt me?” Like the speaker in Rossetti’s sonnet, Christina wants to ask a lot but is worried about asking too much. By sending the remembrance rather than the key, she offers Mike a choice without conferring an obligation. Maybe the darkness and corruption have left more of her than we’re ready to see at first glance.

If the high culture / low culture explanation risks being reductive, turning Christina into canny wielder of compassionate allusions feels like it’s giving Kiss Me Deadly way too much credit. Let’s split the difference like this. Rossetti’s sonnet, like the key it substitutes for and eventually points us toward, is essential and indigestible. It’s tough to swallow, and yet the movie wouldn’t quite work the way it does without it.

Rita Dove describes the form of the sonnet as “an intact world where everything is in sync, from the stars down to the tiniest blade of grass.” Yet the flip side of such utopian harmony is the paranoid conspiracy in which malevolent purpose leaves nothing to chance. The recurrence of Rossetti’s sonnet in Kiss Me Deadly, in its unmistakable incongruity, counsels us against simply accepting everything going inexorably to plan.

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Matthew VanWinkle is an associate professor of English at Idaho State University specializing in nineteenth century British literature. His work has previously appeared in Studies in Romanticism, The Journal of Dracula Studies, and Victorian Poetry.