the interrogation as noir cosplay
bring a portable high-watt lamp and plug it in and adjust its neck so the light shines down directly on the face of the interview’s subject, whose homburg and shade-affording eyebrows had been removed by polite but emphatic request
Context
U.S.O.U.S. tradecraft styled as film-noir pastiche, and the narration knows it — "Technical interviewers under Chief of Unspecified Services R. ('the G.') Tine really do do this." Tine Jr. and his partner break into ("lock-dickied") Notkin's darkened co-op, sit her in a director's chair amid her dropped luggage, strip her of homburg and eyebrow-shade, and train a high-watt lamp on her face until she'll "spill her guts, roll over, eat cheese, sing like a canary." The whole apparatus of intimidation is borrowed wholesale from the movies, an intelligence service performing "interrogation" as genre — theater that nonetheless works.