Abstract
This introductory chapter surveys the current status of film noir in both popular and academic discourses in order to situate the book’s critical intervention. It begins by showing how popular culture/media have flattened the varied and variegated body of films that make up the noir canon into a single and unified aesthetic, one marked by a small handful of stereotypical signifiers (chiaroscuro lighting, venetian blinds, hard-boiled men, femme fatale figures, etc.). I then argue that a similar flattening can be seen in much of the scholarly and critical discourse on noir, which has been dominated by a tendency toward generalization and totalization, a quest to identify the defining characteristics of noir. Reviewing the history of noir criticism and theory, including revisionist takes that argue that noir did not actually exist, I suggest that much of the existing criticism illustrates a pattern of thinking that Ludwig Wittgenstein has called “a craving for generality.”
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Notes
- 1.
Certainly not all of the essays in this volume are concerned with questions of gender and sexuality, but essays by Britton, Thomas, Walker, and others are enough to make one question E. Ann Kaplan’s assertion that the Movie critics “approaches deliberately avoid ideological, political, or feminist perspectives in favor of addressing matters of style, history, narrative, auteurism” (1998, 4).
- 2.
Only a portion of films thought of as noir employed the flashback/voice-over structure. Meanwhile, situations in which characters constantly lie to and deceive one another are by no means exclusive to noir—many 1930s and 1940s screwball comedies, for instance, also center on such matters, though obviously to much different effect.
- 3.
For an analysis of film genre conducted in similar terms, see Rick Altman’s “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” (Cinema Journal, vol. 23, no. 3 [1984]: 6–18; reprinted in Film/Genre, British Film Institute, 1999).
- 4.
See, for a programmatic overview, Gibbs and Pye’s introduction to Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (Manchester University Press, 2005).
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Deyo, N. (2020). Introduction: The Case of the Missing Films. In: Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood. Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_1
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