I've seen many Films Noir now, and read several articles. I was thinking through the themes and how they relate to the sociological trends of the 4os and 50s which they were a product of. Suddenly it coincided with Jungian thinking and it all made perfect sense.
First I must do a bit of disambiguation though. I'm not including the hardboiled PI movies, because they're fundamentally different from 'real' Noir. As explained in this Wikipedia entry, both kinds of movies take place in a world of crime and moral ambiguity, but the true Noir protagonist is a doomed antihero who is corrupted, often by a Femme Fatale, and becomes hopelessly tangled in a web of fate that will destroy him. And while the Philip Marlowes and the Mike Hammers exist in the same corrupted world of crooked DAs and bad cops etc, and they often encounter femme fatales, they remain stainless. They're not doomed, they're somewhat akin to Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirrot, in that they represent logic and reason defeating the corrupt forces of darkness and crime. They have a flat character arc, relieving the world around them of the lies it labors under. The real Noir protagonists follow a negative growth arc of tragedy.
The hardboiled movies are usually called Noir because they share so many attributes, and they use the same dark atmospheric lighting and Expressionist-derived cinematography. In literature the distinction is more clear between the two, and it needs to be understood in the movies as well.
With that explained, I'll move on to my point:
True Noir is the dark underbelly of the classical Hero's Journey myth that lies at the center of any classical civilization (during its classical phases). It explores male vulnerability and female cruelty and power.
Among other themes of course, but these are 2 of the big ones, and in Hollywood outside of Noir they're generally swept under the rug. These are the failed heroes, the fallen ones. Like Odysseus if he had never escaped from the island of Circe, or had succumbed to the seductive song of the Sirens.
I also have a vague hypothesis that the upswing of optimism and frivolity of entertainment in the 80's was mostly just gloss, a necessary break from the pessimism and cynicism laid bare by WWII and compounded by Vietnam, a loss of trust in government, and the massive growth and callousness of corporations. It seems to me that as a society America grew up in the 40's and shed its naivety, and that those naive periods were breaks in the unrelenting starkness of what was revealed.
Oh, how did Jungian theory alert me to this? I was thinking about his revelation that progress and growth happens in cycles involving upswings followed by a fall into darkness, and that growth happens only through suffering—an idea shared by many religious and spiritual systems.
- This entry is part 10 of 33 in the series General Writing Related.
Series TOC
- Series: General Writing Related
- Part 1: The New Weird
- Part 2: Creative/Critical—pick one
- Part 3: Back to Basics
- Part 4: No Art without Craft
- Part 5: Internal Dialogue
- Part 6: Conflict
- Part 7: Emotion
- Part 8: Story Unites
- Part 9: Noir
- Part 10: Noir #2
- Part 11: Neo-Noir
- Part 12: Noir #3
- Part 13: Noir #4
- Part 14: Chapter and Scene
- Part 15: Dialogue = Action
- Part 16: Webbage
- Part 17: Who or what is driving this thing?
- Part 18: How Many Words?
- Part 19: Short Story Structure
- Part 20: Telling Tales
- Part 21: Transcendent Writing
- Part 22: Inner Life
- Part 23: Characters in King and Spielberg
- Part 24: What can be Learned from Buffy?
- Part 25: Looking closely at some Hardboiled Writing
- Part 26: Writing from the Unconscious
- Part 27: Alter Yourself
- Part 28: Writing From Life
- Part 29: Local. Script. Man.
- Part 30: Dunning Kruger
- Part 31: Looking into Leiber
- Part 32: Discovering Writing
- Part 33: Devices of Horror
- This entry is part 10 of 33 in the series General Writing Related.
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