[...] Revisited are debates as to whether or not noir is a European or American style; and on the degree to which noir is confined to its particular historical moment, and thus only ‘readable’ within that frame. Silver asserts, quite in keeping with earlier research, that film noir seems to be ‘a body of films that not only presents a relatively cohesive vision of America but that does so in a manner transcending the influences of auteurism or genre ... film noir is a self-contained reflection of American culture and its preoccupations at a point in time. As such it is a unique example of a wholly American film style’ (p. 6). Two of the more interesting issues raised at the end of the book include the relationship of film noir to TV noir, including shows such as Miami Vice, and the relationship of recent films — what Jeremy Butler calls ‘tech-noir’ and ‘neo-noir’ — to 40s film noir (Butler, 1996: 289-306).

In my essay I note how the repressed fears regarding race and gender partly account for the dis-ease films noirs are famous for. Feminists have focused on this dis-ease in regard to women returning from the war (Harvey, in Kaplan (ed.), 1978). But the dis-ease was equally to do with the race issues that had emerged as a result of World War II. It was harder to deny racism after the revelation that black and white Gls had segregated quarters when in Europe; as well, the Nazis had embarrassing support among Germans in the US. Thus, race disturbance surfaced in oblique but still dramatic ways in films noirs. During the war, as during the Depression (see John Stahl’s 1934 novel Imitation of Life), some black women still served as baby-minders and house cleaners for the white women who made up the majority working in factories and making war weapons. However, as Julia Reichert has documented in her film War Maids, and as Lucy Fischer has noted (Fischer, 1990), World War I! at least opened up possibilities for black women to join white women in the factories. The changing roles of white and black women provided a kind of double threat to male culture in the post-war period.

Arguably, these images can be read by women as speaking to their anger and perhaps disappointment at what feminist movements have failed to achieve. In recent years, women have carried out their fantasies on the living bodies of men: Lorena Bobitt achieved fame in her celebrated actual castration, as did Amy Fisher in her shooting of Mrs Buttafuco.? While Susan Smith’s murder of her children is of a different order, nevertheless we were given to understand that her tremendous rage at her husband and her abusive father might have been behind her actions. Women are angrier than ever, partly because of the expectations that feminists of earlier decades promised: they now want explicit fantasies of women overcoming weak, stupid and oppressive men.

Since the placement of women in this way is so necessary to patriarchy as we know it, it follows that the displacement of women would disturb the patriarchal system, and provide a challenge to that world view. The film noir world is one in which women are central to the intrigue of the films, and are furthermore usually not placed safely in any of the familiar roles mentioned above. Defined by their sexuality, which is presented as desirable but dangerous to men, the women function as the obstacle to the male quest. The hero’s success or not depends on the degree to which he can extricate himself from the woman’s manipulations. Although the man is sometimes simply destroyed because he cannot resist the woman's lures (Double Indemnity is the best example), often the work of the film is the attempted restoration of order through the exposure and then destruction of the sexual, manipulating woman.

In my viewing experience there are five main structural features of film noir that together produce a specific location for women and somewhat ambiguous ideological effects. These are:

1. The investigative structure of the narrative
2. Plot devices such as voice-over or flashback, or frequently both 3. Proliferation of points of view
3. Frequent unstable characterisation of the heroine
4. An ‘expressionist’ visual style and emphasis on sexuality in the photographing of women.

In the mainstream thriller the investigative structure presupposes a male hero in search of the truth about an event that either has already happened or is about to come to completion. This premiss has two consequences. The plots of the thriller/detective story offer a world of action defined in male terms; the locales, situations, iconography, violence are conventions connoting the male sphere. {Women in this world tend to split into two categories: there are those who work on the fringes of the underworld and are defined by the male criminal ambience of the thriller — barflies, nightclub singers, expensive mistresses, femmes fatales, and ruthless gold-diggers who marry and murder rich old men for their money; | and then there are on the outer margins of this world, wives, long-suffering girlfriends, would-be fiancées who are victims of male crime, sometimes the objects of the hero’s protection, and often points of vulnerability in his masculine armour,}T he second consequence is an epistemological one in so far as the investi- gation assumes truth to be a goal attainable by tracing a logical process of cause and effect, and that to every puzzle there is a key through which a complex but coherent pattern will emerge within seemingly anarchic events.

Rather than the revelation of socio-economic patterns of political and financial power and corruption which mark the gangster/thriller, film noir probes the secrets of female sexuality and male desire within patterns of submission and dom- inance. Thus the enquiries of the police or private detective come eventually to concentrate on the state of the hero’s, and more frequently, the heroine’s, heart.

These inflections set up a conflict in the treatment of women in film noir. On the one hand their image is produced in the course of male investigation and moral judgment. On the other the suppression of the bourgeois family and centrality of women in the male world of action produces female representations out- side family definition and dependency. This means that questions of economic survival have to be broached. Two options are available to women — work or living off a man. In film noir both options emphasise the sexual objectification of women, for its criminal ambience situates working women in bars and nightclubs rather than in professions or factories. But sexuality and money are brought into explicit juxtaposition — a contradiction for bourgeois morality in that female sexuality is supposed to be sanctified by love given freely, which is hidden within marriage and the family. Moreover, the heroine often shares the hard-boiled cynicism of the hero, which further undermines conventional sexual ideology. But this does not imply an unambiguously progressive approach in the noir treatment of women, for female sexuality is also juxtaposed within the investigative structure to the law and the voice of male judgment, and in many ways it is the under- side of the bourgeois family that is brought to the surface for investigation.

Rather than a coherent realisation of the unstable, treacherous woman, we tend to find in film noir a series of partial characterisations juxtaposed, not necessarily in continuity but separated by gaps in time (see Out of the Past) and often in blunt contradiction with each other. So, for instance, in The Postman Always Rings Twice Cora exhibits a remarkable series of unmotivated character switches and roles something as follows: (1) sex-bomb; (2) hardworking, ambitious woman; (3) loving playmate in an adulterous relationship; (4) fearful girl in need of protection; (5) victim of male power; (6) hard, ruthless murderess; (7) mother-to-be; (8) sacrifice to law. Such a mode of characterisation, needless to say, is in marked contrast to the consistent moral trajectory of the male, who, although he may be confused or uncertain as to the relation of appearances and reality, at least maintains a consistency of values.

The ultimate ideological effect of this unstable and fractured characterisation of women depends on the organisation of each particular film. As an aspect of the genre’s theatricality such characterisations contribute to the instability and uncertainty of the hero’s world, to the ever-deceiving flux of appearance and reality. In this sense they express a male existential anguish at the failure of masculine desire. But in the course of this, noir female characterisations, while they super- ficially confirm popular stereotypes about women, in their stylisation and play with the surfaces of the cinematic image they arguably foreground some of the features of that image. This is not to claim the progressiveness of the cycle but merely to assert its ideological interest for feminists.

Despite the presence of most of the conventions of the dominant methods of film-making and story-telling — the impetus towards the resolution of the plot, the diffusion of tension, the circularity of a narrative that resolves all of the problems it encounters, the successful completion of the individual’s quest — these methods do not, in the end, create the most significant contours of the cultural map of film noir. The defining contours of this group of films are the product of that which is abnormal and dissonant. And the dissonances, the sense of disorientation and unease, while frequently present at the level of plot and thematic development are, more importantly perhaps, always a function of the visual style of this group of films. Disequilibrium is the product of a style characterised by unbalanced and disturbing frame compositions, strong contrasts of light and dark, the prevalence of shadows and areas of darkness within the frame, the visual tension created by curious camera angles, and so forth. Moreover, in film noir these strained compositions and angles are not merely embellishments or rhetorical flourishes, but form the semantic substance of the film. The visual dissonances _ that are characteristic of these films are the mark of those ideological contradictions that form the historical context out of which the films are produced.

With the increasing size of corporations, the growth of monopolies and the accelerated elimination of small businesses it became increasingly hard for even the petit bourgeoisie to continue to believe in certain dominant myths. Foremost among these was the dream of equality of opportunity in business, and of the God-given right of every man to be his own boss. Increasingly, the petit bourgeoisie were forced into selling their labour and working for the big companies, instead of running their own businesses and working ‘for themselves’. It is this factor of being forced to work according to the goals and purposes formulated by someone else which accounts in large measure for the feelings of alienation and helplessness in film noir.

It is no accident that Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (1944) seeks an escape from the dull routine of the insurance company that he works for, in an affair with the deadly and exotic Phyllis Dietrichson. The possession of Dietrichson, as of any of the other film noir women who function as sexual commodities, is, in the magic world of the movies, held up as a tempting means of escape from the boredom and frustration of a routinised and alienated existence. Nor is it accidental that Neff, on his way up to his office to make his final confession, encounters the elevator man who tells him that he never could buy medical insurance from the company that he has worked for all of his life, because he has a bad heart. It is this feeling of being lost in a world of corporate values (represented in different films by big business, the police, the mob etc.) that are not sensitive to the needs and desires of the individual, that permeates film noir.