This dialecticized or oscillating structure is absent from Dark Passage, and not only from the scene where Parry escapes from Madge's apartment. As Parry jumps to the ground and rushes out into the street to board a trolley car, the camera continues to keep him fully in view. The absence of an answering look is now marked not only by the continued refusal of a reverse shot, but additionally by the disturbing depopulation of the field we are given to see. The street and the trolley car are inexplicably empty. Our disquiet continues throughout the bus sequence that follows. Narratively this sequence is set up for suspense: the bus will not leave until two more tickets are sold. We are therefore led to expect a tense countdown as the selling of the tickets is measured against the arrival of the police. But this is not what we get. The sequence is cut to disperse rather than to build suspense. A policeman does arrive, nonclimactically, at the station and, as we watch the four other passengers board the bus one by one, we wonder if Parry will make it on before he is spotted. As the last of the other passengers walks toward her seat, the camera pans slightly forward to reveal Parry, already seated. Not only does his sudden appearance here not answer to the diegetic look of the police, it also fails to respond to the extradiegetic look of the spectator; that is, Parry's appearance neither meets nor surprises our expectations, it simply disregards them. To whom, then, is Parry visible?

It can be argued that he is visible to no one; not articulated within a dialecticized structure, his visibility is for no other subject. If he is seen, nevertheless, it is by something more 'rigid' than a subject, something incapable of being deceived, the way a subject is deceived. But if the dialectic of desire - hence suspense - and the possibility of deceit are both eliminated from the world of Dark Passage, then we have not only left the world of detective fiction far behind, we have also left behind many of the commonplaces of film noir criticism. As an example of film noir, the film would be described by this criticism as a dark sort of 'thriller', filled with deceptions, false leads and sudden reversals. Would we deny these basic descriptions of the genre? Yes. What is taken for deception is, in fact, something much more sinister: the emergence of a split between power and those whom power subjects such that the very world of these subjects appears incomprehensible to them. The world no longer unfolds in nonsimultaneous parts, as in detective fiction; in film noir it breaks up into inconsistent and always alien fragments. As a consequence of this, nothing can remain hidden in the noir universe only to become visible in a future moment. The noir hero is embarrassed by a visibility that he carries around like an excess body for which he can find no proper place. Already encumbered by his own overexposed being, the noir hero has no desire to seek his being through another. The links of intersubjectivity, invisible yet essential to detective fiction, are here dissolved. A different kind of struggle with a different, unyielding adversary remains.