[...] This is precisely equivalent to the emergence of the 'real' Laura in Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) : the police detective (Dana Andrews) falls asleep staring at the portrait of the allegedly dead Laura. Upon awakening, he finds the 'real' Laura by the side of the portrait, alive and well. This presence of the 'real' Laura accentuates the fact that the portrait is a mere 'imitation'; on the other hand, the 'real' Laura emerges as a non-symbolized fantasmatic surplus, a ghostlike apparition. Beneath the portrait, one can easily imagine the inscription 'This is not Laura'.

This, then, is the 'noir' that defines the noir universe: that crack in the half-open window that shakes our sense of reality and is as such correlative to the subject qua void, gap in reality. Eventually, everything that has been said is given a condensed expression in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), a film whose unmistakable noir undertones belie the common reduction of Capra's universe to a New Deal populist humanism. When, out of utter despair, the hero (James Stewart) is on the brink of committing suicide, the angel Clarence stops him and submits him to a Kripkean mental experiment with possible universes: he sends him back to his small Massachusetts town, but renders him unrecognizable, depriving him of all aspects of his identity, including his past history, so that he can witness how things would have turned out had he never existed. In this way, the hero regains his optimism, since the catastrophic consequences of his absence are made evident to him: his brother has drowned long ago (the hero was not there to save him) , the good-hearted old pharmacist is rotting in jail (the hero was not there to warn him against inadvertently mixing in poison when preparing a prescription), his wife is a lone, despairing old maid, and, above all, his father's small loan society, providing credits to working-class families and thus serving as the last shield of the popular community against the ruthless local capitalist who wants to control the entire town, has gone bankrupt (the hero was not there to take his father's business over, so, instead of a town where solidarity prevails and every poor family has a modest home of their own, the hero finds himself in a bursting, violent American small town, full of rude drunkards and noisy nightclubs, totally controlled by the local magnate). What immediately strikes the eye here is the fact that the America encountered by the hero when he witnesses the way things would turn out in his absence is the actual America, that is, its features are those of the contemporary grim social reality (the dissolution of its communal solidarity, the boastful vulgarity of its nightlife, etcetera). The relationship of dream and reality is thus reversed : what the hero, in the mental experiment he is subjected to, experiences as a nightmarish dream is actual life; in other words, we encounter the real in the filmic dream, and it is precisely in order to escape this traumatic real that the hero takes refuge within the (diegetic) reality structured by the ideological fantasy of the idyllic community still able to resist the ruthless pressure of big capital. This is what Lacan means when he says that the traumatic real is encountered in dreams; this is the way ideology structures our experience of reality