I describe this situation here not to deplore or criticize it, nor to attempt to resolve the questions of cultural politics that flow from it; it is, for better and for worse, the set of circumstances we in the developed West, and the USA in particular, now inhabit. So it will serve both as the context from which we must think about the meaning and direction of some of the newest mutations in the nair sensibility, and, dialectically, as the subject of that sensibility's reflections back upon us. But before turning to consider those mutations, it may be worthwhile to rehearse briefly those aspects of film noir conceded to be its constitutive features, even by critics who otherwise disagree over where it belongs and what it means. These aspects typically involve a combination of iconographic, stylistic, narrative and thematic features: iconographically they stretch from the dark city streets and lurid jazzy bars to the privatized, alienated space of the car and the modern urban apartment, and down to the close-up level of the cigarette, drink, swanky dress, trenchcoat and slouch hat; stylistically, from the use of voice-over and flashback to expressionistic lighting and decentred and unstable compositions, often in deep space; narratively, they include a new emphasis on deviant psychological motivation, the deviousness and frustrating confusion of the male protagonist's project or quest, and the outright hostility, suspicion and sexual attraction between the often confused and weary male protagonist and the duplicitous, powerful femme fatale (with a good asexual wife-mother figure optionally dead or waiting in the wings) ; and thematically, they consist above all in the 'absurd' existential choice of moral behaviour according to one's own individual ethical code, in a hopelessly dark universe in which more consensual authorities are ineffectual, irrelevant, or corrupt.