Film can represent life in such a way as to provide critical distance and insight that might otherwise be lacking in unreflected experience. Film noir, from the beginning, was quick to exercise theoretical licence and a certain self-consciousness in this regard, this being one of its defining characteristics. What does it mean for us to continue to dream of an industrial age, a class-based society and the principle of universal inclusion, that is, a society in which the proletariat has a home and a moral voice, and can make a difference? 2 There is a kind of innocent codependence of film noir sensibility and Marxist criticism , each providing the images and concepts that the other believes it needs.3 Mike Davis has argued that the intentional structure of Los Angeles-based film noir uses an 'existentialized Marxism' to unmask a 'bright guilty place'; that it insinuates 'contempt for a depraved business culture' and is a 'mirror of capitalism's future'; 'a kind of Marxist cinema manque', a shrewdly oblique strategy for an otherwise subversive realism,.4 Slavoj Zizek similarly but more broadly argues that film noir exposes a symbolic order that is neither neutral nor benign, within which 'an obscene sadistic Other watches over me'. 5 In short, film noir affirmed in a popular genre that capitalism is not a fair game and it anticipated the critical insight that patriarchal judgement only pretends to be disinterested, whilst its true aim is to protect the privileges certain members of society enjoy over others.

These are crucial insights, but they no longer depend for their conveyance on a fictional medium with theoretical pretensions. The consequences of the symbolic disturbance highlighted in these films are now directly lived by those evicted from their most characteristic spaces. Still, there are things to be learned from the films. Classic film noir, we are repeatedly told, emerged after World War Two, but it eludes historical 'solutions' because it instantly became a crucial component of its own historical context. How could anyone try to grasp the problematic details of Western post-war self-understanding without film noir? Film noir is our faded old black-and-white family album from this period. Like other albums, it contains a family embarrassment that we would all want to forget, and perhaps some dues about the beginnings of current difficulties.