[...] 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.