ABSTRACT
To begin with, a review of the genre is in order. In film noir, there are numerous plot and character paradigms. Best known is that of the private eye such as Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe (The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past). The story is propelled when the detective is hired by a client to find someone or something. At the heart of his quest lies a mystery which must be solved; but this proves difficult. His various sources, including his own client, tell stories that contradict one another, and frequently these contradictions are not resolved in the end. As journey, his quest is not along a straight path. He is sent up blind alleys and into cul-de-sacs, literally and metaphorically. And along the way, he loses his professional detachment, becoming personally involved in the case, which puts him in peril. Sometimes in the end he dies; always he is in some way wounded, marked by the experience. Then there is the paradigm of the ordinary man who finds himself in a trap that threatens to shatter his entire world (Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street). While the trap is almost always deliberately set by others, the protagonist is susceptible to the trap because of some failing, some flaw in his character. He is as much seduced as tricked. Once in the trap, he struggles to free himself; but like a fly in the spider’s web, everything he does in attempts to extricate himself from his situation only makes it worse, and the trap closes around him ever more inexorably. But there are other types of plot and protagonist. Indeed, in what he called ‘The Family Tree of film noir’, Raymond Durgnat listed ten categories of noir (e.g. ‘Crime as Social Criticism’, ‘Hostages to Fortune’, ‘Psychopaths: Who’s to Blame’), each further subdivided numerous times.3 While many would dispute some of Durgnat’s attributions, the range of plot and character possibilities is striking.4 But for all their differences, there are two elements that are fairly universal to all noirs. First and foremost is a sensibility of fatalism; and second is the character that best epitomises that sensibility, the femme fatale.
