ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that drawing on post-Jungian ideas about the archetypal can provide a useful analytical framework within which to understand the enduring appeal of film noir and, by extension, other films. Using the framework of analytical psychology, the people reflects on the psychological reasons for a development and on the significance that the themes and characters of film noir hold for the reader. The lapse in Lynn's judgement is in part explained when the people realise the way in which the persona, shadow and anima are interconnected. In the cases of film-making, and genre theory, what the people find is an examination of themes and ideas, and of how they develop film after film. Raymond Chandler once remarked that Hammett took murder out of the vicarage garden and put it back in the city where it belonged.
