Another aspect that contributed to the noir thematic elements was in the writers and directors themselves who had experienced firsthand the horrors of the war. This was
especially true among the Jewish writers and directors who emigrated from Germany. One such example is Billy Wilder, who was responsible for directing the film Double Indemnity.
His whole family was killed in Auschwitz. This tragedy and living during the horrors of the war contributed to the dark themes found in the film. Many similar examples can also be
found, as noir films have a strong German influence due to the German Jewish expatriates. The pessimistic and politically provocative themes of noir crime films were due to
German Jewish émigré directors who liked to use psychological themes, expressionistic visual styles, and doom-laden worldviews as WWII broke out. Noir’s origins and themes can
also be linked to American hard-boiled detective and crime story writers like Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and Woolrich. However, these writers are all different in their writing styles
and themes. It also reveals that literary works combined with particular directors and screenwriters were significant in creating the particular noir style during and after WWII.
56
2.5 Noir as a Reflection of American Societal Concerns
In American society throughout the years, a common goal of people has always been the pursuit of happiness through one’s own self-effort, whether that be for wealth, fame,
power, or some other objective. In the film and novel Mildred Pierce and many other noir films of the type, these personal ambitions often swallow the characters as they fall deep into
an abyss that they cannot crawl out of. In Mildred’s case, she is obsessed with wealth to the point where she keeps expanding her restaurant business and is never satisfied with her
personal achievements. This issue about striving for happiness and trying to attain more in one’s life leads one to examine the question of whether one’s personal background can affect
56
Osteen, Mark. Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2012, p.11.
one’s present or future or whether people can indeed better their lives or obtain a certain goal through hard work, no matter what personal or social background they may have. Related
with noir literature and films, the pursuit of happiness or individual goals is limited to forces outside of the character’s control. Therefore, characters have hopes of reaching their dreams
but ultimately fail, leaving them despondent and disillusioned. Characters are generally unable to make social advancements like from being poor to rich, but when they do
accomplish moving up into another social class their efforts are all in vain. In other words, “Noir registers a postwar crisis of national identity related to the dissolution of the myth of
Jeffersonian democracy. Noir posits an inversion of equality whereby almost everyone is equally trapped.”
57
“Made during a period marked by social and political upheaval, film noir tested and critiqued both the principles of the American Dream – individualism and self-determination,
liberty, equality, upward mobility, capitalist enterprise – and their practice.”
58
Gangster films and literary works were instrumental in developing the noir style and characteristics. These kinds of stories are caught between the Franklin and Emerson concepts
of identity, meaning that characters can survive for a goal but then it ends up being wrong. Or it may be alright to be individualistic but then a catastrophe may occur. These kinds of
themes represent the notion that people have assigned places in society and are not supposed to escape from their pre-determination, as if individuals are in a caste system.
In considering the societal effects of the war on noir film and literary productions, many war-related themes and messages are found throughout like the criminal violence of the
films and novels reflecting the real-life violence of the war. There are also displaced war veterans that show the psychological effects of the war. Next, numerous noir works depict the
57
Ibid, p.4.
58
Ibid, p.4.
tensions between women being in traditional homemaker roles and independent as working women. Furthermore, in post-war noir works, there is often a strong anti-communist
sentiment during the Cold War. Numerous cultural transitions were apparent in the 1940s. Noir both reflects this postwar hangover residual anxieties about identity, gender
disability, and labor and registers new fears about race, representation, capitalism, technology, privacy, and security. Amid this turmoil, noir films ask whether the
American Dream of liberty and democracy is still viable and, if so, how it may be altered or fulfilled.
59
The threat to achieving the American Dream and being able to live one’s own life based on traditional American values became apparent to many small business owners as
they had to struggle to survive and lost faith in the American ideals. “With the increasing size of corporations, the growth of monopolies, and the accelerated elimination of small
businesses it became increasingly hard for even the petit bourgeoisie to continue to believe in certain dominant myths. Foremost among these was the dream of equality of opportunity in
business, and of the God-given right of every man to be his own boss.”
60
As small business owners could not survive on their own and had to close their doors and work for big
enterprises, they felt disillusionment, alienation, and helplessness in living their lives. These feelings, then, were also shown on the big screen as reflections of what Americans had to
endure during and after WWII. In terms of the popularity and influence of noir, not all critics and scholars consider it
as necessarily being a true reflection of society when these films and literary works were made. Mike Chopra-Gant argues that noir is overrated as a sign of postwar America’s mood.
He points out that noir films and fiction works were not the most popular of the time. He thinks it is better to look at the hit movies of the era to see what the real mood was. Although
he admits that it is impossible to know how many films were viewed by how many people, he
59
Ibid, p.12.
60
Harvey, Silvia, qtd in Kaplan, Ann. Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, 2008, p.39.
says that just because someone watches a film, it does not mean that the film lingers in the individual’s mind, reflecting the person’s mood or behavior.
61
Nicholas Spencer, in quoting historian William Graebner, reveals that America had to deal with two conflicting trends during the 1940s. “On the one hand, culture was
characterized by nostalgia, sentimentalism, a belief in scientific progress, and a pervasive yearning for a culture of the whole. On the other hand, it was a time when irony, historical
contingency, a feeling of historical exhaustion and cultural fragmentation, and an attraction to existentialism borne of a sense of meaningless were evident.”
62
This last statement best conveys the sentiment of noir.
Noir films and literature can be considered as echoing America’s unconscious sentiment during the times they were produced. In considering the relationship of noir films
with society, Pippin states, “Movies have often been important pieces of evidence for sociological and historical interpretations of the temper of the times.”
63
These films can show the anxiety and social dislocation of the time when hundreds of soldiers returned home after
fighting a dangerous war for several years and having to readjust to a boring, monotonous, and domestic style of living. Even the directors and others involved in the film industry that
escaped the horrors of the war by emigrating to the USA had to deal with survivor guilt, and they expressed this feeling through their film productions. After the war, there was also the
problem of high unemployment, financial problems, and high crime rates. The realism of film noir developed from American popular culture. Crime was
expressed through various cultural outlets like in radio drama programs, magazines, stories,
61
Chopra-Gant, Mike, qtd in Osteen, Mark. Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2012, p.13.
62
Osteen, Mark. Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2012, p.13.
63
Pippin, Robert B. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy. Virginia: The University of Virginia Press, 2012, p.7.
comics, dime novels, and hard-boiled crime novels that depicted Jazz age crime with realism.
64
Some of the prolific crime writers that had an effect on film noir were Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich. They mostly wrote
about tough characters in violent environments. Many of the settings were also similar with noir films like in seedy locations, bars, jazz clubs, and other nightlife settings. “Liberal and
conservative writers used crime movies as vehicles for social commentary and were just as critical of society. The Right portrayed crime as a symptom of social disintegration, the Left
presented it as a form of capital accumulation.”
65
The noir films conveyed anxieties about the 1940s, through a lack of common purpose after the war was over, worry about losing financial gains made during the war,
materialism, consumerism, difficulties in readjusting with a peacetime society, veterans having to adapt to a post-war lifestyle, increasing tensions with the USSR, sadness for those
who died in the War, and other kinds of uncertainties due to the anxiety of the war and what would happen afterwards. The moods found in noir films were opposite to those generally
associated with traditional American society of being optimistic and having faith. In noir films, “The no exit conclusion is a recurring motif: whenever the hero and heroine try to
escape a condition of life in which they no longer believe … helplessness overwhelms them.”
66
Therefore, noir films best reflect the personal anxieties of people in the 1940s than other film types. “They vacuumed up the psychological detritus swirling in the air, the
vellieities, secret wishes, criminal thoughts, unspoken fears, dream images of the times.”
67
64
Biesen, Sheri Chinen. Blackout: World War 2 and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005, p.17.
65
Lingeman, Richard. The Noir Forties: The American Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War. New York: Nation Books, 2012, p.189.
66
Ibid, p.60.
67
Ibid, p.190.
Feminist film scholar, B. Ruby Rich, writes, “Noir etched a metaphor of light and shadow into the popular psyche. Rain-slicked streets, feelings of loss, fear and betrayal, male
bonding, femme fetales, postwar malaise, atomic pressures, Communist threats, melodrama, and gangsters all coalesced under its banner.”
68
One of the main elements of a noir film is about a man being alone and not in touch with the real world. Usually this kind of character is vulnerable to a woman who may have
bad intentions femme fetale. Usually this male character is alone because he represents a soldier who returned from a war and cannot reintegrate with society. Even Raymond
Chandler was a World War I veteran who would never talk about his experiences and did not get over what happened during the war. So, as a crime writer, he would write about murder
mysteries and hard-boiled crime stories of a veteran returning home from a war like the movie script for Blue Dahlia.
In Chandler’s film adaptation of The Big Sleep, the movie was made at the end of World War II, and the characteristics of the protagonist started to change as the movie
industry wanted to portray characters that were in non-war settings. As a result, Humphrey Bogart’s character did not have the personality of an unstable patriotic war hero anymore but
was more about a character who was hard and had to live in the mean streets of an urban setting. His character was also very cynical in this film, which can be related with the
uncertainty many Americans felt at the time in a post-war era. Lauren Bacall played the femme fetale as there was a sort of switch in sexual dominant roles from previous noir films.
Bacall’s character was the pursuer and very aggressive and assertive. This difference in gender roles is reflective of the way men had to readapt their relationship roles with women
after fighting in the war for so long. Many men had emotional scars that made it difficult for
68
Ibid, p.190.
them to be in emotional relationships upon returning home. The role of women in films can also be seen as being a reflection of society. In noir films there was a femme fetale type of
character who was given more control, sexy deadly, would be undone by her own demise, and played active roles in determining the outcomes of events. This kind of woman went
against the societal standards of what a traditional woman should be like. In the 1940s, men were concerned about women leaving their traditional roles as homemakers and not returning
to them after the war was over. When men were away fighting, women were taking their jobs and abandoning their traditional roles in the home as well as having sexual relations with men
while their boyfriends or husbands were away fighting in a war. Consequently, the theme of jealousy is also found in many noir films as it reflects the feeling of veterans that many of
their wives or girlfriends were cheating on them when they were fighting in the war. These femme fetales can depict male anxiety and ambivalence as seen through the
novel and film Mildred Pierce. This literary work and movie convey the image that women should be loyal to men and not be too independent or financially driven or it will lead to her
own self-destruction. Femme fetales are physically and psychologically strong, but these traits are seen in a negative light in 1940s society, which leads to them self-destructing.
The various “B” noir films are typically crime films based on crime or detective novels. These kinds of films were made to make more realistic, mature, and serious films
instead of just appealing to the movie industry’s desire for escapism type films. As the Hollywood Box Office level of films did not generally support noir films and would try to
sensor or change the plots, these movies could be best filmed as “B” movies. The realism can be seen in movies like Double Indemnity that was made in a documentary style to make it
look more real and used settings with dim lights and lifeless settings to convey the cold reality that the characters faced.
However, not all people agree that crime films or film noir were “a symptom of a deeper malaise afflicting American society.”
69
For example, the critic James Agee wrote that films of the noir canon were “nostalgic and amusing, if far from original melodramas, which
Hollywood’s creative artists, trapped in the studio system, amused themselves by making. It was wrong to regard such harmless little slumming parties a sinister mirror of American
morals, psychology, society, and art.”
70
The producer John Houseman also found these films morally troubling not because of the violence, which is a basic element in American life and often found in American
entertainment, but because the private-eye heroes “have ambitions no higher than a skinful of whiskey and a good sleep. In all history, I doubt there has been a hero whose life was so
unenviable and whose aspirations had so low a ceiling.”
71
What he meant by this was that the characters were not really realistic because they did not have moral traits and they were
always listless and fatalistic. The crime films in the 1930s were more positivistic, in that if someone committed a crime then the character would have to make amends. However,
Houseman did find the lack of morality reflective of American society. In relation to the alienation and despair of many noir films, he stated, “The tough movie is without personal
drama and therefore without personal solution or catharsis of any kind. It almost looks as if the American people, turning from the anxiety and shock of war, were afraid to face their
personal problems and the painful situations.”
72
The war effort had a significant effect on American culture that was portrayed through noir films. The dark aspects were brought about by wartime uncertainties and fears
due to German spies, Japanese threats, and the loss of American lives. American culture
69
Ibid, p.221.
70
Ibid, p.222.
71
Ibid, p.222.
72
Ibid, p.222.
would become obsessed about these concerns and the threats of invasion or hardships in daily life. Some of these hardships were in the form of government rationing of basic essentials,
shortages during the war, and people being deprived of basic needs. People could even relate with the nighttime scenes in these movies, as many factories had three shifts, and people were
able to relate with working in this kind of an atmosphere. The darkness in film noir could also be related to the wartime as there were often blackouts in certain coastal cities, so that the
military could better react to an attack if they could see the enemy approaching. The seductive world of film noir captured wartime fears and anxieties through violent
actions in unglamorous or disreputable working-class settings. As life on the home front became increasingly hard-boiled, so too did American film. America’s
involvement in the war penetrated every facet of daily life. Nearly everyone knew someone killed or wounded in combat.
73
This is a significant concept conveyed by Biesen, as the USA was shocked by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Also, Americans had to do without many necessities that
were previously available to them. Before this incident, there was a glorified image of the war and what it was like to fight as an American.
Watching a newsreel or flipping through an illustrated magazine at the beginning of the American war, you were likely to encounter a memorable image: the newly
invented jeep, an elegant, slim-barreled 37-mm gun in tow, leaping over a hillock. Going very fast and looking as cute as Bambi, it flies into the air, and behind, the little
gun bounces high off the ground on its springy tires.
74
Essentially this portrays that with the horrors of the war becoming more real, people’s perception about the war also changed. It was not as romanticized as it previously used to be,
resulting in a change in societal portrayals as expressed through film noir. Perhaps separated by great distance from most of the war action, Americans did not experience many of the
realities of war firsthand like European countries did. This change in sentiment spilled over
73
Biesen, Sheri Chinen. Blackout: World War 2 and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005, p.5.
74
Fussell, Paul, qtd in Biesen, Sheri Chinen. Blackout: World War 2 and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005, p.5.
into the movie industry. Therefore, film noir was able to develop based on noir influences like cultural disillusionment, German expressionism, realism, and hard-boiled fiction.
75
The dominant world view expressed in film noir is paranoid, claustrophobic, hopeless, doomed, predetermined by the past, without clear moral or personal identity. Man has
been inexplicably uprooted from those values, beliefs, and endeavors that offer him meaning and stability, and in the almost exclusively urban landscape of film noir in
pointed contrast to the pastoral, idealized, remembered past he is struggling for a foothold in a maze of right and wrong. He has no reference points, no moral base
from which to confidently operate. Any previous framework is cut loose and morality becomes relative, both externally the world and internally the character and his
relations to his work, his friends, his sexuality. Values, like identities, are constantly shifting and must be redefined at every turn. Nothing – especially women – is stable,
nothing is dependable.
76
Film noir portrayed how women in the work world were considered during the War period. Women in the workforce made them seem more sexual and tough compared to
traditional perceptions as homemakers. For example, in The Postman Always Rings Twice, female sexuality was more emphasized for veterans and as a reflection of working women
who had to improve their toughness and be more independent during the war. This resulted in the femme fetale often found in film noir. “The femme fetale was deviant, a spider woman,
frustrated and guilty, half man-eater, blasé and cornered, she falls victim to her own wiles.”
77
In Double Indemnity, it shows the harshness of life during the war time. The male protagonist character Walter Neff is misogynistic, reflecting the true life perception of
society’s concern over changing gender roles. The story was more true to life in the psychological aspects it conveyed and how the violent death was prevalent during the war
era. It shows that if you commit a crime, you will be caught in the end. Double Indemnity was significant to the development of film noir because it was able
to use a story about crime that was previously not allowed. It could combine the realism of
75
Biesen, Sheri Chinen. Blackout: World War 2 and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005, p.5.
76
Place, Jane, qtd in Kaplan, Ann. Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, 2008, p.51.
77
Biesen, Sheri Chinen. Blackout: World War 2 and the Origins of Film Noir. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005, p.7.
the war and the psychological aspects as a result of living in this period. It also showed how American culture, economic constraints, and the Hollywood institution affected its
development. Noir can also represent the middle-class struggle of resistance to corporatization.
During the war, this is reflected in people having to conform to factory regulations and working conditions, unable to work independently. In Double Indemnity this feeling of being
controlled is realized through the protagonist Walter Neff, as he has to deal with the mundane lifestyle of being an insurance salesman with every day being the same.
In examining how film noir became relevant, one needs to look at the period in which it was produced.
Film movements occur in specific historical periods – at times of national stress and focus of energy. They express a consistency of both thematic and formal elements
which makes them particularly expressive of those times, and are uniquely able to express the homogenous hopes Soviet Socialist Realism and Italian Neo-Realism
and fears German Expressionism and film noir brought to the fore by, for example, the upheaval of war.
78
This concept of fear is significant as it conveys the primary feeling of the war time. This feeling of fear was manifested through losing one’s identity, instability, and a lack of
security.
2.6 Traditional Gender Roles and the Femme Fetale
