Fatalism in American Film Noir

(The Coen brothers clearly understand the style and its importance. Their noir [or meta-noir] The Man Who Wasn’t There—a title that makes the point all by itself—has a highly stylized example of this in the performance of a feckless, almost completely affectless antihero by Billy Bob Thornton.)

framing conventions in noirs are vertical (stairs, bars, and shadows of bars or blinds, shots from up or down, elevators, small, closed-in rooms, tight shots), urban, interior, with disorienting and shifting camera locations suggesting shifting and sometimes unreliable points of view, with shadowy lighting and paradigmatically taking place at night

the much-discussed problem of relatively liberated working women who were not about to take up again their old and oppressed roles as housekeepers. (The infamous misogyny and simple fear of women so obvious in many noirs are no doubt connected to both phenomena.)

(Many critics date the classic noir period as occurring between 1941, with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, and either 1955 with the rather bizarre, almost avant-garde noir by Robert Aldrich, Kiss Me Deadly, or the highly stylized, theatrical apotheosis of the noir style in 1958 with Welles’s Touch of Evil.)