Great question ChiO. I do indeed see a change, and noir was doomed as many of the anxieties underlying began to fade by the late 1950s.ChiO wrote:Welcome, Shannon --
Do you see a change in the narrative arc, theme, focus or iconography of film noir from the '40s to the '50s and beyond? If so, what do you consider those changes to be and to what do you attribute those changes?
Thanks for hanging out at SSO.
I think reading my last post, on the nature of the femme fatale, will go a long way in responding to this question. The great motifs and character types of film noir were tied to specific anxieties that arose during and just after WWII. This is also the reason we had a great resurgence of "throwback" hard-boiled writing at the beginning of the millennium, with authors like Megan Abbott, Reed Farrel Coleman, Charles Ardai and Christa Faust bursting on the scene, and movies like THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE and BRICK coming out. Many of the same anxieties arose when we were reminded that the U.S. is vulnerable, that some wars can't be won in any objective terms (or a completely uncompromised fashion), and that life in the suburbs wasn't all we had been hoping for the last 50 years.
In my opinion, noir began to peter out by the mid '50s, as wartime anxieties and the economic hardships of those years went away. We started to see noir move into the domestic sphere, where the raw force of those anxieties is sapped by more mundane domestic concerns. We also saw noir morph into more crime procedurals, where police procedure becomes the focus and order is too often restored.
For me, the glory years are the 1940s, peaking in '46 and '47--as soldiers came back from war with all the horrors fresh in their mind; as women who had been working, and running the household, struggled to simply be domestic partners; as the world economy sputtered, and tried to decide what to build if not the machines of war.