Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

2 Social and Political Influences on Film Noir
2.1 McCarthyism
I have discussed in the previous parts of this study the popular conception that film
noir holds up a “dark mirror” to American society. In an age of anxiety left by the two
World Wars, social themes came to dominate the late noirs. At its peak, classic film noir
managed to express issues related to the House Committee on American Activities
(HUAC), with the fear and paranoia of the Hollywood red scare era, the years of the great
anti-communist witch-hunt. The late forties and early fifties were a period of intense anticommunist
suspicion in the United States, a time in which thousands of people were
investigated and questioned, more often than not in aggressive ways (involving public
name-calling, browbeating, vilification of witnesses, threats, etc), for any kind of suspicion
of them being communists or communist sympathisers. This plan of action was essentially
41 This cartoon was taken from the Washington Post, March 29, 1950 in which Herbert Block (aka Herblock)
coined the term “McCarthyism”. It shows four leading Republicans of that time trying to push an elephant
(which was traditionally the symbol of their party) to stand on a teetering stack of ten tar buckets, the topmost
of which was labelled “McCarthyism”.
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