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

Whether one agrees with this particular application or not (I consider that this view
lacks grounding in Freudian theory, more precisely in terms of explaining and
understanding human behaviour) is not altogether the point here; it serves the purpose of
demonstrating why seeing symbols in film noir from a semiotic point of view is a fruitful
approach to unravelling a system of coded meanings. This will be carried out later on with
the detailed film analyses that follow. For now, I would like to stress that issues of
consciousness and the unconscious, of subjectivity and intentionality, are all linked and
integral to culture, and therefore are continually shifting in the relationship between
meaning and context. Times and categories change, and so do perspectives, and
consequently, one should not consider exclusively film noir’s main formal components to
provide a plausible definition of what this category of film really is. This would prove to
be too inadequate, as film noir also involves a sensibility, a specific mode of looking at the
world, in short, as Richard Maltby has argued, a reflection of the Zeitgeist.
It is also worth restating that film noir is indeed identifiable by an evocative
eroticism. From Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep to Gilda and White Heat, these
movies contain sequences where a man and a woman are involved in a teasingly displaced
sexual negotiation through oblique and flirtatious dialogues, dances serving as “an age-old
transposition of the sexual act itself” (Borde & Chaumeton 2002:53), or “fetishistic
themes” like “the boots and gloves of Rita Hayworth in Gilda” (ibid). There, she plays a
heroine who is portrayed as a promiscuous woman in lines such as “Gilda gambles as
recklessly as she lives!” Another passage in which she asks her husband Ballin to do up her
dress, she jokes: “I can never get a zipper to close. Maybe that stands for something; what
do you think?” The film is filled with lines of sexual innuendo. One that is particularly
relevant here and that makes a straight allusion to psychoanalysis is as follows:
Johnny: Get this straight. I don’t care what you do. But I’m going to see to it it
looks alright to him [her husband]. From now on, you go anywhere you please,
with anyone you please. But I’m going to take you there and I’m going to bring
you home. Get that? Exactly the way I’d pick up his laundry.
Gilda: Shame on you, Johnny. Any psychiatrist would tell your thoughtassociations
are very revealing (…). All to protect Ballin – who do you think you
are kidding, Johnny?
The intellectual foundations of film noir in respect of paranoia and psychological
disturbance are Freudianism and Existentialism. The latter was an outcrop of late
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