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

Romanticism present at the very heart of the American hard-boiled novel - as seen before –
and made a strong impact during and after the Second World War. Existentialism in film
noir is to be found and expressed not in terms of the school of thought that developed in
occupied France, but rather as a general attitude, which had ideological and philosophical
significance, as André Bazin observed in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1957: “even if there wasn’t
exactly a genre there was a style, the realist film noir.” This way film noir describes a
world of despair and pessimism, in dark cities with dark foggy corners, in which the noir
character wanders, sometimes to the sound of a jazz tune like “Slowly I open my eyes”,
like Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) in Fallen Angel, in the hope of realistically “opening his
eyes” and “waiting for something to happen” as he tells to June Mills (Alice Fay) to which
she responds “Nothing’s going to happen.”
In the years before and during the war, when the French were themselves overtaken
by powerful political and historical forces, many of the most significant themes of
existential philosophy were incorporated in the hard-boiled novels of Dashiell Hammett,
Chandler, and James M. Cain, as they were in the more celebrated writing of Hemingway
and Faulkner. 50 This group of writers saw many of their novels being adapted by
Hollywood in the forties in a time of pre and postwar radicalism, depicting generations of
individuals who seemed to be very much alienated from the inconsistencies of modern
urban society. David Riesman’s influential sociological study of modern conformity from
1950, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, recognises and
analyses three personality types that coexist in his society and how they evolve in a certain
direction according to cultural, social and moral values: the “tradition-directed”, the
“inner-directed” and the “other-directed”. He uses them to explain the conformity of the
era and to express his feeling of sorrow about the decline of the independent American
spirit. He argues that a common personality type of the 1940s was “the other-directed
character”, meaning the type of people who needed to be emotionally in tune with the
others but who might be otherwise lost if not given a strong sense of social orientation. He
also notes that postwar American society impels individuals to “other-directedness”, the
finest illustration of which being modern societies, where people try to be socially accepted
and to avoid being excluded from their community. This lifestyle, Riesman notes, can also
have great power and influence, making people give up any “inner-direction” in their lives
50 Albert Camus is actually said to have confessed that he had got much of the inspiration to write L’Étranger
(The Stranger) after reading Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.
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