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

or assume the goals and ideology of their own community. Paradoxically, he concludes,
this particular behaviour produces social groups of individuals that find it impossible to act
in terms of companionship. The individual becomes thus progressively more alienated
from the shapeless indeterminacy of modern urban life. 51 In this sense, literary noir
develops its own narratives of disagreement and its exposures of repression, discrediting
the prevailing myth of an integrated, contentedly conformist America.
Richard Schickel makes a useful point when he states in an article that he wrote in
2007 that noir films managed to place “a new stress on the power of the past”:
Noir films, with their greatly intensified visual style and their stress on perverse
psychology, weren’t reflecting our misery in a peacetime economy, as Schrader
suggests. Instead, their aims were quite different (don’t forget, they were meant to
entertain). For one, they were trying to give the traditional crime film a new lease
on life - particularly in the way it represented the city’s place in the postwar world.
Somewhat more originally, they were placing a new stress on the power of the past
- something most of us thought we had buried - to reach out and twist our fates
when we least expected that to happen. (Schickel 2007:43)
In truth, film noir of the fifties was not interested in reflecting the time of prosperity
that the country was experiencing after the postwar. Despite the fact that numerous
changes occurred - both industrially and technologically -, the common individual
remained practically defenceless against these major forces, and was socially and
sometimes even ideologically pushed to conform to the national mood of need for
existential self-definition, as Lee Horsley observes. After the whole set of events that had
erupted in France since the thirties - illustrated by the French as “les années noires” – many
literary writers started to express their existentialist concerns as a way of understanding the
sinister trends in modern literature and film. In the meantime, the philosophy of the French
existentialists travelled to America, along with their anxieties, as a reaction towards the
absurdity of modern life. In line with this, Horsley concludes, American writers in general
gradually started to convey a stronger logic of “self” and “community”, incorporating in
their works the image of worried and isolated anti-heroes.
This existentialist sentiment reminds us to a great extent of Ernest Hemingway (often
considered America’s premier literary loner) as personal alienation was a major element of
his fiction. The most significant aspects of our personal lives are to be found in our ability
51 These general social attitudes of the time were also evident in other films, such as Nunnally Johnson’s The
Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956) or Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (1957).
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