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

to persist and overcome difficulties, he suggests, adding that “existence” comes before
“essence”. His characters are then responsible for creating their own essence, with personal
choices which will help them see and understand whether the world has any meaning for
them or not. In film noir it is also at the level of the individual that the fragmented psyche
of the protagonist reveals itself. Alienation and paranoia constitute a mysterious force that
often transcends the noir figure, like the hapless Al Roberts in Detour with his final
declaration: “Someday fate or some mysterious force can put the finger on you or me for
no good reason at all” (see p. 83). Roberts feels the very same intimations as the principal
French advocate of Existentialism, Albert Camus: “at any street corner, the feeling of
absurdity can strike any man in the face”. This existential awareness is indeed one of the
defining features of film noir, and it just reinforces the existential despair that follows on
from the almost compulsively erroneous choices made by noir characters. The sense of
inescapable entrapment is often therefore reinforced by an existentialist consciousness of
life’s absurdity experienced intellectually by the noir protagonist. However, the critical
distinction between Detour’s image of a pointed finger and Camus’s notion of “the absurd”
lies mostly in the noir vision of fatality rather than the outcast position of a marginalised
man found in the French narratives of this period. The dying comment from Nick Blake
(John Garfield), “Nobody lives forever” (the words of the film’s title), at once existential
and grimly reminiscent of the larger holocaust from which Blake has recently returned; or
Swede’s (Burt Lancaster) dignified response to a sense of entrapment and isolation in The
Killers, “Everybody dies...”, bear this out.
When he came to the United States in 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre saw Citizen Kane and
disapproved of the use of flashbacks that Welles employed in his film, adding that “Orson
Welles’s oeuvre well illustrated the drama of the American intelligentsia, which is rootless
and totally cut off from the masses.” It was among the noir novel writers that these
formulations of existentialism emerged as an important challenge to optimistic descriptions
of American life. Their non-acceptance of the “vocabulary of normality” or familiarity was
translated into descriptions of personal maladjustment in society – what Riesman referred
to as “Tales of the Abnorm”. In other words, traditional Hollywood forms, like musicals,
comedies or romances were definitely dismissed by noir novelists and hard-boiled writers
of the forties. The feeling of disillusionment and the topic of social and physical
deprivation were made more visible in this type of novel, normally showing archetypal
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