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

Other imagery in these films suggests that a routinised boredom and a sense of
stifling entrapment are characteristic of marriage (...). The family home in Double
Indemnity is the place where three people who hate each other spend endlessly
boring evenings together. The husband does not merely not notice his wife, he
ignores her sexually (...). (Harvey 1998:43)
Politically and ideologically, film noir managed to resonate with American
audiences and expressed concerns about social trends and injustices, shaped in part by
contemporary social realities. This is made visible in The Big Sleep by Howard Hawks,
which functions as a socio-political critique, or Ministry of Fear (1945) by Fritz Lang,
through the framework of political intrigue surrounding World War II. The world in
general and American society in particular are then depicted as politically and socially
fragmented, which is then reflected in the films in another set of violations: corruption and
vice.
The radical individualism that is felt in these films is essentially expressed through
the sense of negativity that pervades most of them. The heroes’ own desires are a toying
with the dangers of transgression and constitute a threat to the institution of the family.
Interestingly, apart from Pitfall, noir productions rarely depict images of parents and
children, let alone the institution of the family seen as a defended fortress that outsiders
attack at their peril. In fact, the family, religion, the State and education (major pillars of
society) are all set at crisis point in film noir. As seen in the chapter regarding censorship,
noir filmmakers became proficient in getting round the Code’s regulations which promoted
home and family values and upheld American legal, political and religious institutions.
These illustrations of subversion clearly demonstrate that film noir intended to test the
boundaries of what was allowable on the big screen and they also remind us of the strength
that noir movies potentially had.
Noir movies reverberate with messages that seemingly conveyed the anxiety felt
first in the economic pressures of the 1930s and then into the turbulent times of the forties
with WWII and the disintegrating political certainties. This was mostly registered in a
dramatic shift in sexuality and the male - female duality, breaking out as volatility in
gender relations that unquestionably led to the anxiety addressed by noir concerning male
authority and adequacy. Noir explored traditionalist values of individualism, the need to
stand alone, and found it wanting despite there being no viable alternative. The heroic
fatalism of noir’s characters was predicated on a shaky self-reliance, apart from all
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