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

Either as a femme fatale or an homme fatal, the power of psycho-sexual impulses in
noir protagonists in all their ambiguity is undeniable, and apparently there is a good reason
for that, as Andrew Dickos notes:
As the cautionary cinema of the great negation of a “healthy” puritanical American
vision, the film noir almost mandates a depiction, however perverse, of those
repressed impulses reigning hand-in-hand with the anarchy that drives its
protagonist to violence and paranoia. Unrepressed sexuality alongside these
characteristics is far too messy to contain, so it must be vanquished. When it is
particularly threatening, one may be sure that there is a woman involved. (Dickos
2002:144-5)
The repression of these impulses is part of the hero’s claim to strength to be
asserted and approved rather than merely being assumed by the noir protagonist. The
testing assumes there is something weak or unstable to be tested, and this is “despite the
fact that [noir] films are characterised by an overt masculinisation of both language (the
aggressive and competitive ‘hard-boiled’ banter) and action (the predominance of
violence)” (Krutnik 1991:88). For example, Dead Reckoning depicts Rip Murdock
(Humphrey Bogart), as the noir hero who becomes at once the hunted and the hunter in his
doomed romance with Coral Chandler (Lizabeth Scott). Beaten and hunted like an animal,
Rip then confronts Coral. They both get into a car and drive off at hight speed, when Coral
attempts to kill him. Just after shooting him, the car crashes and this also proves fatal for
the corrupted Coral Chandler. In noir productions like Detour or The Dark Corner, both
protagonists seem to offer a clear denial of the conventional route of heroic masculine
adventure. In Detour, Al Roberts voyages metaphorically to an understanding of his
immediate present through images and the sound of his own voice, in a sort of symbolic
castration; whereas in The Dark Corner, the narrative acquires deterministic overtones of
hopelessness and Galt’s affliction reinforces his instability and constitutes a cry of
existential anguish.
In conclusion, when outlining and analysing the representation of masculinity in
film noir, it is possible to recognise different categories of masculine identity defined in
relation to the male’s mission in the film. Therefore, this identity can either be related to a
legal framework (as Frank Krutnik notes, “the private eye occupies a mediating position
between the worlds of crime and legitimate society” (Krutnik 1991:92)) and to the law of
patriarchy or often as a transgression of the law and the male has consequently to suffer
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