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

Many other noir productions followed this pattern of a variety of voices / narrators
and flashbacks. Double Indemnity, for example, makes use of two time-frames: the real
present and remembered time. While Neff is dictating his confession of having killed a man
into a dictaphone, the words elicit a flashback that is sporadically narrated by voiceover
confession. There seems to be a certain tension between the speaker’s present situation and
the scenes he recounts of the past. They seem to emerge from his memory or his
consciousness and the images that we view deviate our attention to try to get an explanation
and a clear meaning for the past events.
The same happens with Out of the Past 55 or The Big Clock, in both of which there
is also an unusual juxtaposition of temporalities. Here again the voiceover / flashback
strategy is used to highlight the weight of fate in the lives of the characters. As Paul
Schrader observes, the flashback technique is used as a way to establish “an irretrievable
past, a predetermined fate, and an all-enveloping hopelessness” (in Silver & Ursini
1996:58). This kind of narrative combination, in fact, normally comes associated with the
basic noir conventions, namely those of a subjective nature (for example, disturbed
psychological states). This technique, as seen so far, is often used to display the mental
conflicts that exist in the minds of the (amnesiac) noir protagonists, in films such as
Possessed, The High Wall (1947) or Fear in the Night. In these films, dream sequences are
used to express the psychological disturbance that invades the characters’ minds. In others,
especially Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, the limits are being pushed insofar as the creation of
a very specific sense of malaise is concerned. Yet, in all of them, American society is
presented to us as ruined by psychological and social trauma, with central protagonists who
seem to have emerged from a haunted past and for whom escape, as seen many times, is
impossible. 56
The technique of voiceover used in Detour can be even more overwhelming in the
sense that the voice of Al Roberts is actually his own mind speaking out, restructuring his
journey with Vera. Again, we here find a two-levelled function of the technique: it
externalises in the protagonist’s memory images and emotions and it internalises his inner
voyage by the incessant confessional tone of his narration. His voice unceasingly addresses
55 See p. 350: “Modes and Subverted Uses of Flashbacks”.
56 In this respect, Kiss Me Deadly is (arguably) believed to be the film that closes the era of film noir. The
film also presents a private detective marked by fate who, similarly to the hero in The Maltese Falcon (which
opened the noir period), is also in search for a treasure (a statue or an iron box).
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