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

flashbacks, the noir characters reveal themselves to be trapped into believing they are
guilty of murder or unaware of their innocence. Their pursuit of self-identity, seeking
answers and an elusive truth in the past, often stimulates this disorienting perspective of the
unknown, as Turim points out:
This use of flashbacks to fill the character psychology and of close-ups on objects
symbolically saturated with psychological meanings can be seen as establishing
both the iconography and the narrative structure from which the psychological
melodrama will develop. (Turim 1989:148)
From the spectator’s point of view, these devices serve the stories and most of them
work beautifully to create a bond between a certain character and the audience. Ultimately,
as a vehicle of inquiry, flashbacks explain how one finds oneself in this moment in the
story, and manage thus to place the audience in the same morally complex positions from
which noir protagonists operate, as with Al Roberts in Detour or Walter Neff and Phyllis
Dietrichson in Double Indemnity. Therefore, the viewer becomes ethically involved with
the criminals, hoping that they will elude the ever-cruel present, even if that means
identification with a hero who is a selfish and fierce loner.
194