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

throughout this work); and c) to disassociate it from any simplistic or easy genre
categorisation.
Part III takes up the topic of themes and contents, concentrating on the central
archetypes portrayed in noir, specifically “the male victim” (often called the non-heroic
hero) and the duplicitous femme fatale. This part of the study links directly to the previous
one since the examined noir themes and motifs hold up a “dark mirror” to American
society, in other words, to film noir’s fundamental fixation on paranoia and despair. In
subsection 1, I turn back to (American) existentialist themes (with a reference to film
novels by hard-boiled writers, such as Cornell Woolrich), as a prevailing view of film noir,
engaging existential themes of isolation and anxiety with the ones taken from a generalised
Freudianism (schizophrenia, insanity and disturbed sexuality) debated in Part II.
The city, a noir character in its own right, and its life are analysed in detail as this is
to where the noir narrative gravitates and where the events fatalistically occur. By now, it
is clear that the noir universe revolves around causality, but it is in the city that the noir
figures, whatever good intentions and high hopes they might have, will inevitably succumb
to a foreshadowed conclusion. Shadows and dark alleys or the back doors of underworld
places and luxurious apartments are all part of the scenario, differently characterised
spaces in the unscrupulous city and its suburbs that reek of the night and which give form
to “the fatalistic nightmare” of its noir inhabitants. The noir labyrinth is always found in
the specifics of cities like Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, and so I will discuss
the subject of spatiality and the city in film noir, not only through the physical, labyrinthine
streets, but also through the various intertextual discourses swirling around the films (the
journeys and quests of the heroes, or high-rise and tower living, for example). I will refer
to the way that Dimendberg compares the “centripetal” noir city, associated with cities
from the early part of the noir cycle like New York (with representation of the urban space
in Dassin’s The Naked City (1948) and the photojournalistic style of Weegee), to the
“centrifugal” noir city of Los Angeles, for instance, connected with films set on highways
and in suburbs.
The femme fatale is unquestionably the most subversive element in noir
productions. In this subsection, I consider what her main role is in these films, namely in
comparison with traditional images of womanhood set within the nuclear family. Trapped
in a universe dominated by male, the femme fatale (seen by many as an empowered
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