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

It is not only in terms of narrative resolution that lovers in film noir are not allowed
to live happily ever after. It is also in terms of the mise-en-scène or visual style that the
physical contiguity of lovers (whether created by landscape / set, or by camera angle,
framing and lighting) is presented as fragmented and disturbing. In the scene below (fig.
112) the sexuality of the two characters, Diamond and Rita (Diamond’s on-and-off
girlfriend), remains unspoken yet sufficiently expressive through the mise-en-scène. And
so too is that of Mingo and Fante, where their intimacy is insisted upon as a childish
reciprocal interdependence. In the scene below, there is a kind of metamorphosis: Leonard
has his back turned to the woman, and as he tries to put her shoe on, he gently touches her
leg. Yet, the viewer understands that his thoughts go to Susan whom, in the sequence
immediately after, we see being brought to the height of sexual excitement by Brown. 108
Figure 112. The Big Combo
Taking into account the censorship reasons debated in Part II, it is also possible to
state that the gap that exists in these noir narratives between the detective who tries to
solve the mystery and the omission of the signifier for woman can be shown to define the
fictional space of classical noir detective story. In other words, the absence of this signifier
108 This is the scene in which Lewis offended his leading actress by insisting that she make it clear that she is
addicted to oral sex / cunnilingus. And this forty years before it became a central and acknowledged narrative
strand of HBO’s The Sopranos, when Junior Soprano conceals his taste for cunnilingus because it will
undermine his position in the hierarchy as a mobster (see Robson 2005:178).
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