posted on 2017-06-06, 01:31authored byWard Blanton
Cinema Theory has for a long time been haunted by the question: is noir a genre of its own kind or a kind of anamorphic distortion affecting different genres? From the very beginning, noir was not limited to hard-boiled detective stories: reverberations of noir motifs are easily discernible in comedies (Arsenic and Old Lace), in westerns (Pursued), in political and social dramas (All the Kings Men, The Lost Weekend), etc. Do we have here a secondary impact of something that originally constitutes a genre of its own (the noir crime universe), or is the crime film only one of the possible fields of application of the noir logic? That is, is noir a predicate that entertains toward the crime universe the same relationship as toward comedy or western, a kind of logical operator introducing the same anamorphic distortion in every genre to which it is applied, so that finding its strongest application in the crime film turns on nothing but historical contingency (iek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, 1993, pp. 9-10)?