What We Talk About When We Talk About Noir
One [the private eye story] is dependent on its hero maintaining the ethical high ground while most everyone with whom he interacts lies, cheats, steals and kills. The other features people who wallow in the sty that is their world. The machinations of their lust, whether for money or love (which, in noir fiction, is a four-letter word for sex), will cause them to be blinded to rudimentary decency as they become entangled in the web of their own doom.
He went on to describe the protagonists of noir fiction in practically theological terms: "The lost and corrupt souls who populate these tales were doomed before we met them because of their hollow hearts and depraved sensibilities." Ray Banks picks up the theory in a post at the Mulholland Books blog, tracing the roots of noir all the way back to the fatally-flawed heroes of Greek tragedy. (And offering a helpful corrective.)
While I think this talk of flaws and depravity makes sense, it's not as if noir fiction has a stranglehold on the concepts. If I had to put my finger on the element I find distinctly -- if not exclusively -- noirish, it would be the sense of systemic as opposed to individual corruption.
The point really isn't that people are flawed or doomed; it's that this doom extends into the structures and institutions they create. The mean streets are themselves mean, and not just because mean people happen to walk them. The rot goes deeper. Corrupt cops aren't just bad apples, they drop from a bad tree. Everybody is bent, and that's just another way of saying everybody is human.
I'm not interested in arguing what is and isn't noir. I'm not even sure it's helpful to try and pigeonhole a genre based on thematic elements, since I tend to see theme as the province of the individual artist, not the label. No, to me noir is kind of like salt. You might use it in a variety of different dishes. Some people will like it on everything, some on nothing. Some will consider more than a dash overuse, while others aren't satisfied until they can taste nothing else. With influences, keeping it "pure" is almost never the point.
The point is keeping it interesting.
As a sub-genre, though, I do think the noir mode lends itself to certain ways of seeing life, and those of us who identify with noir (whether we write it or not) probably are more deterministic, more nihilistic, and more attuned to corruption -- both personal and systemic -- than everybody else. The noir aesthetic jettisons the moral melodramas. Noir tunes into reality's underbelly rather than its white-washed surface.
