The ends of film noir

This is a dissertation which considers how death is represented in film noir. In their fifty-year quest to define film noir as a genre, film theorists and critics have frequently suggested that film noir is concerned with images and themes of fate and fatality. It is my purpose in this dissertation to move beyond these suggestive remarks by a thorough exploration of the omnipresence of death in film noir at every level, from plot events and shot compositions to overall narrative structures.;In order to argue that film noir is defined by its obsessive investigation of death, I analyze noir's peculiar historical and aesthetic emergence over several decades. Crucial to my analysis is the relationship between the narrative structure and content of film noir and the role of the "death drive" in the narrative movement toward closure. In "Freud's Masterplot", Peter Brooks applies the notion of the "death drive" found in Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle to the structure of fictional narrative, claiming that the pleasure of all narrative resides in its representation of the biological death drive. Our unconscious drive toward "the quiescence of death" is replicated in the narrative movement toward the quiescence of closure, of "the end." Through an analysis of dozens of films noir, I argue that the film noir narrative both complicates and self-reflexively examines this narrative drive, undermining the possibility of "quiescent" closure by making "the end" both the object of investigation and an obsessive structural recurrence in the form of flashbacks, scene repetitions, hallucinations and dream sequences. Film noir is most consistently characterized by a convoluted narrative structure and an obscure, disorienting cinematic style. Noir tends to upset linear chronology and forego predictable and satisfying closure in order to circle and investigate some shadowy, mysterious object--which is most often a corpse.