Fatalism in American Film Noir

The crime melodramas of the 1940s known now as film noir shared many formaland thematic elements, from unusual camera angles and lighting to moral ambiguity and femmesfatales. In this book Robert Pippin argues that many of these films also raise distinctlyphilosophical questions. Where most Hollywood films of that era featured reflective individualsliving with purpose, taking action and effecting desired consequences, the typical noir protagonistdeliberates and plans, only to be confronted by the irrelevance of such deliberation and by resultsthat contrast sharply, often tragically, with his or her intentions or true commitments. Pippinshows how this terrible disconnect sheds light on one of the central issues in modernphilosophy--the nature of human agency. How do we distinguish what people do from whatmerely happens to them? Looking at several film noirs--including close readings of threeclassics of the genre, Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Orson Welles'sThe Lady from Shanghai, and Jacques Tourneur's Out of thePast--Pippin reveals the ways in which these works explore the declining credibility ofindividuals as causal centers of agency, and how we live with the acknowledgment of suchlimitations.