The male protagonist

In film noir the male protagonist is often a detective or an otherwise social alienated individual. Sometimes the male heroes are featured as amnesiacs, a situation that absolutely creates a feeling of social estrangement and disillusionment. These hard-boiled heroes are anti-social loners that are subject to existential angst. The environments they live and work in are dark and scary metropolises, often red-light districts, or otherwise dehumanizing environments, like large desolate office buildings. They are experiencing anonymity through their large scale surroundings. The tough guy is often marked by an excellent gift of verbal wit, even if they are not always given the strongest intellect; this is a heritage from the hard-boiled novels. Their worlds are dominated by crime, corruption and cruelty. The protagonist often gets tangled up in some of these activities himself, in addition to his interest in the erotic. Thus, he lives in a distorting world.

The men are, as well as the women, portrayed as stereotypes. As a result of this they are not allowed to live their lives in alternative ways anymore than women. The patriarchal order that is surrounding them, and that they in addition to women are trying to upheave, represents a certain set of rules they have to follow and live up to. As it seems, the patriarchy is asking for quite a bit. The struggle to keeping women in their place also keeps the men in their places. The men can not show much emotion in order to upheaval their masculinity, (to be emotional is regarded a female virtue), and they have to work alone and be successful in what they do (something Oedipal). They have to seek meaning in activity, not in contemplation which also is regarded a female virtue. Their position within the patriarchal system provides them with purpose in life; to work, provide, protect and serve and protect the patriarchy. The first three virtues must be seen in the context of the family and the masculine.

The existence led by men in film noir is one of toil and loneliness. The actual choices men have in life are either to become a family man, which is the accepted thing to do, or not. Because of the way women are defined in these films, life as a married man would doom him to a domestic life, with a dull domestic woman. There would never be excitement or individual thought. So, the male must do all the thinking, and becomes surrounded by a deading conformity. For the film noir men and women are all the same: they are nobody. This must produce a non-interesting heterosexual relationship. So the reason is clear why the male protagonists becomes obsessed and fascinated with the femme fatale. A life outside this patriarchal determined role is a life of destruction in a closed and claustrophobic world. He is victimized by society, and perhaps also by a woman, and expresses the awareness of the loss of the fixed ties that bind a man to a community. The similarities between different male protagonists in different films are underlined by the mere fact that most noir heroes/actors were cast against type.

The sexuality of the hard-boiled hero is a question often brought up in film noir research. A consequence of the noir females masculine characteristics is that feminine characteristics are attributed to the male. This is why the noir male is humiliated and reduced. Because of an underlying misogynous attitude, females are not suitable objects, except for the women that make the noir male dull, and who offers an existence without emotional and sexual commitment. At the same time as women do not represent a tempting alternative, patriarchy has made homo sexuality taboo. What remains for the male hero is male friendship. (In America male bonding intensified during the war). It's a tough world.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir07.htm

Women in film noir

Generally in art there are two archetypal female characters; the whore and the Madonna. In film noir we are introduced to both of these women: the dark, sexual and active spider woman and the maternal virgin. To give a meaningful presentation of the women's role in film noir I will first give you a short reminder of how the traditional family was viewed, and which values it represented in the world of movies in the forties and fifties.

The institution of the family reveals significant social values and beliefs. It functions as an ideological cornerstone of our society with its embodiment of traditional values. It represents the framework for reproduction, because marriage is the only institution that legitimates reproduction. Marriage at the same time both legitimates and conceals sexuality. Married couples are the only ones that are allowed to enjoy the erotic, but they are rarely presented as sexual partners or in any other ways erotisized. With breeding follows the upbringing of children which responsibility traditionally is lain on women. From a feminist point of view these practices of oppressing women are seen to be legitimated by this representation of the family institution. This image of the family, where the man is the family's head and ruler, is also a legitimizing model of a hierarchical and authoritarian society. Here the family can be seen as a metaphor of society on a larger scale. Thus the representation of the family institution in movies contributes to legitimize different social values, among other things the value of the family institution as a social unit, the ruler role of the man, the domestic role of women, and the total dependence of children.

In film noir the family relations are not normal. In some ways the noirs are based on the absence of the family. If a family, or more likely family relations are represented they are often broken up, filled with mutual hatred or in other ways perverted. The movies often concern themselves with what the loss of these family values and satisfactions can lead to. Marriages in film noir are often described as boring and sterile or non sexual. Because of this twisted family life, both men and women seek satisfaction outside marriage in film noir. This satisfaction is not only sexual, but also an attempt to reassure and find themselves in this confused and threatening society, an escape from the frustrating routine in an alienated existence. The violation of the marriages and traditional family values often results in destruction for the violators. In this manner both pleasure and death await outside the family institution. The family represents an antithesis to the femme fatale. I think that instead of showing and offering women an alternative to the traditional family life, film noir shows what happens if one chooses to stand outside the traditional values of the patriarchal system.

The dark, strong femme fatale of noir is the main female character in these movies. These women are given not only sexual powers, but also ambitions. They are longing or looking for independence, often economic, and freedom, often from relationships with men. These women that are masters and possessors of their own sexuality represent a danger to the males. She is--because of her ambitions and independence--a threat to the patriarchal system. On account of this she gives the males a feeling of alienation from his environment, and she must be punished for this to restore the patriarchal balance. The femme fatale is promiscuous, exiting, intelligent and narcissist while her opposite is the boring, but stable wife and mother. The virgin is capable of total devotion to the male, something that the sexual woman is not. The former is thus described as the ideal role for women, and it fits in well with patriarchy.

The sexual women's power and strength are visually expressed in the films, both through the iconography of the image, and through the visual style. It is often the woman that dominates and controls the camera, both because of her own strength and because of the male heroes attraction to her. Thus other participants become static within the image. But in the end when she is destroyed, she also loses her physical motion in the picture.
The dress code is also applied as her appearance defines her moral transformation. In Mildred Pierce for instance, she is dressed up in more manly clothes during the film and her own development. These women also use for example cigarettes and guns for phallic symbols, something I view as an extension of their bid for masculine powers. Filmaticly, the woman that represents an alternative to the dark world of film noir is often placed outside this world.

The spider woman uses her sexual powers in the quest for reaching her own ambitions. The mere possession of such ambitions is unheard of for a woman, and represents a danger to the male. She is a dangerous woman and the males own sexuality along with the patriarchal system are threatened. The only way to control her is to destroy her, something that happens in most noirs. Even though she is destroyed, it is her vital, deadly strength we remember.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir06.htm

NO PLACE FOR A WOMAN : THE FAMILY IN FILM NOIR

In a disturbing scene from Dark Passage (1947), a back alley plastic surgeon tells Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart), "There's no such thing as courage. There's only fear, the fear of getting hurt and the fear of dying. That's why human beings live so long." He is looking straight at Parry and — through the use of the subjective camera — straight at the audience. His statement is especially striking because it dismisses courage as a myth soon after World War II, rejecting a basic cultural belief that all of America and all of Hollywood had just spent four years trying to build up. Such an attack on society's (and Hollywood's) most cherished values is characteristic of film noir, and perhaps its favorite target is the most fundamental value of all — the family. A short description of film noir In classical Hollywood cinema, as in American culture generally, the family and home life are celebrated as a safe haven from the world outside and a common aspiration of each generation. When we say that a film has a "happy ending," we often mean that the male hero and his female love interest are united in marriage — or seem to be headed in that direction — before the closing credits. Indeed, many of the most popular films of the 1930s and '40s depict the family almost as a cure-all that will save the hero from any trouble, if he or she can only learn to appreciate it. Thus, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939) runs away from home, but discovers in the end that "There's no place like home"; George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life (1946) nearly attempts suicide, only to find that friends and family make any crisis worth living through; and even Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939) comes to value Tara, the family home, above all other things. World War II only intensified American culture's endorsement of society's dominant ideology and the importance of shared values — values that may be said to begin with the "traditional" nuclear family. The urge to affirm marriage and the family, already a popular and therefore profitable formula for filmmakers before the War, became an absolute political and cultural imperative during the War years. As the War came to an end, however, films began to Humphrey Bogart established the archetypal film noir detective-hero. The Maltese Falcon (1941) experiment with alternative formulas and introduced a radically different visual and narrative style. This body of films, which is generally thought to begin with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and end with Touch of Evil (1958), became known as film noir for its dark, disturbing visual style and thematic content. Of course, film noir confronts a range of status quo values and institutions and does not focus exclusively on the family. In many of these films, the criminal justice system is incompetent,1 the white-collar office is dull and dehumanizing,2 the police force is corrupt,3 and even the federal government is threatening and oppressive.4 Yet, like classical Hollywood cinema, film noir often expresses its view of American society through the image of the family generally and specifically woman's place in the family. Dana Polan suggests that in mainstream Hollywood films, "realizing one's place can only mean realizing one's place in the family. . . . Family and public ideology are indeed one."5 Sylvia Harvey elaborates on this viewpoint, tracing the complex connections between the depiction of women, family, and society in film: All movies express social values, or the erosion of these values, through the ways in which they depict both institutions and relations between people. Certain institutions are more revealing of social values and beliefs than others, and the family is perhaps one of the most significant of these institutions. For it is through the particular representations of the family in various movies that we are able to study the process whereby existing social relations are rendered acceptable and valid.6 Harvey emphasizes the special function that women perform in communicating American culture's view of the family: "[T]he representation of women has always been linked to this value-generating nexus of the family. . . . Woman's place in the home determines her position in society, but also serves as a reflection of oppressive social relationships generally."7 In film noir, women serve to express these films' skepticism toward the family and the values that it supports. With few variations, noir films divide women into three categories: the femme fatale, an independent, ambitious woman who feels confined within a marriage or a close male-female relationship and attempts to break free, usually with violent results; the nurturing woman, who is often depicted as dull, featureless, and, in the end, unattainable — a chance at conventional marriage that is denied to the hero; and the "marrying type," a woman who threatens the hero by insisting that he marry her and accept his conventional role as husband and father. Each type of film noir woman functions in a way that undermines society's image of the traditional family. Still, noir films usually stop short of rejecting the family altogether. While criticizing the family and marriage in a fairly overt way, film noir cannot resist the urge to restore or reinforce the family, even if it is only at the last minute. This restoration involves punishing or destroying women (and men) who transgress the boundaries of "normal" family relations or providing a tacked-on "happy ending" in which the hero marries the nurturing woman or even a converted femme fatale who has learned to accept her proper role. In either case, the ending contradicts the content and style of the film itself. Thus, film noir inverts the classical Hollywood formula of wish fulfillment through the family and marriage — where marriage is the "happy ending" that resolves all conflicts — by denying such an ending or by providing a conventional happy ending that draws attention to itself as unrealistic or inappropriate in the context of a particular film. Indeed, either type of noir ending — the denial of marriage or the unrealistic happy ending — can be seen as a critique of classical Hollywood cinema and the traditional values that it reinforces. http://www.filmnoirstudies.com/essays/no_place.asp