We are not angry about the world being the way it is, we accept it like death at a funeral.
Noir has this tangible mood of pessimism that pervades everything in the world. From the reaction of a bartender kicking out a desperate dame looking for a safe place to hide to a crowd of people walking by someone lying face down in the street because they don't want to get involved you will find this mood giving the world a dark and sinister air.
Everyone assumes the worst about everything.
Nobody's motives are pure.
Nobody wants to help.
You definitely get this big city vibe, where the city itself is this like-minded and cold-hearted entity of people who are cogs in a indifferent and uncaring machine. People accept this. The world moves along. People live and die. Nobody cares.
Nobody seems to get angry at this fact. Nobody leans out the window like Edward R. Murrow and yells they are as mad as hell. Nobody cares. Someone would yell back, "Shut up down there!" The world sucks and everyone accepts it. There are no activists. There are no kind hearts walking these streets.
The phrase "trapped like rats in a maze" comes to mind.
Only in this maze, the rats have no reason to treat each other with any sense of decency or kindness. They aren't angry and thrashing about, it is just there is no community or society in this maze that would give one damn to help out a rat dying in a passage somewhere. The rest would crawl by, trying to get to wherever they want to go.
In some genres, you have characters angry at the system. The society itself is causing this great injustice, and like Katiness in the Hunger Games, she needs to win in defiance of this system. She needs to prove "the system" wrong with heroics and valor.
Not so in Noir.
In a Noir version of the Hunger Games, Katiness would likely go through with her match. She would enter and likely lose. She would do something that would possibly redeem herself, like letting someone more worthy win. She would accept her fate, and likely not choose to escape. The strange book two and three war to destroy the society which caused this injustice would not even be a part of the Hunger Games consciousness.
The society is what it is. it will never change, and there is nothing we can do to change it.
Life goes on without her, not caring about her sacrifice, no one motivated to make a better world, and nothing coming out of anything she did. The next year, there will be another game.
Yet, in a small way, because she stuck by her ideals, she won a small victory for herself. Before she passes away, she knows in her heart she did what she needed to do, and she won because she met her fate with honor and dignity.
She isn't angry at the system, she can't be, because that is the way the world works and will always work. She can feel helpless and alone, but the sense of being able to change things because of a sacrifice is a uniquely heroic theme, and also one you don't find much in the original Noir movies. It may have been heroic to stick it through to the end, or in the pointless and worthless efforts to try to escape fate, but the true hero faces an inevitable fate alone with dignity and honor. A rat would try to weasel their way out, but the fate of the hero and the rat is the same.
In a way, Noir has a lot to do with the stages of accepting death. Some less noble souls try to angrily fight it to the end, while the noble ones accept the fate which awaits them. Some end their story in deep depression, while others try a futile bargain. And some others fight it until the end. If you think of a character's inevitable fate at the end of the Noir story as death, you can use these stages to your advantage when you get close to the end. The end doesn't always have to be death, it could be a loss of freedom, imprisonment, admitting a lie, losing something or someone, or any other tragic circumstance. But knowing how people accept the eventual end will help you write for them a great deal.
All this is decidedly anti-heroic, and I suspect this is why not many big-budget Noir movies are made anymore. You can't get excited about something so dour and pessimistic. You can't put many helicopters or explosions in a Noir movie. That somber sense of pessimism takes all the fun out of a summer blockbuster. Noir doesn't make very good movies with cute talking animals in 3d.
If you go parody or homage, you can ape Sam Spade and go all gumshoe on the audience with the catchphrases and hard-boiled lingo and tone of voice. You can pen in a happy ending to please the marketers and studio bosses. It won't be true Noir though. You will have written in an escape hatch or happy ending, and you will have lost that feeling of somber pessimism.
But the world sucks.
It always has and it always will.
There is nothing anyone can do to change it, so don't get upset at the way things are.
They just are what they are.
Noir has this tangible mood of pessimism that pervades everything in the world. From the reaction of a bartender kicking out a desperate dame looking for a safe place to hide to a crowd of people walking by someone lying face down in the street because they don't want to get involved you will find this mood giving the world a dark and sinister air.
Everyone assumes the worst about everything.
Nobody's motives are pure.
Nobody wants to help.
You definitely get this big city vibe, where the city itself is this like-minded and cold-hearted entity of people who are cogs in a indifferent and uncaring machine. People accept this. The world moves along. People live and die. Nobody cares.
Nobody seems to get angry at this fact. Nobody leans out the window like Edward R. Murrow and yells they are as mad as hell. Nobody cares. Someone would yell back, "Shut up down there!" The world sucks and everyone accepts it. There are no activists. There are no kind hearts walking these streets.
The phrase "trapped like rats in a maze" comes to mind.
Only in this maze, the rats have no reason to treat each other with any sense of decency or kindness. They aren't angry and thrashing about, it is just there is no community or society in this maze that would give one damn to help out a rat dying in a passage somewhere. The rest would crawl by, trying to get to wherever they want to go.
In some genres, you have characters angry at the system. The society itself is causing this great injustice, and like Katiness in the Hunger Games, she needs to win in defiance of this system. She needs to prove "the system" wrong with heroics and valor.
Not so in Noir.
In a Noir version of the Hunger Games, Katiness would likely go through with her match. She would enter and likely lose. She would do something that would possibly redeem herself, like letting someone more worthy win. She would accept her fate, and likely not choose to escape. The strange book two and three war to destroy the society which caused this injustice would not even be a part of the Hunger Games consciousness.
The society is what it is. it will never change, and there is nothing we can do to change it.
Life goes on without her, not caring about her sacrifice, no one motivated to make a better world, and nothing coming out of anything she did. The next year, there will be another game.
Yet, in a small way, because she stuck by her ideals, she won a small victory for herself. Before she passes away, she knows in her heart she did what she needed to do, and she won because she met her fate with honor and dignity.
She isn't angry at the system, she can't be, because that is the way the world works and will always work. She can feel helpless and alone, but the sense of being able to change things because of a sacrifice is a uniquely heroic theme, and also one you don't find much in the original Noir movies. It may have been heroic to stick it through to the end, or in the pointless and worthless efforts to try to escape fate, but the true hero faces an inevitable fate alone with dignity and honor. A rat would try to weasel their way out, but the fate of the hero and the rat is the same.
In a way, Noir has a lot to do with the stages of accepting death. Some less noble souls try to angrily fight it to the end, while the noble ones accept the fate which awaits them. Some end their story in deep depression, while others try a futile bargain. And some others fight it until the end. If you think of a character's inevitable fate at the end of the Noir story as death, you can use these stages to your advantage when you get close to the end. The end doesn't always have to be death, it could be a loss of freedom, imprisonment, admitting a lie, losing something or someone, or any other tragic circumstance. But knowing how people accept the eventual end will help you write for them a great deal.
All this is decidedly anti-heroic, and I suspect this is why not many big-budget Noir movies are made anymore. You can't get excited about something so dour and pessimistic. You can't put many helicopters or explosions in a Noir movie. That somber sense of pessimism takes all the fun out of a summer blockbuster. Noir doesn't make very good movies with cute talking animals in 3d.
If you go parody or homage, you can ape Sam Spade and go all gumshoe on the audience with the catchphrases and hard-boiled lingo and tone of voice. You can pen in a happy ending to please the marketers and studio bosses. It won't be true Noir though. You will have written in an escape hatch or happy ending, and you will have lost that feeling of somber pessimism.
But the world sucks.
It always has and it always will.
There is nothing anyone can do to change it, so don't get upset at the way things are.
They just are what they are.
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