Film Noir Doesn’t Exist: Impossibility, Definition and the Point of Failure

Abstract

Here, I take on Lacan’s concept of the Real as a conceptualisation of impossibility and failure. This entails a journey into the archives of film noir criticism to explore contemporaneous reactions in the “classic” noir period to understand the ways in which the American tradition in the 1940s and 1950s might—following Vernet’s deconstruction of the category in “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom”—offer problems for the Eurocentric characterisation of noir offered in Chap. 2. I discuss Sheri Chinen Biesen’s thesis in Blackout that noir was referred to as a “red meat” film cycle in the American press as just such a problem and suggest that this thesis should itself be found wanting. I take the dissolution of the noir category as a point of departure for a Lacanian ontology of film noir, based in the theory of feminine sexuation, as a non-universalisable, and thus open, set.