Noir is the flip side of Horatio Alger. It is the product of desperation, the recurrent dream of failure, a catalogue of the many things that can go wrong and do go wrong when lust and greed overlap. It is in this regard that noir could be said to extend a tradition of American literature, which 'from Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and Dickinson through Crane, Dreiser, and Faulkner has been obsessed with crime, guilt, deception, deceit, nightmare, mystery, murder, and the disintegrating psyche.'

Labels: film, movie, noir, poetry