The Noir Aesthetic

1.
The Noir aesthetic is interesting. Typical aesthetics are supposed to elicit a response to the beauty, joy or happiness being depicted. But with noir there's an emotional distance. Its original feeling has dissipated and been exchanged for a visual pseudo-homage not acknowledging the social circumstances directly responsible for its original conception as a genre or artform. Contemporary noir exists purely for profit, so it has a claim to timelessness. Their shared factor is their distance from the audience through their presentation of an archetypcal and hyperbolic social reality. Noir is social commentary which glorifies without comment, an ideological venture attempting to balance itself and present an image of neutral observation. That, of course, is negated by the social circumstance responsible for an asocial reaction from their audience in viewing an artwork actively perpetuating the intellectual foundations for the aforementioned asocial response without ever considering solutions or alternatives.

2.
Noir has never imagined itself to be a critical aesthetic, despite the occasional merge in territory through the social criticism implicit in an individual film's themes. In general though, critical aesthetics are usually ineffective or confined within the barriers of 'acceptable commentary' while lending their subject legitimacy and negation. Our understanding of social negatives gets added to the dominant discourse, briefly, before being subtracted or overwhelmed in our state of academic entropy (its own self-regulating aesthetic standard). An aesthetic is now a commodity whose use-value is the criticism of other commodities. All aesthetics are critical reactions to subjective-social responses, and all commodity criticism interprets our reaction to itself as another means of economic standardization. Any true critical aesthetic would need distance from conditional norms, which would make its criticism as sterile as that coming from within.

3.
Noir is an interpretation of recent history, being a product of Depression, War and The Red Scare -- to that end, it's just one of the newest incarnations of privileged social commentary trying to understand socio-economic crises while failing at the task, like romanticism and the 1920s avant-garde before it. The genre's relative popular appeal coupled with the constant technological revisions the film industry undergoes every minute comments on both our obsessive (and excessive) ideological need to equate technology with progress and the absence of any genuine progress since the last anarchist revolutions -- and it does this by depicting bleak industrial environments devoid of both happiness and progress, which gives noir an almost hyperrealistic quality for a genre of ideological fantasy.

4.
Noir exists as a genre, and genres are mostly meaningless labels attached to cultural products for divisive and marketing purposes. 'Meaning' is both contained and erased within the consumptive act. Any philosophical content a film may have, aside from obvious social truisms, are the result of individual conjecture, itself usually the result of collective preconditioning and intellectual values. Noir's primary philosophical character is the individualism, fatalism and pessimism which drives the despair driving all unnecessary production and consumption. Our society relies on the alienation of its peoples to thrive. Both sides are negated without the other, and noir offers us a portrait of that negation, embodied as a sort of apocalypse fiction.

5.
It pretends to be apolitical while illustrating the general cynicism of the environment in which it was spawned -- that of political pessimism and banal truths regarding class relations. The absence of any direct commentary (in the didactic sense) leaves us with indirect political angst and despair, probably the most common, popular and thus most POLITICAL feeling felt in late-capitalist society. Its origins also show the apparent alienation toward the era's supposedly 'revolutionary politics' alongside the increasing tensions between the various subtypes of state capitalism which emerged and began contesting after the first world war. The cynicism the genre recreates is persistent even as the ideologies responsible for its origin recede, whither and die. As an aesthetic, noir can't neutralize cynicism without neutralizing itself, analogous to how neo-Leninist fantasies can't induce change without distancing themselves from their heritage, something they refuse to do due to the refusal to admit their total failure.

6.
Entertainment is a distraction from our lives. Obviously. It estranges us from our issues and concerns. We are always aware of them, despite being told we have no idea about what is happening in the present, and our cultural production reflects that subdued understanding by turning it into fiction -- by making our problems mythical, and thus ideological. Through their reduction to entertainment, our problems are absorbed into the spectacle to be recycled and to entertain again. Ever the more profitable if we can 'relate' to the subject, which in turn is a pseudorelationship with ourselves projected outward as an evasion of dire introspection.

7.
The self engages film, if not through aesthetics, through ethics. And considering that most, if not all, contemporary ethics are capitalist in orientation, society is a prior unethical. Our recognition of that forms the base for positive ethical conduct, and with that conduct we can give a film the 'most correct' interpretation possible -- happiness: the source of all action and all use-value...at their strongest, most films allow us momentary amusement and the temporary remove from our unhappiness. Still a distraction, but something. Unhappiness allows for film commentary, but from there we can only define happiness in a negative sense. Experiences are all positive. But art mirrors the negative interpretation of happiness as temporary, false or artificial. Noir criticizes our methods and conditions for acquiring happiness rather than happiness itself, though they are related and most often indistinguishable. Their connection is mostly associative. But happiness is an intangible and capitalism requires our misery to sustain itself and its absence of personal autonomy, social equality, community or empathy. Noir is about the character archetypes manufactured under these conditions in an exaggerated state. They're individual characteristics distilled -- our protagonist is usually an ethical male situated on a borderline separating different shades of moral ambiguity, while his counterpart the femme fatale is a misogynist icon, a person reacting to the duplicities inherent in our relationship to capital who happens to be female. Noir seems sometimes to explicitly defend or endorse the patriarchal values it displays.

8.
Noir gives us sharply-defined gender roles by emphasizing a very specific type of relationship, that of the strong male victim and the weaker female manipulator, wherein the woman is given the task of representing the negative consequences of capitalist ethics. She is always the other, and the relative inequalities we experience daily are othered through her. She represents our problems and to her we (the audience) can direct blame, she is a cypher to which we can throw our frustrations and she humanizes an abstraction while dehumanizing the gender and adding continuity to the social divisons said dehumanization causes.

9.
Our lack of autonomy is always shown to be a result of fate or circumstance. The depiction appears metaphysical in nature and it too reinforces dominant repressive social concepts, those articulated all through our aesthetic history -- Greek tragedy, the Rota Fortunae -- and yes, we are always subject to circumstantial coercion and whatever information is available in any moment, the quest for autonomy is not as doomed as claimed, nor is the weak start-and-end cycle accurate. Noir reduces autonomy into an existential question rather than something social, an observation and opinion directly out of the genre's intellectual origins. Characters demanding autonomy are seen as obviously absurd, and so we let ourselves reinforce our feelings as a sort of personal tragedy, something we can only understand when alone. Likewise, its romanticism increases our distance to autonomy, keeping it as an unrealized (or realizable) concept.

10.
So too is inequality depicted as eternal, mystical or part of 'human nature'. In noir, everyone tends toward Machiavellian power-plays -- So social circumstances impress upon us an immutable sense of pre-determination. All dominant ideologies believe in the eternal and in their truths as infinite but, contrary to that bullshit, Marx and Engels have already shown this to be a fallacy circa 1845. While we could interpret noir as allegory (individuals are direct incarnations of issues and ideas), any effective allegory is anti-populist by default via subjective intellectual inequality. Egalitarian theories can be extremist and absurd so as to invite easy satirization but noir is among those eager to prove it to be impossible in any sense. A sort of late-life Debordian negativity without the history of progressive action. And, sadly, if equality is ever portrayed, it is only done so in irony where everyone is fucked equally.
 
11.
In noir, community is a joke. Nobody exists but the alienated individual, and that holistic alienation is the sole drive for their (and our) every action. It destroys trust and the most remote possibility of a long-lasting positive communion with anyone. This theme is the most accurately presented in the genre, and indeed alienation is very real. Without community all we are are individuals competing for pieces of metal or paper. Seeing as individuals are nothing without their communities, it's shown how it's lived: as cannibalistic, misanthropic and ultimately suicidal. It's the best indictment the genre can make against capitalism.
 
12.
Returning to its origins, we can see the genre responding to the negation of revolutionary politics, as a counter-ideological reaction to state capitalism: the inverted anti-glorification of individual stagnation instead of collective change. We can see in this the recognition of the bullshit-in-rhetoric. But by accepting a negative alternative, noir is a portrait of dashed idealism brought about by decay and collapse since the Depression. Any revolutionary initiative is considered more of the same, if not worse. Leninism is directly responsible for the prevailing image of the brutal calculating revolutionary elite, but here we ignore the fact that the potential for change is omnipresent. Noir is then a proto-end-of-history ethos in a mystical container that, as with all drama, enacts the the whims of ruling class values.
 
13.
So the essential noir thesis is the end of revolutionary ethics -- the dominant image of revolution is neither revolutionary nor ethical. But so too can noir be understood as a simple representation of negative social norms...norms with are not handled by the leftover Cold War parties -- the cynical pessimism we use to recover after the fall. Revolutionary ethics exist only in a minority. They're our social other. But here instead of the normal inter-community alienation, we have it between communities divided according to ideology and circumstance. The sacrifices they've made are turned into entertainment to be eventually forgotten or reduced to something historical -- it's the expectation of inevitable cynicization, and what we could call the 'noir fall' is seen as a desirable end to the social idealism displayed by activist communities. Our dominant ideology demands our resignation and masochistic acceptance -- the expectation of which noir depicts as its primary social merit.