Film Noir Conclusion - Essay Example

The cities that are closely associated with these settings are, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco to name but a few.  The most common scenes are during the night when it is raining. These are used to portray the underlying message of the film noir movie which is set to portray fatalism, confusion, alienation, disillusionment, moral corruption, desperation, paranoia, and darkness, which attribute to the name. The visual effects, especially light, employed in film noir represent all these themes that make up the movies (Silver & Ursini, p. 94).

            The main character or the principal protagonist of a noir film is not displayed as a normal hero. His or her attributes are different and lack those that make up a hero, but the audience is still able to identify with him/her. The hero is usually displayed as a conflicted individual with conflicted morals. He/she can be portrayed as a person who was once bad but changed his/her ways. The heroes in film noir are always caught up in some twisted scandal, either a con game or a foiled heist. These are usually related to a gambling aspect. Like in Gilda, the whole movie is in a casino. The situations that the heroes are faced with are inter-tangled with murderous conspiracies and often adulterous scandals.  This characterization makes up most of the movies in film noir.

            Storylines of film noir are often nonlinear, twisting, and elliptical (Muller, p. 32). If presented in a narrative, the narratives were often convoluted complex, and maze-like, with background music and a series of flashbacks. A common plot implement was the amnesia state of the protagonist. The amnesia is brought about by the victim falling into temptation, which leads to a frame-up. In trying to discover his past and reveal what happened, the hero’s life story is revealed in an attempt to explain the hero’s current state of mind. In many of the movies film noir confronts a variety of the status quo values. Although it focuses on many of society’s institutions, it does not excessively focus on the family. Most of the films depict the justice system as incompetent and the police force as corrupt. They even portray the federal government as distrustful, oppressive, and threatening, and white-collar jobs as dull, boring, and dehumanizing (Muller, p. 57). Noir films do not focus on family. Sometimes, they stop short of rejecting it altogether, but even with the criticism, they always reinforce the family values even if for a short time during the movie. In conclusion, characterization visual styles plots, setting, and themes are the conventions that makeup Film Noir.