The world that went wrong is an environment from which many characters in film noir cannot break free. In many noir films of the classic period of Haocaiwu, this wrong world is the urban expansion brought about by industrialization; After the war, it was the social environment in which faith was lost and the fear of war was extended.
In addition to the victorious countries of the United States, the social changes and pessimism after the war are more reflected in the films of the defeated countries. Kurosawa's "Noradog" focuses on Japan's postwar social conditions, but it is an extremely "black" film in form and content.
The audience follows a variation of the role of detective, that is, an old and a young policeman in the process of finding guns and solving cases, through their perspective to show the social situation of post-war Japan and the living conditions of ordinary people, the terrible world created by the destruction of human nature by the war.
The fear of politics is embodied in The Kiss of Death, released a decade after the end of World War II, but which reflects the myths of victims and nuclear fears of the American people during the Cold War.
The mysterious object that represents the unknown and has great danger is the ultimate answer that private detective Mike wants to painstakingly pursues, and it is also the MacGuffin who attracts the audience's attention throughout the film.
And in the end, when everything seems to be revealed, that is, the "Pandora's box" that represents danger is opened, the destruction of the world is announced (interestingly, in the indoor space where the villain opens the box, the poster on the wall is painted in the style of Soviet propaganda).
At this time, the solution of the puzzle not only did not restore order, but caused greater destruction, and there was no longer a safe corner of the world By examining those traditional love movies, the development of their plots and the obstacles encountered by lovers mostly came from factors other than the emotions connecting the two: class differences, opposition from outsiders, injustice of fate...
But even a movie with an extremely low ending like "Blue Bridge", its tragedy ultimately strengthens the purity and eternity of love.
The romance films produced by the supremacy of love are timeless human emotions and artistic themes. And what shakes this "eternal emotion" in genre films is the feelings of men and women in film noir.
Love in film noir is like a negative in traditional love movies, with a satirical gesture that doubts the authenticity and testability of love, a human emotion.
The emotions of the male and female protagonists themselves are tested by deception, betrayal and human greed, and most of the time end in failure, perhaps there are one or two moments when the audience can see the true feelings from the actors' action lines and performances, but they will soon be swallowed up by the consequences of the accumulated criminal behavior in the early stage.
Considered the pioneer of film noir, "The Maltese Falcon" carried out the theme that love will eventually fail from the beginning, and also established stylized character settings of tough guy detectives and femme fatales in the character setting.
The first dialogue begins with the portrayal of Speder, a private investigator played by Humphrey Bogart, who cleverly says to him as he casually smokes a cigarette: "There's a Woodley woman looking for you, and you'll want to meet him, because she's knockout."
As the plot develops, when Spade's partner Archer is killed, the film reveals that Spade had an affair with Archer's wife and her secretary.
As a male protagonist with the power of viewpoint, the huge moral flaws have shaken the inherent concept of true love in traditional romance films from the beginning.
Hypocritical, deceitful and exploitative, sexually driven behavior subverts traditional values such as the supremacy of love and marital fidelity. When Spade is deceived and used by Woodley in a more cruel way, Spade, who has fallen in love, can only show his cold side and send her to prison, and love is finally lost to greed-driven deception and forced indifference.
Woodley's image of a femme fatale was borrowed and emulated by almost all subsequent film noirs, so much so that in a later series of film noir, the tough-guy detective was divided into an insurance salesman who was more morally flawed and weaker in the face of temptation and an idealized police officer within the system.
However, the roles of femme fatale women were brought to the screen in various forms in the forties, they are: Gloria Graham, Rita Hayworth, Barbara Stanwyck...
In Fritz Lang's "Blood Red Street", Cady, played by Joan Bennett, pushes this image to an extreme terrifying image, just like the portrait at the end of the movie that becomes a man's dream demon.
Here, true love has become the object of ridicule, and the object of desire of Kadie and the man she represents manipulates all emotional relationships.
William Ruhl illustrated this subversion of male and female gender in Film Noir - The Flower of Evil on the Screen, and pointed out that the core of film noir was "the destruction of decadent male ideas and desires" and all this was related to the rise of women's status in society at that time.
On the one hand, in the United States at the beginning of the 19th century, women triggered many men's resistance by obtaining the right to vote, and the traditional social pattern of strong men and weak women began to transform, and women gradually got rid of the position of subordination to men, so that men had a sense of threat;
On the other hand, after the end of World War II, when men who had served in military service returned home, they found that women in war had already entered society from the family, occupied the positions in which they worked, and gained economic and social identity independence. When the government in turn encourages women to return to the family, it leads to a strong gender confrontation between men and women, and women are qualified for all kinds of jobs in society.
This fact also punctures men's "innate sense of superiority" and deepens their fear of being threatened. So he projected this panic on the screen and "transformed into a portrayal of the femme fatale to seek self-comfort."
