Blade Runner (1982) and Double Indemnity (1944) might at first glance seem to have little in common, the first being a science fiction film about a man who hunts down and kills androids and the other a film about an insurance investigator and a woman who team up to kill her husband for his insurance. Both films derive their power, their style, and their "look" from the same source, the film noir style of the 1940s that developed spontaneously in response to the paranoia and uncertainties of World War II. In the 1940s, the style was used primarily for urban crime dramas, and the style is marked by sharp angles in both the setting and the use of the camera, night scenes, darkness, wet city streets, and sudden violence. The plots center on moral dilemmas, a sense of paranoia that often proves to be justified, the woman as lure for the male, and the male as dupe for the woman.
The style is described by one critic in terms of its style rather than its plots:
Film noir was itself a system of visual and thematic conventions which were not associated with any specific genre or story formula, but rather with a distinctive cinematic style and a particular historical period (Schatz 112).
Schatz's insistence on noting the relationship to a historical period is important because it indicates that film noir was a social, psychological, and aesthetic response to a certain sense of societal angst that developed first in the uncertainties of World War II, a period of world tensions manifested in the psychological ambiguities of film noir, and then continued in the new uncertainties of the Cold War period, especially in the years immediately after World War II when American society was straining to recover from the war while also trying to adapt to the new line-up of international friends and enemies. The style is revived or reused by filmmakers seeking to tap into that same sense of uncertainty and tension to this day.
The women in...