It occurs to me that warfare, rather than crime per se, can
provide the disorientingly violent (and possibly
meaningless?) milieu in which noir becomes possible, or
unavoidable. _All Quiet on the Western Front_, for instance,
is pretty thoroughly noir, as is the magnificent Kubrick film
_Paths of Glory_. Heck, World War I even gave us noir poetry
-- "The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells", "Myriads
of broken reeds, all still and stiff", and so on.
And how about espionage fiction? Often noir, and not exactly
about crime. _A Drink to Yesterday_ by Manning Coles might
have been my first real noir experience (at age 14 or so,
which explains a lot); then there's Len Deighton, John le
Carre', James Sallis (_Death Will Have Your Eyes_, a totally
noir title), and many others.
To my mind, the essence of noir isn't in the protagonist's
defeat, but rather in the horrible thought that success or
defeat may be a matter of uncontrollable chance; and behind
that, the even more terrible suspicion that it may not even
matter.
-- Fr. John Woolley
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