The Divided Self and the Dark City: Film Noir and Liminality

Abstract

The American film noir is a cinematic tradition whose representations are thoroughly liminal. What I mean is that the protagonists of these films characteristically find themselves straddling the border between competing forms of identity, as they often enter into perilous rites de passage through a nightmarish version of contemporary urban reality. Only seldom do these borderers emerge from that dark city (which is sometimes just a moral or psychological condition) to enjoy the transfiguration and triumph of a conventional happy ending. By way of illustration, let me begin by rehearsing some familiar details from what is arguably the best-known and most influential American film noir. In Billy Wilder' s Double Indemnity (1944), an adulterous couple plot and then carry out a crime that is meant to be understood as an accident. That crime will pay by releasing insurance benefits to one of the perpetrators, and at a bonus double rate, but only if the coroner rules that the death in question is no murder, rather the result of an unfortunate and accidental tumble from the back of a train.