Introduction Of The Film Noir Scale

When I, or likely most people, think of film noir, there’s no real tangibility to what is visualised. With westerns, it’s pretty easy to rattle off cowboys-n’-indians, cacti, deserts, horseback riding and gunslinging, and so as a genre it’s rather concrete. Same with period dramas; elaborate costumes, archaic language, sweeping soundtracks, constant subtextual comparisons with the modern day. Action or adventure movies don’t have as much of an absolute visual or thematic code, but there are still some fairly reliable constants, mostly involving explosions, macho-yet-flawed male protagonists (or, in clearly lampshaded subversions, sexy-yet-deadly female leads), a sense of the underdog going up against the big-bad, and any number of set-piece conflicts.
Science fiction is even harder to pin down, to the point where almost any piece of weird fiction that doesn’t readily subscribe to magic (or, in other words, pretends that its events exist in some kind of scientifically sound universe) can be placed within the genre. Finding similarities between Star Wars and Children of Men is a tricky matter, yet both are arguably science fiction; on the contrary, classifying No Country For Old Men as a revisionist western is possible not because the film strays from traditional western codes, but because it subscribes to enough of them to differentiate it from typical thrillers, etc. Westerns are obvious because their signifiers are so absolute; science fiction films are identified as such merely because they appear to be self-evidently science fiction films.
So we come to film noir, which is even harder to really pin down as a genre. Its storylines vary wildly, and usually function merely as mysteries or thrillers without the trappings that classic film noir (by classic film noir, I am generally talking about the good old black-and-whites from the forties and fifties) dresses itself within. It is these trappings, however, that make up my scale. Some of them are pretty well-defined, the most iconic of which is the femme fatale. This female character is a beautiful, promiscuous woman who seeks personal gain or advantage through the seduction and manipulation of men; the other variation on the femme fatale theme is she who the male protagonist can’t resist, yet who ultimately leads him to encounter great danger, often life-threatening. She often dies at the end, or at least suffers great physical or emotional damage as the film rolls on; within the text of the movie she gets repeatedly ‘punished’ for her transgressive behaviour. After the male lead, she is the main character, and storylines frequently revolve almost entirely around her. Think Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity for an archetypal fatale; then bounce off to Vera (Ann Savage) in Detour, Vivian Rutledge (Lauren Bacall) in The Big Sleep or, for an interesting play on the manners of seduction, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard.