The crime melodramas of the 1940s known now as film noir shared many formal
and thematic elements, from unusual camera angles and lighting to moral ambiguity and femmes
fatales. In this book Robert Pippin argues that many of these films also raise distinctly
philosophical questions. Where most Hollywood films of that era featured reflective individuals
living with purpose, taking action and effecting desired consequences, the typical noir protagonist
deliberates and plans, only to be confronted by the irrelevance of such deliberation and by results
that contrast sharply, often tragically, with his or her intentions or true commitments. Pippin
shows how this terrible disconnect sheds light on one of the central issues in modern
philosophy--the nature of human agency. How do we distinguish what people do from what
merely happens to them? Looking at several film noirs--including close readings of three
classics of the genre, Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Orson Welles's
The Lady from Shanghai, and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the
Past--Pippin reveals the ways in which these works explore the declining credibility of
individuals as causal centers of agency, and how we live with the acknowledgment of such
limitations.
