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Trapped in the 20th Century
Christopher’s analysis of noir also lays bare the effect that other technologies have on character’s lives. Telephones, radio, television, electronic listening/recording devices are all potentially alienating devices, employed to heighten our sense of isolation from one another. Units of transportation, whether cars ("the automobile's interior can carry the same charged or claustrophobic atmosphere as the noir city itself," says Christopher) trains, buses, subways or planes, are constantly used to separate people instead of bring them together. Technological progress consistently creates personal angst; machines fragment us. In fact, Christopher produces dozens of noir examples of how the city is a machine that creates wealth at the expense of the individual, who is a cog in this machine. The city chews him up in its gears, spitting out the individuals, while only those who conform and subsume themselves to the urban machine survive. go back ... or continue to the next page: Film Noir and Misogyny
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The skyscraper
gives people a god-like perspective--people are ants (remember the classic
Harry Lime speech in The Third Man?), and enhances anti-social attitudes (people
not so special or interesting), which isolate us from other people. Christopher
cites an array of noir films that depict workers in noir films feel trapped in
the skyscraper -- it is their prison. They must breathe stale air while battling
feelings of confinement, claustrophobia and depersonalization (in many ways,
noir films are philosophical companions to existentialism, which had emerged in
the late 19th century, but only found its feet in the first half of
the 20th century, just as noir was emerging out of the nuclear
shadows).
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