Paranoia and Entrapment in Film Noir

Classic film noir developed during and after World War II, taking advantage of the post-war ambience of anxiety, pessimism, and suspicion in America. Film noir acted as a "dark mirror" to post-war America and reflected its moral anarchy of the "American dream". It "portrayed a world, all too familiar to the post-war U.S. population, of uncertainty, darkness, and a lack of faith in the systems, like government, religion, and family that were relied on in the past"(Santos, 2014).
             The American Dream is the ideal that every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative. However, noir protagonists realize that equal access to enlightenment is an absurd premise. Film noir, especially during and after the war, "tested the dream of upward mobility and the ideas of individualism, liberty, equality, and free enterprise that accompany it" (Osteen, 2012), and took the position as the dark side of the American dream. Very often, a film noir story was developed around a cynical, hard-hearted, disillusioned male protagonist who encountered a beautiful and seductive, but immoral, femme fatale. She would use sexuality to manipulate him into doing her bidding, be it covering a murder she committed or committing a murder for her. After a betrayal or double-cross, as in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1946), she was frequently destroyed as well, often at the cost of the hero's life. Although the male protagonist knows that falling into the snare of this femme fatale is suspicious and may prove dangerous, he does it anyway, unable to fight off the urge that is too overwhelming to resist. .
             A situation and a character can prove to be overwhelming for another character, usually the main protagonist, causing them to do something they wouldn't normally do. For example, in Detour (1945), the male protagonist Al Roberts who was hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles to be with his woman Sue Harvey, could have easily driven the man he hitchhiked with, Charles Haskell, Jr.