Film Noir Analysis

Film Noir is most often seen as a man’s world- the hard boiled detective is the ultimate masculine hero, and the he fits right into the dirty world around him. However, with a shift in perspective, we see that just maybe the opposite gender are the ones who are the heroes of the genre. The women are certainly memorable. Through analyzation of the typical hero’s journey and comparison to the stories of the women in film noir, we see that they are the true heroes of the genre. This again begs the question of why it is so often that men rule the grimy world of the film detective. Why are these women demonized in their own narratives, punished for their raw sexuality and delegated to the static sidekicks or to the simple villain role? We can
In Chinatown, she is the widow of a murdered city official with a secret she is keeping from the rest of the word. In The Maltese Falcon, perhaps the most widely known detective film noir, she is the woman at the heart of a missing person’s case that keeps the audience guessing through the entire running time. As defined by the website Film Noir Studies, “she refuses to play the role of devoted wife and loving mother that mainstream society prescribes for women. She finds marriage to be confining, loveless, sexless, and dull, and she uses all of her cunning and sexual attractiveness to gain her independence” (Bayer.) This in itself may be part of the reason why we don’t see her as the hero of film noir. She is a character that contains traits that are traditionally rejected in women. Even with her all-around dynamism, she is often seen just as the sidekick to the detective or his one-dimensional
The most widely-used and accredited outline of the hero’s journey was created by Joseph Campbell in his The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Campbell, a seminal figure in the world of mythology, plots out the points through which every heroic character of literature has trodden. The women of film noir can be found to place their feet in these holes. Taking one for example- the quintessential femme fatale of Double Indemnity, Phyllis Dietrichson. According to Campbell, the hero begins in the ordinary world, then has a call to adventure that brings him to the extraordinary world- he may rejects the call and has to ask a mentor for assistance. After this optional meeting, the hero crosses to the threshold of the extraordinary world, then descends into it where he finds tests, allies, and enemies. After this, he approaches the innermost test, after that is the ultimate boon- when he has succeeded. After this, any of a few stages may happen, but the hero sometimes comes to an untimely death after they return to their home, or otherwise comes to a feeling of failure (Campbell.) Phyllis starts out as a typical married woman, and the call of money brings her to the realization that it will be necessary for her to kill her husband in order to collect his life insurance money. She finds an ally in Neff, an insurance adjuster who agrees to help her kill her husband and scheme the system in order