Existentialism, Film Noir, and Hard-Boiled Fiction By Stephen Fa ...

I argue that hard-boiled fiction and film noir represent an American existentialism, but the terms existentialism and film noir have been notoriously difficult to define and the subjects of much disagreement among academics. The debate over meaning has become tiresome, especially as it pertains to film noir, and I do not pretend to offer a perfect solution to this problem, but I am obliged to clarify how I will use the terms in the following chapters, and explain why certain definitions are unsuitable.

Terms of Engagement: Existentialism

Some philosophers and commentators describe existentialism as a shared mood articulated by creative writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, and Franz Kafka. Others insist it is a systematic philosophy best expressed in methodical works such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The systematic works are sometimes described as responses to what John Wild refers to as “The Breakdown of Modern Philosophy” in The Challenge of Existentialism (see ch. 1) During the twentieth century, traces of existentialist thought were retrospectively discovered in the writings of Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, and these figures are often cited as protoexistentialists. In any case, existentialism is presumed to be a European phenomenon defined by its most visible and outspoken representative, Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre offered “existence precedes essence” as a concise definition of what he called existentialism, effectively planting the flag of Europe in the soil of the unnamed and therefore unclaimed frontier (Existentialism 13).

European existentialism, in its familiar French versions, appeared in the aftermath of traumatic national, continental, and world events that challenged the ontological, epistemological, and ethical claims of modern philosophy. In “Situation of the Writer in 1947,” Sartre explains how the atrocities of World War II shook the foundations of prevailing moral assertions: