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

If Schrader is correct, general audiences were prepared by the war for the dose of realism offered by film noir, but since its initial source material, in the form of hard-boiled fiction, was popular before the war and the Great Depression, evidently some American audiences were already prepared in the 1920s for this realism.

The 1920s are notable for the Lost Generation authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. George Cotkin in his Existential America contends that the Lost Generation writers “enunciated a metaphysical condition of despair and alienation,” which “embraced an essentially existential perspective” (24). These authors expressed the disillusionment felt by a generation who, Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise, had “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (282). Lynn Dumenil’s examination of Fitzgerald’s work in The Modern Temper reveals that “beneath the glamour of his flappers and jazzhounds lay a fragility rooted in their failure to find meaning or purpose amid the uncertainty of modern life” (150). Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), features a lost cast drifting aimlessly, their instability symbolic of their homelessness and inability to find substance in the modern world.

Hemingway is appreciated by some to be the father of the hard-boiled tradition, and it can be argued that writers like Hammett and Chandler were taken more seriously because their styles were considered similar to his. Hemingway was recognized as a literary artist, a title only recently accorded to Hammett and Chandler.⁶ Hemingway’s link to the hard-boiled tradition is mostly due to his tough prose and the tough characters depicted in his writing, but Hemingway did not write crime stories. To Have and Have Not (1937) is the novel most related to hard-boiled fiction, and the only one that actually contains criminals. Two of his short stories, “The Killers” and “Fifty Grand,” feature hoodlums, though only briefly in the latter tale.

The Lost Generation writers offer an existential perspective that begins during the 1920s, and might be called a rich man’s existentialism. Their characters are mostly members of the leisure class, who live in a decadent world of vanishing illusions. But another brand of existentialism was brewing during this decade, and its characters do not suffer from disillusionment because they harbored no illusions.