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My discussion of the existential metaphysics of noir does not offer a theoretical inquiry into the nature of reality but expresses the often harrowing experiences of the randomness of existence, the accidental and coincidental, the existential expansion and contraction of time and space, and the presence of “fate or some mysterious force” (Al Roberts in Detour). The existential epistemology of noir does not present an abstract analysis of the problem of knowledge but pertains to insurmountable barriers encountered by desperate seekers of concrete information. These obstacles are especially common to the private detective’s search to find out whodunit, whodunwhat and how and why they dun it. The epistemological question is not how is knowledge possible? The protagonist asks, “How can I find out what I need to find out?” given numerous concrete barriers. The existential ethics of noir do not compare theories of moral values or search for the supreme principle of morality, but examine noir’s irredeemably corrupt world in which conventional standards of morality are obsolete and irrelevant. In the realm of noir, only a saint or fool is ethical in such a wicked world; nevertheless, protagonists are reluctant to conclude that all is permitted. The existential politics of noir do not engage political theories but trace film noir’s critique of the cleavage between the nation’s expressed values and its actual practices. In hard-boiled fiction and film noir, the encounter with nothingness does not have cosmic origins, nor does it pertain to the breakdown of modern philosophy, but it emerges out of the emptiness of a corrupt society.
In summary, this book is not the basis for an abstract inquiry into the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, and values. American noir, in the form of fiction and film, does not attempt to prove the truth of propositions pertaining to the isolation of the individual in a meaningless world or the unexplainable nature of human existence, but it offers a compelling vision of the world in which these conditions are experienced by human characters in concrete situations. The world is revealed as meaningless, not in some abstract sense that the universe cannot provide meaning, but in the sense that the metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and political limitations of the noir world crush the goals, objectives, and actions of protagonists, leaving them to realize the futility of their endeavors.