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My position is that film noir and the hard-boiled fiction that initially served as its source material represents one distinctive form of American existentialism and that this form was produced independently of European philosophy. What is unique about American noir is its exploration of existential themes of absurdity, contingency, meaninglessness, and despair from the perspective of working-class men. French and American intellectuals agreed that Americans had no sense of despair, but the commercial success of American noir undermines that assessment.
I do not contend that other analyses of hard-boiled fiction and film noir are untenable, but I submit that the dominant themes expressed in these works lend themselves most easily to existentialist interpretation. In this book, my role as philosopher is to make explicit the implicit existential metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, and political meanings conveyed in the narrative forms of fiction and film.
Through my discussion of American noir, I expect to accomplish a couple of objectives beyond establishing American noir as one form of existentialism. I intend to describe and celebrate the production of a kind of existentialism by and for working-class people. As I use novels and films to make my case, I mean to illustrate that philosophical ideas are available from a rich diversity of sources. Furthermore, I submit that philosophers do themselves a disservice when they restrict what is called existentialism, or philosophy, to that which academia traditionally approves. The tendency to limit the range of sanctioned material led the professional community to miss the philosophical importance of the critically acclaimed phenomenon known as film noir. I also mean to show that by restricting the sources of philosophy, we limit the discussion of philosophical matters to elites, ignore those outside the university system, and contribute to the class divisions that required working-class Americans to create their own existential vision.
What is sometimes called American noir begins with hard-boiled crime fiction and the cycle of Hollywood films made from these stories. The case for the existential value of American noir will be made, but it is immediately clear that early examples of hard-boiled crime fiction precede the introduction of French existentialism, since these stories appeared during the 1920s.