Down These Mean Streets: Men, Women, and Film Noir

Catalog description

This course examines the group of films that have come to be called "film noir," the dark cinema chronicling postwar American anxieties concerning place, politics, and gender that emerged most prominently in the 1940s and 50s. In these films, the "mean streets" of the city are an extension of the distressed men and women who inhabit them. The women of film noir struggle with shifting gender expectations, and the men returning from the war confront overpopulated urban areas (e.g. The Blue Dahlia, 1946). The city and noir's characters morph through the decades, but men and women continue to be traumatized by changing social roles and political challenges (e.g., the "red scare" [the threat of Communism in the 1950s]; the rise of modern capitalism; and, later, the Civil Rights movement, feminisms, and the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s (Cape Fear, Chinatown, Taxi Driver). Prerequisite(s): WRT 101 .