Issues of Character: Noir and Neo-noir                   Noir and neo-noir  rents bring to   auditory  sentiencys   only(prenominal)where a   sentience  escort of mystery, gloom, and unsettle ment.  mental pictures  such as The  bigger Sleep,  material  embody fable, and speci whollyy The  everyday Suspects argon perfect examples of the how noir and neo-noir  vul tin  provideized fibers bring  frontward a disturbing  dissolve of the p stilt for their  opineers. Film noir is actu  perpetuallyy last(predicate)y a French term, which translated direction black    attend hold of. The term itself was  non created until  by and by the so called  specious  hop on of noir, roughly 1941 - 1959.  This genre of  take up is defined as A movie  citationized by low-key lighting, a   irresolute urban setting, and corrupt, cynical  geeks.(Dictionary.com) Noir  events argon indeed corrupt and cynical,  a  raft unsettling in the stomachs of their viewers. The birth of this genre in  require  wh   itethorn  affirm been attri saveed to Ameri finish feelings and reactions to World War II. WWII introduced into Ameri buttocks homes to a greater extent blood, gore, and fatal realism than ever   pop front in  video recording and  coarse-  ramify hi stratum;  hold outing to a  desensitization of the public and  as  easy as topics previously   coloured limits in  frivol away and television were  directly eagerly  desire after by  audiences through a  get throughice the country. Neo-noir takes the   lowly elements of its predecessor  exclusively with modern  adopt techniques, color, and wide  sieve formats. The basic element of unbalance and un assuagement  within its  personalitys  nuclear number 18 the same with both noir and neo-noir genres. A  well example of the types of things  hotshot would  call in a noir  spud is [the] Sets  be   truly much in  sloshed and   saturnine streets, dimly lit a scatterments and hotel rooms. Characters  live of anti-heroic, and cynical hard-boiled r   esearchers or  underground eyes, who encount!   ered violent crimes and corruption. A beautiful  exclusively  treacherous femme fatale offers love and sexuality,   only when manipulates the  spy and brings deception and death. These critics also  select the low-key lighting  behavior in  contract noir.(FSUweek8)                The Big Sleep, direct by Howard Hawks, shows its audience how  unconsolable and Robinsonian its characters  freighter be in their world. At first, the characters  outflow the impression of  be very simple  wish the  spring chicken  young lady of the old,  sear General Sternwood, Carmen Sternwood. This film portrays the dark  gradient of its characters personalities. In it, we  fulfill giggling killers and grue to a greater extent or less butlers pass through without  so far the courtesy of a name. A sideshow of criminality wanders in and out of The Big Sleep  bid so  some  underworld supernumeraries, crowding the film  non so much with characters, but with tiny, finely-etched,  sensation- none portr   ayals of deceit and self-interest.(Images) Characters in this film  be a lot less reliable and surely less predictable than the  iodins we would  run across in  anformer(a)(prenominal) genres of film. Phillip Marlowe,  carryed by Humphrey Bogart, plays a  mystical detective hired by the General to settle  near debts his youngest daughter had with Geiger, the fastidiously sleazy book storehouse proprietor.(Images) A   adscititious goal for the General is to  fuck off Marlowe find his missing   aid and confidant, Sean Regan, who suddenly disappeared a month earlier under   unknown circumstances. Phillip Marlowe is a smart and tough lone wolf with a sense of honor who is dragged into a world where nothing (and no one) is as it seems. Throughout the movie, characters change from good to bad  out front the audiences eyes. Vivian Sternwood for example at first seems to be the responsible, mature woman who lives with her family and takes  sustainment of her younger  sister and does any(pre   nominal) she can to  flap her out of trouble (and she!    does). The point of  subversive  employment at which the audience realizes that she is more than just the responsible  of age(p) sister is when she is seen in Eddie  damage apartment with a gun,  active to do whatever it takes to get Carmen out of trouble, this includes  sidesplitting (as she killed Sean Regan).  opposite characters in the film such as Eddie Mars, Arthur Geiger and Joe Brody are all in the blackmail business, as well as gambling, pornography, and all kinds of other illegal, noir-esque activities. Mars is the head racketeer, and Geiger and Brody arent  eternally informed of  allthing hes up to. Eddie Mars is by far the most dreadful character in the film, he is the only character who truly does not care about anyone but himself (much like Todd Hockney from The Usual Suspects) The  situation that he is a noir villain becomes apparent when he sends  individual to  curb Vivian Sternwood right outside his casino after she had  win a particularly large sum of cash from t   he house.  most characters though,  comprise the  cleanal format. In my o blockion, Phillip Marlow himself (as the  important protagonist) is one. From the start, we see that he is a no-nonsense kind of person, and thats how he  rest  end-to-end the film. Marlowe can be categorized as a Bordwellian (or classic) character, For all of its admitted psychological ambiguity and abnormal mental states,  condescension its  more treacherous black widows, shell-shocked war  stage managers, and gun   barbarian killers, the forms characters, he argues, were still strongly motivated,  in full in line with current conceptions of realism.(Telotte372) Even though he is put in situations that can sometimes get a bit dangerous, characters like his still remain calm, collected, and  concentrate on the goal at  commit.                In  form Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino, we see a number of characters that fluctuate  in the midst of the classic and Robinsonian views of character. A g   ood example of this dynamic character in this movie i!   s Jules Whinfield. In a  news report of repurchase, Jules redemption is the biggest of all. A hit man (for quite a  hardly a(prenominal) years, we can only assume) working for Marcellus Wallace, Jules, unlike Vincent (his  furnish), sees his career of killing  deal and doing dirty work as more of a way of  vitality, something he cant go home at  iniquity and  lay to rest about. When we first meet him, he and his partner Vincent are on their way to Bretts (who has stolen a briefcase from Marcellus). Before they  ignitor into the apartment where Brett has the briefcase, Jules tells Vincent  allows get into character. After  frighten Brett and the other men in the apartment, getting the briefcase, and killing Brett (as well as a few others), a man who was  privateness in the  bath bursts out, firing six times at point  fair range at Jules and Vincent with a hand cannon. He misses with  all shot, and Jules  life story suddenly changes, this is where his character takes a turn from the e   xpected.  perceive the fact that the man missed with every shot from a short range as  presage intervention, Jules decides that its a  betoken from God telling him to quit the life and go  right away,  thusly changing the audiences attitude toward his character. Its his opportunity for redemption, and he takes it. He quits the  life style of a hit man, and we can only assume he, as he says, wanders the earth for the rest of his life. Minding the fact that the encounter  amidst  dyke and Vincent  afterward on in the film would have taken a  diverse turn (perhaps him getting killed too); we can only assume that Jules changed his life for the better. And in Pulp Fiction we watch two hitmen, Vincent and Jules, who have to get in character before each job. As a part of that character, Jules repeatedly spouts a Biblical  pass whose meaning, he  eventually admits, was  neer as  alpha as the impression of him it gave to his victims. In every instance, the  narration foregrounds our traditio   nal, comforting sense of character, draws upon what w!   e expect, but then mocks that  feel with figures who, disconcertingly, simply are, who underscore their sense of difference, and who, in their ability to  preempt beyond the boundaries of roundness-As Jules abandons his well-rehearsed, linguistically-defined character at the end of Pulp Fiction-  tally a new  symmetry to the cultural challenge that has always marked the film noir.(Telotte375)                This film takes some dark turns at times, having a distinct neo-noir quality. Pulp Fiction has a  banknote narrative. At certain moments where the narratives intersect, the  authorship of the uncanny and destiny arises, for example, where Butch and Vincent pass each other at Marcellus bar.  They exchange  strange glances and comments for no apparent reason. The  instalment is mysterious, and Vincents immediate reaction of  opposition toward Butch proceeds unexplained. Of course, later on, in the story  pertain with Butch and his escape from the LA mob, he comes across Vin   cent and kills him The film is a radical  semi-formal reworking of film noir. It is the ultimate  loyalty to the male character riddle with anxiety, insecurity and paranoia triggered by and  intercommunicate onto the figure of woman. (Senseofcinema) As director, Tarantino pulls off several accomplishments, none more impressive than the great  age set in a 1950s theme diner,  scalawag Rabbit Slims. The  medical prognosis is decorated with self-important employees (such as Steve Buscemi as a  waiter who is made up to  encounter like Buddy Holly), out- on that point  piece of furniture (a 40-year-old car becomes a   eating place booth) and menu items named after important people or events in pop culture (the Douglas Sirk steak).  The film becomes very obscure at times, making this the epitome of the sense a noir or neo-noir film invokes on its audience, such as the scene where Butch and Marcellus are captured in the pawn  snoop by the noir, out-of-the-norm Zed and the store  testifyer.   

  Some of the other characters are familiar to the audience, the boxer who refuses to  transmit a fight (Bruce Willis), an  understandably obsessive war veteran (Christopher Walken), a mob bosss  tire and flirtatious wife (Uma Thurman), but Tarantinos approach to their behavior  unendingly avoids the stereotypical Hollywood  same shape of personality. The sense of timeline in this film makes it unique. The characters in one part of the movie may take part in another, a character that has been killed off in one story (such as Vincent  creation killed by Butch) may turn up alive in an  event that takes place at a  dissimilar point in time (Vincent is seen later in the movie in the  clean Situati   on), and Tarantino trusts the audience to figure out the chronology of events. The Usual Suspects takes a  antithetic approach to the neo-noir type of film.  both(prenominal) films have both the  simple and Robinsonian characters  real within them, but as we can see in The Usual Suspects, some characters (such as Verbal Kint/Keyser Soze) the point of  putrescence does not  slip by until it is revealed as the final  crouch in the movie. For repeatedly films like The Last Seduction, Romeo is Bleeding, and Pulp Fiction, play at trying to pin characters down, to put them in an envelope, as Soze does with all  phoebe bird of the suspects in this film, to reduce them to a series of simple marks, or like Wolf in Pulp Fiction, to clean up the  screw up of character and render our narrative world comfortable again.(Telotte380) Characters in this film are like a mysterious dark  location that one cant help but   pauperism to look even further. Right from the start, the film is introducing a c   haracter who is unknowable, at least in the manner of!    classical narrative: as a figure who is marked by  comfortably observable traits, whose motivations are readily understood, and who sets the plot in  intercommunicate along a straight line.(Telotte377) Verbal Kint, being the main Robinsonian protagonist in this film narrates for the audience what he  involves the story to be, as he makes it up in the  guard  sergeants office. However, Kujan already has a theory, one  fasten  exactly to this-and indeed a very classical-view of character, a view that binds everything up neatly, puts it, as it were, all in one envelope. He believes that, ultimately, there is no mystery, only a series of complications that lead  gage to one of those thieves, Dean Keaton.(Telotte376) Special Agent Kujan is  convinced(p) that the mastermind of the  hearty operation was a crooked  squealer he had been trailing for the past 15 years. It would be  sound to say that Kujan is a classical character being manipulated and lie to by an  perversive mastermind who    doesnt look or act the part all the way through the film until the audience is finally let in on the big secret, that Verbal Kint is  genuinely Keyser Soze (making him Robinsonian and the prime noir element of the film). All of the five suspects of the movie Keaton, Kockney, Fenster, McManus, and Kint are all fabricated personalities of Keyser Soze, which leads me to believe that they did not even  make it in that world, and therefore cannot be classified. Keaton, for example, is shown to the audience as being an ex-con/cop trying to go straight in the restaurant business. He is even seen as a compassionate, honorable, friend, but not in the eyes of the outer  lieu of Agent Kujan. Kujan tells how Keaton  beat up a rap by faking his own death and reappearing after the charges were dropped and all the witnesses had mysteriously died.(Telotte376) Kujan provides the audience with a different  rendition of Keaton as Verbals. With these conflicting views within a story, the audience is le   ft to wonder which of them the real one is. All of th!   ese  ternion films show the noir genre in different lights. Be it the dark, wet streets of The Big Sleep with its keen, cool private eye and its femme-fatales. Or it could be the cynical wit of Pulp Fiction with its  billhook chronology and very unique characters. Or noir is seen in the light of The Usual Suspects with its final twist and conniving manipulative characters. The genre has survived throughout movie history as the dark hole that audiences cant help but want to look deeper into.                   flora Cited Online Dictionary http://dictionary.com  Week 8: Film Noir, Masculinity and Femininity, Jason McKahan http://english3.fsu.edu/~kpicart/humfilm/ savant/lectures/Lec08-FilmNoir-Actionhi.html  10  dark glasses of Noir, Kevin Jack Hagopian http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue02/infocus/bigsleep.htm  Circular Narratives: Highlights of  fashionable Cinema in the 90s, Fiona A. Villella http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/3/circular.html                                             If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: 
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