Noir Films, Dark Charisma and the Death of the Ideal Self draws on sociocultural theory to illuminate the development and content of classic noir and neo-noir films, their audience reception and their continuing attraction by linking the origins of film noir to the extended moral crisis of the “noir generation” in America and Europe. It demonstrates that noir films and the neo-noir films that followed are inseparable from the continuing cultural revolution of late modernity.

This revolution began with the breakdown of liberal-Christian ideals and the rise of a new model of human nature during the first half of the twentieth century that leveled traditional hierarchical understandings of the self as divided into “higher” and “lower” motives.

Film noir is significant because it developed as a form of psychological melodrama in the mid-twentieth century that gave a powerful new cinematic vision and voice to fantasies and impulses, many of them previously defined as pathological, that had been condemned, repressed and denied by the dominant culture.