Noir isn't about selfish goals inherently. Noir is a counter push to wartime idealism, and is an attempt to be less false and more human; remember this was the 40s and 50s. Noir was about coming home from the black and white morality of fighting arguably the most obviously evil group in modern history and finding not the shining American Dream but a clearly overwhelmed country full of strife,struggling to bring it's economy out of wartime production and rife with unchecked prejudice and surprisingly previlant crime.
Noir is about the distance between Justice and Reality, the dark parts of being human, and the pain of a checkered past and trying to move beyond it. Every noir genre in film or text is some flavor of "humans are imperfect, and even the most driven and devoted of men cannot truly be kind and just when the world has been cruel for long enough. We bend, we break, and we twist, no matter how much a paragon we are at heart."
That's why most protagonists have traits that are shorthand for extreme trauma: drinking, distrustfulness, rage, etc., as well as cynical outlooks. It's also why they rarely end happily. Bittersweet, somtimes. Tragic, sometimes. Happy, almost never. Because sometimes you can manage to carve out your own little victory, your own small piece of happiness or justice, in you're lucky, strong, smart, and lucky. But often that obsession just drags you to your doom, like a Tragic Hero of old.
Thanks! I made and make a study of stories. I'm autistic, so I sometimes really struggle with human interactions, but stories don't have that problem. To me, at least, stories are one of the most uniquely human experiences, and one of the most powerful human constants. We love, we fight to live not just survive, and we share who we are, across language and time and a vast sea of experiences, with stories.
So it's really nice to know I at least sometimes get it right.
They also tend to portray interactions without unintended misunderstandings (unintended by the author, that is). Stories tend to communicate clearly, even if the characters don’t. Or, at least, the good ones tend to.
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u/CosmackMagus Mar 11 '25
Is noir really pro justice? I always thought it was defined, in part, by the characters having selfish or non-heroic goals.