Percolating Paranoia
Percolating Paranoia
Fritz Lang's The Big Heat
Fritz Lang brings the terrors of noir
into the bright kitchens of America.
Watch that coffee pot!
BY H
In Bright Lights 12 devoted to film noir, Gary Morris locates the malaise giving rise to the noir sensibility in the "mechanized, immoral, soul-destroying city."1 He defines the urban noir setting as attacking its characters' chances for "hope, happiness, peace, complacency, and romance" (Morris 16). Although the attack may be related to the loss of a pastoral setting as Morris suggests, many film noir narratives locate those happy possibilities in the seemingly stable institution of the family, and can be read as ironic, hopeless searches for a humanized, moral, soul-restoring home. According to Sylvia Harvey, "the loss of those satisfactions normally obtained through the possession of a wife and the presence of a family" is one of the recurrent themes of film noir.2 Of course, the archetypal array of characters in film noir are......
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Approximate Word Count: 2123
Approximate Pages: 9 (250 words per double-spaced page)
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