And unrelated: I love the Coens… except for Raising Arizona.

You rule. Seriously, it's so overrated.

I love the Coens… except for Raising Arizona.

I recognize all the words, but this sentence makes no sense.

I want to vote for Murder My Sweet, but that's more because it completely remade Dick Powell's image than because it's noir. So I'll vote for the surprisingly un-urban The Postman Always Rings Twice.

It now appears that Adrienne Shelly was murdered. Over a goddamn noise dispute, of all senseless bullshit.

Shit. That's awful. It's so bizarre to read about things like that happening in real life.

Jesus Christ.

That's just horrible.

My favorite noir are the overripe ones like Sunset Boulevard and Touch of Evil. They're a little too baroque and mannered to qualify as a benchmark. My Ur-Noir would come from a pool of Criss Cross (Burt Lancaster and Yvonne Decarlo), The Killing (Sterling Hayden rules!), Nightmare Alley, The Big Heat, Gun Crazy or Detour.

Maybe The Killing. It's got the fatalism, the downer ending, a great femme fatale (Marie Windsor as the ultimate in castrating bitches), a fascinating plot and great, twisted minor characters like Timothy Carey. Also it's been very influential.

It now appears that Adrienne Shelly was murdered.

Fuck. Fucking humans. They never cease to disappoint me.

It now appears that Adrienne Shelly was murdered.

Messed up, yo.

genre describes the product. What happens in the artist's head is irrelevant to that, as far as I'm concerned. [...] Well, sure. All classifications simplify. That is what they're for.

It's like the difference between a priest and a rabbi walking into a community center, and a priest and a rabbi walking into a bar. Different expectations in the audience; different set of references.

You're describing the noir pictures as if they were actors walking together in a power-shot, but they weren't. At the time, they were a varied bunch that all used different methods and spoke to different traditions: crime, thriller, procedural, gangster. After the cycle, people looked at them and said they had a lot in common, but that commonality is more like a family-resemblance theory than a strict set of generic constraints.

Urbanity: The Postman Always Rings Twice takes place entirely in the countryside.
B&W: Vertigo is in gorgeous color.
The femme fatale dies at the end: Gilda runs away home with her husband.
Crazy time structure: lots of them don't have crazy time structures.

Lots of them don't have cops; don't have regretful narrators; don't have downer endings; don't have arty shadows; don't have mirrors and doppelganger imagery; don't have an alienated protagonist; don't have extensive dealings with the criminal underworld. Some films noirs are expressionistic, and some are devoted to neorealism. Some take place mostly in the day, and some entirely at night. The movies we're talking about are wildly diverse, so diverse that it's extremely difficult to say what is and what is not in the category.

To call it a genre is to ascribe to it a fairly standard set of generic constraints. The above list is part of why it's hard to describe generic constraints for a genre called "noir." Whereas, using time-constraints to bound the category at least makes the boundaries clear and obvious (if still somewhat debatable).