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).

You rule. Seriously, it's so overrated.

Yay! We will sit in our corner of rightness and be right.

You're describing the noir pictures as if they were actors walking together in a power-shot, but they weren't.

...What? Where did I describe noir at all?

It now appears that Adrienne Shelly was murdered.

Oh for fuck's sake. Hec's right - fucking humans suck.

standard set of generic constraints

I'd still argue that by these standards, genre is pretty much a null term. You can make a list of the things any genre is supposed to have, and then pull out half a dozen films which clearly count as Genre X but don't have them. Once you get beyond "cop movie = is about cops," (which isn't a very useful definition for crit purposes) you're not going to be able to construct an airtight classification system.

Fucking humans. They never cease to disappoint me.

I've been feeling that way a lot lately.

Where did I describe noir at all?

Well, by saying it was a genre rather than a cycle. (Other people were putting up specific criteria that described what they thought defined the boundaries of the genre.)

You can make a list of the things any genre is supposed to have, and then pull out half a dozen films which clearly count as Genre X but don't have them.

But noir is kind of an extreme example, don't you think? They're a lot more diverse than, say, westerns or disaster movies or war movies.

(It's the same kind of problem that science fiction novels have: mystery and romance and most of the rest of the genres are very strongly defined; but SF is so big and diverse, and it's so hard to define its core components, that many people prefer not to call it a genre at all.)

They're a lot more diverse than, say, westerns or disaster movies or war movies.

I'm not so sure that's true. At the very least, the conventions seem to change to reflect the current mood. Looking at Westerns, Silverado, say, looks at themes that would never have come up in the days of Roy Rogers.

Silverado, say, looks at themes that would never have come up in the days of Roy Rogers.

Themes, yeah -- those change over time plenty. But it takes place in the 19th C. west, right? Sere, wide landscape; clapboard houses in a "town" springing up in the middle of nowhere; men on horses with six-guns who whistle to signal their appreciation; lassoes; lone, taciturn heroes who posse up only reluctantly; stand-up show-downs; black-hattery.

(N.b. I haven't seen a Roy Rogers movie in a dog's age, so I'm extrapolating mostly from other 1950s-era westerns.)

Every genre has got its variations, reinventions, taking the body of an Impala and putting a Honda engine in it, etc. But even reinventions have awareness of and reaction to the traditional constraints that have come before. If you set a western in space, you're still nodding to the established history of westerns. If you set a western in a drawing room, and strip it of the formal elements that traditionally define westerns, most people would say that it's no longer a western.

With noir, you'd get a spirited debate.

Well, by saying it was a genre rather than a cycle.

I didn't say that. I think maybe you're attributing someone else's posts to me. Or I'm having another schizoid moment.