NOIR AND THE POSTWAR ERA After World War II, the joy of victory
melted into new fear as the world witnessed the awesome power of
United States' not-so-secret weapon, the atom bomb. That the
human race could wipe itself out entirely was now a real
possibility. World War II had revealed the world as a "cockeyed
place"; the blissful innocence of prewar appeasement-policy had
been exposed as the dangerous naiveté it was. If there had been
any doubt before, the horrors of war, the concentration camps,
the cities in rubble, and the millions dead and displaced made
clear that the human race was capable of great evil. If film is
the subconscious of a society trying to work itself out, then
film noir is nightmare. Shot in stark black and white, with
intricate symbolism and calculated use of light and shadow, many
took place in cityscapes as twisted as the lurking fears in the
American subconscious. This site is not a genre study, but
rather a look at America's postwar paranoia as refracted through
noir's The films cho