Noir and Economic Recession

The bad financial news keeps pouring in. It’s not even noon, and the market today is down by over 200 points on news that Citibank is writing down another $18 billion and laying off employees while selling more of itself to overseas investors.

This blog doesn’t really have anything to do with the economy as such. The financial news is not its subject. But in any work of fiction there has to be a background noise, a sense that the story takes place at a definite point in time.

At the base of noir fiction is a sense of bleakness. And nothing adds to this sense as much as harsh economic realities. I don’t think it’s an accident that the classic noir tradition began in the 1930's during the Great Depression. The sense of doom that hung over pulp characters was reflected in the pervasive hard times and massive unemployment that threatened so many.

While it’s often noted that many Depression-era Hollywood films, especially the musicals, were produced as escapist fare and were totally cut off from the grim realities of the period, it’s equally true that the pulp noir fiction of the period was grounded in the harsh reality of everyday life. People in noir lived in a gritty world where the rent was always past due and jobs were hard to come by and even harder to hold onto.

Noir is about the fear experienced by an ordinary person as he or she is threatened by unseen enemies. The more nebulous the menace is, the greater the fear becomes. Noir is almost always set at night during the hours when nightmares crowd so densely that it’s impossible to distinguish them from waking life. Escape routes are closed off and characters are boxed in by entities too formless to be confronted in daylight. What makes the evil bearing down on the character so sinister is that it is so impersonal. There are no means by which the character can reason with his enemies or placate them. Often, the threatened character seems to have been chosen at random. His ordeal is not brought on by his own actions but by forces over which he has no control. In this sense, a pulp noir story shares common ground with a Kafka novel. There is the chance that an innocent person can be singled out by seemingly omnipotent powers and made to endure a frightening ordeal through no fault of his own. A falling economy sparks this same fear of destruction by overwhelming forces. Economic instability inevitably creates unease and panic.