Noir springs from a fundamental conflict between the values of individual freedom and communal safety: a fundamental doubt that the two can coexist.”

“Noir stories are powered by the need to escape, but they are structured around the impossibility of escape: their fierce, thwarted energy turns inward. The ultimate noir landscape, immeasurable as the ocean and confining as a jail cell, is the mind—the darkest city of all.”

Since noir is too diverse to be classified as a genre (it’s more a “mood, a stance, an attitude”), suggests rating movies by noir content (like alcohol is by proof) based on degree of characteristics: crime and deadly sins, convoluted narrative, expressionist style, pessimism

Noir was born from mating American pulp fiction with Weimar-era German expressionism 

“Film noir offered something more, a vision of the world in which crime is not an aberration or a marginal profession, but a temptation lurking in every heart.”

“It was not just the Production Code that noir flouted, but the national character—resilient, optimistic, self-reliant—that American art and literature has traditionally celebrated.”

“Noir flourishes in marginal places and what Marc Augé calls “non-places”: the outskirts of cities, industrial wastelands, airports and bus stations, motels, trains, and borderlands where identities and loyalties shift like sands.”