The Divided Self and the Dark City: Film Noir and Liminality

Palmer talks about noir film that focuses on ultimately moral protagonists who discover that they can transcend the past, achieving something like a wholeness of self if only in a death that somehow makes amends for their transgressions. He also suggests that a key feature of the film noir is through their dramatizations of liminal, wherein these texts become intriguingly metafictional. Moreover, he examines the groundbreaking study of Vivian Sobchack who argues that the film noir is the most deeply marked by its unique representational response to a culture in transition between the collective, public experience of a world war which requires the wildest marshalling of all nations's resources and the desired, collective return to the family unit and the suburban home as the domestic matrix of democracy.