Elements of Film Noir and its Implementation in the Contemporary TV-Series 'True Detective'

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Film Science, grade: 1,7, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Institut für Anglistik), course: Introduction to Crime Fiction, language: English, abstract: When researching for the topic of film noir, it is inevitable to stumble upon keywords like nihilism, femme fatales, post-war American life or the adjectives dark, gloomy and mysterious. But what is film noir? And why does it appear so bleak? In this term paper, film noir as a movie genre in the 1940s will be examined and applied to the contemporary TV-series 'True Detective' (2014). First of all, it is important to provide a theoretical foundation. Therefore, the history of film noir and how it developed will be discussed tersely. Afterwards, the main elements that mark a film noir as film noir will be described. Themes, like nihilism or pessimism are essential parts of film noir, but so is murder and corruption. The characters are also quite dreary, there is a male victim, who gets seduced by a femme fatale and precisely that woman might be involved with the noir psychopath. Hence, themes and characters are part of this term paper. Cinematic features are not to be forgotten: the extensive use of e.g. voice-over and cut-backs is also representative. It will be explained what the features mentioned before are and how they are applied in film noir. After the theoretical foundation is made, the analysis of the HBO TV-series True Detective takes place. The choice has been made because many newspapers and articles considered True Detective as film noir and it was sapid to investigate whether this can be proven on facts or whether it is simply an assumption. After a short summary of the series, the items themes, characters and narrative strategies will be explored and applied to the film noir schema. Concluding, the aspect of neo-noir will be taken into account and the decision will be made whether True Detective can be seen as a product of film noir.