Copenhagen Noir

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The French word for black is currently an often (mis) used trendy word for irrational and uncontrollable crime, a melodramatic, spectacular, and thrilling intrigue in an entertaining story that begins well but ends badly. The word gained this interpretation in the postwar world of the 1940s, after the launch of a French series of hard-boiled books, “Série Noire,” written by American, English, and French authors, from Dashiell Hammett to Cornell Woolrich and Raymond Chandler, to Georges Simenon and Léo Malet. Black on black, death never gives credit and life is short and dirty, like a kid’s shirt. Yet, what does noir mean nowadays with regards to concept, style, and genre?

Noir is the story of the fateful coincidence, the precarious absurdity and bitter nonchalance of life. It speaks of loss of control and lack of insight, of irrationality’s impact on what seems to make sense-the throw of the dice that didn’t win, to put it simply. The style is minimalistic, open, and terse. It attempts to describe an unpredictable calamity rather than any act of clear rationality. Capturing the murderer is neither what’s necessary nor important. Because noir is seldom interested in illuminating a valid truth or forming clarity, it rarely seeks a transparent understanding that it doesn’t believe in anyway. Noir is the crime genre’s bleak nostalgia and, at the same time, its unsentimental vision of modern times; without degenerating into cheap puritanism or bigoted abstinence, it often includes sexuality, and more in the light of being used destructively than as any romantic idealism. A noir story seldom has a happy ending. When it does happen, such as in Chandler’s Philip Marlowe books, it is with a bittersweet taste of compromise or bargaining.

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