Film noir, image, and argument: the creation of film noir style through the visual image and its persuasive discourse

Abstract

This dissertation hypothesizes that film is a linguistic phenomenon, constructing arguments for the reality it represents through a linguistic process that is figurative. By making a rhetorical analysis of the figures used in films and the way they are formed with visual images, that linguistic process can be discovered. In this regard, the Introduction develops the idea of figuration as a pre-text to understanding film using film noir and its representation of disorder as its subject. Chapter Two examines the stylistic discontinuities of conceptual metaphors in The Maltese Falcon, disruptions which signal a change from the classic Hollywood film style and a move toward film noir. Chapter Three uses The Third Man as a case study of film noir's reinvention of the hero, a less assured and self-assured hero than genres such as the western and the gangster films had previously portrayed prior to World War II through the use of repetition and pun. Film noir designates women as a primary cause of disorder and, thus, the cause of the hero's decline to anti-hero. Chapter Four employs Fatal Attraction as an illustration of film noir's treatment of women and how Fatal Attraction produces an image of the seductive and dangerous female who creates chaos for the hero through personification. Chapter Five analyzes The Killing as a model for a disordered world, indicating through its narrative structure the metaphor that life is a gamble, implying that chance and not rational order governs the world. Looking at the flashback in several noir films, Chapter Six postulates that for the hero the origins of disorder and conflict exist in the past, a past he perceives as fated and unchangeable. The final chapter hypothesizes the joke as the metadiscourse for film noir.