Beginner's Guide to Film Noir

L.A. Noire is a strange title for a game (and we're not talking about that seemingly unnecessary 'e'). It could even be read as an anxious title, one that is all too aware that noir, despite the odd foray, is relatively unfamiliar territory for video games.

There was no need for us to cautiously guide Isaac Clarke down blood-daubed corridors in Space Horror. Nor did we forge a team capable of taking down the Reapers in Science Fiction: Space Opera 2. Rightly or wrongly, the average player is assumed to have above-average genre competence when it comes to horror, SF, and fantasy. But even Rockstar, despite Westerns enjoying relatively little mainstream appeal since the '50s, didn't resort to this kind of emphatic billboarding with Red Dead: Redemption. So why do it for L.A. Noire?

Maybe it's because noir is a notoriously slippery genre. So if your noir knowledge is in need of topping up, below are five recurrent, though in no way indispensable, noir conventions to orientate yourself amidst the smoke, rain and shadows of Rockstar's latest.

(All quotes are by the inimitable Raymond Chandler, of course.)

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1. The Detective
"He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake."

From Spade to Shelby, Marlowe to Deckard, the detective – a man in search of answers – is the quintessential noir protagonist.

He is a particular type of investigator. The first wave of noir features directly adapted or freely drew inspiration from the hardboiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, which relocated the detective from the drawing rooms of Europe to the scum-saturated streets of L.A.

But the change was more significant than simply swapping a deerstalker for a fedora. Unlike their sleuthing ancestors, this new breed of detective – hard-drinking, cocksure, uncompromising – operated in a world of muddied morality, and was more than ready to bruise his knuckles to solve a case. There are no black-and-white judgement calls, no mustachioed villains cackling; the noir detective, instead, is faced by a spectrum of ambiguous grey and a cast of psychologically opaque supporting characters.


The classic example is Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, in which Sam Spade – the cookie-cutter for future noir detectives – cynically observes that "Everyone has something to conceal." And it is, of course, the detective's job to sift through the tangle of lies.

At times, film noir focuses on faces, mannerisms, and words more than it does on action or plot. Knowing their noir, Team Bondi perfected a technology that would allow them to accurately record the physiology of lying: the blush, the errant glance, the telltale twitch, creating a game that rewards emotional acuity, rather than preternatural thumb dexterity.

2. The Femme Fatale
"It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in stained-glass window."

Men often feel threatened by successful women, and to deal with that anxiety, to contain it, books and films have repeatedly warped it into a kind of sexual fantasy – the deadly woman. As a convention, it isn't exclusive to noir. Bram Stoker used lustful female vampires to quarantine the anxiety that the rise of women's rights provoked in crusty Victorian gents. But it's much older than that. From nymphs to naiads to sirens, women have often been portrayed as dangerous distractions.

The rise of the femme fatale in film noir – or so the theory goes – was prompted by social changes that occurred in the U.S. post-WW2, as women began to enter the workforce en masse. Unsurprisingly, they were seen as using their sexual allure to manipulate their male co-workers, to get ahead, to win a promotion.


In film noir, the femme fatale is depicted as a mysterious and seductive presence, who threatens to sidetrack the protagonist, derailing his investigation or mission.

James M. Cain's novels specialised in deadly dames, and classic exammples can be seen in adaptations of Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). But in the late '80s/early '90s the femme fatale experienced a resurgence with neo-noir films like Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and To Die For (1995), offering a succession of Black Widows who took centre stage. For an even more recent example, check out the superbly manipulative Natalie, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, in Memento (2000).