Darwin's Screens by Creed Barbara;

Author:Creed, Barbara;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

for natural selection to work, the world must be full of competitors and governed entirely by chance ... What most people saw as God-given design he [Darwin] saw as mere adaptations to circumstance, adaptations that were meaningless except for the way in which they helped an animal or plant to survive (Browne 1995, pp. 542–3).

In noir, the struggle to survive is paramount, but this is played out as individual survival, not in relation to the survival of the species. In this sense, both noir and the hard-boiled detective genre that has inspired so many noir scripts are quintessentially modern.5 The noir genre offers an individualistic interpretation of the struggle to survive in a world divorced from family and familial ties. The nihilistic, cynical atmosphere that characterises noir arises from its focus on a Darwinian urban jungle, in which sexual display and sexual choice are completely detached from the demands of family and society. The world of noir is seductive, exciting and alive with dangerous predators. In the classic noirs of the forties, the noir couple invariably meet an untimely death; in the postmodern noir of the eighties and nineties, however, the femme fatale often profits from her corrupt behaviour while her lover is punished (demonstrating an anti-Spencerian disassociation between moral fitness and the ability to survive). In films such as Body Heat (1981), The Last Seduction (1994) and Basic Instinct (1992), the postmodern femme fatale outwits the male every time, suggesting that sexual deception is essential to survival in the modern world.

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