So here I am, back from my first film noir seminar, and my tutors have just explained that they are "introducing the topic, but also framing it".

I am, in all honesty, a little upset. I appreciate that film can be studied on many, many levels. And the arto-philosophico -totally divorced from any sort of reality approach is an important one. If only in a purely academic context. But if you want to analyse real-world factors, it's important not to move too far away from a populist reading of cinema i.e. it's a product, designed to appeal to consumers. Perhaps noir is "about" class structure, and remapping race, but it's also one of cinema's most self indulgent genres. It's popular because it offers a heady dose of everyone's favourite things, including:

• sex - marvellous femme fatales, rugged grizzled wise guys
• violence - the above, shooting one another in a variety of inventive ways. And film noir offers a particularly brutal, nihilistic form of violence, frequently perpetrated by the heros.
• A combination of the above.
• wish fufilment - men are quick-talking and smooth, women are always terribly glamorous and a little in love with them
• morbid curiosity - anything crime or murder related fufils a desire for "true crime" stories, but they also tend to up the salacious women's mag interest by adding evil cripples, maniac mad women, nymphomaniacs, "bisexuals who kill!" (a genuine essay we get to read later in the term), psychopaths, drug addicts e.t.c.

Obviously, class and race play a part in this. Obviously, as a serious film academic we can't rely on how normal people react to mainstream movies - they're only the intended, paying audience. And then, at the same time, you've got the subtitle to this course -"Geographies of Desire" - which we've had described to us in the following way:

"geography, as a discourse or field is very wide and quite discursive"

Well, I'm glad we've cleared that up. The idea of teaching is, not unsurprisingly, to convey ideas from a wiser individual to a less learned one. This course is being taken jointly by two younger members of the department, and I feel as if they've been chomped up and regurgitated, using lots of long words in place of content. That, or I'm just too stupid to understand - which isn't impossible, but also doesn't seem likely. Noir, we are told, represents the "failure of a capital society" but we need to "constitute other noirs", and discover "how place comes to engender domestic dialogues in film". He capped off this five minute barrage of nonsensical proto-Marxism by apologising: "it sounds a bit reductive and totalising". I'm a Latin student, and I understand "reductive" has something to do with "reduced" which also implies "cut down, simple, shortened. I'd hate to hear the full rendition. We also discussed a bit about what noir is as a genre. I quote:

A first inclusion then would be to contend that...[stopped paying attention,
distracted by the fact that none of those words mean anything]...its most stable
characteristic is its absent centeredness, it's over determiness whose ghostly
discources, instead of cancelling out...[put my pen down in disgust]

Dear Christ, is it too much to ask for a good gunfight?

The most frustrating thing about all this is I disagree with the tutors entirely, in what I think they're trying to say. And I'd love to get to grips with why one of us is wrong, if only they would speak plainly. Last year, I figured I had noir sussed: it's Anti Classical Hollywood Cinema:

• Hollywood heroes are good guys, whose core beliefs are reinforced by the movie.
• Noir heroes are flawed, and if they have core beliefs, they are inevitably destroyed
• Hollywood heroes overcome the odds
• Noir heroes are overcome by the odds
• Hollywood heroes are buoyed by optimism
• Noir heroes are resigned to their inevitable failure
• Hollywood heroes go on a journey and learn
• Noir heroes are doomed to repeat old bad habits and patterns
• Hollywood heroes never give up
• Noir heroes don't know what's good for them, and are habitually stupid
• Hollywood heroes get the girl
• ...do I even need to answer this?

But then, as Pluto pointed out, this also adequately describes South Park, so perhaps it is inaccurate. Perhaps there has to be a sort of "detection narrative" to make it truly noir. I'll never know if they don't start putting context in their lectures, instead of speaking around the topic in a never ending thesaurathon. And there have been some interesting ideas in the reading, particularly comparing noirs and westerns - during the McCarthey era, the downbeat conscience of noir moved away from contemporary movies to ones safely set in the past. I'm also endlessly reminded of Blake's 7, but I suppose anything would. Can we technically count it as noir? It certainly fufills most of my categories.

Film noir is my very favourite genre - I enjoy the pessimism, and how smashed up it leaves people; and I also enjoy the beatings up, and the fantastic hair, and it's bleak outlook on human nature.

And it's multifaceted modalities of heuristic discourse.