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This essay argues that light in post-World War II American films noir is not only an aesthetic feature but a thematic and ideological one as well. These films use Enlightenment conceptions of light to explore postwar subjectivity in ambivalent and contradictory ways. I proceed from an understanding of film noir as an historical movement and argue that noir protagonists in films such as Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944), Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945), The Dark Corner (Hathaway, 1946), D. O.A. (Maté, 1950), The Big Heat (Lang, 1953), and The Big Combo (Lewis, 1955) reflect an existential, often despairing, awareness of the impossibility of their own enlightenment and, by extension, of ever realizing the American Dream.1 This journal issue focuses on media interrogation of the construction of identity within and beyond national boundaries, and the cycle of films now identified as film noir is central to understanding the formulations of postwar American identity and its relationship to the meaning of citizenship. For late 1940s and early 1950s audiences, noir protagonists-however personally to blame for lack of enlightenment they may be depicted as being within any one film's diegesisupdate the Nietzschean tragic hero: a suffering and reluctantly cosmopolitan figure cast into a dark world of eternal recurrence and from whose performance geographically uprooted and socially buffeted audiences might derive a modicum of ambivalent pleasure through identification. Audiences have the opportunity to sympathize with noir's failed protagonists and so-called femmes fatales because, in terms of the structure of order, disorder, order that organizes the narrative of so many of these films, during the "disordered" middle section-when the powers of the state, the law, and the father are most under question and attackprotagonists enact certain qualities of oppositional, often unexpressed, politics of audience members.
The success of classical Hollywood narrative cinema relies on audience identification with an on-screen character or characters. Yet while audiences may experience sympathy with postwar noir protagonists, as David Hume understood, sympathy allows us to understand that "there but for the grace of god go I" even as it also contains within itself the understanding that it is not, in fact, I who actually stand there in the place of the other. Sympathy, then, including that felt by audiences for on-screen characters, is always contingent and...