Film noir as a genre is perhaps one of the most difficult to consider. Compared to the western genre or the screwball comedy, the patterns and storylines of noir are infinitely more complicated. Film noir "is not defined, as are other genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood." What complicates the identification of noir as a genre is the fact that noir emerged from multiple layers of already identifiable genres, like the gangster film, the melodrama and the hard-boiled detective film. As a result, noir initially was identified as a movement or style rather than of genre. Over time, this debate has continued, complicating the understanding of film noir and even further, the understanding of film noir revisionism.

Conceptualization of film noir's origins and markers is best found in Paul Schrader's "Notes on Film Noir" from 1972. Schrader's essay is perhaps the most vibrant examination of the first critical phases of film noir. The three phases Schrader identifies truly are the groundwork for not only classic noir films but also for contemporary noir films. Schrader identifies, from within the 1941 to 1953 classical Hollywood period, first the "phase of the private eye and lone wolf," then the "postwar realistic period" and finally the "period of psychotic action and suicidal impulse." As noir's lifespan has extended beyond even what was considered to be noir's epitaph with "The Touch of Evil" in 1958, these same periods have been both collapsed and revisited, both as homage and as parody, and continue to serve not only as the basis of understanding for classic noir but also for a more contemporary, revisionist noir.

Considering the application of Schrader's original phases within both the classic noir as well as the contemporary noir context is best achieved by comparing a film from each respective period. Irrefutably, the essential noir text from the classical Hollywood period is Billy Wilder's 1944 film "Double Indemnity." Fifty years later, amidst the resurgence of film noir, John Dahl's 1994 film "The Last Seduction" serves as one of the most clearly labeled modern noir films. In comparing and contrasting the two, their intersections serve to highlight the irrepressible themes and styles of the film noir genre while their deviations illuminate their different historical periods of production. While each film conforms to the basic genre practices of film noir, each also manages to speak to its own time and thereby underscore the importance of recognizing noir not only as a genre but as a revisionist genre as well.

"Double Indemnity," the story of a simple-minded guy duped by a dangerous femme fatale into committing murder for the profits of love and a hefty financial reward, serves as the paradigm for both classic noir as well as contemporary noir. Created between the first two phases of noir as identified by Paul Schrader, Double Indemnity rides the line between the lone wolf, private investigator story and the focus on postwar realism. At the same time, the psychosis and death that befalls our leading man in Double Indemnity foreshadows the looming maniacal turn leading noir characters would soon take in what Schrader identifies as the third phase of film noir, the suicidal, psychotic phase.

In Double Indemnity, Fred MacMurray's Walter Neff character is an everyman type insurance agent whose downfall comes when he meets Phyllis, the spider-woman femme fatale. Persuaded by the forces of love, or just lust, Phyllis convinces Walter to murder her husband after she takes out a high paying insurance policy on his life. With this ever-present noir plot structure, the essential noir themes of victims, greed, lust, violence, deceit and isolation are all played out across a backdrop of haunting shadows, cynicism, pessimism and darkness.

Precisely in line with Schrader's essay, Double Indemnity matches its influences with four unique historical moments of its time: post-war disillusionment, post-war realism, German expressionism and the hard-boiled tradition of the 1930s. Lacking the elements of either 1930s social consciousness or early 1940s patriotism, the film is darker and more sardonic than its predecessors and is overwrought with antagonism towards society. With a recognizable contempt for a world that does not seem worth fighting for, the film clearly marks itself as a production played out in the wake of the war and in the middle of post-war disillusionment. Instead of working within and for society, the lone wolf Walter Neff avoids and attempts to outwit the rules to create what will be his own doomed path, paved with lust, greed and violence.

Beyond disillusionment, Double Indemnity is also marked by post-war realism and the German expressionist influence. The film focuses on the realistic grit of the street and on real-life locations, with a dedication to vogue, real-life fixtures and authenticity. Although this type of realism would be heightened and improved upon in later noir films of the classical period, Double Indemnity makes an effort to leave the studio look when it can and put the characters into the throes of the real world. Likewise, the darker tones and graphic focus on vertical and oblique lines and expressionist lighting within Double Indemnity demonstrates the expressionist influences of German expatriates working in Hollywood. Billy Wilder, the director, was not only a key figure in film noir but also a German expatriate himself. This combination of realism and expressionism that was visible in the over-staged lighting on top of the realistic settings laid the groundwork for the recognizable and easily identifiable look and feel of film noir.

Finally, the hard-boiled tradition that Schrader identifies as the last of the four historical influences of classic film noir also plays an important role in Double Indemnity. Although the narrative follows Walter Neff, who is an insurance salesman and not a private investigator, his partner Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), is a claims investigator and maintains a close watch over the torrid events of Walter's plot and eventual downfall. With Walter behaving as a noir anti-hero, Keyes stands in as the hard-boiled detective, derived from the more moralistic 1930s, into whose arms Walter dies at the end of the film. Keyes cynical way of acting and thinking and his innate distrust of the dangerous femme fatale enables his survival. His behavior is in line with the "hard-boiled" school of writers that emerged in the 1930s, a connection particularly close for Double Indemnity whose script was written by Raymond Chandler and based on a James M. Cain story. Despite taking a pessimistic and sardonic look at society during that period, the film still wraps with the only surviving character being that of the cynical and hesitant investigator. The theme remains in line with classical Hollywood at the time: In the gloomy world of noir, caution and honesty are the most essential survival skills.

The basic tropes of film noir that were perhaps best seen in Double Indemnity, while tightly woven with the historical context and influences of that classical period, have since managed to lend themselves to more contemporary noir films whose own historical contexts are also available for consideration. Each of Schrader's original four influences can be reinterpreted and adapted to modern, 1990s film noir contexts. In place of post-war disillusionment, contemporary noir films suffer from post-Cold War disillusionment. The economic boom of the 1980s that came about as a result of the Cold War military buildup came crashing down by the beginning of the 1990s. This crash and its psychoanalytic affects, became visible in early 1990s noir revivals. Likewise, where post-war realism demanded exterior, real life scenes over studio shots, contemporary noir films switched the focus to the oddities of suburban life. Noir characters from the 1950s have recently and frequently relocated from the big city life to suburbia and beyond in the 1990s. Observing familiar street smart characters relocated into places without streets serves to convey the absurdities of non-urban living and post-modern, contemporary noir.

Similarly, whereas the German expatriates contributed a new expressionist style to major Hollywood productions in the classical noir period, the contemporary noir period has been marked by highly reflexive film-school trained filmmakers who constantly evoke and interweave the styles of classical Hollywood with the styles of other periods and directors. Rather than an uneasy combination of expressionism and realism, the new noir films combine highly stylized modern techniques with reproductions of classical noir traditions. The effect is undoubtedly postmodern, clashing older styles with newer styles and leaving both undoubtedly out of any intentional context.

Finally, rather than a heroic hard-boiled influence, contemporary noir films now focus instead on the hard-edged woman. The femme fatale from the 1950s has evolved from a dangerous but second fiddle character in classic noir films to the main attraction of contemporary noir. Freed by the women's liberation movement, the new femme fatale is markedly stronger, more seductive, more dangerous and even more irresistible than her ancestors. Oftentimes, it seems that as a nod to classical noir roots, the contemporary femme fatale often finds herself with an assortment of familiar noir male stereotypes to dominate. It is as though the new women are not only stronger than average men, but are now intentionally presented as dominating the same men who used to dominate them in classical noir. Needless to say, these new women remain, like their predecessors, ruthlessly more sexually dominant than the women in any other genre. Even still, the women of contemporary noir have evolved beyond characteristic noir men, reflective of the classical hard-boiled detective era, and now effectively dominate all types of men within their sphere.

This type of switch from hard-boiled to other focuses is a step Schrader predicted in his essay. Schrader recognized that in what he refers to as noir's final stages, "film noir adapted and then bypassed the hard-boiled school." It is exactly through this sort of adaptation to new historical influences that the film noir genre has continued to evolve. The contemporary noir film revises classical film noir by adopting the original codes and repurposing them to suit its new historical context. As Paul Schrader says in his essay "as the years went by, Hollywood lighting grew darker, characters more corrupt, themes more fatalistic and the tone more hopeless." Although Schrader's comments were specific to the later classical period of noir, they apply equally well to contemporary noir. In the 1990s a resurgence of film noir films erupted and one of the most important new focuses became the reconsideration and rewriting of the femme fatale and her destiny.

The Last Seduction, which serves as a prime example of this shift in focus, is the story a woman taking on, dominating and succeeding in the space traditionally reserved for a man in classic film noir. As the film progresses, Bridget Gregory, our femme fatale and lead character, manages to outstep all the men in the film, including two private detectives and two lovers to get away with what presents itself as noir's crime of the century.

Ironically, the basic premise, that of an insurance scam, mirrors that of Double Indemnity. The simple-minded insurance salesman, Mike, in The Last Seduction is clearly a stand-in for the Walter Neff character. The crux of the film, for both The Last Seduction and Double Indemnity, lies with the femme fatale convincing the lovestruck simpleton to murder her husband so as to enable her to collect the accidental death insurance policy. This narrative parallel between the two films testifies to the ongoing dedication of contemporary noir to classical noir formulas, while the newfound focus on the femme fatale and her ability to effectively get away with murder illustrates the revision of noir for more modernly relevant purposes.

Despite being born distinctly in the postwar period, noir's endurance over time and recognizable patterns of narrative structure, characterization and theme serve to validate its position more as a genre than as a movement. The evolution of noir over time demonstrates its progression of stylistics and thematic and exemplifies how noir has managed to extend beyond its points of origination and into a form capable of mirroring changes in historical trends and concerns.

In light of this recognition, The problem with Schrader's analysis of film noir lies in his dedication to noir at a movement rather than as a genre. In "Notes on Film Noir" Schrader claims that "film noir is a specific period of film history, like German Expressionism or the French New Wave." If that were the case, how can films like The Manchurian Candidate, Chinatown, Body Heat, The Usual Suspects, L.A. Confidential and The Last Seduction be explained? More than fifty years later, the presence of film noir has never been felt more strongly in Hollywood. It is this longevity of noir styles and themes that testifies to its true identification as a genre rather than a movement. While Schrader's phases define the essence of recognizable film noir in its primal period, they do not stand to mark its boundaries.

Fortunately, stepping in are contemporary noir theorists like Foster Hirsch. What Schrader's essay lacks in terms of accounting for the evolutionary revisionism of the film noir genre beyond 1958, Foster Hirsch's book "Detours and Lost Highways" makes up for. Hirsch, claiming that noir did not expire with "Touch of Evil," examines the resurgence of film noir since 1958 in a new form he identifies as "neo-noir." Neo-noir moves beyond the original four influences Schrader suggests as the inspiration for noir and identifies further rips and tears in modern society that have brought about new revisions within the classical noir framework.

Effectively, the confusion over the evolution and revision of the noir genre can be contributed almost entirely to its rocky start. Initially recognized as a style that could be found amongst various genres rather than as its own genre, film noir was originally denied the same merit of consideration that other genres received during this period. As Rick Altman explains in Film/Genre, noir completed "the full adjective-to-noun trajectory." At the time of Paul Schrader's "Notes on Film Noir," the idea of noir as a genre was still not widely accepted. Noir remained an adjective and has only since proven its viability as a complete genre by returning to popularity in the 1990s, well beyond the historical period it was believed to have been originally confined.

Film noir, as a genre, remains problematic, however its staying power over time continues to serve as evidence to identity as a genre rather than a movement or style. Film noir maintains a repertoire not only of style and themes, but also of narrative devices and recognizable character types. The resurgence of film noir in the 1990s as a popular and intentional generic medium further evidences this fact. Film noir is not only a genre but also a genre that maintains the same level of identifiable genre revisionism as any other. As the characters, plots and themes of noir continue to be revisited, film noir, as a genre, continues to be rewritten.