Barbara,
Would The Sixth Sense be of any assistance to you? Reading your posting after
having just watched Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, it seems that the
whole film is charting the attempt to avoid the electric chair by a man who
masquerades as a killer in order to demonstrate the barbarism of capital
punishment. Just as he is about to be pardoned, he admits to murder, placing
him back on Death Row. Like many of Lang's films, BARD dramatizes the attempt
to avoid a singularly horrible fate which is always already in waiting,
whatever one does. In this respect, film noir owes much to Kafka's
irrevocable mise-en-scene. Its structure amounts to a detour, you might say.
Is this relevant? Wilder's Sunset Bvd also features a protagonist 'unable' to
face up to the reality of his end before his story is told. Double Indemnity
too. In the latter, a piquant metaphor of a trolley ride is used to suggest
the awful finality of death. Film noir is so interesting precisely because it
does find memorable ways of trading in the unthinkable or the imponderable,
playing on the culture's fear/fascination with mortality.
Good luck,
Richard
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