Perhaps the attraction is that film noir is a way of traveling into the past—the world right before I was born. When watching old films, I like to remind myself that to the people in the film, their world was just as rich as ours and felt just as “now” as ours does. Here’s John Koenig talking about the people in old photographs:
Of course, to them, it wasn’t all flickering silence and grainy black and white. They saw vivid color rushing by in three dimensions, heard voices in deafening stereo, confronted smells they couldn’t escape. For them, nothing was ever simple. None of them knew for sure what this era meant, or that it was even an era to begin with. At the time, their world was real. Nothing was finished, and nothing guaranteed.
That world is now gone. If the past is a foreign country, we’re only tourists. We can’t expect to understand the locals or why they do what they do.
I doubt that today’s young can understand the 1970s. If you cannot imagine a professor smoking in class, or the person next to you on the airplane smoking, without it seeming weird or annoying, then you’ll never understand what life felt like in the 1970s. Just as the people of 2075 will never understand that it 2025 it felt perfectly normal to walk into a friend’s house without taking off your shoes, sit down at a table, and begin eating an animal.
From Scott Sumner.