Noir Motifs and the Allure of Noir: The Lure of Certain Doom

Jim Ridley of the Nashville Scene has written an excellent article, The Naked City, on the film noir genre and its allure, while reporting on the upcoming Nashville Film Noir Festival:

… real-life ruin with plausibly grubby motives… all angular shadows and slashing black-and-white… [protagonists] either slaves to temptation and lust, or tarnished knights honor-bound to clean up their mess. Hard-edged in style, hard-headed in content and [with] their resolute lack of sentiment, these movies were existentialist to the core. You made a bad choice, and you lived—or more often, died—by the consequences.
[Dark Soul] …sums up the allure of noir: the chance to experience, vicariously, how it would feel to act on the impulses we’ve been wisely conditioned to ignore.