neo-noir

The Hays Code had kept sex and violence off the American screen since the 1930s. Its enforcement arm folded in 1968, and the films that followed shot in colour and put both back into a genre critics named by reaching backward: Nino Frank had coined the word noir in 1946, and neo went in front of it. Chinatown opens on the plainer version of the job, a socialite hiring Jake Gittes to watch her husband, and lets it grow into a political scandal and a private one before he can close the file. The Coens run the same trap twice: a bar owner has his wife and her lover killed in Blood Simple, and a car salesman stages his own wife's kidnapping in Fargo, both plans undone by people too chaotic to run them straight. Fincher moves the genre indoors, into procedure: two detectives in Se7en spend the film one step behind a killer working through the deadly sins. Lynch keeps the amnesia and throws out the explanation: Mulholland Drive puts an actress fresh off the plane with a woman who cannot remember who she is. You can see the ending coming from a long way off, and the film knows you can.

Distinguish from Film Noir is the original 1940–1960 cycle — black and white, studio-era, shaped by the Production Code's constraints on what could be shown. Neo-noir inherits the worldview but not the limitations.