Each Unit Essay should be 1,0001,500 words and fully address the chosen topic for that Unit. Essays should be typewritten, double-spaced, properly punctuated, and correctly spelled. Students should draw their own conclusions and observations and not merely recite what someone else has written about the topic. Each essay should demonstrate thoughtfulness, originality, clarity, and general writing effectiveness and should include specific examples and quotations from the work(s) in question. This essay is an opportunity to react thoughtfully to material read and viewed.
Source citations are required for each Unit Essay: Andrew Spicer’s Film Noir MUST be a cited source as well as one additional source from the assigned course readings. Essay format and citations should conform to APA style guidelines (consistency is the key). All cited sources should be identified in text and at the end of the essay in a References section. Note: An abstract is not required.
Each essay must have a VERY SPECIFIC TITLEit should include the name of the selected film or novel, a focused topic or theme, and one or more preview details related to the Essay’s specific area(s) of focus. Subtitles with a colon may help convey all these criteria.
WEAK: “Lighting in Double Indemnity” or “Femme Fatales in Film Noir”
STRONG: “Themes of Entrapment in the Lighting Motifs of Double Indemnity” or “Pandora, Cassandra, Eve, and Lilith: Variations on the Femme Fatale in Kiss Me Deadly”
Topic Options:
One of the last films in the classic noir cycle, Kiss Me Deadly displays Martin Scorsese’s concept of the “Director as Smuggler.” This perspective suggests that director Robert Aldrich “smuggles” a cynical contempt for codified hard-boiled character traits, gender portrayals, and violent themes by exaggerating those key features to highlight their absurdity.
Using specific elements of plot, dialogue, visuals, music, and performance, choose one of the following topics to explore this idea of critique via exaggeration in Kiss Me Deadly:
In “Women in Film Noir” (assigned course reading), Janey Place claimed that film noir “stands as the only period in American film in which women are deadly but sexy, exciting, and strong” (p. 63). Analyze the film’s complex portrayal of one or more female characters in relation to the trope of the femme fatale.
In a Criterion Collection essay called “Kiss Me Deadly: The Thriller of Tomorrow (Links to an external site.)” (2011), writer J. Hoberman described Mike Hammer as “one of the sleaziest, stupidest, most brutal detectives in American movies” (para. 1). Analyze the film’s complex portrayal of Mike Hammer in relation to the trope of the homme fatale.
