1943 : War Movie vs Film Noir , Captain America comics vs Joe & Willy comics

I would argue - I do argue - that the most Noirish 'gotcha' of all WWII was the simple one panel Bill Mauldin cartoon that won him a Pulitzer prize in 1945.

That cartoon's title is a quote from an actual news report, repeated at the top verbatim :

"Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners"

Just one sentence from hundreds of thousands of similarly morale-uplifting sentences published on all sides of that six long years of the war.

But below it was Mauldin's simple pencil strokes depicting weary despondent Allied troops (infantry riflemen like his famous Joe and Willy) escorting equally weary despondent Axis infantry POWs to the rear , all engulfed in a cold driving rain.

At second and third glance the cartoon is actually quite hard to read - both sets of infantrymen look so much alike in their miserable state.

Eventually you figure out that the American GIs have their distinctive steel helmets while the Axis have forage caps.

Professor and author Paul Fussell also served in the the infantry in WWII - as a very junior officer- and he knew full well what this cartoon captured.

In one of his best books, entitled Wartime , he zeroed in on petty chickenshit , as he and millions of other front line troops called it.

That constant modern need to plenticide the complexities of a global war into a simple black and white parable between the always good guys in white hats and the always bad guys in black.

As a Modernity-destroying rebuttal, this masterwork of art, this simple cartoon, was right up there with books like Catch 22 or films like Double Indemnity ...

Noir films reveal the disconnect between Breen Office moral uplift and the darker reality of America

Contrary to general opinion, Noir films do not just show the grimmer parts of American life.

Their particular effectiveness is to give you both the official version and then show you the unofficial reality.

It was a bit like public school and high school in my day : we got plenty of sunny uplift from our unaltered textbooks, '40s and '50s NFB films and present day CBC radio school broadcasts.

But just outside the classroom, TV's noir and sci fi horror movies , combined with tv newscasts, told us all was not really that rosy in the human animal kingdom.

Of course, learning in school and on television about good old Uncle Joe Stalin's Katyn Forest mass graves, Auschwitz, DDT, Thalidomide and Nuclear Fallout had already prepared us to trust film noir far more than any government official ....

1895-1945: the new forms of En-LIGHT-enment

We often fail to take the scientists at their word.

They meant for their "En-LIGHT-enment" project to be taken literally.

 They had a determination to turn the full light of scientific curiosity upon that childhood darkness that lies at the top of all of Humanity's stairs, because they were certain to the point of certitude -They Had Faith - that it would turn out to be more simple, more regular and more benign than our dirty,cluttered day-to-day visible world.

Our fears of these dark unknown areas they dismissed as superstitions promoted by priests.

So between 1895-1945, we got ever more powerful searchlights that probed the skies above us or the seabed deep beneath submersibles.

In wartime, they served to coned Allied bombers high in the air or to Leigh-ted up U-boats lying low on the surface of the sea.

Bigger and bigger telescope lens or mirrors gathered up more light and concentrated it, letting us see further and further in Space and further and further back in Time.

With newer microscopes, we added ever sharper lights to ever more powerful lens, to clearly see Brownian motions and thus see the motion of molecules.

But ultimately there is a limit to the sharpness of visible light, so we expanded into X-Rays (circa 1895) to peer into bodies, metals and crystals and molecules and then Radar (circa 1945) to see into clouds and darkness and finally to bounce off of the Moon itself.

We developed flash photography, in ever shorter, sharper bursts so we could clearly photograph a speeding bullet stopped in mid-flight.

The electron microscope uses a sharper (a shorter wavelength) form of illumination to reveal a lot more of the hidden details of bacteria
and to show us viruses and even atoms for the first time.

If an atom buster ray can be thought of as a form of light, it too revealed much that was new - in particular the world of sub-atomic particles, indirectly visible as con tails in cloud chambers or revealed on exposed film.

New radio telescopes (circa 1931) listened to waves of information coming into us from the darkness of the universe - as did cosmic ray detectors.

All of this before 1945, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, et al.

The Enlightenment didn't die or fail - it succeeded only too well in revealing what lies in those areas of Reality beyond our normal ken - but it was totally wrong in assuming that they would be simple,regular and benign.

Perhaps Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their famous little mimeographed book a little too early.

 Because they failed  to understand that the deliberate 'return to darkness' of post 1945 Film NOIR might have been a reaction against all the bright enlightenment that the previous half century had produced...