The Power Point I used at the seminar I gave in the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland, on the 20th of April, 2018. You can check the talk in this Youtube: https://youtu.be/eitJwUtzDh4

1. “The Rise of ‘Bright Noir’:
Redemption and Moral Optimism in
American Contemporary TV-Noir”
University of Queensland, 20th April 2018
(Research Seminar, School of Communication and Arts)

3. Summary of the talk
1. Film noir, existentialism… and cliché
2. Why the bright leap in TV Noir?
3. Ideological postmodernism vs the optimist moment
4. Redemption and hope: from Justified to Fargo

4. 1. Film noir, existentialism… and cliché
• No way out, hopelessness, sense of despair
• N.O.I.R. = Negative Outcome Is Requisite (Turnbull)

5. The classic logic of “no
way out”

6. 1. Film noir, existentialism… and cliché
• No way out, hopelessness, sense of despair
• N.O.I.R. = Negative Outcome Is Requisite (Turnbull)
• “A fusion of nostalgia and imitation that can never fully
function as a generic category but nonetheless becomes a
widely circulating way of identifying certain types of
television shows” (Steenberg 2017, 63)

7. 2. Why the bright leap in TV Noir?
• The exhaustion of the antihero formula

8. Failed antihero narratives

9. 2. Why the bright leap in TV Noir?
• The exhaustion of the antihero formula
• The logic inherent in any genre’s evolution
 A contained and controlled heterogeneity, which balances
between repetition and difference (Neale)
 A genre “must continually vary and reinvent the generic
formula” (Schatz, 1981, 36).

10. Cyclicism rather
than evolution

11. Cyclicism AND evolution

12. 3. Postmodernism vs the ‘optimist moment’
• “A mood or attitude associated with an expectation about
the social or material future—one which the evaluator
regards as socially desirable, to his advantage, or for his
pleasure” (Tiger 1979, 53)

13. 3. Postmodernism vs the ‘optimist moment’
• Aesthetic postmodernism ≠ ideological postmodernism
• Grenz argues, postmodernism “affirms that whatever we
accept as truth and even the way we envision truth are
dependent on the community in which we participate ...
Further, and far more radically, the postmodern worldview
affirms that this relativity extends beyond our perceptions
of truth to its essence”

14. 3. Postmodernism vs the ‘optimist moment’
• “Pessimism had not only become deeply embedded in the
practice of cultural criticism, but it had also to some extent
become a mark of moral and intellectual seriousness”
(Bennett 2011, 302)

15. The ‘optimist moment’

16. The ‘optimist moment’

17. 3. Postmodernism vs the ‘optimist moment’
• “Pessimism had not only become deeply embedded in the
practice of cultural criticism, but it had also to some extent
become a mark of moral and intellectual seriousness”
(Bennett 2011, 302)
• “Hope is an intentional movement toward an object (…).
Every act of hope presupposes the existence of something
good, something the subject is aware of before setting off
in its pursuit” (Schumacher 2003, 66)

18. 4. Redemption and hope: from Justified to Fargo
• ‘Bright’ noir ≠ ‘sunshine’ noir

20. 4. Redemption and hope: from Justified to Fargo
• ‘Bright’ noir ≠ ‘sunshine’ noir
• The sense of an ending and the moral closure
• Detectives do not fail, evil is defeated
• A case for humanism: “What brings us together as
human beings and what we can hope to achieve as
such, about the barriers to success and how we might
overcome them” (Cummings, 2006).

21. “The dinner you wanted to treat me to. How about now?”.
(Saga Norén)

22. “You don't have to go. I just take a left up here, hop on the
freeway down to Mexico. In a couple of hours, we're sitting
on the beach in Baja having margaritas”.
(Hank Dolworth)

23. “It's not how you hit the mat, it's how you get up”
(Murdock motto)

24. “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgive one another
as God in Christ forgave you”.
(Rev. Paul Coates)

25. “The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men
from the door”.
(Rust Cohle)

26. True Detective (HBO, 2014-)

27. “I said you’d be fine”.
(Raylan Givens)

28. Justified (FX, 2010-16)

29. “We’re sitting here together. That’s what matters. A man
once said, ‘You’ll know the angels when they come ’cause
they’ll have the faces of your children.’”
(Hank Larsson)

30. Fargo (FX, 2014-17)

31. Fargo (FX, 2014-17)

34. Alberto N. García Martínez
School of Communication
University of Navarra (Spain)
albgarcia@unav.es
Web - unav.academia.edu/AlbertoGarcía
Blog – diamantesenserie.com
Twitter - @AlbertoNahum