In “The Power of Blackness: Film Noir and Its Critics”, Charles Scruggs argues that Billy Wilder’s famous comment on film noir “I think the dark outlook is an American one” is true. Many film historians think that Wilder’s cynical and dark film noir’s, most notably Sunset Boulevard, are rooted in his angst against Central Europe in Word War I. However, Scruggs builds an interesting case against this claim. He begins the article by defining whether or not film noir is a genre and not just a visual style. He states qualities of film noir such as revolving around a crime (something extremely present in Sunset Boulevard as the film is framed by the murder of Joe Gillis) and dark plot lines. He does a good job summarize how films become defined as film-noir and then continues on to further discuss the effects of American history on the style.

            In Sunset Boulevard, widely considered one of the great film noirs, the main character, Joe Gillis, is a writer down on his luck having attached a few B-pictures to this name. His has a glum outlook on life which Scruggs claims can be traced back to American gothic tradition. Such authors as Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scruggs argues, have laid the groundwork for the film noir style of dark themes with horrid plot twists.

            He contends that film noir was built out of the “rips and tears of social fabric” or rather the portions of the human psyche that began as good and end up bad. Both Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis personify this idea. Before meeting each other both were in essence good humans but as their complicated love affair worsened so did their characters. The climax of the film, Norma shooting Joe, shows the transformation of both characters into dark characters typical of a film noir.