Acta Universitatis Wratislaviensis • No 3869 Literatura i Kultura Popularna XXIV, Wrocław 2018 Kamila Żyto ORCID: 0000-0003-2822-8341 University of Łódź Detours of absurdity: Coen brothers’ Fargo in the noir melting pot of genre patterns Keywords: flm noir, flm history, flm genres, cinema of Coen brothers Słowa kluczowe: flm noir, historia flmu, gatunki flmowe, kino braci Coen The long-lasting debate over whether flm noir should be seen as a genre, a cycle or a tendency in the history of cinema remains unsettled. No defnitive solution has been found, nor any consensus reached, owing to the fact that the flm noir phenomenon is particularly complex and convoluted. Much of the debate revolves around questions of approach and genre. But many movies, both those released in the 1940s and 1950s (the classical period) and those released in the following decades (the neo-noir, or postclassical, period), do not obviously ft any genre pattern or other ordering scheme. The diversity among flms that are now unquestionably classifed as noir, provokes controversy and raises numerous questions. What does Sunset Boulevard (dir. Billy Wilder, 1950) have in common with The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946)? The frst one is simultaneously a crime story, melodrama and horror. The second one is, without a doubt, a gang- ster movie. Do all noir flms really constitute a single genre? I will leave this question unanswered, as to support any of the various opinions about the generic identity of flm noir is not the main aim of this paper. 1 From my perspective, there is little utility in joining this on-going debate, which has reached a standstill some time ago. Therefore, I will make no attempt to prove that either flm noir is one of popular culture’s most recognizable genres, or that it is a historically restricted and determined tendency. Rather, flm noir, at its core, is 1 Magdalena Kempna-Pieniążek’s monograph on neo-noir cinema identifes nine different approaches to the problem of defning noir. See: M. Kempna-Pieniążek, Neo-noir: Ciemne zwierciadło czasów kryzysu, Katowice 2015, pp. 20–21. DOI: 10.19195/0867-7441.24.4 Literatura i Kultura Popularna 24, 2018 © for this edition by CNS