Give Your Home A Film Noir Makeover

It’s cinema’s greatest cliche: alternating strips of light and shadow slicing across the screen and the cynical gumshoe on it. The effect, created by light passing through wooden Venetian blinds seems completely harmless and meaningless when it happens in your comfortable study. But in the context of a high-contrast, black and white film, it makes meaning ambivalent, instable and represents the imprisonment of characters. It’s a strange contrast in meaning.

So, perhaps you want the Film Noir look in a room in your home. Well first there’s the window blinds. Applied copiously, they can make your room feel smaller and more claustrophobic than the mysterious realities on the outside. Your conversations will be laced with hidden meaning, only semi-transparent to the people you talk to. Be sure to talk in cheesy metaphors, and don’t respond to even simple enquiries with anything less than a string of cynical imagery. You talk mostly to yourself anyway.

It’ll help if the sprinkler on your frontlawn gives you a perpetually rain-streamed window. Have a mirror in every room, and talk to people’s reflections the majority of the time. All women must enter your room with intent. If your significant other isn’t hiding some ulterior motive, she has no business being in your room. If you’re in a healthy relationship with her, you’ve failed Film Noir 101.

But perhaps the only way to truly lounge around like a private detective is to return back to the 40s and 50s. Truth is, Film Noir is really a product of the time in which it was made, that wartime and post-war tension full of suspicion about neighbours: both the guy next door and the country across the border. Even in today’s climate, the venetian blind is a homely symbol, an accessory to the perfect middle class kitchen. Today, you’re better off putting up some Black out blinds and pretending you’re a Twilight vampire (anyone over fifteen need not apply).