Present-day noir is tired because it uses the esthetics of classic noir without the philosophy, she says.

“What I love about noir is the cynicism. The bleakness. The awareness that corruption is everywhere, and everyone is complicit to some degree. That violence is not something that happens to other people, but rather a key feature of the system that we all support. These notions are pretty perfect for the time we’re living through, a time of incredible corruption, blatant state-sponsored violence, and worsening levels of inequality and plutocracy.

“But… I don’t know anyone who dresses in 1940s clothes. I also don’t know any femme fatales, or dames with legs that go on for days – which sounds like something you might want to get a doctor to look at. There aren’t really any private detectives in fedoras and trench coats walking around either, and almost nobody I know smokes these days. The world is in color!”

Cory Doctorow has written about this elsewhere (I cant find the link.) The original noir novelists, writing in the 1930s, wrote about veterans who were shell-shocked from hard combat during World War I, hoped after the war to rediscover the innocence of their childhood homes, but instead found their city to be corrupt and perverted. So these antiheroes became private eyes or criminals — outlaws.

What you have to overlook when reading classic noir today (Cory says) is that much of what disgusted the noir protagonists was women’s liberation, racial equality — particularly interracial sexual relations — and homosexuality.

However, stripped of the bigotry, the central spirit of noir is sound and still relevant today. Raymond Chandler summed it up:

“… down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor–by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

“He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

I think I agree with Charlie Jane. Original noir, like “The Maltese Fountain” and “Double Indemnity,” is classic and timeless and very watchable today. But I did not care for the recent “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” episode filmed in black-and-white. And while I suppose we’ll watch “Spider-Noir” eventually, I’m in no rush.