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Many people like noir, including me. The charm of negative characters is such a flashback to the teenage years, when in” bad guys ” you see a hidden power from the eyes of others. You have to be honest and admit that noir is fraught with a very vulgar pathos, which can easily be reduced to a formula that I would describe as “in a black-black city, in a black-black house, in a black-black room there is a man with a vicious face.”
In general, everything is quite easy in noir. Using a black-and-white palette, you can create an endless expanse of superficial discontent-corrupt officials, corrupt policemen, ordinary people are frail, soft and spineless. Heroes in noir are necessarily vicious, and beauties are always fatal. It seems that noir makes fun of both mass culture and modern human double morals, and even makes fun of a person. There is madness in noir, but madness is always something that we understand, there are no problems with it at all. There is no fundamental difference between the harmless Joker and the characters in The Seal of Evil (1958). It's crazy, and it's a laugh we can easily understand, because noir is ready to make fun of anything but himself.
Decadence is very similar to the noir of the late twentieth century. Rather, noir is similar to decadence, because it is precisely noir that is its historical and cultural derivative. Noir, which appeared in the 1940s and 1950s, is a decadence adapted for the mass reader/viewer. Why adapted? Because noir lacks the main aesthetic power of decadence – the ability to make fun of itself. Noir always leaves a serious face, it does not allow itself to be parodied. If there is a parody of noir, then it is already perceived independently. Decadence, on the other hand, can turn itself inside out as much as it likes, until no trace of the original remains. The madness of the decadents is much more interesting. In this sense, Leonid Andreev in “Diary of Satan” reaches the last limits of human sanity, and the comic in the sad images of Alexander Vertinsky takes on a real aggressive sweetness. There's a lot about decadent madness that's hard to imagine with a black-and-white noir palette. The mystical anarchist Georgy Chulkov believed that decadence was intended to complete the culture of Modern Times, to end the era of rationality and human sanity. The artistic and philosophical irrationalism of decadence gave rise to whole trends within culture(in the symbolist literature, especially), which was exactly what Noir could not do (however, he did not set such a goal).
The absence of irrationalism is what makes noir inferior to decadence.