Essay Questions

The short stories of Cornell Woolrich have been adapted (many more than once) into some of the most memorable examples of film noir produced in the forties and fifties. Why are his stories such a good fit for this movie genre?

One would think Cornell Woolrich had a hand in creating film noir if one compares the content of his stories with the unofficial rules of film noir. Although some noir films include aspects that others do not, the general expectation for this genre is a pervasive sense of doom, fate and destiny being beyond control, the increasing sense that there is something going on out there most of us know nothing about, a sap falling victim to the agency of evil and which is, almost but not quite always, in the form of a woman. The truth is that Woolrich’s stories are far less dependent upon the machinations of a femme fatale than film noir usually requires, but aside from that, nearly all his stories hit either most of all of these marks. Even when not writing crime fiction per se, in fact, a noirish patina overlays the plot.

Woolrich has been termed a master of the particular style of noir fiction known as the paranoid thriller. Which of his stories might be considered essential to assessment?

Although Alfred Hitchcock transformed the story into a movie with voyeurism as the central theme, Cornell’s “It had to be Murder” is at heart a story of paranoia at its most visceral level. The protagonist is a good man and we know this because he pursues the right thing in trying to catch a killer even though he knows the potential of exposing his helpless situation if things go wrong. This is paranoia on two very different levels: the fear of helplessness versus the fear of having to live with yourself if you chose not to do the right thing because of that fear of helplessness. “The Light in the Window” puts a spin on the same story in which the paranoia engulfs not the man peering through the window, but the man looking up at the window with the light. From the sublimity of these explorations in paranoia Woolrich even moves into the ridiculous in “The Corpse and the Kid” as the ultimate in paranoid situations: trying to dispose of a body rolled up in a carpet.

What is the status of free will in a typical Woolrich story?

At best, free will is missing in action. “It Had to be Murder” is actually one of the rare stories where a Woolrich protagonist seems to successfully engage proactive measures that are coincident with the belief in free will. And yet even here the final line points to a certain amount of determinism: the only reason he was able to exercise that free will to the extent he did is because fate broke his leg and put in him a cast and wheelchair in the first place. One might well term the short stories of Woolrich to be the noir of determinism except that the general idea of a determinist philosophy requires some kind of belief in a logical cause and effect that simply happens to be beyond one’s control or understanding. Such logic is often absent from a Woolrich story. In more cases than not, his characters seem to move about in a world that is truly random and dependent on a logic that not only defies understanding but that is not even there. If Woolrich can be said to embody a philosophy of any sort, it would seem to be pure, simple, frustrating fatalism where nothing anyone can do can change the course of events which is destined to play out.