The big sleep: Strategic ambiguity in Judges 4-5 and in classic film noir

Abstract

This article discusses similaries between film noir and the book of Judges such as anxiety over constructs of masculinity and normality, interest in ritualized violence, fetishization of women, existential deliberation over character, resignation to the fate of the individual (and by extension the nation), withering acknowledgment of the façade of material progress — all expressed with indeterminate narrative modes that frustrate attempts at making meaning.