Disabled masculinity as a metaphor of national conflict in the cold war era: Orson welles' the lady from Shanghai (1947)

Abstract

Resisting censorship and American optimism in the postwar era, film noir emerged with some specific particularities which made the genre a countercultural phenomenon in the late 1940s. The possibilities offered by these films captured the attention of Orson Welles for their display of sexual dramas as metaphors of social anxieties of the times. The renovation of the noir canon is accomplished in Welles' first noir, The Lady from Shanghai (1947), with the intention of exploring deficient masculinities surrounding the totemic power of the femme fatale. The analysis of these masculinities points out the historic and cultural context of the Cold War, an era characterized by fear and paranoia, whose effect on masculinity ends with the decomposition of any heroic stand and the loss of any kind of patriotic faith.