Role playing games give us a way to escape the world. But if we look at it from a different angle, they can give us tools to deal with the stresses we endure, and try to struggle with them. The world is a terrible place for many of us. With the transformations that our world hurtles through every year, a focus that can encompass these things is welcome. Discussion of noir fiction is ripe for this.
This may need to be proven, though. Noir, particularly film noir is often a very male-focused, white, hetero-normative affair. But, the reasons it packed a punch to the post-WWII French film critics who coined the term are the reasons it is still relevant today: it speaks of the massive trauma to the world and human psyches brought about by modernization of warfare, commerce and technology. What is often swept under the rug are the voices who spoke of oppression and loss of belief in the powers-that-be from long before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of the lives lost in the conquest of the Americas by Europeans, and the massive enslavement and forced migration of Africans.
Noir narrative, also, in its structure broke conventions that bound us to one linear path to knowing a tale. The films were characterized by the flash-back, fourth-wall-breaking voiceover narrations, dream sequences, unreliable narrators, expressionistic and emotion heightening lighting, and the use of real locations over sounds-stages. Film noir creators produced a visual vocabulary which allowed their stories to break the frame of modern, conventional tales and explore contrasts and contradictions of stories from the twilit parts of our lives and minds. These techniques crossed over from literature and psychology, and map readily onto role playing games. Using the strengths and dimensions unique to each form.
Noir can't change the facts of history, but it can allow us to see history differently. It's a mode of communication that points to the gaps and breaks in what we often think of as the closed and healthy system of 20th (and now 21st) century human societies. In fiction, film and in games it is an avenue for criticism and exploration--though one which is as vulnerable to becoming watered down and repetitive as any other genre, mode or form.
Let's approach noir with fresh eyes, then. Looking at the spaces it creates in narrative for critiquing the failings of society and the individual. And as a narrative form that is meant to embrace narratives counter to the mainstream.