Starting in the Sixties, a series of changes affected Hollywood and the film industry. On the one
hand, cinema experienced the crisis of the majors, the explosion of independent productions and the
rise of American auteur; on the other, we witnessed to the invasion of porno chic in theaters. This study aims to demonstrate how noir, in this postmodern phase, is invested with a dual role: not only it accepts the challenge of representing the violence and contradictions of the pornographic world from an ethical
and political point of view, but it also has to show the artificiality of the film product, reflecting on the viewing experience itself. Taking Paul Schrader’s Hardcore (1979) and Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) as case studies, I argue that, in these films, the detective’s eye – consciously or not – must
necessarily look at the world not so much through Hitchcockian binoculars, with which the detective’s figure is traditionally represented, but rather through the artificial filter of the film.
