This dichotomy is a core theme of film noir, Pippin said. Characters are trapped in a situation by numerous surrounding forces, such as social expectations, obsessive love and, in "Out of the Past," their own pasts. Their future is predetermined, and this fatalism is so great that characters may be unaware of the reasons for their actions, according to Pippin.
"Characters may know that what they're undertaking is profoundly ill-advised, yet they continue to do it because they've been pushed onto this path," Pippin said.
These films echo ancient Greek ideals of faith, Pippin said. Throughout Greek mythology and epic poetry, gods determine fate no matter what humans plan and how they try to fight it. Even romanticized tales of two people falling in love despite class differences contain the theme of fatalism, according to Pippin. The couple is doomed because social structures have already determined their fate, he said.
"In this setting, it's foolish to think we can act contrary to what the authorities decide," Pippin said.
Yet however enraged, smitten or confused they may be, characters do act, even if their actions may be hard to explain, he said. The fatalism of noir films thus reveals the futility of their actions, because the characters cannot escape their predetermined fates despite their choices, Pippin said.
Noir films also feature the archetypal femme fatale. Pippin showed scenes from several movies where the lead male character sees the femme fatale for the first time and "turns to mush." In Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" (1958), for example, a long camera pan from Jimmy Stewart to the femme fatale, coupled with melancholy music, shows that he is about to fall victim to her power.
"Femme fatale entrances suggest their extreme magical spell and mysterious erotic power that render males forever as passive victims of power," Pippin said.
This scene depicts how drastically a character's life can be altered in a single moment and how it will determine his life's course. Films noir use this femme fatale technique to emphasize the theme of fatalism, Pippin said.
Noir films have a reputation for misogyny, and femme fatales often serve to counter that, Pippin said. In "Out of the Past," the lead male character dies when the femme fatale fatally stabs him in the groin. She avenges herself and her gender by emasculating him and thus overcoming the force of misogyny, Pippin said.
Pippin also discussed fatalism's roots in characters' own pasts.
"They can never escape the dark shadows cast by the past and get into the future," Pippin said.
The past is emphasized through the essential film noir elements of flashbacks and voice-over narration, Pippin said. Narrators simultaneously show the viewer events and describe them, making it unclear whether the audience is seeing the same events they are hearing described, or if they need to interpret possible distortions in the narrator's view of the events, according to Pippin.
The ironic tone of the narrator implies his helplessness during both the action and the flashback, he said. The narrator is in the same position as he was at the time of the event a spectator, not a participant, unable to change the course of fate both then and now. The playback of something that has already happened emphasizes characters' inability to fully control their action, furthering the notion that fate has already been predetermined, he said.
Pippin also traced the concurrence between the explosion of films noir in the mid-1940s and World War II. Fatalistic crime melodramas were far more resonant with the period's events than previous films depicting "upbeat heroes saving the day." Pippin said.
"Fatalism is clear even in our own history," Pippin said. "The U.S. and its allies decisively affected the future of the world by intervening in the war and stopping Hitler."
For soldiers who returned home from war, the idea of uncontrollable fate helped them cope with their own survival and the deaths of their comrades, according to Pippin.
"These movies showed how futile and naive it was to think that we could determine what happened to us," Pippin said. "They gave an image to the vicissitude of faith and chance."
Several audience members praised Pippin for clearly explaining a complicated cinematic theme.
"It's one of the few times that I've thought that fate or fatalism in literature is worth talking about," humanities professor Katherine Kretler said.
