Throughout Farewell, My Lovely, the white citizens consistently other the foreigners, making them distinct from the main characters. Malloy laments that Florian’s changed from a white bar to a colored bar. This change causes him anxiety and factors into his fear of a changing world. While fear of change and xenophobia play into the noir genre, the more pressing issue remains that noir centers on darkness, and darkness cannot exist without light. Therefore, creating the other becomes essential, regardless of how it plays out within the genre. This frequently manifests as a fear of foreigners entering the city, however in If He Hollers Let Him Go, Bob does not possess the same anxieties because he is a part of the new wave of people entering Los Angeles. As such, he must find a new way of distinguishing himself, so he turns to the materialism of Los Angeles. Bob owns a car and uses it to set himself apart, even reflecting on the inability of rich white people to purchase a new car during the war. He buys into the materialism so completely, that the fear of losing his car keeps him from killing a white man. He does not care about losing his job or facing prison because those do not set him apart, only his car and other similar material possessions can do that for him.
Noir’s fascination with the other manifests in varying ways, but I think it plays more deeply into the othering within people’s own persona. They focus on external image and an external fear of others in order to ignore the darkness within themselves. They fear becoming the other and facing the isolation and loneliness, but they continue to divide. Therefore, the physical darkness becomes representative of the journey people will take within their own mind, and that which they fear most becomes their destiny.