Among critics and fans of the Buffyverse, it has become something of a commonplace to tag the spin-off Angel as more noir than the original Buffy series.  But what, exactly, is meant by this?  Merely that Angel is literally darker—stylistically, thematically, visually—than Buffy?  That Angel, unlike Buffy, is urban?  Or perhaps that Angel more often deals with its demons through the contexts and clashes of various institutional powers—Angel Investigations, the LAPD, Wolfram and Hart?

The noir-ness of Angel (and of Angel) is of course due in large part to these factors, and to the not insignificant similarities between the ensouled vampire Angel and film noir’s most famous detectives.  Like Phillip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Mike Hammer, vampires are nocturnal, (un)natural loners, and heavy drinkers—though bourbon is not their drink of choice!  As the scorned half-breeds of the demon world, vampires inhabit a liminal space between human and demon society—shunned by both, alternately despised, feared, and ignored.  Similarly, Angel, like the aforementioned noir detectives, often seems to have more in common with the “criminals” he fights than with the humans he saves (witness, for example, Riley’s understandable confusion when he assumes, on meeting a brooding and bullying Angel in season four of Buffy, that he is “bad again”).

Still, these are mere surface connections, and the purpose of this paper is to examine the deeper implications of the noir-ness of Angel/Angel—the hero as a descendant of various figures of idealized masculinity and representatives of a “pure” moral universe in which the only “true” justice is that which takes place outside of institutional frameworks (for example: John Wayne in Liberty Valance, Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep), and the endurance and continued relevance of such figures in American popular culture.