These Depression-crazed middle classes of Southern California became, in one mode or another, the original protagonists of that great antimyth usually known as noir. Beginning in 1934, with James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, a succession of through-the-glass-darkly novels – all produced by writers under contract to the studio system – repainted the image of Los Angeles as a deracinated urban hell. ‘Writing against the myth of El Dorado, they transformed it into its antithesis; that of the dream running out along the California shore . . . [they created] a regional fiction obsessively concerned with puncturing the bloated image of Southern California as the golden land of opportunity and the fresh start.’39
Noir was like a transformational grammar turning each charming ingredient of the boosters’ arcadia into a sinister equivalent. Thus, in Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses Don’t They? (1935) the marathon dance hall on Ocean Pier became virtually a death camp for the Depression’s lost souls. The ‘changeless monotonous beautiful days without end . . . unmarred by rain or weather’ of William Faulkner’s noir short story, Golden Land (1935) were a Sisyphean imprisonment for the matriarch of a Midwestern family corrupted by L.A. success. Similarly, Cain, in Double Indemnity (1936) and Mildred Pierce (1941), evoked poisoned bungalows, whose white-walled, red-tiled normality (‘as good as the next, and perhaps a little better’) barely hid the murderous marriages within. In Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), Hollywood became the ‘Dream Dump’, a hallucinatory landscape tottering on apocalypse, while in successive Chandler novels the climate (‘earthquake weather’ and mayhem-inspiring Santa Ana winds) was increasingly eerie; there were even ‘ladies in the lakes’.
Collectively, the declassé middle strata of these novels are without ideological coherence or capacity to act except as McCoy’s sleepwalkers or West’s stampeding ‘flea people’. Individually, however, their petty-bourgeois anti-heroes typically expressed autobiographical sentiments, as the noir of the 1930s and 1940s (and again in the 1960s) became a conduit for the resentments of writers in the velvet trap of the studio system. Thus the very first hardboiled Hollywood detective, Ben Jardinn, the hero of a 1930 serial in The Black Mask, echoed the studio-weary cynicism of his creator, Raoul Whitfield, bit actor turned hack screenwriter.40 Likewise, Tod Hackett in The Day of the Locust is portrayed in a situation similar to West’s own: brought to the Coast by a talent scout for the studios and forced to live ‘the dilemma of reconciling his creative work with his commercial labors’.41 Chandler’s Marlowe, by the same token, symbolized the small businessman locked in struggle with gangsters, corrupt police and the parasitic rich (who were usually his employers as well) – a romanticized simulacrum of the writer’s relationship to studio hacks and moguls.42
NOIR UNDER CONTRACT
Paramount Gates, Hollywood
Budd Schulberg, on the other hand, examined the exploitative relationship between writer and mogul from the top down. A studio brat (son of Paramount’s production chief) turned Communist writer, he portrayed Hollywood capitalism with almost documentary realism in What Makes Sammy Run? (1940). Sammy Glick, the rising young mogul, battens off the creativity of the friends and employees whom he, in turn, betrays and crushes. As one of Schulberg’s characters observes, ‘he is the id of our society’.43
Schulberg’s psychoanalytic perspective, however, was exceptional. One of the distinguishing traits of first-generation ‘Los Angeles fiction’ was its emphasis on economic self-interest rather than depth psychology. Thus something like the labor theory of value supplied a consistent moralizing edge in the novels of Chandler and Cain. There is a constant tension between the ‘productive’ middle class (Marlowe, Mildred Pierce, Nick Papdakis, and so on), and the ‘unproductive’ declassés or idle rich (the Sternwoods, Bert Pierce, Monty Beragon, and so on). Unable to accumulate any longer through speculation or gambling, or having lost their inheritance (or merely desiring to speed it up), the noirs declassés invariably choose murder over toil. Invariably, too, the fictional opposition between these different middle strata suggests the contrast between the ‘lazy’, speculative Southern California economy (real-estate promotions and Hollywood) and America’s hard-working heartlands.
These motifs of the 1930s ‘Los Angeles Novel’ – the moral phenomenology of the depraved or ruined middle classes; the insinuation of the crisis of the semi-proletarianized writer; and the parasitical nature of Southern California – underwent interesting permutations in the film noir of the 1940s. Sometimes film noir is described in shorthand as the result of the encounter between the American hardboiled novel and exiled German expressionist cinema – a simplistic definition that leaves out other seminal influences, including psychoanalysis and Orson Welles. For our purposes, however, what was significant was the way in which the image of Los Angeles was reworked from novel to screenplay (sometimes incestuously as in Chandler rewriting Cain or Faulkner rewriting Chandler), then translated to the screen by such leftish auteurs noirs (some of them emigrés) as Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., Ben Maddow, Carl Foreman, John Berry, Jules Dassin, Abraham Polonsky, Albert Maltz, Dalton Trumbo and Joseph Losey. In their hands, film noir sometimes approached a kind of Marxist cinema manqué, a shrewdly oblique strategy for an otherwise subversive realism.44
After the first adaptations of Cain and Chandler, film noir began to exploit Los Angeles settings in new ways. Geographically, it shifted increasingly from the Cainian bungalows and suburbs to the epic dereliction of Downtown’s Bunker Hill, which symbolized the rot in the heart of the expanding metropolis.45 Sociologically, 1940s noir was more typically concerned with gangster underclasses and official corruption than with the pathology of the middle class; politically, the implicit obsession with the fate of the petty producer was supplanted by representations of political reaction and social polarization. Of course, film noir remained an ideologically ambiguous aesthetic that could be manipulated in dramatically different ways. Thus Howard Hawks chose to flatten the deep shadows of The Big Sleep (Chandler’s most anti-rich novel) into an erotic ambience for Bogart and Bacall, while the more toughminded Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott (both future members of the Hollywood Ten) evoked premonitions of fascism and brainwashing in their version of Farewell, My Lovely (Murder, My Sweet).
The experiments of film noir were mirrored by new directions in hardboiled Los Angeles writing during the 1940s. John Fante, who together with Adamic and Cain had been discovered by Mencken’s American Mercury in the early Depression, founded a one-man school of ‘wino writing’ that autobiographically chronicled life in Bunker Hill’s single-room-occupancy hotels and Main Street taxi dancehalls during the Depression and war years.46 Charles Bukowsky would later acquire a hyped-up celebrity (including two ‘autobiographical’ films) for his derivative, Fantesque descriptions of a Hollywood demimonde of fallen ‘stars in bars’ – a world better evoked in the phantasmagorical autobiography of jazzman and junkie Art Pepper.47
Aldous Huxley’s two Los Angeles novels (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939] and Ape and Essence [1948]), on