Out of the past, into the supermarket: Consuming film noir

Film Quarterly

Volumn 60, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 16-27

  Dussere, Erik ^a  

^a AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

Author keywords

Altman; Consumerism; Fincher; Noir; Wilder

Indexed keywords

EID: 62649119290     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/fq.2006.60.1.16     Document Type: Review

References (17)

1. Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (New York: Little, Brown / Penguin, 1990), 326.
2. James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), provides an excellent overview and interpretation of the origins of the term in his chapter "The History of an Idea."
3. Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
4. Dean MacCannell, "Democracy's Turn: On Homeless Noir," Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1993), 282.
5. MacCannell argues that the "still unexamined tension at the heart of film noir is that between senile capitalism and democracy," and that noir "witnesses" the confrontation between the two "with implacable numbness" (284). In Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), Sean McCann locates a similar dynamic in the tradition of American detective fiction, in which he sees the drama of the New Deal's confrontation between capitalism and government playing itself out.
6. Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 (1955; San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2002), 12.
7. The line is quoted in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 18.
8. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Random House, 2003), 8.
9. Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 8-9.
10. Kim Humphery, Shelf Life: Supermarkets and the Changing Cultures of Consumption (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6, 71-72.
11. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 24.
12. In Black & White & Noir: America's Pulp Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Paula Rabinowitz offers an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink reading of commodity fetishism and the role of objects in noir, among other things. Her discussion touches on the way that Phyllis Dietrichson's identity as femme fatale is an accretion of signifying objects: "Barbara Stanwyck's anklet and heels, her cigarette and whiskey, her cat glasses and gun would indeed turn you into a femme fatale - murderous, deadly, and doomed to die in a hail of bullets" (191).
13. Thomas Schatz, in Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Film Making, and the Studio System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), makes a comparison between the Western hero and the detective: "Like the Westerner, the hardboiled detective is not only a man apart, but he is a social mediator: his capacity for violence and streetwise savvy ally him with the outlaw element, although his values and attitude commit him to the promise of a well-ordered community" (128).
14. Jennifer Cross, The Supermarket Trap: The Consumer and the Food Industry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), viii.
15. Jameson, Postmodernism, 38.
16. The setup of Fight Club is quite similar to the argument made by Susan Faludi in her book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: HarperCollins-Perennial, 1999), released in the same year as Fight Club. Stiffed argues that contemporary men feel that traditional masculine roles and behaviors are no longer available to them in a consumer society and thus feel lost, confused, and angry. Many commentators have noted this convergence, and I find it cheering to think of Fight Club as offering an introduction to the work of Susan Faludi for adolescent boys.
17. Lucy Chen, "Fight Club," Masculinity and the American Dream in Films (2000), http://www.columbia.edu/lcc20/amhs/ fightclub.html (accessed 20 February 2004).