Toward Alphaville: Noir, Midcentury Communication, and the Management of Affect

This presents a genealogy of noir affect as it emerges alongside of and against midcentury humanism and the transformation of work from Fordism to the postwar logic of cybernetics. Tracing a filmic trajectory from Wilder’s Double Indemnity to Goddard’s Alphaville, Nieland also charts the changing fate of noir affect, which goes from a negation of midcentury Fordist humanism to becoming incorporated (and thus potentially defanged) in the global and cybernetic focus of the postwar moment. Nieland thus warns us early on about the complicated political effects of noir affect. It is rarely univocal or unambiguous in its political resonances.

Double Indemnity

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on two growing trends in academia, particularly in the humanities, which separately contribute to self-censorship, doublespeak, obsessive crafting of personal brands, egocentrism, and sanitized discourse and publication output. Using Wilber’s Integral metatheory, these trends are linked to two developmental levels within academic populations that exist alongside each other in the contexts that support and perpetuate them. One is the corporate university context, which is competitive and brand driven, supporting the formal operational “Orange” developmental level. The other is the pluralistic “Green” level, which is characterized by relativism and political correctness. Both developmental levels are currently gravitating toward their pathological expressions, resulting in extreme self-censorship within both populations. This self-censorship in turn often results in publication output that is neutered: trivial in content, extremely politically correct, not leading, not risking, not asking significant questions, and thus not making meaningful contributions to the wider community.

Not a Lost Generation: James M. Cain, Al Dubin, and the Doughboy's Voice in Popular Culture between the Wars

James M. Cain and the songwriter Al Dubin were drafted into the army and served on the Western Front during World War I. Both men would go on to play major roles in the making of American popular culture during the interwar period: Cain writing the noir bestsellers The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Dubin providing the lyrics for several hit musicals, including 42nd Street. For both artists, the impact of the war was more complicated than the themes of disillusionment and a collective loss of innocence more famously offered by writers like Hemingway and Dos Passos. This article argues that Cain's and Dubin's pop successes in fact reflected the attitudes of millions of other veterans, who rejected the Progressive Era's moralism and asserted a new, determined, cynical, and irreverent sensibility in American life. Cain and Dubin were not alone, but part of a larger generation of Great War veteran artists who are rarely regarded as such, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, Jack Benny, Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell among them. Working in the most accessible forms of art and entertainment, their contributions, no less than the Lost Generation's, should also be identified as an important legacy of World War I.

Costume on film: How the femme fatale’s wardrobe scripted the pictorial style of 1940s film noir

The character of the femme fatale and the visual style of film noir are vital elements in our understanding of that genre. Film costumes worn by the femme fatale are crucial, and are defining elements in genre recognition precisely because of their explicit cinematic visualization, rather than functioning as unequivocal signs. This article proposes a methodology for film costume researchers to conduct a pictorial analysis, without necessarily analysing film costume in terms of a meaning-making repertoire adhering to our understanding of film as a ‘language’. In the proposition of a framework for the close textual analysis of film costumes, the methodology is based on the triangulation of a shot-by-shot description, a wardrobe breakdown and an examination of production stills. This triangulation is crucial to understand the complexity of film costumes, which are defined by a wide-ranging set of factors such as: the film industry’s mode of production, the film costume’s relation to the fashion of its time, the body and star image of the actor, the work of the costume designer and his/her department, and the film-specificity. The ways in which a film costume functions in a specific shot will prove to be an important tool to analyse the pictorial characteristics of film noir and the femme fatale. To exemplify to methodology, this article proposes a close reading of an iconic film costume designed for one of the best-known performances of such a character, i.e. the white jumpsuit designed by Edith Head for Barbara Stanwyck in the closing scene of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944).

“Chick Noir”: Shopaholic Meets Double Indemnity

In early 2014, several articles appeared proclaiming the rise to prominence of a new subgenre of the crime novel: “chick noir,” which included popular books like Gone Girl, The Silent Wife, and Before We Met. However, there was also resistance to the new genre label from critics who viewed it as belittling to women’s writing and to female-focused narratives. Indeed, the separation of female-centred books - whether “chick lit” or “chick noir” - from mainstream fiction remains highly problematic and reflects the persistence of a gendered literary hierarchy. However, as this paper suggests, the label “chick noir” also reflects the fact that in these novels the crime thriller has been revitalized through cross-pollination with the so-called chick lit novel. I contend that chick lit and chick noir are two narrative forms addressing many of the same concerns relating to the modern woman, offering two different responses: humour and horror. Comparing the features of chick noir to those of chick lit and noir crime fiction, I suggest that chick noir may be read as a manifestation of feminist anger and anxiety - responses to the contemporary pressure to be “wonder women.”

Classicism and Deviation in His Girl Friday and Double Indemnity

Chapter 2 illustrates an aesthetically productive balance between easy understanding and cognitive challenge in classical Hollywood cinema with extended analyses of His Girl Friday and Double Indemnity. These films combine classical narrative, stylistic, ideological, and genre properties with artistic devices that complicate formal patterning and thwart audience expectations.