Another Novel about Work

[Nushra MohamedKhan]

Why Film Noir? Could it be that TRP is interested in the labor
question? I've long contended that Pynchon writes about the American
labor movement. Before Vineland and before M&D, it was evident that
one of Pynchon's major concerns is the American Labor Movement. It's
there in the Short Stories before V. It's a major concern in V.,
Walter Reuther, the Marxist/Catholic  debate of the Rats in the parish
under the street where Benny labors with Angel. In The Secret
Integration, where the boys fancy themselves after Spartacus and in
their youthful idealism rebel against the racist real estate
capitalism, forming a secret integration, planning acts of
anarchy--bombing the local institutions of power and control. Who is
Slothrop working for? The dedication of GR to Farina speaks to this
queestion.  Who are Mason and Dixon working for? Who is Zoyd working
for? The labor stuggle is not something Pynchon read about in books.
He lived it. His family was deeply involved in the labor struggle.
And, although I've never taken the time to spell this out to you all
here, it's fairly easy to see that all of P's novels are about
American Labor. AGTD is a novel about American Labor. The characters
in AGTD struggle with the same question: Who are we working for? And,
IV is also about labor. Now, when I say "about" labor I can hear the
knees jerking, the steel-toed reductionism's joint out of place
knocked against my shins. OK, have it your way Burger Queen.



Class, Crime, and Film Noir: Labor, the Fugitive Outsider, and the
Anti-Authoritarian Tradition
Journal article by Dennis Broe; Social Justice, Vol. 30, 2003
Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood
Dennis Broe; Richard Greenwald; Timothy J. Minchin

Film noir, which flourished in 1940s and 50s, reflected the struggles
and sentiments of postwar America. Dennis Broe contends that the
genre, with its emphasis on dark subject matter, paralleled the class
conflict in labor and union movements that dominated the period.By
following the evolution of film noir during the years following World
War II, Broe illustrates how the noir figure represents labor as a
whole. In the 1940s, both radicalized union members and protagonists
of noir films were hunted and pursued by the law. Later, as labor
unions achieve broad acceptance and respectability, the central noir
figure shifts from fugitive criminal to law-abiding cop.Expanding his
investigation into the Cold War and post-9/11 America, Broe extends
his analysis of the ways film noir is intimately connected to labor
history. A brilliant, interdisciplinary examination, this is a work
that will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers.

Dussere, Erik, “Out of the Past, Into the Supermarket: Consuming Film Noir
ABSTRACT This article traces film noir's conflicted place in postwar
American consumer culture. Using detailed analyses of supermarket
scenes in Double Indemnity, The Long Goodbye, and Fight Club, it
argues that the films stage a struggle between two competing versions
of the American national character: the consumer society versus the
noir underworld.

IN A SCENE from Thomas Pynchon's book Vineland, two young women meet
at a California shopping mall called Noir Center, which takes its
theme from what one character calls the "weird-necktie movies" of the
1940s and 50s. As the novel describes it, "Noir Center . . . had an
upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble Indemnity, plus The
Lounge Good Buy patio furniture outlet, The Mall Tease Flacon, which
sold perfume and cosmetics, and a New York-style deli, The Lady 'n'
the Lox. Security police wore brown shiny uniform suits with pointed
lapels and snap-brim fedoras."1 Pynchon is making a familiar point
here about the way that an omnivorous consumer culture can and will
appropriate anything in order to create the illusion of novelty in
both products and shopping spaces. The satire suggests that to
appropriate the dark themes and images of film noir is the ultimate
absurdity; the final frontier of American authenticity has now been
paved over and sold to the highest bidder.
Lary May sees the "rebels" of 1950s film and the emergent 60s
counterculture as "the children of noir."3 James Naremore writes that
for Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, authors of the first
book-length study of the films, "noir is not merely a descriptive
term, but a name for a critical tendency within the popular cinema -an
antigenre that reveals the dark side of savage capitalism... noir
produces a psychological and moral disorientation, an inversion of
capitalist and puritan values, as if it were pushing the American
system toward revolutionary destruction."4 If so, then it is not
surprising that leftist critics like Mike Davis and Fredric Jameson
have found in noir and the hard-boiled tradition the potential for a
critical analysis of American capitalism. Dean MacCannell writes
aphoristically that "there is a kind of innocent codependence of film
noir sensibility and Marxist criticism, each providing the images and
concepts that the other believes it needs."5 Although not all noir
critics are Marxists and not all critics see the films as politically
progressive, it is clear that the noir tradition is engaged with the
contradictions inherent in the American political economy, with the
opposition between democratic ideals and capitalist structures.6
Both as a collection of films and as a critical category, film noir
has a distinctive and conflicted relationship to the American consumer
culture of which it is a part; the underworld that the films invoke is
both an indictment and an artifact of capitalism, a populist
intervention and a popular entertainment. These films tend implicitly
to distance themselves from the artificiality of the movie-making
system from which they emerge; thus the political critique of
capitalism identified by noir's Marxist viewers is performed in part
through a formal critique of popular film. In this sense, there is an
unexpectedly utopian impulse in noir: the suggestion that a filmic
encounter with the "reality" of the urban and criminal underworld may
also be an encounter with the presence and immediacy that we feel
ourselves to have lost when confronted with the apparent artificiality
of consumer culture. Because noir offers this promise-which is also
the promise of an experience more vital than that of other films-it is
important that these films present themselves as "authentic." Through
their streetwise attitude, moral ambiguity, and existential
reflections on crime and death, they posit for themselves a film world
that is less prettied-up than other popular film and ostensibly less
commodified. Noir drives this point home by providing a critique of
consumption generally and of Hollywood's product in particular.
In their 1955 Panorama of American Film Noir, Borde and Chaumeton
argue that film noir is specifically dedicated to undermining
Hollywood style:
[A]ll the components of noir style lead to the same result: to
disorient the spectators, who no longer encounter their customary
frames of reference. The cinema public was habituated to certain
conventions: a logic to the action, a clear distinction between good
and evil, well-defined characters, clear motives, scenes more
spectacular than genuinely brutal, an exquisitely feminine heroine,
and an upright hero.7
As Borde and Chaumeton go on to explain, these conventions are
systematically violated in the film noir cycle. But of course these
crime films are themselves offered as entertainments with some sort of
mass appeal. Although their serious subject matter and disillusioned
tone suggest a gritty, urban realism presumably absent from other
Hollywood films, this tough-mindedness is really a kind of
authenticity effect created through a set of strictly mannered noir
conventions: expressionistic lighting and scoring, hard-boiled
dialogue that is formulaic almost to the point of parody, obsessively
complex investigations of the past. Noir is gritty realism rendered
through a stylized, filmic, and pleasurable mode of representation.
Shimmering rain-soaked streets, white-hot gun flares in darkened
rooms-these are confections offered to the moviegoer, in a defining
case of Guy Debord's observation that "the image has become the final
form of commodity reification."8
Caught between opposition to and complicity with Hollywood, classic
noirs and later neo-noirs have struggled to differentiate themselves
from other film entertainments and from consumer culture as a whole
through the assertion that their visions represent an alternative,
authentic America-one that has not been "sold out." Part of the
particular appeal noir offers for viewers and critics is that its
opposition to capitalist structures has a homegrown quality, despite
its urban setting. Noir makes its case against American capitalism by
presenting itself as representative of a more genuine American spirit:
it combines a powerful debunking of American pieties with the vague
promise of something better. As Naremore's description of noir as an
"antigenre" suggests, the particulars of the alternative to
consumerism offered by these films is hard to pin down; often it seems
to exist purely as a force of opposition. But in its evocation of an
underworld lurking just beneath the surface of the acknowledged social
order, noir taps into a deep American sense that our republic, our
real national identity, resides somewhere outside of traditional
institutions of government and economy and outside of our inevitable,
daily participation in the sphere of consumption. If the content of
noir's definition of America remains vague-the hopedfor return of a
repressed and indefinable national character-its critical strategy is
clear: to disrupt the equivalence between American citizenship and
consumer capitalism that has developed in the postwar era.