Himes’s Dostoyevskian portrait of Los Angeles as a racial hell, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), is noir as well-crafted as anything by Cain or Chandler. Set in the long hot summer of 1944, it narrates how white racism, acting in utterly capricious circumstances, launches the self-destruction of Bob Jones, a skilled ‘leaderman’ in the shipyards. As a critic has noted, ‘fear is the novel’s major theme . . . the progressive deterioration of a personality under the deadly pressure of a huge and inescapable fear’.55 Himes’s next novel, Lonely Crusade (1947), is also given a nightmare setting in the racially tense Los Angeles war economy. This time fear eats the soul of Lee Gordon, a Black UCLA graduate and union organizer under the influence of the Communist Party. Together, Himes’s two Los Angeles novels, ignored in most critical treatments of the noir canon,56 constitute a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the psychotic dynamics of racism in the land of sunshine.
However inadvertently, Himes’s caricature of the local ‘red conspiracy’ in Lonely Crusade also prefigured the emergence of an ‘anticommunist noir’ in the Korean War years. While the Hollywood Inquisition was cutting down the careers of a majority of the writers, directors and producers of hardcore film noir, a redbaiting, bastard offspring – frequently set in Los Angeles – appeared on the B-movie circuit (for example, Stakeout on 101) and the drugstore paperback-rack (Mickey Spillane’s sado-McCarthyite thrillers). Meanwhile through the 1950s, Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) continued to churn out reasonably well-written detective noir in a Chandleresque mode, usually with some pointed contrast between the primitive beauty of the Southern California seacoast and the primitive greed of its entrepreneurs.57
A major revival of noir occurred in the 1960s and 1970s as a new generation of emigré writers and directors revitalized the anti-myth and elaborated it fictionally into a comprehensive counter-history. Thus Robert Towne (influenced by Chandler and West) brilliantly synthesized the big landgrabs and speculations of the first half of the twentieth century in his screenplays for Chinatown and The Two Jakes. Where Chinatown established a 1920s genealogy for 1930s and 1940s noir, The Two Jakes and John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions extrapolated it into the postwar suburban boom; while Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (cleverly reworking the plot of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) depicted a stunningly Chandleresque Los Angeles of the third millennium. More recently, Ray Bradbury, returning to the genre for the first time in forty years, has ‘softboiled’ noir in an unabashedly nostalgic mode to recall Venice Beach of the 1950s – before urban renewal and gentrification – in his Death is a Lonely Business (1985).
Parallel to this project of a noir history of Los Angeles’s past and future (which actually has come to function as a surrogate public history), other writers in the 1960s re-experienced the moral chill that shivered down the spines of Cain’s and West’s anti-heroes. John Rechy’s City of the Night (1963) captured, from the standpoint of its gay ‘Lost Angels’, the image of the city as a fugitive midnight hustle – ‘the world of Lonely America squeezed into Pershing Square’ between anonymous sex acts and gratuitous police brutality. But where Rechy could ultimately find a certain nihilistic exhilaration along the shore where ‘the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black sea’,58 Joan Didion found only nausea. More haunted than anyone by Nathanael West’s dystopia, she described the moral apocalypse of 1960s Los Angeles in her novel Play It As It Lays (1970) and her volume of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968). For Didion – on the edge of a nervous breakdown – the city of the Manson murders was already a helter-skelter of demeaned ambition and random violence. Her visceral revulsion was recalled years later by Bret Easton Ellis, L.A.’s ‘bratpack’ writer of the 1980s. His Less Than Zero (1985), a Cainian novel of gilded Westside youth, offered the darkest Los Angeles yet: ‘Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. . . . Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left.’59
Finally, sixty years after the first short stories in The Black Mask and The American Mercury announced the genre, Los Angeles noir passes into delirious parody in the over-the-top writing of James Ellroy, the self-proclaimed ‘Demon Dog of American Literature’. Although other contemporary tough-guy novelists, including Arthur Lyons, Robert Campbell, Roger Simon, T. Jefferson Parker and Joseph Wambaugh, keep pace with the Chandler/Macdonald tradition on its native turf, Ellroy’s sheer frenzy transports his work to a different plane.60 His Los Angeles Quartet,61 depending on one’s viewpoint, is either the culmination of the genre, or its reductio ad absurdum. At times an almost unendurable wordstorm of perversity and gore, Quartet attempts to map the history of modern Los Angeles as a secret continuum of sex crimes, satanic conspiracies, and political scandals. For Ellroy, as for Dunne in True Confessions, the grisly, unsolved ‘Black Dahlia’ case of 1946 is the crucial symbolic commencement of the postwar era – a local ‘name of the rose’ concealing a larger, metaphysical mystery. Yet in building such an all-encompassing noir mythology (including Stephen King-like descents into the occult), Ellroy risks extinguishing the genre’s tensions, and, inevitably, its power. In his pitch blackness there is no light left to cast shadows and evil becomes a forensic banality. The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagan–Bush era: a supersaturation of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest.
Indeed the postmodern role of L.A. noir may be precisely to endorse the emergence of homo reaganus. In an afterword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of What Makes Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg confesses consternation that his savage portrayal of avarice and ambition has been recuperated as a ‘handbook for yuppies’:
The book I had written as an angry exposé of Sammy Glick was becoming a character reference. . . . That’s how they’re reading it in 1989. And if that’s the way they go on reading it, marching behind the flag of Sammy Glick, with the big dollar sign in the square where the stars used to be, the twentieth-century version of Sammy is going to look like an Eagle Scout compared to the twenty-first.62
Pynchon forsees even worse ‘repressive desublimations’ (a Marcusean expression peculiarly apt to the context) of noir. In Vineland (1990) – his wily, California-centered novel about ‘the restoration of fascism in America’ – he envisions the Disneyfication of noir to sell deodorants and mineral water to Schulberg’s coming hyper-yuppies. In a memorable scene, his ‘mall-rat’ teeny-boppers, Praire and Che, rendezvous at Hollywood’s ‘new Noir Center’:
This was yuppification run to some pitch so desperate that Praire at least had to hope the whole process was reaching the end of its cycle. . . . Noir Center here 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’ Lox . . .63
THE EXILES
Shirley Temple lived across the street. Schoenberg was incensed when guides on the frequently-passing tour buses would point out her home and not his. Dika Newlin64
Between the Nazis’ seizure of power and the Hollywood witch hunts, Los Angeles was the address in exile of some of Central Europe’s most celebrated intellectuals.65 Desperate and ‘very modest’ (Eisler), having just escaped the camps and the Gestapo, they arrived with few initial demands upon their sanctuary. They were stunned by the opulence of the movie colony. Even the most shirtless among them usually received so-called ‘life-saving’ contracts from the studios that guaranteed work visas and $100 weekly stipends. The more famous joined the exclusive salons established in Santa Monica and the Palisades by the pre-Hitler immigration of European film stars and directors.66 Yet, despite their acknowledgement that Los Angeles did indeed appear like
