As in: Reading

I'm reading Mike Davis' 1991 book on the train in the next couple weeks. I've been meaning to read it for a long time, but it was always checked out of the UF library, and I never needed it enough to recall it.

Some passages I've enjoyed so far:

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. (40)

I like this description because I thoroughly enjoy German expressionist cinema. My master's thesis turned on the idea that Hollywood took the techniques from German expressionist cinema (madmen and dramatic mise-en-scene) and used them to create horror films, which turned the "madman" into the "psychopath."

Writing about James Ellroy's Los Angeles Quartet:

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. (45)

I feel like this passage applies now just as much as it did in the early 90s, perhaps moreso. I'm also reminded of Dark Knight Returns and Dark Knight Strikes Again, in which Miller plays the "good" fascism of superhero might-makes-right against the "bad" fascism of Reagan/Bush/Corporate America.

Finally, for today:

[When Adorno and Horkheimer were in America], they allowed their image of first sight to become its own myth: Los Angeles as the crystal ball of capitalism's future. And, confronted with this future, they experienced all the more painfully the death agony of Enlightenment Europe. (48)

It seems like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash exemplifies the final state of L.A.-as-capitalism's-future. In it, he describes L.A. not as an urban wasteland, but a suburban one in which all space has been bought, built upon, and commodified. He describes a place where one could drive hundreds of miles without ever driving on a street—one merely goes from parking lot to parking lot. Davis draws a distinction between 20s-30s noir, which focused on the dark underbelly of suburban life, and 40s noir, which fastened on to the urban hellscape of downtown L.A.. Stephenson clearly plays into the former apocalypse.

Posted by briley at February 3, 2005 8:35 AM