Journal of Cultural Geography Fall/Winter 2005

23(l):43-69

L.A. Noir
Gary J. Hausladen and Paul F. Starrs
ABSTRACT. Between Utopian visions of a profoundly suburban American idyll that appeared in gallery spreads in magazines and pompous architectural joumal epistles in the 1920s and '30s and the epically ignorant and sophomoric self-satisfaction of Ozzie and Harriet in the 1960s lay just a few decades that produced an historically rare episode in the United States^ a pause for introspection and uncertainty. While some of this is owed to The Bomb, HUAC, and an upheaval of collective national sacrifice through the 1940s and early 1950s, the literature and film produced at the time was routinely of high caliber and often singularly inventive. None outstrips film noir, the celluloid expression of a collective national unease, and no place offers a better geography for noir than Los Angeles. Examining three of what can be considered classic L.A. noir films, we then jump ahead to look at the genre's
reemergence in Chinatown, Blade Runner, L,A, Confidential,

and Pulp Fiction, each offering a novel reconditioning of noir themes.

Space is the most dramatic stylistic entityfrom Giotto to Noland, from Intolerance to Weekend, How an artist deploys space, seldom discussed in film criticism but already a tiresome word of the moment in other art, is anathema to newspaper editors, who believe readers die like flies at the sight of aesthetic terminology. If there were a textbook on film space, it would read: "There are several types of movie space, the three most important being: (1) the field of the screen, (2) the psychological space of the actor, and (3) the area of experience and geography that the film covers." Manny Farber, 1971 43

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fournal of Cultural Geography INTRODUCTION

"Peristaltic" is an apt word for the twisted primeval ooze whose constituent parts are Los Angeles, a city dilated by the acute observations of detective novel authors, noir film, and applied urban geography. The result is nothing a casual quip or a single slashing theory can bring to heel. For a hundred years after its Spanish-Mexican founding, the City of Los Angeles stood apart, clearly home to a new modus vivendi, one that seemed to onlookers a whole heck of a lot like some kind of paradise (Starrs 1988; Sackman 2005; DeLyser 2005). Sure, it was a big place with ambitions bigger stiU, and for all the winners there were losers aplenty, as happens anyplace (Davis 1990, 2001), but by the 1930s Los Angeles was a trembling and growth-strained empire of diminishing orange groves. Long Beach walking-beam oil well pumps, a drought-formed waterscape spoiling for fights over scarce supply, poised withal for creation of a new urban form: the Southland suburb. Impatiently overlooking the landscape, thinking of lawns and houses replacing a resource-extraction frontier, were invidious, or at least aspiring and ever-vigilant, real estate magnates. That California historian Kevin Starr would title the second volume of his seriesthe first to cover Los Angeles Inventing the Dream (1985) was anything but a slipup: he was on safe ground asserting that for most Americans paradise was the Southland. With new arrivals and great expectations in the buildup, the Southern California landscape began to spark, erode, and implode. As the acid journalist-chroniclers Carey McWilliams (1946) and Neil Morgan (1963) noted in their day, the rough edges of the Southern California fabric so long hidden by great basting stitches became more evident, and a seemingly endless space filled with human traffic and threats of collision. A booming film industry moved from silent film locations in New York and northern California to studio-based SoCal talkies, embracing in the act new and far darker themes. Hollywood burgeoned, cloaked in an adventurous sordidness. The Industry's penchant for image-manufacturing was a part of the problem, as John Parris Springer points out in Hollywood Fictions (2000, 250). Crime, venality, self-concern and conceit, the illumination of obscure sexual predilections and the obscuring of a variety of suspect practices and social maladies, emerged as themes picked up by w^riters who set their works in the Southland. And some of the best w^ould become films noir.

LA. Noir 45

An explanation for this is in part pragmatic: Even with the Production Code clamping down on obvious film immorality in 1934, the stiff-armed disdain for propriety peculiar to Him noir set loose topics that would grow taboo once the forces of religion and intolerance clamped a hold on the nether regions of filmmaking and put to a halt the more obvious scenes of screen vice, replacing it with an Ozzie and Harriet sensibility. For noir, allusion supplanted depiction. Especially as presented in the Southland, Him noir shows up in two distinct windows: the classic era of the 1940s and '50s, and again (and in color) in the 1970s-onward renaissance of neonoir. But this essay is not about noir literature as a whole, nor is it about Los Angeles alone, but about the meeting in Los Angeles of city, urban ambition, and crime, and the inevitable attitudes that are struck from that complicated blend. Noir is not just pulp novels and so-so films, it is deservedly taken to be a distinctive form of American communication to the worldand the most admired, since it concedes more than a few elements of self-doubt. And it does so with styleas the legendary Him critic Manny Farber reminds us, there is a distinguished film space enclosed by "the area of experience and geography that [a] Him covers" (1971, 3). A weight of experienceexpressed in the Southlandwas and is the noir staple: atmospherics welded to ambition.
GENERIC EVOLUTION

Like its filmic distaff cousin the Western, film noir is quintessentially American, something even fastidious French Cahiers critics of the 1950s agreed upon. Just as the picaresque confidence man of Herman Melville became the gentle grafter of O. Henry, growing later into the hard-case grifter and flimflamming con-artist of half a hundred Hlms, there exist in literature and Him character types at once stereotypical and unique who are distinctively creatures of the American land. The transformation, precise and not awkward at all, anoints the hard-boiled dick as the newest tough guy swaggering into town. Film noir recasts 19* century staples, bringing up to the moment the traditionalor even the revisionistAmerican Western. In a casual sideslip the cowboy hero, reprised and recast, takes on a mantle of the detective, calloused by experience and attenuated by the demands of urban life. And though the shift seems marked, both film types. Western and noir, celebrate the triumphal nature of American heroes or the threadbare ambiguities of cultural antiheroes. These two

46 Journal of Cultural Geography exceptional types, cow-boy and gumshoe, recognize adversity while embracing the changes forced in behavior and aspiration by the metropolis: Think of how town corrupts in Eastwood's Unforgiven or Costner's Open Range, to name just two recent examples. The cowhand goes to great lengths to avoid the entanglements of the city; by way of contrast, the detective thrives in the adipose fat of a pudgy urban underbelly: its sins, vices, infidelity, pom trade, alcoholism and drug abuseand that just in the 1946 film version
of The Big Sleep.

Ii the cinematic Western's applicability to postmodern 21*' century life seems elusive to some writers, there is no such problem with film noir. Viewers and scholars interested in the singularities of American life find in noir deep and fertile ground: The legacy is far-reaching. In fact, noir, we argue, pairs nicely with geography as "a point of view: ... not the study of any particular set of things, but a particular way of studying anything,"in the wonderful phrasing of historical geographer D.W. Meinig, concerned a quartercentury ago about the meeting-place of history and geography (1978, 1186). The noir take on American lifeskeptical and grizzledturns out to have a far broader applicability as a mental toner in the dynamic tension that is American scholarship, and not just in regards to filmic treatments, as Manny Farber suggested. More deeply in film than any other artistic or commercial medium, vesfiges of environmental determinism survive. Film "sense of place," which so many of us cherish is, it turns out, a particularly penetrating marinade (Jameson 1970; Farber 1971; Tuan 1985). On film, character is assumed to be shaped by site, and when going from one place to another, a transformation is taken tacitly to occur in lock step; the film fade from diurnal light to dark heralds more than an arrival of nighttime; it is the close of time. Deciphering the exact mechanism by which people in films are inoculated with place, and judging if a director, a cinematographer, a screenwriter, or the production designer governs that act is a discussion for later day, but the mechanism is indisputably there, deus ex machina. Whether consideration is of the film Western or film noir, paradoxically two of the more cerebral film genres, the connection of character to space is overt (Kennedy and Lukinbeal 1997). Settings transform character, and rarely is choice involved; film is a deterministic medium, which gives a movie maker rare and exotic power. Forcibly garbed in the local coloration of environment, protagonists are shaded and shaped (Aitken 1991, 1992; Aitken

L.A. Noir 47 ar\d Bj0rklund 1988). A hero in a Western augured a spacious Tumerian opening-up, a vindication of a "new" Anierican personality and a blessing to the idea of the exceptional West. But for noir, dingy alleys and awful days and wicked dialogue and disconsolate weather all presumably added up to damp, if not dyspeptic, souls. Nor is timing left to chance; Western and noir storylines are set in quite specific, and presumably therefore telling, periods in American historythe Western well-aged, in the nostalgia-inducing pre-urban late 19* century; film noir during the decades preceding, during, and immediately after World War II. There is no refuge in the past for noir. Whether in its classic years, or as neo-noir in films released from the 1970s onward, film noir is taken to have a certain currency, its now-ness an ongoing criticism of the American mood (Tuan 1985; Lukinbeal and Kennedy 1993). That some of the greatest noir films were set in Los Angeles is no accident of Hollywood or its captive scriptwriters: Noir sears the complacency of a filmic industry grown lazy, and in such works as Sunset Boulevard, adds excoriation if not an actual exorcism (O'Brien 1981). The repetition of certain places (The Bradbury Building on South Broadway comes to mind, but other L.A. locales such as the concrete conduits of the Los Angeles River, or the dramatic 450 foot-tall 1928 City Hall building suggest themselves) boast an image legacy, a cinematic immediacy that goes way beyond their role in the real landscape (Lukinbeal 2004). A link joins the Western and film noir: They play out in decisive landscapes, and the singular space and light accorded each fikn form has a strong and instantly recognizable geography. The setting of the Western is open, expansive, uncluttered, even languorous, a Cormac McCarthy world, but film noir plays out in another domain where downtown or suburb, the villa or third-floor walkup, absorb and project an original menace; there, Los Angeles and its eternal suburbs come into their own. This switch-off is played against the spaciousness of the Western, with the contrast all the more sinister because the lead character is forced to make such changes, going from free rural soul to a creature stalking soiled city streets. In American history there remains a great deal of ambivalence about the move from a fundamentally rural society to an urban one, and the shift from cowboy to calloused detective follows upon that. Start with landscape and lead characternoir, especially on screen, works toward the strengths of film, the conveyance of an evolving society that foists unwanted change on the world around, alterations transforming the land and tormenting

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Journal of Cultural Geography

the victim. There is an undying complementarity between film noir as a genre^ and Los Angeles as the perfect locale for films in a quagmire of ambiguity and impermanence. This bond between genre and locale has survived classic noir, neo-noir, and now can be found in the schools of electric noir. Like an old married couple, noir evolves, Los Angeles changes, but the copasetic and elastic nature of their relationship endures.
CiTYSCAPES AS SETTINGS FOR FiLM NOIR

Among the consistent characteristics of film noir are the settings used for these story lines. Film noir is unabashedly an urban-based genre. Its setting is the city. Why? Because cities carry every ambiguity and contradiction needed to set a story line in motion. This is particularly true after 1945, reflecting concern with the massive urbanization seen in the United States after World War II, and especially in Southern California (Starr 1985; Starrs 1988). The ambiguous and contradictory nature of the urban environment has best been described as a labyrinth, where as New York author Nicholas Christopher puts it, "The city as labyrinth is key to entering the psychological and aesthetic framework of the film noir because it operates on three corresponding and interlocking levels" (1997,16-17). The city serves first as a physical maze of networks, roads, and buildings; it stands second as a metaphor for the human condition in which characters intersect and interact; third, a city reflects a hero's mental and psychological struggles (HiUis 2005). The city as labyrinth fulfills much the same role for an ambiguous hero in film noir as the wide-open spaces of the American West played for the cowboy of Westerns. Both offer a journey of transformation. Likewise, where the West was a soiled place, embodying great challenges and untested opportunities, the city of film noir
has a fundamental ambivalence, dangerous, violent, squalid, and corrupt, but also exciting and soptiisticated, the place of opportunity and conspicuous consumption. Films noirs present a city of contrasts stiarply divided by wealth. Noir protagonists may occupy dingy rooming-houses, grimy diners and rundown smoke-filled bars, but they are drawn to the world of smart moneyto bright garish nightclubs, spacious overdecorated luxury apartments and imposing mansionslike moths to a flame. (Spicer 2002, 67)

L.A. Noir

49

Cities exist, and never more blindingly so than Los Angeles, as a kind of maze or trap, truly a labyrinth. Industrial areas prevail; the typical American downtown is often nearer a strangling demise than any burbling economic life of "central business districts" and "peak value intersections," and "100% corners," where the rental values for all other urban properties are benchmarked. In classic noir, the city world is shrunk and even claustrophobic; only when the suburbs and hillside cottages are approachedor sometimes, with a gritty sense of warning, when the gated communities of country clubs and the great manses of the rich hie into viewis there any easing of a sense of being closed in. The city of noir is one of incomprehensible buildingsthe Bradbury Building, for example, in Blade Runner, where the genetic designer Sebastian resides, was earlier used by any number of directors as a macabre ironscaffold feature of chilling films.'^ A filmmaker's interpretation of places and times is communicated swiftly to an audience kept open to these interpretations because of the very nature of the film viewing experience. Though lauded abroad, film noir is an American urban-based genre, its classic period from the 1940s and 1950s. As such, particular cities are used over and over as setting for these films. The city most closely associated with the genre is Los Angeles. There is a reason for this.
Los ANGELES AS LABYRINTH

The key characteristic of film noir is ambiguity, especially in the triangular relationship between a male protagonist, a femme fatale, and a crime: ambiguous protagonists, ambiguous femmes, and ambiguous victims. The tie, therefore, between film noir and Los Angeles is ambiguity and the unsettled city; impermanence is much of what classic noir deplores. The rootless quality of the Southland population is an odd but enduring element in film noir, never more so than with Phillip Marlowe, who in Raymond Chandler's writings barely seems to have a permanent place of his ownhe is house sitting or in a strange breakfast nook, or about the orbit of his weathered office more often than not. The roster of locations covered in some seven novels is a goodly cross-section of Southland geography. The ambiguity in noir is there to be seencriminals who are not all bad, protagonists who are not all good, and damsels who are all at once vulnerable and predatory. Likewise, Los Angeles in the immediate post-War period is a city and culture marked by ambiguity, trying to find its identity as

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Journal of Cultural Geography

a symbol of a newly emerging American culture. On the one hand, L.A. reflected the wealth and vitality of post-World War II America and the creation of a suburban-based life style. Unlike the dominating skyscrapers of the eastern regions of the country, this new culture was embodied in expansion and sprawl into the desert. At the same time, it captured the fear and paranoia of Cold War confrontation and the knowledge that nuclear holocaust was a very real possibility. Los Angeles adds a horizontal dimension to film noir. In place of the looming monoliths and endless urban alleyways of the Eastern cityscape, there is a physical and moral sprawl, a chain of suburbs full of legal and illegal activities linked by wide boulevards and expressways. IRaymond] Chandler ... saw this and Imade his stories] set in Los Angeles, a series of journeys across a mythical landscape of darkened bungalows, decaying office buildings, and sinister nightspots. (Silver and Ward 1992, 33-34) Immediately following the War was a period of transformation for L.A., which experienced its growing pains in the context of a national culture subsumed in McCarthyism and the potential for nuclear holocaust. This context loomed. Numerous Hollywood filmmakers were under suspicion and many were blacklisted as a result of Congressional anti-communist hearings. The impact on Hollywood was devastating. As if the scrutiny of HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) were not reason enough for paranoia, labor strikes and Zoot Suit riots and aqueduct bombings were expressions of discontent, and nuclear testing occurred not all that far to the east of Hollywood in the Nevada desert near Las Vegas. What better place than L.A. as a locale for films steeped in fear and paranoia? The "L.A. School" of urban geography and regional planning makes much of the location of Los Angeles (idiosyncratically, rather than the Southland as a whole), and even more of its role as a kind of blueprint for urban-form evolution in the Sunbelt (the cooperators of the "School" are covered in Dear 2003). Los Angeles is taken to have replicated itself, in part, in Phoenix, and then reached its dismal pinnacle (disapproval is palpable in the words of critics) in Las Vegas, where the amorphous form is perfected. And the theme has been taken up by residents of the Southland who have some genuine literary and analytical skills, whether Carey McWilliams, in the populist 1920s to '50s, Reyner Banham in the decades to follow, or Mike Davis, from the '90s-onward. And this

L.A. Noir

51

sense of immediaq^and concomitant decaythat is so alive and well in Southern (California is the essential oil of Him noir, which captures like few other media the menace of developer mendacity, the falseness of a coastal desert turned garden-world become a megalopolis of twelve million souls. [Reyner Banham dubbed L.A.] "Anywheresville/Nowheresville." ... an apposite epitaph for the film noir cycle and its imbrication with the spaces of late modernity. ... Its optimism contrasts with the melancholy tenor of many films noir but might profitably be emulated when contemplating the challenges posed by inhabiting the spacesreal and virtualof the twenty-first century. (Dimendberg 2004, 258-259) Optimists see in the Southland an empire of airy light, its multiplicity of microclimates and no less diverse clans of settlers and landscape-users a tribute to variation in the forms, economies, residences, transit systems, and lives that humans manifest. But the darker world is more pertinent to noir, and that world sees the proliferation of people and problems as a toxic brew that guarantees discord and unease (Krutnik 1997, McArthur 1997). Not only are the pathologies of packed-in people savage enoughthink gated communities, racial strife, variform cults and religious sops, designed to allay unease and inspire calmthere too is the savagery of profit and disorder: hoodlums (Kiss Me Deadly, Pulp Fiction), pornographers (Big Sleep, L.A. Confidential, Chinatown), whores or pay-boys (Blade Runner, Big Sleep, L.A. Confidential), exotic sexual gratification (Big Sleep, Pulp Fiction), sleazy cityscapes, speculators and developers run amok (almost any of the films). The list of salacious, vicious, or ugly traits could go on. And there are, in turn, the most excellent kinds of cinematic reasons to capture all this, aside from the usual advantages of voyeurism. The noir grist fedand feedsthe cinematic mill, thanks partly to the glorious opportunities for set designers, FX coordinators, location scouts and car wranglers, all of which can make watching noir film an exotic (yet pleasing) event.
INTO THE BREACH: RAYMOND CHANDLER

Raymond Chandler is the patron saint synonymous with film noir, and for good reason.'' The former oil-business executive who started writing in his mid-40s was both fan and Hagellator of Los Angeles. Written references to the City of Angels were just partly ironic; his abiding love-hate relationship with L.A. extended through seven novels (Jameson 1970; Hiney 1997). All were turned

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Journal of Cultural Geography

into films (some more than once), an original screenplay (The Blue Dahlia), and co-scripted screenplays for Strangers on a Train and James M. Cain's novel. Double Indemnity. Chandler's fiction ably critiqued the Southland's social geography and evolving economic landscapes. Through surrogate Phillip Marlowe, Chandler evinced great pleasure in the workaday settings of the city, while savaging its privileged elites. His descriptions of country-club life, of sleazy pseudo-medical retreats snuggled in canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains, fifth-floor walkup offices, capture L.A. life like no other source, and do it without hobbling a plot. The net effect was intoxicating. Much of Chandler's work has been summed up, alas invoking a moronic simple-mindedness, as a kind of morality play about the virtuous working class, contrasted with a degenerate wealthy ruling-class population in Southern California 0ameson 1970; Davis 1990). The Sternwood clan of The Big Sleep, Chandler's first and perhaps best full-length novel, published in 1939 when he was 50 years old, are taken as examples. A considerable part of our enduring affection for the portraits of The Big Sleep are, in fact, owed to the electric Lauren Bacall performance with Humphrey Bogart in the 1946 film version; the novel of seven years earlier is far less cheerful but distinguished by plots and portraits too juicy for imitation. As a dysfunctional family, the Sternwoods effectively presage Roman Polanski and Robert Towne's acerbic CrossMulwray clan in Chinatown. Corruption runs deep for reasons as indecipherable as the tongs and triads of Chinatown. The family relations are pretty depraved, if never "pretty." There are critics who claim that, in Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels (and stories), nature is gilded and bastardized, converting Southern California into a working semblance of paradise. Those who claim otherwiselike Mike Davis, who also has denounced Chandler as a "conservative" deriding women, people of color, and any minorities (Davis 1990)seem to prefer their strokes sketched with fat crayon, rather than calligraphy. Chandler recognizes a Los Angeles that has been heightened, not dulled, by recent arrivals; he is attuned not to an assault upon the senses, in the style of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but instead Chandler favors the acuity of the replicant who sees things that mere humans miss. Philip Marlowe is Chandler's man on a mission; like other picaresque characters, Marlowe moves from one spot to another, with the life of the land revealed as he is slapped with emblematic events. For that we love Marlowe. His special bequest was wicked

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observation of the arduous social orders of the Southland, which contains among the most complex landscapes the world has generated. Beginning with landscape and lead character, noir plays best to the strengths of film, conveying a multi-sensual and evolving society that foists unwanted change on the world around, change that transforms the land and torments the soul. Whether screenwriter or an original novelist or writer (in the case of the stunningly productive Philip K. Dick) is better able to muster a story into film is always a great debate; the number of famous fictions writers and essayists who "went to Hollywood" to work surely can be counted in the thousands.
CLASSIC L.A.-BASED FILM NOIR

Of the numerous noir films set in L.A. during its classic period,^ three seem representative and useful for analyzing L.A.'s initial role in the genreThe Big Sleep (1946), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). Many believe The Big Sleep is the quintessential noir film, with characters that are prototypes for hundreds yet to follow. At least five famous actors would play private eye Phillip Marlowe;^ it is Humphrey Bogart who is most closely associated with the role and the type, with Betty Bacall the personification of the classic femme fatale.
THE BIG SLEEP

All the features we now associate with noir film are present in The Big Sleep. The exception is the absence of a voiceover. Although narration was used in many a noir film to help move along a storyline, there is none in The Big Sleep. But there is in the long hard-to-locate trailer, included on the DVD version of the film, in which Marlowe, browsing through a copy of Chandler's novel in the HoUjm^ood Public Library, sets the tone for this and for all film noir by reading a purported (though fake) passage from the book:
Sometimes I wonder what strange fate brought me out of the storm to that house that stood alone in the shadows. As I probed into its mysteries, every clue told me a different story, but each had the same endingmurder! {The Big Sleep 2000)

Storm, shadows, mysteries, clues, stories, murderall key film noir signaturesare evident throughout The Big Sleep. Much of the action takes place at night, or in the rain, or in the fog. Keep in mind how this mood stands in absolute contradiction to the prevailing

54 Journal of Cultural Geography impression of Los Angeles as someplace where it never rains, with sun that always shines. The film uses a combination of urban, but clearly not Eastern, cityscapes; the suburban (Geiger house), and even exurban settings (the gambling joint run by Eddie Mars) emphasize the sprawling, transforming nature of L.A. The dialogue is fast-paced, and you'd better pay attention; but even if you can't keep up with the storyline (and, don't worry, neither could the writers or directors, in numerous cases),^ it is character development, dialogue sizzUng with innuendo and accusation, and visual style that cany the day. Given mounting dead bodies, little actual violence is evident; there is such a difference from 1980s films that have anesthetized us to boatloads of blood and gore. Might The Big Sleep have been set anywhere? Possibly, but how easy it is to connect its storyline with Los Angeles during a particular period of American history. Although more hinted than hollered at, previously taboo subjects are addressed for one of the first times ever in American cinema: homosexuality, nymphomania, drug use, and several flavors of pornography. All were eye-openers in The Big Sleep. That director Howard Hawks (better known for his Westerns) was able to wriggle these past censors suggests the artistry with which they were brought to the screen. Yet filmgoers were ready to identify aberrant behaviors with Los Angeles. Parameters for L.A. noir were set.
SUNSET BOULEVARD

At mid-century, Brackettandwilder, a moruker given the screenwriting team of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, defied Hollywood tradition to produce a Him that for the first time exposed the seamy side of Hollywood, "their mordant elegy to the silent-picture era"Sunset Boulevard (Staggs 2002, 3). In direct defiance of a "gentleman's agreement" that Holljrwood should only be portrayed in film as a place full of hope, promise, glamour and wealth, this film examined the has-beens and hangers-on who populated the putative paradise on earth. L.A. is one thing, filmgoers easily connected L.A. and perversity; but to include Hollywood?say it ain't so. But it was so and, although the focus of Sunset Boulevard is on a trio of a washed-up silent era starlet, her director, and a clinging screenwriter, the characters represent all those who had made it, then been cast aside, or who had not and could never make it in the first place.

LA. Noir - 55 In part, this initial exposure to noir Hollywood helps explain why Sunset Boulevard is in the top five for any best of film noir list and tops the list at imdb.com. Sunset Boulevard is an extreme work, full of bile. It's as black as obsidian, and as lustrous ... A bitter comedy and a tragedy of absurd ambition, the Him is a vivisection of success and celebrity, of Hollywood, America and the world. Whatever the measure of that successsmall, medium, largein Sunset Boulevard it's shrouded in noir. (Staggs 2002, 17) The break with tradition begins with the opening voiceover, arguably the most "arresting" in all of film. Why? Simple; the voiceover is provided by the victim, Joe Gillis (William Holden) who has already been murdered. And the view of him spread eagle in Norma Desmond's swimming pool from the bottom of the pool initiates the journey through wealth, glamour, greed, decadence, and ultimately, murder. This movie is "a set of extremely complex flashbacks within flashbacks, evocative of the jumbled, or mosaic, nature of timeits passages and elongationsin large cities" (Christopher 1997, 10). Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It's about five o'clock in the morning. That's the homicide squad, complete with detectives and newspaper men. A murder has been reported from one of those great big houses in the ten thousand-block. You'll read about in the late editions, I'm sure. ... But before you hear it all distorted and blown out of proportion... maybe you'd like to hear the facts, the whole truth. If so, you've come to the right party. {Sunset Boulevard 1950) Sunset Boulevard is not about private dicks or cops. But it is about murder, about chasing success, and about discovering that depravity and thwarted ambition precedes the fall. Greed is never more pumped u p than when what is really desired is to be 22 feet tall on the silver screen.
KISS ME DEADLY

There is no argument about the origins of Kiss Me Deadly, a 1955 effort from Robert Aldrich so drenched in disdain for the arch-reactionary Mickey Spillane novel whose title it co-opts that the film instantly veers into unrecognizably shattered terrain. But the noir flavor is as crisp as scorched hardball chocolate, and Ralph Meeker's rendition of Spillane arch-dick Mike Hammer puts control squarely in the director's hands.

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Journal of Cultural Ceography

Elements and conventions are borrowed from earlier noir efforts, including a classic device in the MacGuffin, which Hammer dubs "The Great Whatzit," a block of radioactive something that at the end of the restored film fissionably obliterates fashionable Malibu, if not all of the American Southwest (Repo Man and Pulp Fiction would play with similar Hitchcockian devices years later, and to great Los Angeles effect). Among Aldrich's first acts upon gaining the movie rights to the dark Spillane novel was to shift the setting from New York to Los Angeles. Nothing seems righter. The supporting cast ranges from the sublime Velda, an ultimate take on the sexpot secretary who is sent out by her "boss," Mike, who she clearly adores, to compromise divorce clients, to the excellent mechanic Nick, whose "va-va-voom!" in the presence of Hammer's fine-wheeled convertible is a constant refrainuntil the hoods do Nick dead by dropping a car on him. "The jack slipped," Mike tells Velda; not likely, we know, because we have seen what happened. The poetic quality is no accident, in a film that actually quotes Dante Gabriel Rosetti's "Remember Me." That would have made Mickey Spillane throw up, but in this luscious black and white product, the poetic pretension seems as right as the opulent Los Angeles swimming pools and groomed yards and the palm-lined streets that Mike Hammer drives on his various rounds toward filmic doom. It is the hot wheels that Hammer drives, the poolside life of the molls and their hoodlum handlers, the street life and the quick routes to divorce, that are all about L.A., and which collectively dish out their noir with an unapologetic brightness that is all about the Southern California life. Though sun-drenched, this is an urbane and callous existence that is all darkness without light; little wonder that some have called this the initiation of "atomic noir." Yet the marvel is that it is such fun, that Hammer (even if he is likely obliterated at the end of the film) is having a ball, he has not relented, he is not about to stoop to guilt. His satisfactions are those of the suburbanizing Southlandcars and chicks and cads, copping attitude with corrosive pleasures. The tropes are an epic act of local experiential geography, like shooting three-dozen oysters, straight, and with nary a carbohydrate in sight.
NEO-NOIR L.A.

A national uncertainty, born of an unhealthy possibility of atomic apocalypse, generated plenty of dramas, ranging from sublime (Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove) to pretty awful {On the Beach or

L.A. Noir 57 Fail Safe come readily to mind, though other candidates are many). Kiss Me Deadly reiterated the nuclear threat, yet repudiated (by emetic example) the skittish paranoia of the 1950s and 1960s. And there would be a rebirth of paranoia in the mid-1970s, as a sense of American world control faded and the faces of diversity and local autonomy rose. After all, some of the principals of the paranoid '50s were still around: J. Edgar Hoover reigned as head G-man until his death in 1972; Dick Nixon lasted as President until impeachment in '74; Chief William Parker ran the L.A.P.D. with an iron fist from 1950 until 1966; the Vietnam War stretched on and on (and on); tensions with the Soviet Union and China fermented. It was a good time to be afraid, and not much was to be done about it. So we made films, and a couple of them, bookends of the neo-noir era, were among the very best: Chinatown and L,A, Confidential, each a pinnacle of noir mood, faced with squared shoulders.
CHINATOWN

Nearly 20 years after the end of the classic film noir period, screenwriter Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, and director Roman Polanski collaborated on Chinatown, a fresh slice of quintessential noir. The ties between Chinatown and The Big Sleep were not accidental. In creating the characters for the screenplay, Towne admitted that he started "with the Philip Marlowe prototype ... a tarnished knight" (Chinatown 1999). From the very start Towne visualized Jack Nicholson as the Philip Marlowe type for this story. Polanski explained that he approached directing the movie as "a story of a private eye in Marlowe's style," which needed to be shot with a radical subjectivity, "very much like Raymond Chandler's novels" (Chinatown 1999). Now in color, motifs and characters remain true in this recreation; the time frame is 1937, and explicitly involves events crucial to the transformation of Los Angeleswater theft and the political gobbling up of distant unincorporated areas. It is the growth and development of L.A. that provides the context for murder and mystery, the settings urban, suburban, exurban. Like many noir predecessors, Chinatown deals with unambiguously aberrant behavior, rape and incest being most prominentalmost a dark-hearted primer for The Aristocrats, from Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza (2005). No one forgets the haunting words of Evelyn Cross Mulwray (Faye Dunaway): "She's my sister ... she's my daughter; my sister; my daughter. She's my sister AND my

58 Journal of Cultural Geography daughter" {Chinatown 1999). The line goes anything but softly into the night. Chinatown recreates the mood and style of Him noir at its finest. Ambiguous characters, intricate storylines, plot twists meant to surprise the characters, not the audience, and the effective use of darkness and shadow. In the finest noir tradition, key scenes take place at nightthe discovery of water diversion and the concluding scene in Chinatown. The film communicates the sunny L.A. obliviousness to history, but at the same time captures perfectly a sense of history and corruption for the film's modern viewers we recognize the allusions to historical events, even if the characters then and there have seemingly no sense that they are participating in something exceptionalsave for one person: HoUis Mulwray, who 10 minutes into the film is dead by drowning. There are great cryptic themes, and the plot is nothing easy to absorb, at first watching; Chinatown itself is only mentioned four times in the film, and only the concluding events take place there; but its psychological weight hangs over an entire film until at last the story comes to its dramatic conclusion in Chinatown: as enigmatic as "Rosebud." Mention of Chinatown alludes to a whole side of Los Angeles society that is unknowable to the official city (which Farish misses (2005)), someplace that lies outside the law, and irretrievably so. The remoteness carries with it just the range of connotations we associate with film noir. Other sides of Chinatown capture a sinister geography. The director Roman Polanski uses casual brutality with elan; the knife to the nose of Jake Gittes 0ack Nicholson) is, after all, wielded by none other than Polanski himself, in a cameo no less savage for being short. Los Angeles is caught at a transition: Jake Gittes drives his car through the orange groves, but the workers, in 1937, are on foot or horseback. After a hundred years as an empire of agricultural colonies and genteel orange growing (so did Anaheim, Pasadena, and Riverside originate), the Southland's population is set to explode, facing an economic onslaught of World War II and the return of suburb-hungry troops. Power brokers like Noah Cross (whose name is nothing if not meaningful, especially with John Huston playing as the personification of charismatic evil) have supreme power over the form and development of the shape of the Southland., and even government officials such as Hollis Mulwray (a fictional stand-in for L.A. Department of Water & Power chief engineer William Mulholland) are essentially marionettes. This was the first peak of water-and-power authority in Southern CaUfomia,

LA. Noir 59

as visionaries in the years just before World War II recognized the boom that would come after. They banked on building, and their vision proved exactly on the mark. Within eight years, the tide would tum, though, and the sheer populist weight of inflowing suburbanites would convert Southern California from an agricultural paradise into the wealth-making metropolis that Cross, and his Albacore Club cronies, imagined. It was a time to mint money.
L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

In 1997, we jump-shift back to Los Angeles of the 1950s in L.A. Confidential, based on the novel by James Ellroy. Dismissing the classic noir visual techniques of darkness and shadow, director Curtis Hanson strives to create "a naturalistic look, where the audience would understand where the lighting comes from in every scene" allowing the characters always to be the focus of every scene. Forty-five different locations were used for filming. And, although L.A. Confidential is meant to be a period and location piece, Hanson sought and found "locations that would not call attention to themselves." He "wanted the movie to feel ordinary, casual in its look" {L.A. Confidential 1997). The other obvious twist is that the cops themselves, not private eyes, are the protagonists; but, true to form, like their private eye predecessors, they are cast ambiguously. All three main characters Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey); Ed Exley (Guy Pearce); and Bud White (Russell Crowe)remind us of the Marlowe-style tarnished knight, each going through his own personal transformation over the course of the story. Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger) portrays a prostitute who physically imitates the classic femme fatale, Veronica Lake, but she plays the part with all the spirit and verve of a Lauren Bacall or a Faye Dunaway. And in fact, Basinger handled the role so well that her acting earned her an Academy Award. Whereas Chinatown is about turning the desert into dreams, in L.A. Confidential dreams take a twisted tum, this time in the form of hookers made up to resemble Hollywood starlets who, with the allure of Hollywood, provide plot movement. The growth and development of post-War L.A., however, is not totally ignored. We witness the ground breaking for the Santa Monica Freeway. The simple conclave of city officials at the ceremony imputes ties between growth and progress and an essential and pervasive criminal corruption of L.A. In the scene is a city councilman, a regular client of Lynn Bracken, who is one of Pierce Morehouse

60

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Patchett's stable of Hollywood starlet look-alike prostitutes. With his eerily Nixonian three-part name, Patchett is unsurprisingly further enmeshed in drugs and nefarious activities. In classic noir style, L.A. Confidential employs the voiceover to move the storyline along, but, unlike the norm, it is not a main character that provides the explanations. Instead, the tabloid reporter Sid Hutchins, played as a sleazemonger by Danny DeVito, implores us: Come to Los Angeles. There are jobs aplenty and land is cheap. Life is good in Los Angeles. It's paradise on earth,... but there's trouble in paradise ... the head of organized crime in these parts ... runs dope, rackets, and prostitution. How can organized crime exist in the city with the best police force in
the world? {L.A. Confidential 1997)

In these opening lines, Sid captures the essence of post-War L.A.'s ambiguityparadise with a seamy side. The best and the worst of American society brought together in this most enigmatic of American places. But it is not just organized crime that provides the dark side of L.A. Again, we get to connect Los Angeles with aberrant behaviorwife beating, child abuse, rape, and drug use; and, of course, now we have crooked cops. L.A. Confidential also underscores the increase in the amount of violence shown on the screen in these kinds of films as we have progressed from noir to neo-noir. Movies focused on murder, of course, always include the presence of violence. But in the classic period, as in the case of The Big Sleep, the actual blood and gore are kept to a mirun\um. Although more prominent in Chinatown (many people still have a hard time watching Roman Polanski slit Jack Nicholson's nose), it is still relatively mild. In L.A. Confidential, however, the level of on-screen violence increases dramatically in both the amount of violence and the graphic nature of its depiction.
THE SCHOOLS OF ELECTRIC NOIR

By the late 1980s, a recrudescence was at hand that favored a new, amped-up variant of noir. While L.A. detective fiction of the 1970s and later was rarely right for conversion to film, there were a few pleasant surprises. The two most gifted films to appear took dry-eyed looks at society far beyond the somewhat tedious banalities of the Nixon erathey were screaming line drives of originality, if still somehow tied to an enduring and evolving genre. Blade Runner came out of a gothic demimonde of science fiction in

LA. Noir 61

the writing of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson. But in fact, the Ridley Scott-directed film actually spun from perhaps the very progenitor of cyberpunk, the inimitable Philip K. Dick. A somewhat skewed paid-by-the-word sci-fi writer, Dick's stories and novels have generated at least seven major films so far, and the residual work, despite his death in 1982, will undoubtedly fuel more. The electrodes had been applied to electric noir, and a beast was rising. Its fullest form to date is Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, a work so acclaimed, and so hysterically original that it proved postmodernism could actually be fun on film.
BLADE RUNNER

In an early moment of Blade Runner an air car scoots by, pointed at a vast pyramid, one that looks slightly ... wrong. As the obelisk swiftly swells the foreground with tinkling music, there is a sense that this ride is going to be off-kilter. The great building, headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, an interplanetary genetic engineering firm that first and foremost builds androids destined, like much of the Earth's population, to go to the "off-world colonies," is also surrounded by gas fiaming off of a vast system of pipes, and day never seems to come. The unearthly Vangelis orchestration swells, and Los Angeles of the near future is at hand. Just how science fiction can also be film noir catches the edge of our larger argument that noir, like geography itself, is complex and skeptical. Director Ridley Scott put Blade Runner together from a variety of sources, but first and foremost from a novella. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? written by Philip K. Dick. And the Beat novelist William Burroughs is alleged to have had a hand in an early script (Klein 1997). Everything not neon on screen in Blade Runner is black; the brief glimpse of blue sky, just once seen, is shocking, as a dove fiies away from android Roy Batty, after almost two hours watching a drenched Los Angeles thronged with crowds speaking impenetrable dialect. The only woman we meet who is not an android in Blade Runner has a scanning electron microscope on standby at a noodle counter, and when she explains to Deckard what he has, it is not in the Cantonese or Hakka that we might expect, from seeing her, but instead spoken in a perfectly cultivated Queen's English. The internationalization of Southern California is done. Ablebodied English speakers have gone off-world, answering a clarioncall of great advertising blimps ceaselessly circling night-dark skies. The atmospherics deepen as the former blade runner Rick Deckard,

62 Journal of Cultural Ceography

whose once and future job calls for "retirement" of any android who returns to earth, lounges in a sea of lower-class humanity, in a scene still delectably reminiscent of contemporary Los Angeles the White Dragon noodle restaurant where Deckard eats is a conscious straight lift from the White Castle hamburger joints of past fame (Sammon 1996). When Deckard is accosted by blade rurmer Gaff (Edward Olmos), Gaff speaks to him in a dense patois that David Peoples, one of the screenwriters, calls gutter-talk or Cityspeaka heady brew of Japanese, Hungarian, French, Spanish, Tagalog, Cantonese, slushed together and cut with menace (Sammon 1996). The language, even of cops, has shifted to a lingua franca. By then, a noir die is cast, and after an aerial tour (traveling surface streets for any distance would be impossible, as a later chase scene where Deckard kills the first female "replicant" makes clear), the blade runners arrive at police headquarters, which turns out to be Union Station in Los Angeles. What in American life is so retro as a train station? What is evoked is a time when men wore hats, elegant women modeled clothing seemingly designed from great pyramids that emphasize square shoulders and wasp waists, and the rain falls forever, quenching open fires, any social life, and hope (Harvey 1990). The beginning of Blade Runner, especially in Ridley Scott's refabricated "director's cut," clearly sets a mood to last an entire picture. Noir is like that, but few actions over the course of 116 minutes of film depart from a noir sensibility. Most instead reinforceDeckard "retires" a replicant woman by shooting her twice in the back as she crashes through a plate glass window; we have a "father-killing" in which android Roy Batty slays his creator. Dr. Tyrell, by crushing his skull through the eyes; and end in an astounding scene where Roy first saves Deckard, who has been trying to kill him for the last 30 minutes, then offers a soliloquy: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost ..." and expires. The philosophical questions are obvious; evident even in the original Philip K. Dick novel: If robotic constructs are indistinguishable from us, how are they not human?
PULP FICTION

In 1994 when Quentin Tarantino released Pulp Fiction he jumpstarted an entire cinematic debate. While it is true that a whole class

L.A. Noir

. 63

of film directors of the past have been avid students of Him history, and that many of the most memorable films have for decades drawn on extensive "quoting" of work by past directors whose work the incumbent admires, there is no doubt that Tarantino ratchets his admiration for a variety of popular culture to a previously unattained height. His use of Him is neither polite nor deferential (Kirsch 2002); he is not Tmffaut or Spielberg, who rely on sly or cute borrowings from great works. Part of this has to do with the peculiar chemistry of Tarantino's visual diet: His kinkiest love is for the explosion of popular culture, world adventure Him, blunt soundtracks, and antic "B" or "C"-grade pulp that count, in fact, for the vast majority of what the world actually sees and hears on screen, whether the source is cinema or television. Reservoir Dogs had its moments; Jackie Brown perhaps fewer still (though a great soundtrack). But with Pulp Fiction, and now the Kill Bill tandem, it is clear that Tarantino is an ascended master of neo-pulp. A litmus test for L.A. noir is a simple question: Is it even conceivable that a given Him could have been set or made anyplace else? The road scenes, the travel, the suburbs, the sidewalks have an unmistakable signature. Tarantino's Los Angeles is a gritty roadtown of indissoluble delight, his principals are exactly the sort of down-and-outers who Hourish in the classic noirs of yore, the scrambling of time that so lends fame and vividness to Tarantino's effort adds for any audience a degree of chaos and confusion (guaranteed ... ) that is difHcult to sort out. From physique to economy, labor to lust, security bars to diner decor, what you see is what you get; his L.A. is a bit biased toward the louche, but that turns out to be as right as Tom Waits looks, once you have heard one of his songs. It is mastery, is what it is. Pulp Fiction is about revenge, honor, a watch with a nasty history, a ridiculous diner knock-over, a has-been who will not stay bought, one mysterious but wonderful clean-up man, a great MacGufHn (whatever is in the briefcase, like the radioactive contents of the chest in Kiss Me Deadly), and messy accidents. To describe the plot in anything approaching a straight timeline is a disservice, because Tarantino's main emphasis is on life itself, the cascade of chance, good planning, bad planning, and happenstance that afHicts most urban residents. Somehow most effective is the casual juxtaposition of good, bad, and ugly, a tradeoff that is remarkably normal in life. Much of Tarantino's charm is dealing with the mundane, instead of following an elite Hhnmaker's

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predilection for toney plots and high drama. Admittedly, some of Pulp Fiction's thrills are cheap: We move from Amanda Plummer's loving "Honey-bunny" kiss to witness, with a whirl of motion worthy of Chow Yun-Fat in The Replacement Killers, a brace of guns drawn and an explosion of obscenity which suggests that brunch in an L.A. diner is an event always subject to interruption. More palatable is the shift from retro dancing in the pseudo-'50s diner to the wicked things that imagination does, as we consider just who "Marsellus" might be, and what he might look like, and when Vincent (John Travolta) has to plunge a cardiac needle into the heart of his "date," and realize Marsellus' wife has just nodded over to the other world, we are all apt to sit upright with Mia (Uma Thurman) as the adrenaline does its stuff. But Pulp Fiction also succeeds where it needs to, in its relationship to the city and its parts. Driving, walking sidewalks and hallways, visiting the San Fernando Valley to clean up after the accidental shooting, offer glimmers of classic noir: JULES (Samuel L. Jackson): Oh man, I will never forgive yo' ass for this. This is some fucked-up, repugnant shit. VINCENT (fohn Travolta): Jules, did you ever hear the philosophy that once a man admits he's wrong, then he's automatically forgiven of that wrongdoing? JULES: Man, get out of my face with that shit. The motherfucker who said that never had to pick up itty-bitty pieces of skull on account of your dumb ass. {Pulp Fiction 1994) The dialogue may be considerably bluer than in the days of Bogart, Bacall, Swanson, Holden, or the stalwart Ralph Meeker, but the sentiment is no less heart-felt and evocative. And there is no telling what Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, or Robert Aldrich would have done with all the fetters of censorship removed. Tarantino is working for a sense of the city, especially its wildly diverse character and the constant compromises a place makes to accommodate its residents. Bruce Willis' Butch Coolidge plays the punchy boxer to the hilt, his girlfriend barely able to navigate broken FngUsh, the world of Los Angeles not just glaring open streets, but also the playground of degenerate sodomite thugs (the verb form "to get medieval" will never seem quite so apropos). For all the implication of violence, there is little actually seen on the screen; it is the reaction of witnesses, the shock and horror of bearing witness, that catch our attention.^

L.A. Noir NOIR GEOGRAPHY IN LOS ANGELES

65

What noir filmmakers consistently cherish is an environment, a skepticism about any innate virtue in human endeavors, and a certain raw enthusiasm for what Raymond Chandler, after all, called the "mean streets" of Los Angeles, in what is surely one of the enduring phrases to enter world consciousness through cinema. That was to appear, notably, not in one of his fictions, but in the Chandler essay that begins The Simple Art of Murder. In it he caught a great wave of Southland fraternity: "down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. ... The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth" (Chandler 1950, 18). Little wonder that Martin Scorsese would use Mean Streets as the title of his first big film. Part of the American dream and nightmare at the same time, Los Angeles of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s is the perfect setting for films steeped in experiential ambiguity. That is why it served and continues to serve as the fitting locale for movies following in the tradition of classic film noir. A concept of filmicand human space is developed in L.A. film noir. The vision captures the pathologies of living in increasingly close confines, with an environment perhaps as much mythologized as paradise slipping away from the middle and lower class and leaving behind a collection of entirely normal afflictions and social relations. The paving of paradise is more than a Joni Mitchell verse; it is the forlorn love song of the Southland. Such change and concern with urban evolution were themes of Chandler and the hard-boiled detective novel authors. But in the actual making of L.A. noir movies, with opportunities abundant to sample multiple dimensions and bring sound and (imagined) taste and great visuals and torrid dialogue to the screen, films noir gained immediacy and a broader social critique was both possible and, in short order, made fiesh.
NOTES

1. Experts categorize film noir in remarkably diverse ways, but in each case, they focus on visual techniques and narrative structures. The fundamentals are a feel, a critique, and an approach. However defined, in film noir a body of films taking a common stylistic approach, with recurrent patterns and character emotions, features repeatedly suggestive of alienation and obsession, and with the absorption of ambiance into

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Journal of Cultural Geography

skin and soul. For detailed bibliographies and arguments about the nature of film noir, see: Silver and Ward 1992; Borde and Chaumeton 1996; Naremore 1998; Hirsch 1999; Minturn 1999; and Spicer 2002. 2. The Bradbury building, at 304 South Broadway, houses the Los Angeles Police Department's Internal Affairs Division on two upper floors of the 1893 building, the oldest in the downtown heart of Los Angeles. It has been a source of some cinematic amazement with appearances in better than 15 movie credits, including appearances in D.O.A. (1950), in the 1951 Joseph Losey (dir.) American remake of Fritz Lang's M, and in the forgettable James Gamer portrayal of Chandler's detective in Marlowe (1969). The Bradbury also featuresif brieflyin Chinatown, according to the imdb.com Web site. 3. For a detailed study of Chandler's role in film noir, see Gene D.
Phillips, Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film

Noir (2000); the slightly earlier biographical treatment of Tom Hiney (1997) is quite good; and the photographic coverage, after the fact, in Ward and Silver (1987) is evocative. 4. It is often difficult to determine filming locations for films especially less popular films not readily available on VHS or DVD; as well, often films shot in L.A. are supposed to take place somewhere else. The number of noir films set in L.A. during the classic period ranges somewhere from 60 to 100 films. Calling it a quarter of the total ought to be about right. 5. Humphrey Bogart would be followed in the role of Philip Marlowe by Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, George Montgomery, Elliot Gould, James Gamer, and Robert Mitchum. 6. As legend has it, during the filming of The Big Sleep, when director Howard Hawks was asked who killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor, he had to admit he did not know, so he asked William Faulkner, who had written the screenplay. Faulkner was also at a loss as to Owen's murderer, so they wired Chandler himself, who admitted that by this time he had forgotten. For this anecdote and a detailed description of the filming of The Big Sleep, see chapter 4, "Knight Moves: Two Films of The Big Sleep," in Creatures of the Darkness (Phillips 2000, 48-72). 7. Los Angeles is still capable of generating surprise. There is the skeptical affection of artists such as Ry Cooder, in Chavez Ravine, or the apparent dislike of Mike Davis in his several L.A.-based books, which nonetheless eamed him a well-deserved MacArthur Award. The new Frank Gehry-designed metal-clad Walt Disney Concert Hall in the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles actually proved so bright that reflected sun was changing climate in the immediate vicinity. An astounding entente between the L.A.P.D. and housing activists has homeless residents hiding in back-alleys along downtown streets and emerging at 5 p.m. with a huge tent city established along city sidewalksa sight guaranteed to startle conventioneers in the downtown, which is otherwise

L.A. Noir 67 essentially deserted at dusk when office workers depart. The contrasts are illuminating.
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68 Journal of Cultural Geography Jameson, Frederic. 1970. On Raymond Chandler. Southern Review 6(3): 624-^50. Kennedy, Christina, and Christopher Lukinbeal. 1997. Towards a Holistic Approach to Geographic Research on Film. Progress in Human Geography 21(1): 33-50. Kirsch, Scott. 2002. Spectacular Violence, Hjq^er-Geography, and the Question of Alienation in Pulp Fiction. In Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity, edited by T. Cresswell and D. Dixon, 3 2 ^ 6 . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Klein, Norman M. 1997. Building Blade Runner. In The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, 94-101. New York: Verso. Krutnik, Frank. 1997. Something More than Night: Tales of the Noir City. In The Cinematic City, edited by D. Clarke, 83-109. London: Routledge. Lukinbeal, Christopher. 2004. The Rise of Regional Film Production Centers in North America, 1984-1997. Geojournal 59(4): 307-321. Lukinbeal, Christopher, and Christina Kennedy. 1993. Dick Tracj^s Cityscape. Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Vol. 55, edited by D. E. Turbeville, III, 76-96. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. McArthur, CoHn. 1997. Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City. In The Cinematic City, edited by D. Clarke, 19-45. London: Routledge. McWilliams, Carey. 1946. Southern California: An Island upon the Land. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearee. Meinig, Donald W. 1978. The Continuous Shaping of America: A Prospectus for Geographers and Historians. The American Historical Review 83(3): 1186-1205. Minturn, Kent. 1999. Peinture Noire: Abstract Expressionism and Film Noir. In Film Noir Reader 2, edited by A. Silver and J. Ursiru, 271-309. New York: Limelight Editions. Morgan, Neil B. 1963. Westward Tilt: The American West Today. New York: Random House. Naremore, James. 1998. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press. O'Brien, Geoffrey. 1981. Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold. Phillips, Gene D. 2000. Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. Sackman, Douglas Cazaux. 2005. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sammon, Paul M. 1996. Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. New York: HarperPrism.

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Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, eds. 1992. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, S " " " * ed. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press. Spicer, Andrew^. 2002. Film Noir. Harlow, England: Longman/Pearson Education. Springer, John Parris. 2000. From Tinseltown to Suckerville: Hollywood Crime Novels of the Thirties and Forties. In Hollywood Fictions: The Dream Factory in American Popular Literature, 218-260. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Staggs, Sam. 2002. Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream. New York: St. Martin's Griffin. Starr, Kevin. 1985. Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press. Starrs, Paul F. 1988. The Navel of California and Other Oranges: Images of California and the Orange Crate. The California Geographer 28: 1-42. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1985. The Landscapes of Sherlock Hoknes. Journal of Geography 84(2): 56-60. Ward, Elizabeth, and Alain Silver. 1987. Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles: A Photographic Odyssey Accompanied by Passages from Chandler's Greatest

Works. New York: The Overlook Press. Gary J. Hausladen and Paul F. Starrs are Professors of Geography at the University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557.