America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture

by Erik Dussere

America is Elsewhere provides a rigorous and creative reconsideration of hard-boiled crime fiction and the film noir tradition within three related postwar contexts: 1) the rise of the consumer republic in the United States after World War II 2) the challenge to traditional notions of masculinity posed by a new form of citizenship based in consumption, and 3) the simultaneous creation of "authenticity effects" -- representational strategies designed to safeguard an image of both the American male and America itself outside of and in opposition to the increasingly omnipresent marketplace. Films like Double Indemnity, Ace in the Hole, and Kiss Me Deadly alongside novels by Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler provide rich examples for the first half of the study. The second is largely devoted to works less commonly understood in relation to the hard-boiled and noir canon. Examinations of the conspiracy films from the Seventies and Eighties -- like Klute and The Parallax View -- novels by Thomas Pynchon, Chester Himes and William Gibson reveal the persistence and evolution of these authenticity effects across the second half of the American twentieth century.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an amazingly ambitious book as Dusserre attempts to create a lineage of Noir->Conspiracy->Counterculture->Cyberpunk as the postmodern corporate-consumerism culture overwhelms the individual's (Chandler's detective-hero) ability to create authentic opposition. We have extended analyses of The Long Goodbye and The Big Clock and The Parallax View, and then Pynchon and William Gibson and the Coen Brothers' The Hudsucker Proxy.

After reading the 48 page introductory section that establishes and argues the premise - Noir is a critique of America's inauthentic consumer culture - you question whether you need to read the rest of the book because this introductory chapter is quite repetitive in that it keeps making the same argument over in different ways, but the rest of the book has all of the detailed analyses and side arguments and is well worth the follow through.

[Cindy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This scholarly work takes some time to read, but it does tell you more about "noir" than you might want to know and its following genres -- conspiracy plots, postmodern, etc. The "authentic" in American culture is only defined by not being something. Consumerism may be a great evil and may be not if looked at a certain way. If I write more, I'll just confuse you more, so read the book.