‘In his pitch blackness’, Mike Davis wrote of Ellroy in 1992, ‘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’. Yet this very desensitization serves a function for capitalist realism: Davis hypothesized that ‘the role of L.A. noir’ may have been ‘to endorse the emergence of homo reaganus’.
