Dan Flory

The Edges of Noir

WHAT CAN SPAM TELL US ABOUT CLASSICAL AMERICAN FILM NOIR? ACCORDING TO Paula Rabinowitz, a great deal. In her astute analysis of American Dream (1990), Barbara Kopple’s documentary about the failed strike against the meat manufacturer Hormel, Rabinowitz argues that the politics and sentimentality that emerged over Spam in that film illustrate once again the bankruptcy and unsustainability of the traditional American dream. Accompanying the demise of that dream is the insight that classical noir films also operated against a backdrop of “modern economic relations and their melodramatic stagings,” in particular the ways in which traditional men’s labor and the left’s hopes for it were mediated through the conventions of melodrama (141). Serving as “cynical antidotes” to this saccharine presentation, classical film noir nonetheless derived much of its power by playing off these aspects of America’s best picture of itself, this dream of what the nation could be if only certain ideals were blended into the so-called melting pot. Thus Spam’s salty mystery reveals by contrast the syrupy preconditions of noir’s bitterness. This interplay between classical film noir and the politics of U.S. history appears at the heart of Rabinowitz’s new book, and she derives insights such as the one just described by