Ken Hillis

Film Noir and the American Dream: The Dark Side of Enlightenment

his essay argues that light in post–World War II American films noir is not only an aesthetic feature but a thematic and ideological one as well. These films use Enlightenment conceptions of light to explore postwar subjectivity in ambivalent and contradictory ways. I proceed from an understanding of film noir as an historical movement and argue that noir protagonists in films such as Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944), Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945), The Dark Corner (Hathaway, 1946), D.O.A. (Maté, 1950), The Big Heat (Lang, 1953), and The Big Combo (Lewis, 1955) reflect an existential, often despairing, awareness of the impossibility of their own enlightenment and, by extension, of ever realizing the American Dream.1 This journal issue focuses on media interrogation of the construction of identity within and beyond national boundaries, and the cycle of films now identified as film noir is central to understanding the formulations of postwar American identity and its relationship to the meaning of citizenship. For late 1940s and early 1950s audiences, noir protagonists—however personally to blame for lack of enlightenment they may be depicted as being within any one film’s diegesis— update the Nietzschean tragic hero: a suffering and reluctantly cosmopolitan figure cast into a dark world of eternal recurrence and from whose performance geographically uprooted and socially buffeted audiences might derive a modicum of ambivalent pleasure through identification. Audiences have the opportunity to sympathize with noir’s failed protagonists and so-called femmes fatales because, in terms of the structure of order, disorder, order that organizes the narrative of so many of these films, during the “disordered” middle Film Noir and the American Dream: The Dark Side of Enlightenment

Building the Cartesian Enlightenment

The built form of the Los Angeles region manifests key ideals first cultivated within what Habermas refers to as the Enlightenment bourgeois public sphere. In its use of space and communication technologies, LA is an unanticipated monument to those eighteenth‐century Cartesian theories and practices that conceive of subjectivity and space as infinite, promote their mutual division, and encourage the modern subject to imagine itself as conceptually disembodied. Once conceptually disembodied, this subject comes to increasingly rely on practices of representation for communicating itself and its ideas to others. These practices begin with printed texts and now center on electronic networks. I historicize the connections between the LA region’s vast geography and the ideology of early boosters such as interurban railroad magnate, Henry Huntington, who, in 1912, proclaimed that the city could ‘extend in any direction as far as you like’. The intersection of geography and boosterism in LA would necessitate ever greater reliance on transportation and communication technologies. These technologies would be used by conceptually disembodied subjects to strive toward the individualist ideal of a private place in the sun organized according to an idea of nature reduced to ‘real estate’. I theorize both the conception of homelessness and its material reality in the city of angels in order to illustrate how privatizing Enlightenment ideals have been put into everyday practice in Los Angeles. I also examine homelessness as a means to better understand how space and subjectivity are linked in contemporary urban ideologies. In so doing, I probe the relationship between mobile bourgeois subjects organized according to the logics of representation and how publicly homeless bodies seem to ‘talk back’ to and refute the logic of these subjects.

A Space for the Trace Memorable eBay and Narrative Effect

eBay the firm and eBay as a set of everyday cultural practices together arise at a time of material excess combined with an intensified exteriorization of memory processes onto digital media devices. Exchange and use values on eBay are negotiated through elaborate, at times sensational, narrative histories contextualizing the objects past, ambiguous images, and fetishized practices. Individuals may pay a premium for a sense of imagined experience “exchanged” through buyers and sellers and other browsers through these narratives prior to the actual sale of any object. The indexicality of eBay—the sense that one is able somehow to experience a trace of the object or, just as important, its seller through online media—works to suggest that authenticity is transferable, an exchange value available to the highest bidder. The growing belief that Web sites such as eBay constitute the equivalent of material space contributes to this perception.

From description to depiction: free indirect discourse and online graphical chat

Iconographic avatars in web-based graphical chat environments work to create a ‘shattered’ sense of self through the use of emblematics (the bringing together of text and image) coupled with a reformulated use of free indirect discourse, a style of indirect address found in the modern bourgeois novel. Free indirect discourse, or ‘middle voice’, is crafted by the novelist but takes on the characteristics of the person described, even as the difference between novelist and character creates an ironic distance directed at both the character and the reader who may be encouraged by the style to identify with the character. Avatar-driven graphical chat suggests a synthesis of the value of an avatar external to oneself and that of the ironic distance provided by free indirect discourse. The ‘middle ground’ of iconographic graphical chat environments exemplifies how images reformulate and seemingly mitigate the tensions inherent in text-based free indirect discourse – with its suggestion of ‘experience without a subject’ – to create greater ambiguity, irony and abstraction of the self and others. This mirrors how various forces of global capital work to reformulate the subject.

From Webcams to Facebook: Gay/Queer Men and the Performance of Situatedness-in-Displacement

MIT’s August 2012 issue of Technology Review presents a snapshot of an important aspect of the contemporary zeitgeist: the sense of dis-ease engendered by the rapid rise of information technologies and the social changes that have accompanied their deployment, coupled to relentless hype that we must embrace these same technologies as progress incarnate even as we wait impatiently for their next iteration and further development. The magazine’s cover, a remix of the publicity poster for the film The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 examination of Facebook’s early years, features a close-up head shot of founder Mark Zuckerberg staring directly into the reader’s eyes. WHAT FACEBOOK KNOWS is emblazoned across his face, and immediately beneath: “It has collected more personal data than any other organization in human history. What will it do with that information?” A boxed section on the cover’s upper right corner lists more of the issue’s content. The first title promises to answer “Why you will wear Google Goggles.” These titles pivot between the present and the future—what Facebook knows now and why augmented reality as offered by Google, coming soon, will be irresistible. Their juxtaposition points to and is part of the dis-ease—can Facebook be trusted with this much power?—and the hype—you must have it!—on display throughout much of contemporary culture.

So Near, So Far, and Both at Once: Telefetishism and Performing Identities in Web Technologies

In a short period of time, considerable cultural capital has been invested in the on-line practices of digital information technologies support. The hype surrounding these technologies positions them as a break with the past, but web technologies draw from a long history of naturalized yet contradictory desires, theories and ideologies about vision and sight: age-old metaphysical desires expressed in the belief that images allow access to ‘direct unmediated perception’ and therefore might allow us to ‘see what we mean,’ empiricist epistemologies that confer on sight primacy among the senses, and more recent cultural instruction that encourages people to identify both with and as commodities and images. These understandings, together with a related and accelerating shift towards an ‘image culture’ supported by digital information technologies, have significant implications for how subjectivity and self identity are reconceptualized and practiced. How some English speaking, first world gay men—‘digital queers’—negotiate these technologies in producing fetishes as new forms of personal identity grounds this essay’s inquiry into the relationships among fetishism, interactive visual technologies and the ways these are used in performing and negotiating identity claims on-line. Though these men’s stated intentions may be pleasure, distraction, and communication across distance, they are also developing new forms of mediated social relations important to interrogate as models and cautionaries in an increasingly ‘wired’ and ‘wireless’ world made possible by information technologies that are equated with proof that the progress myth remains true.