SU N SH IN E

OR

NOIR?

In their hands, film noir sometimes approached a kind of Marxist cinema manqu, a shrewdly oblique strategy for an otherwise subversive realism.44 After the first adaptations of Cain and Chandler, film noir began to exploit Los Angeles settings in new ways. Geographically, it shifted increasingly from the Cainian bungalows and suburbs to the epic dereliction of Downtowns Bunker Hill, which symbolized the rot in the heart of the expanding metropolis.45 Sociologically, 1940s noir was more typically concerned with gangster underclasses and official corruption than with the pathology of the middle class; politically, the implicit obsession with the fate of the petty producer was supplanted by representations of political re action and social polarization. Of course, film noir remained an ideologically ambiguous aesthetic that could be manipulated in dramatically different ways. Thus Howard Hawks chose to flatten the deep shadows of The Big Sleep (Chandlers most anti-rich novel) into an erotic ambience for Bogart and Bacall, while the more toughminded Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott (both future members of the Hollywood Ten) evoked premonitions of fascism and brainwashing in their version of Farewell My Lovely (Murder, My Sweet). The experiments of film noir were mirrored by new directions in hardboiled Los Angeles writing during the 1940s. John Fante, who together with Adamic and Cain had been discovered by Menckens American Mercury in the early Depression, founded a one-man school of wino writing that autobiographically chronicled life in Bunker Hills single-room-occupancy hotels and Main Street taxi dancehalls during the Depression and war years.46 Charles Bukowsky would later acquire a hyped-up celebrity (including two autobiographical films) for his derivative, Fantesque descriptions of a Hollywood demimonde of fallen stars in bars - a world better evoked in the phantasmagorical autobiography of jazzman and junkie Art Pepper.47 Aldous Huxleys two Los Angeles novels (After Many a Summer Dies the Swan [1939] and/pe and Essence [1948]), on the other hand, prefigured the postwar fantastic novel (on a spectrum that includes Thomas Pynchons Crying o f Lot 49 [1966] as well as Kim Stanley Robinsons The Gold Coast [1988]) that exploited Southern Californias unsure boundary between reality and science fiction. As David Dunaway has pointed out, Huxleys important contributions to Los Angeless anti-mythography are seldom

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