Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

1.2 Space and the Noir City
Film noir has drawn a lot of its strength from the pace and vertiginous effect of
urbanisation in the first half of the twentieth-century. The momentous and sprawling
construction of cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago provided both theme and
location for noir anomie and which became de rigueur features of the form. In particular,
the city of Los Angeles, as the home of the film industry, has always been abundantly
present in film noir. One might almost affirm that the novel of Hollywood and the Los
Angeles novel were synonymous, judging from the way that the hard-boiled writers of the
thirties projected their work onto the city, in screenplays to be used by the industry. In The
Little Sister (1949), Raymond Chandler vividly mapped the crime novel defining Los
Angeles’s “mean streets” as those down which a man must go, a “mail order city,
everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else (...) the riffraff of a big
hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup” (in MacShane 1995:210).
Metaphorically, Chandler manages to cast a disreputable pall over this city through the
sardonic views of his characters, notably Marlowe, who finds only “grafters and con men
and female bandits” on the streets of L.A. The complicity of the city with dark doings
appears thus to be different in kind from the frantic action and grittiness of the movies of
the past decade (namely of the gangster films).
Los Angeles’s unique city-shape became one of the first settings to be exploited in
film noir, following the adaptations of Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. The grand
recklessness of downtown’s Bunker Hill present in Chandler’s narratives soon displaced
the bungalows and suburbs of Cain’s crime novels. Bunker Hill, a popular film setting,
stands in fact as an ambiguous aesthetic symbol (that of the decay at the heart of the
metropolis) in the noirs of that time, and was used as a location for such noirs as Kiss Me
Deadly and Criss Cross. Such locations were posited as a yearning for lost unity and
amenity, and were seen as both real / urban and moody / mysterious at the same time. They
seemed to serve the purpose of the noir context, as they embodied rough authenticity with
simultaneously an air of menace and a certain impenetrability. They were thus an ideal
venue for neurotic entrapment.
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