Wambaugh, keep pace with the Chandler/Macdonald tradition on its native turf, Ellroy’s sheer frenzy transports his work to a different plane.60 His Los Angeles Quartet,61 depending on one’s viewpoint, is either the culmination of the genre, or its reductio ad absurdum. At times an almost unendurable wordstorm of perversity and gore, Quartet attempts to map the history of modern Los Angeles as a secret continuum of sex crimes, satanic conspiracies, and political scandals. For Ellroy, as for Dunne in True Confessions, the grisly, unsolved ‘Black Dahlia’ case of 1946 is the crucial symbolic commencement of the postwar era – a local ‘name of the rose’ concealing a larger, metaphysical mystery. Yet in building such an all-encompassing noir mythology (including Stephen King-like descents into the occult), Ellroy risks extinguishing the genre’s tensions, and, inevitably, its power. In his pitch blackness 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.
Indeed the postmodern role of L.A. noir may be precisely to endorse the emergence of homo reaganus. In an afterword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of What Makes Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg confesses consternation that his savage portrayal of avarice and ambition has been recuperated as a ‘handbook for yuppies’:
The book I had written as an angry exposé of Sammy Glick was becoming a character reference. . . . That’s how they’re reading it in 1989. And if that’s the way they go on reading it, marching behind the flag of Sammy Glick, with the big dollar sign in the square where the stars used to be, the twentieth-century version of Sammy is going to look like an Eagle Scout compared to the twenty-first.62
Pynchon forsees even worse ‘repressive desublimations’ (a Marcusean expression peculiarly apt to the context) of noir. In Vineland (1990) – his wily, California-centered novel about ‘the restoration of fascism in America’ – he envisions the Disneyfication of noir to sell deodorants and mineral water to Schulberg’s coming hyper-yuppies. In a memorable scene, his ‘mall-rat’ teeny-boppers, Praire and Che, rendezvous at Hollywood’s ‘new Noir Center’:
This was yuppification run to some pitch so desperate that Praire at least had to hope the whole process was reaching the end of its cycle. . . . Noir Center here had an upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble Indemnity, plus The Lounge Good Buy patio furniture outlet, The Mall Tease Flacon, which sold perfume and cosmetics, and a New York style deli, The Lady ‘n’ Lox . . .63
THE EXILES
Shirley Temple lived across the street. Schoenberg was incensed when guides on the frequently-passing tour buses would point out her home and not his. Dika Newlin64
Between the Nazis’ seizure of power and the Hollywood witch hunts, Los Angeles was the address in exile of some of Central Europe’s most celebrated intellectuals.65 Desperate and ‘very modest’ (Eisler), having just escaped the camps and the Gestapo, they arrived with few initial demands upon their sanctuary. They were stunned by the opulence of the movie colony. Even the most shirtless among them usually received so-called ‘life-saving’ contracts from the studios that guaranteed work visas and $100 weekly stipends. The more famous joined the exclusive salons established in Santa Monica and the Palisades by the pre-Hitler immigration of European film stars and directors.66 Yet, despite their acknowledgement that Los Angeles did indeed appear like ‘paradise’, many of the anti-fascist exiles grasped at the first opportunity to leave for New York or, later, to return to the ruins of war-ravaged Europe. However, their recoil from ‘paradise’ is only seemingly paradoxical.
In part they were tormented by their own incestuous choice. Adorno in Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (a journal he kept in Los Angeles during the war) recalled the ‘isolation [which] becomes worse through the formation of exclusive, politically controlled groups, suspicious of their members, hostile towards those branded as different. . . . Relations among outcasts are even more poisonous than among the residents.’67 (Adorno certainly knew what he was talking about; Brecht thought that the Los Angeles soirées of the Institute for Social Research (the ‘Frankfurt School’) resembled ‘graduate seminars in a wartime bunker’.)68 Segregated from native Angelenos, the exiles composed a miniature society in a self-imposed ghetto, clinging to their old-world prejudices like cultural life-preservers.
But their collective melancholia was also a reaction to the landscape. With few exceptions they complained bitterly about the absence of a European (or even Manhattan) civitas of public places, sophisticated crowds, historical auras and critical intellectuals. Amid so much open land there seemed to be no space that met their criteria of ‘civilized urbanity’. Los Angeles, for all its fleshpots and enchantments, was experienced as a cultural antithesis to nostalgic memories of pre-fascist Berlin or Vienna. Indeed, as the September song of exile wore on, Los Angeles became increasingly symbolized as an ‘anti-city’, a Gobi of suburbs.
The formation of a critical consensus about Los Angeles/Hollywood (the two hopelessly conflated in the minds of most exiles) was, moreover, a seminal moment in the European reconceptualization of the United States. What had been largely romance – European fantasies of cowboys, Lindbergh and skyscrapers – was now mediated through actual experience in a city that stood in the same quasi-utopian relationship to the rest of the United States as America as a whole had stood to the Weimar imagination of the 1920s. Put another way, exile in Southern California ultimately transformed the terms for understanding the impact of Modernism, at least in the minds of the intellectuals influenced by the Institute for Social Research, which had moved to Santa Monica at the beginning of the war.69
Adorno, who wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer in Los Angeles during the war, said after his return to Frankfurt years later, ‘It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that any contemporary consciousness that has not appropriated the American experience, even if in opposition, has something reactionary about it.’70 In Los Angeles where Adorno and Horkheimer accumulated their ‘data’, the exiles thought they were encountering America in its purest, most prefigurative moment. Largely ignorant of, or indifferent to, the peculiar historical dialectic that had shaped Southern California, they allowed their image of first sight to become its own myth: Los Angeles as the crystal ball of capitalism’s future. And, confronted with this future, they experienced all the more painfully the death agony of Enlightenment Europe.71
The Frankfurt critique of the ‘Culture Industry’ became the primary theoretical representation of this encounter. The focus of their time in Los Angeles being Hollywood, and its specular double ‘Hollywood!’, the Germans were soon adding a Hegelian polish to homegrown noir sensibility. They described the Culture Industry not merely as political economy, but as a specific spatiality that vitiated the classical proportions of European urbanity, expelling from the stage both the ‘masses’ (in their heroic, history-changing incarnation) and the critical intelligentsia. Exhibiting no apparent interest in the wartime turmoil in the local aircraft plants nor inclined to appreciate the vigorous nightlife of Los Angeles’s Central Avenue ghetto, Horkheimer and Adorno focused instead on the little single-family boxes that seemed to absorb the world-historic mission of the proletariat into family-centered consumerism under the direction of radio jingles and Life magazine ads. The sun rises over Mount Hollywood in Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous opening section of ‘The Culture Industry’:
Even now, the older houses just outside the concrete city center look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans. Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of capitalism.72
Despite their heady discovery, however, Horkheimer and Adorno were scarcely the Columbus and Magellan of this brave new world. The Los Angeles landscape of movie studios and single-family homes was already being