(FMS 0054) Film Noir and the American Tradition – Lee Edelman

This course explores film noir as a profoundly American cinematic tradition that emerges from the fascination with evil that accompanies the fantasy of American innocence, a fascination rooted in the racial crimes at the origin of the nation. We will read film noir as an expression of the contradictions that structure U.S. society--contradictions between law and self-determination, between social collectivity and individualism, between Puritanical strictures and capitalist amorality. These contradictions inform film noir as a genre about incoherence, moral ambiguity, and the inevitability of interpretative doubt. The racial and ethnic subtexts of the genre will be examined in terms of film noir’s response to perceived threats to the social dominance of white, heterosexual, cis-gendered men. Those same threats make the femme fatale, the figure on whom the crisis of interpretation tends to focus, and the queered man, the foil who frequently serves as the femme fatale’s accomplice, central to the sexual anxiety that permeates these films. Linking these narratives of corruption, betrayal, and forbidden desires to issues raised by feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theory, this course will engage the tensions that continue to shape our national psyche and our cinematic imagination. Films to be studied may include The Maltese Falcon, Murder My Sweet, Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, The Third Man, Kiss Me Deadly, Touch of Evil, Odds Against Tomorrow, The History of Violence, Devil in a Blue Dress, Lost Highway, and The Dark Knight. This course fulfills the post-1860 English major requirement.