Out of the Past, Into the SupermarketAuthor(s): ERIK DUSSERESource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Fall 2006), pp. 16-27Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2006.60.1.16 .Accessed: 08/05/2011 11:26

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■ ERIK DUSSERE

Out of the Past, Into the Supermarket

CONSUMING FILM NOIR

IN A SCENE from Thomas Pynchon’s book Vineland,two young women meet at a California shopping mallcalled Noir Center, which takes its theme from whatone character calls the “weird-necktie movies” of the1940s and 50s. As the novel describes it, “Noir Center. . . had an upscale mineral-water boutique calledBubble Indemnity, plus The Lounge Good Buy patiofurniture outlet, The Mall Tease Flacon, which sold per-fume and cosmetics, and a New York-style deli, TheLady ’n’ the Lox. Security police wore brown shiny uni-form suits with pointed lapels and snap-brim fedoras.”1

Pynchon is making a familiar point here about the waythat an omnivorous consumer culture can and will ap-propriate anything in order to create the illusion ofnovelty in both products and shopping spaces. Thesatire suggests that to appropriate the dark themes andimages of film noir is the ultimate absurdity; the finalfrontier of American authenticity has now been pavedover and sold to the highest bidder.

However, this dynamic has in fact always been cen-tral to the weird-necktie films themselves. The iconog-raphy of noir—the world-weary voiceover, the femmefatale, the trenchcoated detective, those brooding urbanshadows—is familiar even to those who have never seeneven one of the original films. And although these de-vices are now sometimes employed in the service ofcamp, the noir style still frequently appears as a markerof seriousness in film, television, comic books, andother popular media. This style continues to connote akind of unflinching realism and I would suggest thatthis effect derives in part from noir’s self-conscious re-jection of the commercial space it inhabits, a rejectionthat represents consumer culture as the polar oppositeof noir.

To attribute any coherent political stance to filmnoir—a grouping of films that has no movement or or-ganization behind it, a critical category that is endlesslydebated—is a tricky business.2 But most critics will

agree that noir positions itself oppositionally, providinga critical viewpoint on American politics of the 1940sand 50s, choosing to portray the underside of theAmerican Dream. The films can frequently be read as aresponse to failures or contradictions in American in-stitutions of government, society, and economy. LaryMay sees the “rebels” of 1950s film and the emergent60s counterculture as “the children of noir.”3 JamesNaremore writes that for Raymond Borde and ÉtienneChaumeton, authors of the first book-length study ofthe films, “noir is not merely a descriptive term, but aname for a critical tendency within the popular cinema—an antigenre that reveals the dark side of savage cap-italism . . . noir produces a psychological and moral dis-orientation, an inversion of capitalist and puritanvalues, as if it were pushing the American system to-ward revolutionary destruction.”4 If so, then it is notsurprising that leftist critics like Mike Davis and FredricJameson have found in noir and the hard-boiled tradi-tion the potential for a critical analysis of Americancapitalism. Dean MacCannell writes aphoristically that“there is a kind of innocent codependence of film noirsensibility and Marxist criticism, each providing theimages and concepts that the other believes it needs.”5

Although not all noir critics are Marxists and not allcritics see the films as politically progressive, it is clearthat the noir tradition is engaged with the contradic-tions inherent in the American political economy, withthe opposition between democratic ideals and capital-ist structures.6

Both as a collection of films and as a critical cate-gory, film noir has a distinctive and conflicted relation-ship to the American consumer culture of which it is apart; the underworld that the films invoke is both anindictment and an artifact of capitalism, a populistintervention and a popular entertainment. These filmstend implicitly to distance themselves from the artifi-ciality of the movie-making system from which they

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Film Quarterly, Vol. 60, Issue 1, pages 16-27. ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2006 by The Regents of the University ofCalifornia. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the

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emerge; thus the political critique of capitalism identi-fied by noir’s Marxist viewers is performed in partthrough a formal critique of popular film. In this sense,there is an unexpectedly utopian impulse in noir: thesuggestion that a filmic encounter with the “reality” ofthe urban and criminal underworld may also be an en-counter with the presence and immediacy that we feelourselves to have lost when confronted with the appar-ent artificiality of consumer culture. Because noir of-fers this promise—which is also the promise of anexperience more vital than that of other films—it is im-portant that these films present themselves as “authen-tic.” Through their streetwise attitude, moral ambiguity,and existential reflections on crime and death, theyposit for themselves a film world that is less prettied-upthan other popular film and ostensibly less commodi-fied. Noir drives this point home by providing a cri-tique of consumption generally and of Hollywood’sproduct in particular.

In their 1955 Panorama of American Film Noir,Borde and Chaumeton argue that film noir is specifi-cally dedicated to undermining Hollywood style:

[A]ll the components of noir style lead to thesame result: to disorient the spectators, who nolonger encounter their customary frames of refer-ence. The cinema public was habituated to certain

conventions: a logic to the action, a clear distinc-tion between good and evil, well-defined charac-ters, clear motives, scenes more spectacular thangenuinely brutal, an exquisitely feminine heroine,and an upright hero.7

As Borde and Chaumeton go on to explain, these con-ventions are systematically violated in the film noircycle. But of course these crime films are themselves of-fered as entertainments with some sort of mass appeal.Although their serious subject matter and disillusionedtone suggest a gritty, urban realism presumably absentfrom other Hollywood films, this tough-mindedness isreally a kind of authenticity effect created through a setof strictly mannered noir conventions: expressionisticlighting and scoring, hard-boiled dialogue that is for-mulaic almost to the point of parody, obsessively com-plex investigations of the past. Noir is gritty realismrendered through a stylized, filmic, and pleasurablemode of representation. Shimmering rain-soakedstreets, white-hot gun flares in darkened rooms—theseare confections offered to the moviegoer, in a definingcase of Guy Debord’s observation that “the image hasbecome the final form of commodity reification.”8

Caught between opposition to and complicity withHollywood, classic noirs and later neo-noirs havestruggled to differentiate themselves from other film

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Setting up the supermarket scene in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)

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entertainments and from consumer culture as a wholethrough the assertion that their visions represent an al-ternative, authentic America—one that has not been“sold out.” Part of the particular appeal noir offers forviewers and critics is that its opposition to capitaliststructures has a homegrown quality, despite its urbansetting. Noir makes its case against American capitalismby presenting itself as representative of a more genuineAmerican spirit: it combines a powerful debunking ofAmerican pieties with the vague promise of somethingbetter. As Naremore’s description of noir as an “anti-genre” suggests, the particulars of the alternative toconsumerism offered by these films is hard to pindown; often it seems to exist purely as a force of oppo-sition. But in its evocation of an underworld lurkingjust beneath the surface of the acknowledged socialorder, noir taps into a deep American sense that our re-public, our real national identity, resides somewhereoutside of traditional institutions of government andeconomy and outside of our inevitable, daily participa-tion in the sphere of consumption. If the content ofnoir’s definition of America remains vague—the hoped-for return of a repressed and indefinable nationalcharacter—its critical strategy is clear: to disrupt theequivalence between American citizenship and con-sumer capitalism that has developed in the postwar era.

Because of the way that these films implicitly in-voke an abiding, underground American character asresistance to the mainstream consumer culture, I havechosen to focus my readings on films that employ themost distinctly American consumer space, the super-market. There is already a robust body of film criticismdealing with the relationship between the cinemascreen and the shop window, one that has a specificallyEuropean lineage—Baudelaire’s notion of the flâneuras appropriated by Walter Benjamin in his remarkablework on the Paris arcades—and that explores the waycinema emerged within this late nineteenth-centuryurban shopping environment. I hope to build on thisscholarship on film and commerce by examining how,in the context of post-World War II America, film noirencounters the supermarket: the store itself as well asthe practices and meanings that derive from it.

In order to trace the historical development of thisstrategy, I will be looking at three films that use thesupermarket as a stand-in for consumer culture as awhole: the classic noir Double Indemnity (1944), the re-visionist anti-noir The Long Goodbye (1973), and thepostmodern neo-noir Fight Club (1999). Although it isunconventional to treat noir and neo-noir as momentsin an ongoing tradition, I do so here in order to show anevolution in which new ideas and technologies in film-

making respond to developments in American practicesof consumption.9 Thus, as we move from the 1940s tothe 90s, the visual and narrative styles of noir constitutea symbolic space within which questions and issues sur-rounding consumer culture are debated. Each of thethree movies employs the formal and technologicaltools available to the film medium in order to reflectupon the relationship between noir and the super-market as competing models for American self-defini-tion. Taken together, they begin to suggest a paradigmfor understanding film noir in terms of its ongoing en-gagement with the development of American consumerculture from World War II to the present day.

THE SUPERMARKET AND THE UNDERWORLD

In the twentieth century, the formation of Americanpolitical and cultural identity is inseparable from thedevelopment of mass consumption. In A Consumers’Republic, historian Lizabeth Cohen specifically suggeststhat not only our private lives but also our relationshipto governmental and economic institutions are definedin crucial ways by practices of shopping and buying.She argues that this phenomenon has its roots in thedepression era but only emerges fully after World WarII, when it becomes possible to think of Americansspecifically as “citizen-consumers.” Cohen’s analysis de-tails the many formations this relationship betweencitizen and consumer has taken, and the cultural andpolitical effects it has created in permeating the wholerange of American experiences from the postwar eraonward: “in the aftermath of World War II a funda-mental shift in America’s economy, politics, and culturetook place, with major consequences for how Amer-icans made a living, where they dwelled, how they inter-acted with others, what and how they consumed, whatthey expected of government.”10 Within this tectonicshift, consumption becomes not just another culturalpractice, but a way of understanding and organizingnational identity.

The evolution of this consumers’ republic runsparallel to the evolution of the supermarket, which canserve as a kind of microcosm for American consumerculture. In her history of “the invention of modernshopping,” Rachel Bowlby cites the 1932 opening of theBig Bear store in Elizabeth, New Jersey, as the birth ofthe supermarket. Big Bear was really a discount ware-house, but its focus on self-service and on stockinghousehold goods for low prices signalled a break withthe previous model for large-scale shopping, the de-partment store. Whereas the department store was in-ternational and cultivated an ambience of aristocraticluxury, the supermarket was an American invention de-

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signed to present an aura of pragmatism and democ-racy. It marked a movement away from urban centerstoward a suburban, car-oriented lifestyle and a move-ment from marketing aimed at bringing glamour to themiddle class to the marketing of affordable food andsundries to the masses.11

This distinction is real, but it also has a powerfulsymbolic dimension. Bowlby writes: “The departmentstore is considered to be feminine, frivolous, French,and fashionable; in its Parisian form, it is one of theemblems of nineteenth-century modernity for WalterBenjamin’s retrospect. . . . The supermarket, massiveand materialistic, figures as an American invention.”12

In Shelf Life: Supermarkets and the Changing Cultures ofConsumption, Kim Humphery notes that the modernsupermarket’s “absurd, almost surreal field of ‘choice’”is, like consumer culture in general, “bound up withvalues of freedom and self-determination.” Since thesevalues are central to American self-definition, it is ap-propriate that, as Humphery notes, “the supermarketmay have emerged as a cheap and efficient alternative tothe traditional grocery store, but within two decades it. . . had become a symbol of all that was American.”13

The distinctly American characteristics of the super-market, then, are its emphasis on consumption madeavailable to a mass market (signifying a kind of democ-racy) and its enormous range of choices (which carriesthe symbolic promise of freedom and independence).These qualities, and our conflicting feelings aboutthem, are also emphasized in the metaphorical uses ofthe institution, as when we talk about the “supermarketof ideas.” Such metaphors are meant to conjure a senseof impressive range and also of a distasteful material-ism, both associated with the deeply held Americanbelief in the sovereignty of individual choice.

In this way the word “supermarket” itself has be-come shorthand for American consumer culture. Bythe 1940s, it was becoming the “dominant food-sellingform in the United States,”14 and in the postwar period,when the U.S. emerged as the world’s primary eco-nomic power, it spread rapidly to European countriesas well, along with the whole gamut of American prod-ucts and popular culture—including the films thatwould eventually acquire the label “noir.” In fact, thecritical definition of noir itself emerges out of the post-war spread of American consumer culture. French crit-ics used the phrase “film noir”—which had previouslybeen applied to some French films of the 1930s—to de-scribe many of the American films that arrived en massein Parisian cinemas after the years of the Nazi occu-pation, as part of a larger influx of American consumerproducts.

One of the films that arrived in France as part ofthe first wave of American imports was Billy Wilder’sDouble Indemnity, originally released in 1944. Adaptedfrom a novel by James M. Cain and with a script byWilder and Raymond Chandler, it provides an exampleof the classic film noir and of how the noir themes andstyles were employed in order to comment on WorldWar II-era consumer culture. This commentary is mostvisible in the much-discussed “Jerry’s Market” scenes,two extended sequences in which Walter Neff (FredMacMurray) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stan-wyck) meet at a local supermarket, first to plan themurder of Phyllis’s husband and later to deal with thefallout from the murder. In the latter scene, the film’splot has reached an especially tense moment, with Neff,who has grown wary of his partner in crime, arguingthat they should stop trying to collect the insurancemoney and Phyllis angry that Neff has been spendingtime with her stepdaughter.

The scene begins with an establishing shot fromabove, showing the tidy geometry of the store and thepeople with carts winding among the aisles. During thenext few minutes we slowly move closer to Neff andPhyllis and their surroundings dominate the screenless, but the supermarket continues to intrude on theirconversation, in the form of passing shoppers and storeemployees—none of whom pays any attention to theirfrantic whispering. After several interruptions, as theystroll the aisles in a forced parody of shopping, the twoend up divided by an aisle stacked so high with prod-ucts that the camera has to give us a Neff ’s-eye view,looking slightly down at Phyllis. This separation byconsumer goods is the point: Neff wants to turn back,to rejoin the citizen–consumers in the banal communalspace of the supermarket, but Phyllis makes it clear thatthere is no turning back and then Wilder makes it evenclearer. The camera moves in for a stunned close-up onNeff and for the first time the supermarket recedescompletely as his face fills the screen and his voice-overresumes, keying a fade to Neff sitting in the dark insur-ance office, recounting the story.

This scene sets out the opposition between super-market and noir in the clearest possible terms. Its vi-sual impact comes not only from its contrast with thescenes that precede and follow it—the bright interiorspace of the store as opposed to the dark insuranceoffice after hours—but from the contrast between thestore and the two characters who have made it thebackdrop for their drama. Wilder uses the cheery mise-en-scène of the supermarket, with its bustle of politeshoppers and its orderly rows and pyramids of prod-ucts, to throw his noir characters into relief. In doing so,

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he makes use of the film medium’s particular capabili-ties. Unlike radio or the written word, film is ideallysuited to representing the space of the supermarket. AsAnne Friedberg suggests in Window Shopping: Cinemaand the Postmodern, shopping and film spectatorshipeach require a gaze that is simultaneously virtual andmobile, a gaze that originates in the nineteenth-centurypractice of flânerie and organizes a whole range of vi-sual practices throughout the twentieth century.15 Boththe film and the supermarket are inherently concernedwith visual display and the organization of space, andboth offer the aesthetic novelty of their design for theviewer’s or shopper’s perusal and delectation. Minusthe two main characters, this scene from Double In-demnity could perhaps serve as a promotional film forthe presentation of products in the modern super-market, circa 1944.

Wilder uses the opposition between the aestheticsof noir and supermarket to create a more subtle oppo-

sition: between noir and the rest of Hollywood film. InJerry’s Market, our two stock figures from hard-boilednoir, the femme fatale and the doomed sap who fallsfor her, are hopelessly out of place. Barbara Stanwyck inparticular, with her platinum wig and dark glasses—look at me, I’m in disguise!—appears loaded to excesswith signifiers of femme-fatality when placed amongthe shopping housewives and the neat aisles stockedwith baby food and macaroni.16 The noir woman is es-pecially alienated here because the supermarket shop-per is always imagined as a woman, but a passive andreceptive female consumer rather than the flinty,tough-talking Phyllis. For James Naremore, Phyllis isessentially continuous with the supermarket becauseher femininity is packaged and mass-produced: she is“visibly artificial,” with a “cheaply manufactured,metallic look.”17 But to the extent that she is visibly arti-ficial, she is also visibly parodic: Phyllis’s evident artifi-ciality refers us mockingly to the unacknowledged

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Double Indemnity: the space of the supermarket . . . and the forced parody of shopping

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Double Indemnity: the femme fatale under neon light . . . and the return to noir

artificiality of Hollywood femininity in general. In thesame way, the bright, mass-produced emptiness of thestore stands in for the bright, mass-produced emptinessthat, the film suggests, Hollywood typically produces.

This visual disjunction suggests that Walter Neffand Phyllis Dietrichson can no longer inhabit the sameworld as the “real” shoppers. Noir plotlines frequentlyevoke an underworld of crime, passion, and perversionthat lurks beneath and alongside the world of re-spectable daily life. The plot typically begins with anapparently discrete event—a single death, a wrong turn,a flirtation—that leads the plot outward to reveal orinitiate an expanding web of lawlessness and corrup-tion. In this sense, the noir underworld has the samefunction as the frontier in the Western genre; it is aliminal space where conflicts in American law and so-ciety can be dramatized in life-or-death terms.18 InDouble Indemnity’s supermarket drama, the robustconsumer society of the 1940s is haunted by two char-acters who inhabit that underworld. Neff and Phyllishave crossed the noir frontier and seem almost invisibleto the respectable citizens who surround them, shop-pers whose citizenship is constituted here not in anyofficial or institutional relationship, but in their statusas consumers.

In fact, the citizen–consumers are almost entirelyoblivious to the two murderers in their midst, an im-plicit commentary on the supermarket as a new kind ofsocial space organized around consumption and com-modity fetishism. Kim Humphery cites a retail expertwho suggested that in the new self-service stores “thepackage is an extremely important substitute for thepersonal relationship that people desire.” Thus, asHumphery notes, “the notion of inanimate objects andphysical spaces as the means by which to preserve, al-beit in altered form, the communicative, social aspectsof the shop was central to the development of the su-permarket.”19 The space of Jerry’s Market is ostensiblycommunal, but in fact the scene as filmed emphasizesthe privatization and commercial purpose of the space,focusing our attention on barriers and awkward si-lences in order to suggest a “lonely crowd” of peoplelost in private reverie and communing only with theirpotential purchases. The noir underworld is presentedas more vivid than the bland comforts offered by citi-zenship: the shoppers are docile shades, lacking theurgency and passion that motivate the conversation be-tween Neff and Phyllis.

As the use of the supermarket in Double Indemnityshows, the noir conjunction of aesthetics and ideologyis motivated at some level by the rise of consumer cul-ture in the postwar era and the increasing conflation of

consumption and citizenship that this rise entailed. Thejuxtaposition between the underworld and the super-market also figures noir’s oppositional stance in rela-tion to Hollywood film, in a specific instance of thegeneral undermining of popular film convention de-scribed by Borde and Chaumeton. Double Indemnitythus presents itself as more unflinching and “authen-tic,” in its dark themes and cynical attitude, than otherHollywood movies of the time. It is in this sense thatnoir is countercultural; it sets up a contrast betweentwo versions of the nation, the mainstream consumerculture and the underworld of the deviant and dispos-sessed. Noir becomes the site of an American identitythat is both alternative and central, the undergroundretreat of our true national character, a retreat that is it-self outside the social and imaginative space of citizen-ship because it rejects the equation of citizenship withconsumption.

FILM NOIR IN THE CULTURE SUPERMARKET

The era of classic film noir ended in the late 1950s, butin the New Hollywood of the early 70s, filmmakersbegan to reevaluate American film genres and iconsthrough the lens of a national culture changed by thenew social movements associated with the 60s. Along-side the more visible political movements—includingthe civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, andgay liberation—the 1960s produced a new wave of con-sumer advocacy that challenged practices in corporatemarketing and production as manipulative and cor-rupt. The consumer culture identified with the super-market, and specifically its relationship to the womanas shopper, was often described as a form of conspiracyor brainwashing. In Jennifer Cross’s 1970 book TheSupermarket Trap, she argued that American house-wives were enmeshed in a plot constructed by mar-keters through the advertising and packaging of theirproducts; the supermarket is a “bewildering, enticing,craftily packaged trap that awaits every housewife dur-ing her weekly shopping expeditions. . . . The contest is not an equal one, largely because most people areunaware that the trap exists, and of the competitiveconditions within the food industry that sprung it, themarketing techniques that bait it so cunningly.”20

This vision of the supermarket as conspiracy isrealized on film in the 1975 film version of The StepfordWives, in which a supermarket serves both as thecommunal center of the suburban Connecticut town of Stepford and also as the site where the film’s anxi-eties about gender, conspiracy, and consumption arestaged in their creepiest form. The town’s housewivesare replaced one by one by compliant and physically

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enhanced robot versions of themselves, designed andconstructed by an ex-Disneyland engineer; the tools ofthe marketing apparatus are being used to literally re-shape women. In the film’s final scene, the robot wivesshop and greet each other vacantly. As they push theircarts among the perfectly stocked aisles, the 1960s read-ing of the supermarket has its apotheosis: a brightly litspace in which the colorful products are purchased bypretty automatons who are themselves the ultimateproduct of the consumer society. In this sense, perhapsthe film’s sneakiest suggestion is that men in positionsof power fear feminism not only because it might ruinwomen as wives, but because it might ruin them as con-sumers. And although The Stepford Wives is itself anunlikely candidate for the neo-noir canon, it does con-tain at least one suggestion that the noir tradition offersan alternative to the artificial America of the suburbs:in this film about men conspiring to create more per-fect shoppers, the only sympathetic male character is anex-boyfriend named Raymond Chandler.

But films of the era that sought specifically toreckon with the legacy of noir did not generally giveChandler such gentle treatment. In the cultural contextof the 1970s, the hard-boiled noir narrative—with itsretrograde gender politics and its masterful detectives—could only seem hopelessly old-fashioned. The onlyway to revisit noir was as a kind of anti-noir, such asRobert Altman’s irreverent adaptation of The LongGoodbye, in which Raymond Chandler’s private eyePhilip Marlowe has been uncomfortably transplantedto 1973. Since the classic era of film noir had ended fif-teen years earlier, the hard-boiled detective–hero had tobe revived specifically in order to be reconsidered orparodied, allowing a director like Altman or RomanPolanski (in Chinatown [1974]) to create a commen-tary on an earlier mode of filmmaking.

Not only is Marlowe out of place in the Los Ange-les of the 1970s—represented by the spacey members of

the women’s commune next door, who spend theirtime baking pot brownies and doing yoga in thenude—but the style of the film is itself a rebuke to theclassic films it parodies. Altman uses Chandler’s novelas a source and Leigh Brackett, who worked on the 1946version of Chandler’s The Big Sleep, wrote the screen-play; but the movie pointedly does not use a film noirstyle. Rather, it is made in the Altman style—withlovely, inventive cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond.The camera pans and zooms and is kept wandering atall times (perhaps suggesting the shopper’s mobile, dis-tracted gaze), while the film image is “flashed” to mini-mize strong contrasts of light and dark. The narrativeitself is loose and improvisational, and the casting andperformance of Elliott Gould emphasize this looseness:he plays Marlowe as a lost, laconic hipster who mum-bles to himself and whose tagline is “it’s OK with me.”

In this context, the opposition between noir andsupermarket is considerably less clearly defined than inDouble Indemnity. Instead, Altman’s attitude towardconsumer culture is largely bound up with his attitudetoward Hollywood as a factory for the mass-productionof images, including images from the noir traditionthat he parodies. The film begins and ends with a tinny,old-fashioned version of the song “Hooray for Holly-wood,” one that suggests that the Hollywood in whichpast incarnations of Marlowe lived is archaic and out-dated by letting us hear the scratches on the recording,as if we were listening to an old 78-rpm disc. The firstspecific reference to noir itself comes in the form of aHollywood security guard who specializes in impres-sions of movie stars—beginning with the Barbara Stan-wyck of Double Indemnity. Film noir is accorded nospecial status here as a site of neglected American val-ues; it is simply part of the larger movie-making indus-try, another artifact of the studio system.

This point is emphasized by Altman’s underminingof noir conventions. In opposition to the complex and

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The Long Goodbye (RobertAltman, 1973): Marlowe

and his neighbors

tightly patterned plots that characterized the 1940snoirs, we are given a shaggy-dog story of a plot and adetective who seems to belong in the supermarket asmuch as he belongs anywhere. The film contains long,digressive scenes that do nothing to advance the narra-tive, and it ends abruptly on an act of sudden and ab-surd violence that violates any desire for consistency orclosure. Meanwhile, although there is in fact one de-ceitful woman in the film, Altman perversely casts afickle and brand-conscious cat in the role of femmefatale. These choices seem indebted to a French NewWave tradition that is interested not in straightforwardsocial criticism but rather in an interrogation and vio-lation of genre conventions. This tone is set in the scenethat plays out during the film’s opening titles: Marlowe,in search of food for his cat and brownie mix for hisneighbors, wanders the aisles of a local supermarketlate at night in his 1940s suit, smoking his perpetualcigarette. Meeting this Marlowe—addled, anachronis-tic, running household errands for finicky pets—it isclear that he is precisely not the paragon of hard-boiledAmerican manhood so lovingly created by Chandler.The dingy store and fluorescent lights themselves pres-ent a contrast with Wilder’s bright stacks of commodi-ties, and the film is casually cynical about consumerculture: when Marlowe asks for a particular brand ofcat food, a store employee gestures at the rows of dif-ferent brands and points out that “all this shit’s thesame anyway”—a phrase that neatly sums up Altman’sfeeling about Hollywood.

So the model set up by Double Indemnity, in whichconsumer culture and noir underworld are placed instark opposition, no longer holds up in The LongGoodbye. Nor is noir seen as a unique space in whichHollywood conventions are contested, as in the modeldescribed by Borde and Chaumeton. Instead, Altmansuggests that noir and supermarket are parts of thesame system, and to put the detective in the macaroniaisle is only to show how the Hollywood productionsystem is a part of the “culture supermarket.” As inDouble Indemnity, the visual practices of filmmakingand film viewing are linked to visual practices of shop-ping and store display. But Altman’s revisionist ap-proach to noir implies that these two kinds of visualpleasure are the same, that the Hollywood film vieweris always a shopping consumer. So here the potentialfor authenticity, for providing a critique of the culturesupermarket, resides not in the noir style or narrative,but in the style of New Hollywood directors like Alt-man—with nods to Godard and to the cultural poli-tics of the 1960s—whose demystification of classicHollywood film is linked to his era’s distrust of theconsumer society.

A MAP OF THE SUPERSTORE

Although 1970s movies such as The Long Goodbye sug-gested that film noir was no longer relevant except inrevisionist modes, noir styles and themes underwent afull-scale revival beginning in the 1980s. Since then awhole new cycle of films loosely classified as “neo-noir”have appeared, ranging from the nostalgic revisiting ofJames M. Cain in Body Heat (1981) to the bluescreenvisual pyrotechnics of Sin City (2005). The film I amconsidering here, David Fincher’s 1999 Fight Club, hasfew of the obvious plot elements we associate with clas-sic noir: no detective, no murder, no heist gone wrong.Rather, Fincher gives us the alienated mood, the styl-ized “realism,” and the skepticism about the Americanmainstream that we recognize as noir, translated intothe context of the 1990s, a moment with its own set ofshopping spaces and film techniques. In its use of noir-derived visuals, themes, and meanings, Fight Club ex-tends the concerns I have raised about film noir and itsrelationship to consumer culture into the contempo-rary imaginative space that we generally refer to as “thepostmodern.”

Like The Long Goodbye, Fight Club is in many waysa self-referential movie. But instead of taking a criticalattitude toward classic film noir, it blends elements ofnoir narrative with a flashy contemporary visual stylethat is indebted to MTV and television commercials. Thefilm suggests that American culture is entirely suffused

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The Long Goodbye: the hard-boiled, bachelor detective goes shopping

by commerce; there is no need to go to the supermarketbecause the supermarket is everywhere. The concernsabout marketing in the 1960s have become a conspiracythat is both ungraspably huge and so pervasive that our identities are completely inhabited by it. As we aregiven a computer-generated tour of a trash can full ofbranded packages, the cynical, noir-style voice-overcomments: “when deep-space exploration ramps up,it’ll be the corporations that name everything: the IBMstellar-sphere, the Microsoft galaxy, the planet Star-bucks.” The hyperbolic claims about interstellar brand-ing are meant to provide a sense of the enormous scaleof global capitalism. In this context the actual super-market is no longer a site of struggle or paranoia; ratherFight Club transfers the techniques associated with thesupermarket—vast and excessive consumer choice, vi-sual and spatial organization, the package as a sub-stitute for social relations—to a scene of virtualshopping. In a famous early scene, the main character,“Jack” (Edward Norton), enters the world of an IKEA-style catalogue, populates a room with furnishings, andthen strolls through it while prices remain floating inthe air around his belongings. By representing Jack’sapartment as a commercial space in itself, the scenesuggests that there is no longer any space, in the work-place or the home or the mind, outside the reach ofconsumer culture.

This apparition of the endless supermarket is thestarting place for the film’s most obvious politicalpoint. The plot follows Jack and his alter ego Tyler Dur-den (Brad Pitt) as they create their own noir under-world in the form of a “fight club,” a secret society thatmeets in dimly lit urban basements, where men whofeel alienated or disenfranchised find both selfhood andcommunity through the experience of physical pain.The fight club ultimately metamorphoses into “ProjectMayhem,” a decentralized guerrilla underground dedi-

cated to undermining the foundations of America’sconsumer society. This movement appears to updatepast models of political action for the 1990s; its tactics—combining quasi-military attacks on property andfinancial institutions with a prankster spirit—recall60s-era groups such as the Weather Underground.

But although the content of the film suggests an at-tack on the supermarket based on 1960s political mod-els, the form of the film has a different agenda. Puttingnew technologies of representation in the service of itspolitical project, Fight Club evokes the cyberspatiallandscapes and networks of the Internet, and ultimatelyconstructs a genuinely postmodern political model, inwhich it is only possible to create an effective resistanceto consumer culture by using the tools of consumerculture. The film suggests that in the era of late capital-ism it is only possible to counter the resilient, amor-phous networks of global commerce by working withinthem. In doing so, it suggests something akin to FredricJameson’s call for an aesthetic strategy of “cognitivemapping” as the form of an oppositional postmod-ernism. For Jameson, it is only through representingand interrogating the new spatial arrangements createdwithin the “decentered global network” of multi-national capital that literature or film can speak politi-cally to the world we inhabit.21 Fight Club takes a similarapproach; using the techniques of computer-generatedimagery (CGI) and photogrammetry, the film con-structs a visual landscape that is both spatial and vir-tual: a map of consumer culture’s imprint on Jack’smind and self.

This attention to mapping is literalized in the use ofphotogrammetry in Fight Club. Originally used in nine-teenth-century France to create topographical maps,this technique involves the use of multiple photographsto build a three-dimensional photographic image. Withthe advent of digital imaging technology, photogram-

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Fight Club (David Fincher,1999): the supermarket

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metry can be used to produce a photographic map ofany given space, which can then be manipulated end-lessly by film technicians, often in combination withCGI. Fight Club employs this capacity for a wholly vir-tual camera gaze—in which the distinction betweencinematography and mise-en-scène disappears en-tirely—in order to survey the spaces we inhabit and theobjects that surround us: buildings, apartment interi-ors, offices, trash cans, the human brain. This effect, likethe scene of Jack shopping, mimics the practices of cat-alogue or Internet shopping, in which the spectator-as-shopper can go anywhere, zoom in, inspect thepotential purchase from multiple angles. In doing so,Fight Club deliberately foregrounds its status asmedium, employing visual effects that are both pristineand deliberately unrealistic. The film recognizes its sta-tus as commercial product but eschews the anti-narra-tive stance of The Long Goodbye. Rather it embraces thetechnological and stylistic innovations of advertising,MTV, and commercial filmmaking in order to suggestthe vast and intricate contours of the supermarket con-spiracy and the possibility of resisting that conspiracyfrom within. Fight Club—which begins with a flashyCGI tour of the brain’s neural map—insists that the su-permarket has inhabited our beings at the deepest level.Thus it requires Jack’s harrowing, schizoid strugglewith Tyler just in order to cast off the chains of con-sumerist identity within himself and regain his man-hood.22

The film’s focus on Jack’s divided psyche presentsan allegory in which masculine identity is asserted as asite of resistance to the new structures of contemporaryconsumerism, an allegory that takes the form of astruggle for (male) selfhood. Without his consciousknowledge, Jack has created Tyler Durden as a virtualalter ego—a hypermasculine dream self, a film self builtout of pure identification—who challenges him anddoes things he is too timid to do. Tyler delivers lectureson the evils of consumerism and of the softness incul-cated in a generation of “men raised by women”; at themoments when Jack hesitates, Tyler challenges himwith a painful initiation rite or a test of courage. He isJack’s idealized vision of manhood, a perfect father andbuddy and self, and as such he is also a creature of film.As in Double Indemnity and The Long Goodbye, FightClub’s relationship to consumer culture is also a reflec-tion on the status of film as commodity. But althoughthe content of the movie is a fairly straightforward at-tack on consumerism and assertion of authentic mas-culinity, Fincher’s formal postmodernism marks adifference from the other two films in that it questions

the possibility of a position outside the system—thesupermarket, Hollywood—from which one might con-struct an “authentic” critique.

Tyler’s status as a filmic construction and com-mentary on Hollywood heroes is made clear by the waythe movie surrounds his presence with moments ofself-reference. Tyler works as a film projectionist, wherehe engages in some guerrilla splicing, adding framesfrom pornographic movies to Disney-style family fare.Here Tyler appropriates “subliminal” techniques, asso-ciated with paranoia about the ability of advertisers tomanipulate the public, for a prankster assault on theHollywood mainstream. Moreover, as Lucy Chen ob-serves,“Fight Club first introduces Durden as a series ofscratchy, flickering images ‘subliminally’ spliced intothe background of the film.”23 This is partly a represen-tation of Tyler’s gradual infiltration of Jack’s uncon-scious, his subversive presence in the film, but theassociation of subliminal images with advertising alsosuggests that Tyler is himself a construction of con-sumer culture—a suggestion that the casting of BradPitt, one of Hollywood’s most reliable star commodi-ties, highlights nicely.

In these self-conscious moments, Fincher repeat-edly draws attention to Fight Club’s status as film, too—and in doing so undermines its own apparent argu-ment for masculinity as a site of political resistance. Inone of Tyler’s motivational speeches about the evils ofconsumerism—“you’re not the car you drive; you’renot the contents of your wallet; you are not yourfucking khakis”—the film appears to shake until thesprocket holes on the sides of the celluloid become vis-ible. In the scene of Tyler as projectionist he points to adot in the corner of the frame in order to illustrate howprojectionists know when to change reels. This “change-over” is later linked to the change—which, like the reelchange, is invisible to the audience—from Jack to Tylerand back that occurs throughout the film, again em-phasizing the sense that Tyler, as Jack’s alter ego, is acreature of the film medium, with its unique capacitiesfor fantasy and identification. This self-referential ap-proach is not merely the familiar wink of the postmod-ern; rather than remaining a clever stylistic tic, itpresents us with an unresolved tension between au-thenticity and artifice. Tyler is presented as the figurewho will return men to their natures by resisting theconsumer culture that has emasculated them. But thefilm is also aware that what Tyler offers is not nature butrather a set of cultural traditions—of embattled mas-culinity, of the solitary individual resisting the system,of a particular attitude of unsparing cynicism—that are

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drawn from the filmic past and from the memory offilm noir’s attempt to locate an authentic Americanidentity outside of the engulfing supermarket.

Each of the three films I have discussed is engagedon some level with the aesthetics and ideology of noir,and each is searching for a position outside the main-stream of American consumer culture, for which thesupermarket is an emblem. Each confronts the prob-lem—which is also represented as the problem of thefilms’ relationship to the larger Hollywood movie-making system and film as commodity—in a differentand historically located way. In a classic film noir likeDouble Indemnity, the noir aesthetic is itself a site of re-sistance from which to provide a critique of consumerculture and popular film forms. For Altman’s The LongGoodbye, made after the decline of the studio system,noir itself is hopelessly compromised as part of a mass-production system that can only be seen critically inretrospect. Fight Club suggests that everything, itself in-cluded, is compromised, but not hopelessly; employinga postmodern model of engagement, it seeks to resistconsumerism through a kind of serious formal play,from within the belly of the beast.

The readings I have provided here argue that filmnoir’s response to American capitalism takes place inthe fluorescent aisles of consumer culture. Noir is thevehicle by which American film from the postwar pe-riod to the present stages the tension between twovisions of national identity: on the one hand the perva-sive everyday practices of consumer society, on theother the dream of an essential, undefinable Americathat exists somewhere on the margins, resistant to gov-

ernment and global capital alike. But in each of mythree examples, this oppositional stance is complicatedby the film’s self-conscious reflection upon itself as a vi-sual commodity. In each case, the political engagementof the film is tied uncomfortably to its complicity inconsumer culture, its status as an image that, howeverraw or disturbing it may be, has a lineage in the shopwindow and a kinship with the supermarket display. Ifthese films offer a critique of the models of citizenshipprovided by consumption, it is one that emerges fromwithin the culture as a ghost in the machine, a glitch inthe republic—a critique made possible by the com-modified image’s uneasy reflections upon itself.

NOTES

Many thanks to those who read or listened to versions of this essayand provided suggestions: Lisa Gitelman, Stephanie Hartman,Amy Holberg, Jonathan Kahana, Lisa Lynch, Jeff Middents, AbbyMoser, and Elena Razlogova.

1. Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (New York: Little, Brown / Pen-guin, 1990), 326.

2. Credit for applying the term “film noir” to American films ofthe 1940s is usually given to Nino Frank, who published anarticle on the new “policiers” in 1946. In the same year, Jean-Pierre Chartier’s essay “Les Américains aussi font des films‘noirs’” appeared. The first book-length study of the subject isthe now-classic Panorama du Film Noir Américain, publishedin 1955 by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton. JamesNaremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1998), provides an excel-lent overview and interpretation of the origins of the term inhis chapter “The History of an Idea.”

3. Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of theAmerican Way (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,2000).

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Fight Club: neo-noir self-referentiality

4. Naremore, 22.5. Dean MacCannell, “Democracy’s Turn: On Homeless Noir,”

Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1993), 282.6. MacCannell argues that the “still unexamined tension at the

heart of film noir is that between senile capitalism and democ-racy,” and that noir “witnesses” the confrontation between thetwo “with implacable numbness” (284). In Gumshoe America:Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New DealLiberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), SeanMcCann locates a similar dynamic in the tradition of Ameri-can detective fiction, in which he sees the drama of the NewDeal’s confrontation between capitalism and governmentplaying itself out.

7. Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, A Panorama ofAmerican Film Noir 1941–1953 (1955; San Francisco, CA: CityLights Books, 2002), 12.

8. The line is quoted in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, theCultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-versity Press, 1991), 18.

9. The film noir cycle is generally described as running from1941 to 1958. “Neo-noir” usually refers to all films made afterthat period that look back in some way to the earlier films. Asmy analysis here suggests, there is a useful distinction to bemade between the 1970s neo-noirs and those that emergestarting in the 1980s.

10. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of MassConsumption in Postwar America (New York: Random House,2003), 8.

11. Rachel Bowlby, Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shop-ping (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 8–9.

12. Ibid., 9.13. Kim Humphery, Shelf Life: Supermarkets and the Changing

Cultures of Consumption (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998), 6, 71–72.

14. Bowlby, 153.15. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmod-

ern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 24.16. In Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2002), Paula Rabinowitzoffers an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink reading of com-modity fetishism and the role of objects in noir, among otherthings. Her discussion touches on the way that Phyllis Diet-richson’s identity as femme fatale is an accretion of signifyingobjects: “Barbara Stanwyck’s anklet and heels, her cigarette

and whiskey, her cat glasses and gun would indeed turn youinto a femme fatale—murderous, deadly, and doomed to diein a hail of bullets” (191).

17. Naremore, 89.18. Thomas Schatz, in Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Film Making,

and the Studio System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), makesa comparison between the Western hero and the detective:“Like the Westerner, the hardboiled detective is not only aman apart, but he is a social mediator: his capacity for vio-lence and streetwise savvy ally him with the outlaw element,although his values and attitude commit him to the promiseof a well-ordered community” (128).

19. Humphery, 65.20. Jennifer Cross, The Supermarket Trap: The Consumer and the

Food Industry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970),viii.

21. Jameson, Postmodernism, 38.22. The setup of Fight Club is quite similar to the argument made

by Susan Faludi in her book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the Amer-ican Man (New York: HarperCollins-Perennial, 1999), re-leased in the same year as Fight Club. Stiffed argues thatcontemporary men feel that traditional masculine roles andbehaviors are no longer available to them in a consumer soci-ety and thus feel lost, confused, and angry. Many commenta-tors have noted this convergence, and I find it cheering tothink of Fight Club as offering an introduction to the work ofSusan Faludi for adolescent boys.

23. Lucy Chen,“Fight Club,” Masculinity and the American Dreamin Films (2000), http://www.columbia.edu/~lcc20/amhs/fightclub.html (accessed 20 February 2004).

ERIK DUSSERE is the author of Balancing the Books: Faulkner, Morri-son, and the Economies of Slavery (Routledge, 2003). He teaches filmand literature at American University.

ABSTRACT This article traces film noir’s conflicted place in postwarAmerican consumer culture.Using detailed analyses of supermarketscenes in Double Indemnity, The Long Goodbye, and Fight Club, it ar-gues that the films stage a struggle between two competing ver-sions of the American national character: the consumer societyversus the noir underworld.

KEYWORDS noir, consumerism, Wilder, Altman, Fincher

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