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Lessons in “Bad Love”: Film Noir and the Rise of the American Oil Regime in Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2020
Abstract
This article examines Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945) as an example of film noir's exploration of the affective dimension of early oil-regime America. Drawing on the work of energy-humanities scholars, the article finds the film, and by extension the genre, providing a much-needed ground-level perspective on the efforts of industry and government to stimulate oil consumption by creating desires in a public struggling with the inherent paradoxes of new technologies, foremost among them the car. The automobile gave rise to “automobility,” seemingly an expansion of democratic freedoms, yet that new way of life also entrapped its participants within destructive habits of consumption involving an entire suite of beliefs, practices, habits, and other technologies. These features of the new life, in turn, were understood within a racialized narrative of whiteness to be productive rather than extractive habits. The shadowy and fated network to which film noir gestures, the article thus argues, is not some abstract metaphysical contemplation or generalized conclusion on a period of war, but a felt recognition of the ways the rapidly expanding network of extraction, distribution, and consumption was compelling Americans to remake their lives in dramatic ways that felt beyond their control.
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References
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57 This observation about film noir is also made by Belton, “Film Noir's Knights,” and about Ulmer's PRC films as a group, in Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer, 132.
58 Gas appliances were responsible for a high number of deaths annually in big cities (825 deaths in New York City in 1926), and the occasional catastrophe, such as the explosion that took the lives of 294 students and teachers in New London, Texas, on 18 March 1937. See Trichter, Jerome B. and Helpern, Milton, “Accidental Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Due to Domestic Gas Appliances and Gas Refrigerators: The Problem in New York City and Its Control,” American Journal of Public Health, 42 (March 1952)Google ScholarPubMed, 259–67; “The New London Texas School Explosion,” at http://nlsd.net/index2.html. Los Angeles was home to a high number of gas appliances, as 67.1% of its households contained such a source of heat in 1940, and films – and news stories about suicides and accidental deaths by asphyxiation – kept in public view gas's potential deadliness. See the relevant US Census data, at www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/fuels.html.
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94 Dussere quotes Dean MacCannell as observing, “The best way to characterize noir sensibility is as a ‘false nostalgia’ or ‘constructed nostalgia.’ What is produced is a sense of loss of something that was never possessed, something that never was” – which sounds to me the perfect description of the effect of the thwarting of a manufactured desire. See Dussere, America Is Elsewhere, 11.
95 LeMenager, Living Oil, 11.
96 Fay and Nieland, Film Noir, 12; Osteen, Nightmare Alley, 133.
97 Szeman, “How to Know about Oil,” 163.