The third chapter considers political and social change in relation to the embattled white middle class. Through a reading of contemporary crime fiction, especially Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Mike Nicol and Roger Smith, it argues that middle-class culture has bifurcated into liberal and illiberal strands. These strands can be examined in relation to the negotiation of the rule of law: on the one hand the detective fictions of Orford and Meyer seek, ultimately, to affirm the constitutional order; on the other hand, the noir novels of Smith and Nicol encode a cynical stance, one which understands the social contract to have been irrevocably violated. These positions are then considered in relation to shifts within the Democratic Alliance, the political party most invested in white middle-class concerns.

The popular genre of the Mediterranean noir responds to the reorganization of global politics and economies. Situated in fallen empires and ineffective modern states, noir novels in French, Spanish, Greek, Turkish, Croatian, English, and Arabic presents a grim, horrified view of the global system. Their sensual detectives investigates criminal activities deriving from an internationally mobile capital—a phenomenon often figured as contemporary gangsterism. The detective affiliates himself with dispossessed migrants and nomads while also valuing local knowledge and cultural particularity. The brilliant lighting and shadowy dangers the Mediterranean noir thus present in an exaggerated form some of the geopolitical and ecological dilemmas facing the region. Despite the pervasive cynicism of the genre, glimmers of utopian optimism appear in the figure of the sea.

This chapter situates noir soundtracks as a technology of blackness in Western modernity. With the formulation “black records,” it points up the deep transnational and technological entanglements of what we can call, following Tyler Stovall’s lead, “a new, postcolonial genre of criminality.” Tapping into contemporary research by black studies and sound studies scholars, it connects noir soundtracks with the history of technologies meant to facilitate the tracing, tracking, identification, and surveillance of people deemed marginal, criminal, or suspect in the West’s long twentieth century. The first of the chapter’s three sections, “Liner Notes,” builds from Peter Szendy’s conceptualization of the dynamics of surécoute – overhearing – in espionage films to suggest the importance of structures of listening and overhearing manifest in noir film. The “A-Side: Miles and Malle: Ascenseur pour l’échafaud” focuses on Davis’s signature performance and soundtrack composition for Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. “B-Side: Melville, Martial, and Solal: Deux hommes dans Manhattan” focuses on the sound and phonographies of blackness in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Deux hommes dans Manhattan. Built on scenes of sound recording within and without the narrative structures of the film, the chapter considers how the sonic tracing, tracking, and recording of dark or deviant bodies in noir fiction and film ushers in new modalities for thinking and feeling urban modernity, and provides an important entryway into the discussion about the “phonographic” as “a singular mode of (black) modernity” (Weheliye).

This chapter addresses aspects of the trans-cultural or merging process at play in Kurosawa’s three Shakespeare adaptations Kumonosu-j / Macbeth (1957), The Bad Sleep Well / Hamlet (1960) and Ran / King Lear (1985) in terms of narrative and thematic parallels, correspondences from local models to Shakespearean ones and symbolic collusions. For each film, the mode of representation is suggestive rather than literal. The play-film dialectical effects never produce the same pessimistic discourse as in the model text, but one essentially of the same nature and depth. Narrative shifts, radical dialogues transformations allow the necessary adjustments and seamless coalescence between Japanese cultural contexts and Shakespeare worlds. Thematic parallels highlight similar circular, tragic patterns. Various techniques and aesthetics (Noh, painterly effects) blend with the sheer cinematic to depict a dark human saga in realistic worlds verging on symbolism.