Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship

Dark Borders connects anxieties about citizenship and national belonging in midcentury America to the sense of alienation conveyed by American film noir. Jonathan Auerbach provides in-depth interpretations of more than a dozen of these dark crime thrillers, considering them in relation to U.S. national security measures enacted from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. The growth of a domestic intelligence-gathering apparatus before, during, and after the Second World War raised unsettling questions about who was American and who was not, and how to tell the difference. Auerbach shows how politics and aesthetics merge in these noirs, whose oft-noted uncanniness betrays the fear that “un-American” foes lurk within the homeland. This tone of dispossession was reflected in well-known films, including Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, and Pickup on South Street, and less familiar noirs such as Stranger on the Third Floor, The Chase, and Ride the Pink Horse. Whether tracing the consequences of the Gestapo in America, or the uncertain borderlines that separate the United States from Cuba and Mexico, these movies blur boundaries; inside and outside become confused as (presumed) foreigners take over domestic space. To feel like a stranger in your own home: this is the peculiar affective condition of citizenship intensified by wartime and Cold War security measures, as well as a primary mood driving many midcentury noir films.

Table of Contents:
Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Un-Americanness of Film Noir 1 1. Gestapo in America: Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Stranger on the Third Floor 27 2. White Collar Murder: Double Indemnity 57 3. Cuba, Gangsters, Vets, and Other Outcasts of the Islands: The Chase and Key Largo 91 4. North From Mexico: Border Incident, Hold Back the Dawn, Secret Beyond the Door, and Out of the Past 123 5. Bad Boy Patriots: This Gun for Hire, Ride the Pink Horse, and Pickup on South Street 155 Postscript: Darkness Visible 185 Notes 205 Bibilography 245 Index 261

About the Author :
Jonathan Auerbach is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations; Male Call: Becoming Jack London, also published by Duke University Press; and The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James.

Review :
"While scholars have long attended to film noir as one of the preeminent genres of U.S. cinema, they ironically have rarely studied it in terms of its specific engagements with national self-identity and self-definition. Deftly employing his strong and reputed background in American Studies to far-reaching ends, Jonathan Auerbach shows precisely how film noir was central to the country's self-questioning in the fraught times of the Cold War. This is a groundbreaking study that comes up with trenchant insights about a genre that one might have thought had nothing new to yield to critical inquiry." Dana Polan, New York University "This terrific book offers fresh insight into both the genre of film noir and the cultural production of the postwar and early Cold War period. Through rich, historically contextualized readings of a range of noir films, Jonathan Auerbach shows how the genre captured the uncanniness of a time of suspicion and paranoia. By illuminating the uncanny figures (the immigrants, the aliens, the strangers) and spaces (national borders and urban zones) that characterize the noir affect, he shows how these films dramatized the national response to the changing terms of citizenship and subjectivity as the anxious fear of the stranger within."oPriscilla Wald, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative