Hollywood: The Creation and Yuppification of Noir
Last week, we were tasked with taking a photo which embodied the idea of "noir. Armed with only
our prior knowledge of the word, we produced a collection of black and white pictures, filled with
shadows and drama–– a purely cinematic interpretation of the idea. In the past few days, we have
learned much more about noir: what it represented, the movement it created, and its close knit
relationship with the city of Los Angeles. After reading Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, I am now more
curious than ever about the rise of and subsequent “yuppification” (as Mike Davis describes it) of noir
as a cultural and artistic movement in Los Angeles.
our prior knowledge of the word, we produced a collection of black and white pictures, filled with
shadows and drama–– a purely cinematic interpretation of the idea. In the past few days, we have
learned much more about noir: what it represented, the movement it created, and its close knit
relationship with the city of Los Angeles. After reading Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, I am now more
curious than ever about the rise of and subsequent “yuppification” (as Mike Davis describes it) of noir
as a cultural and artistic movement in Los Angeles.
I am most fascinated by the limits of noir and how the genre ended up contradicting itself. Although the concept of noir seemed promising when it first appeared, it quickly popularized and spun out of control. The purpose of noir originally was to cast a light on the city and discover the shadows it hid. Noir brought the previous booster and debunker movements hand in hand by showing both the good and bad of Los Angeles. Despite its initial promise, noir, like other products of LA, began to be destroyed by the city that created it. Noir became an integral part of media and movie culture at the time. The silver screen was dominated by movies portraying (most often) middle-class white men seduced by femme fatales and the temptation of the city itself. Noir belonged to those who wrote the screenplays and fell into a monotonous cycle of telling the story of Los Angeles from one perspective. Davis briefly discusses "Black noir," which lacked a platform and subsequently popularity. Black noir presented a perspective which varied from those of the writers in Hollywood. It exposed the untold stories of racism within LA. Even though black writers like Langston Hughes created their own noir pieces, they were ignored and cast from the main steam noir movement. I believe that the lack of inclusion and perspective in noir directly contradicts the illuminating nature it had when it first began. Eventually the public fascination with noir transformed into a fascination with evil, crime, and controversy within the city. Instead of being a genre that explored the juxtaposition good and evil, noir became an aesthetic for stories of gangsters and high-class corruption. The original intent of noir had completely shifted from showing the many facets of the City of Angels to treating it as a one dimensional thing, reduced to exposés and obsession with the drama of the city. Noir fell to the yuppies. An idea that started out as radical and completely different from anything before was entrapped by the city it set out to discover.
Now I am left wondering:
What makes noir unique to LA?
Why do you think noir is more memorable than boosters and debunkers?
Must a movement be “yuppified” to be remembered?
How did cinema and media affect your interpretation of noir?
Do you think that noir becoming mainstream directly contradicted the original concept?
Does noir lack perspective?
I think noir is unique to Los Angeles because in the media I feel like LA is considered a city where people let loose, live it up, and forget about societal constraints. Noir was a very edgy, controversial genre just as Los Angeles is considered a very edgy, controversial city. Whereas the boosters only encompassed the good of Los Angeles and the debunkers only encompassed the bad of Los Angeles, noir’s original intent was to encompass both the bad and good of Los Angeles. I think noir is more memorable because it tries to fuse the perspectives of both the boosters and debunkers. I dont think a movement needs to please the tastes of privileged yuppies to be remembered. There have been plenty of movements, which have not necessarily been made solely for yuppies, that have been remembered throughout history. Chicano murals, for example, is an activist art form that focuses on telling the stories of Chicanos with the purpose of empowering Chicanos from working class neighborhoods. This movement has since been remembered in history. I think that cinema and media turned noir into a genre focused on telling stories of crime, drama, and corruption. I think that cinema and media realized that crime, drama, and corruption excite people, thus generating a lot of profit. I do think that noir becoming mainstream directly contradicted the original concept because once it went mainstream, the original intent was not followed. The original intent of noir was to show the bad and good of LA; however, when noir went mainstream it only told the bad of LA. I think noir lacks perspective. Noir only depicts white, middle class men as the protagonists while everyone else either does not have a role in noir or is depicted negatively.
ReplyDeleteI think noir as a movement is more memorable than boosters or debunkers individually because at its core, it sought to reveal and use the perspectives of both groups, and thus it was able to appeal to a wider audience. While noir quickly changed from an all-encompassing analysis of a city or an idea, it did initially attempt to synthesize both the positive and negative, and I think that gave it an initially wide audience that allowed it to be memorable. I don't think a movement HAS to be yuppified for it to be remembered, but I do think that when a movement becomes more mainstream, while that has the potential to water down the goals of the movement itself, the sheer popularity and reach that comes with being mainstream does help a movement to be remembered by many people. For example, I'm sure there are countless underground movements that are remembered by those who participated, but for those outside of the group, they will never be remembered. In terms of noir specifically, I know I thought I knew what it meant, but my understanding was really just based in mainstream cinematic stereotypes. I pictured black and white, shadowy silhouettes, and men in suits with cigarettes without actually knowing anything about what noir as a concept was trying to achieve. I think because noir is so strongly associated with film and not so much about it's relationship with Los Angeles, we are able to create very vivid, yet possibly not super accurate, images in our minds of what noir "is" without really knowing what it is.
ReplyDeleteI've never believed noir to be solely unique to Los Angeles. New York City, San Francisco, and Boston are all cities which have a prevalent noir movement in them. I think my understanding of noir is greatly influenced by film. Films like Sunset Boulevard, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and Bladerunner have built my initial understandings of what noir is. There is something about noir that is so appealing to me as a consumer. Noir showcases the gritty realness of major cities, presenting the bad and the good, the pure and the sleazy, the clean and the dirty, and the privileged and the disadvantaged. There is something undeniably intriguing about extreme juxtaposition which lures me to indulge myself in the noir movement. Unlike boosters and debunkers, noir is factual. Noir is truthful, not opinionated, and undeniable. Through noir, political idleness is mocked and clandestine issues are made palpable. Noir allows consumers to formulate their own opinions. by becoming mainstream, noir is only coming closer to fulfilling its original concept. The purpose of noir was to expose cities for what they really were (the good, the bad, and the ugly). By presenting the reality of cities to a populous audience, noir fulfills its job. It is awakening spectators to the realities of our world. Not everything is sunshine and magic. Not everything is death and purposeful maliciousness.
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ReplyDeleteNoir is an incredibly interesting phenomenon in analyzing the rapidly changing attitudes of Angelenos as well as Americans in general about the controversial city of Los Angeles during its rise. While the booster and debunker movements/attitudes both faded as time passed in Los Angeles, Noir is a movement which we still study in order to understand this city and the then-newly bustling entertainment industry. Perhaps the main reason Noir has stuck for so long is solely due to its yuppification, but I’d like to believe the reason is because Noir has had so much to do with the rise of arguably the most relevant cultural trait of LA: the film industry. As the film industry was growing in Los Angeles, Noir used Film as a platform to spread messages and social signals, obviously about LA and its complexity, which I think influenced the way film is used as a means of artistic communication and making social statements even now. I think because Noir was obviously projected in front of such an expansive audience and because it was a more artistic and complex means of communicating a message, it ended up being more remembered -although not more important per se- than other expository movements of LA. Of course, as can be shown through Double Indemnity, Noir is unique to LA because of the casual references to parts of its culture and the fictional movie-magic that warrants characters traveling from Olvera street to the beach and back up to the Hollywood Bowl all in the same outing, but I discovered through my deep analysis of the film that Noir is also unique to LA because of much more profound and complex ideas. I think Noir definitely lacks perspective, but I don’t think that warrants a complete cancellation of the messages it sends. Although Noir definitely tells the story of LA from one perspective, I think it's important to understand that during the time Noir was popular, it was already incredibly controversial for its depiction of the archetypal femme fetal; many who watched Noir films when they came out in the mid 1900’s thought this devious and sexual depiction of women was too provocative for mainstream media. This is a bit of an outlandish association for our generation, but I think it's important to recognize that Noir really was revolutionary (in many ways) for its time.
ReplyDeleteI think noir in unique to Los Angeles because of the film industry's presence in the city. Every major city in the United States struggles with crime and controversy, but since the film industry is in LA, writers witnessed the negative aspects of the city first hand. I believe the corruption in the film industry could have also served as a form of inspiration for the noir scripts. I believe noir is more memorable because it shows more of an accurate representation of LA. Debunkers and boosters only highlight the extremes of the city with obvious biases. By highlighting both the positives and negatives of Los Angeles, noir provides audiences with a more accurate depiction of LA which I believe is more captivating than the forms of propaganda that the debunkers and boosters provided. I think most movements eventually become “yuppified,” but I do not believe it is necessary for a moment to be “yuppified” to be remembered. I believe “yuppification” leads to a movement becoming mainstream which then usually leads to loss of the original intent of the movement. Even though I believe that noir provides audiences with more of an accurate depiction of LA, I do not believe noir provides an accurate representation of LA. I think noir films lack perspective because they were mostly filmed in the 1940’s and 1950’s, when almost every form of media lacked perspective.
ReplyDeleteI think that noir is uniquely LA because of its integral part of exposing the seedy underbelly of the city while also including the picturesque exterior that is presented. Palm trees, sunsets, and Hollywood seem nice but the noir film makers and writers of the 1930s and 40s exposed LA's problems through fiction rather than documentation. If noir had not been "yuppified" I don't believe that it would have had the same cultural standing it has today. Cinema aided noir to reach the masses unlike the boosters and debunkers because of the pulp storytelling in it. Without the mass appeal that the genre gained through film noir would not have its place in the cultural lexicon as it does today. The fact that we as a class had a rough understanding of what noir is (today at least) in comparison to the booster and debunker movements show that the over saturation of noir granted the genre and moment a stronger foothold in the cultural landscape of LA and America. Because noir often focuses on the male perspective and takes place in a fictionalized LA I think the amount of perspective to be gained is minimal, not there is just enough depth in the concept that it can get its point across but little to no room for any other exploration or exposé.
ReplyDeleteBefore engaging in class dialogues and reading Chapter 1 in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, my knowledge of “noir” was pretty limited. The foggy notion I had of what noir was and what it possibly looked like came from scattered memories from cinema and media that pieced together to produce nothing more than a vague idea of noir including drama, mystery, and black-and-white. With the knowledge I now have of noir, my impression is that noir is an ambiguous, provocative term that historians and locals alike have used for decades to describe LA’s unique (and occasionally brutal) internal conflicts. I think the idea of cities having issues is not unique to Los Angeles in any way shape or form; for instance, Beijing has its poor air quality, Chicago has its high levels of crime, and NYC has its impossible housing. However, the single characteristic that I believe sets LA apart from other modern metropolises and thus serves as the “breeding ground” for noir as a whole is the fact that there is not one aspect of LA that is solely “good” or “bad”. In other words, everything in LA is controversial, and everything in LA can be disagreed upon. No one is on the same page about anything, and the city can’t offer you something positive without immediately offering you something negative. LA has beautiful beaches! … but you have to sit in traffic for an hour to get to them. LA has so many cool places to visit! … but there’s ultimately no public transit to get to them. The product of this exhaustive tug-of-war is noir — an uncomfortable — yet powerful — middle-ground between love and hate, praise and condemnation. I think that noir is the only thing that has kept and will continue to keep this fragile city from crumbling altogether because noir is the essence of the human experience. Noir doesn’t lack perspective it is perspective because true perspective must be the synthesis of many perspectives. Boosterism isn’t sustainable. When you persistently market the glory of LA, the city starts to appear less and less glorious. Debunkerism is a false prognosis. LA certainly has its problems, but it will only die if you tell people it will die. Noir gives LA its hope and longevity because there’s nothing healthier than naming your strengths and weaknesses and using this understanding as fuel to improve. Noir is more memorable because it’s just reality; with noir, there’s no sugarcoating, no false advertising, no pessimism, and no hyperboles — just the truth. The truth is what gets remembered. As unfortunate as it is, I do believe that, to a certain extent, a movement must be “yuppified” to be remembered because, in today’s world, the things that are talked about and written into history are the things that yuppies take part in. In other words, today, yuppie involvement makes a movement relevant. Although it might seem that noir’s transition to being mainstream is contradictory, I think that noir thrives when more people know about it.
ReplyDeleteI would argue that noir is not unique to Los Angeles, but rather it is probably most eloquently portrayed here than anywhere else. Many other major US cities such as Chicago, New York, and Houston have similar stories to tell as far as experiencing a prerequisite to a noir film setting: extreme poverty juxtaposed with inconceivable wealth. I'd like to believe that noir is more memorable than the boosters or debunkers because of its more holistic approach to analyzing Los Angeles, its people, and its experiences. I think that most people have, although they might not always utilize, the ability to comprehend and appreciate both sides of a story, and noir offers a more complete understanding of a culture to those of us who would lend an ear. Personally, I find noir films to be refreshing accounts of real world experiences. Noir, in its cinema format, is capable of delivering accurate and fair representations of what people and places actually go through. I believe that noir becoming mainstream is actually consistent with the original concept. Noir exposes people, places, and ideas for what they truly are, and I think that the more people who hear its messages the better. Since noir developed during the 1940's and 1950's in Los Angeles, it would follow that it lacks perspective. Only white men could play roles of important or powerful people, while the majority of the population saw little representation in these films.
ReplyDeleteI think noir is unique to Los Angeles because of how freely people live here. Moreover, in this period noir was booming in Los Angeles, I get a sense of a modern wild west kind of feeling. Los Angeles was this “lawless land” needing to be taken advantage of by those willing to take a risk. During this period, most cities had been established for a long enough time to have their identity, but I think Los Angeles’s identity was up for grabs. Many different groups such as the boosters and debunkers tried to establish Los Angles’ new identity, yet Noir managed to beat them out. I believe boosters and debunkers failed to make a major impact because of how bland their views were. Noir was the only style fit for such a unique place like Los Angeles. I don’t think a movement has to be “yuppified” to be remembered nowadays, but in a time like the mid-twentieth century, I would argue that there was a lot of conformation and the movements we tend to remember from that time were extremely mainstream. I haven’t had the chance to watch many noir films. Honestly, I had never heard of it since its introduction to our class. However, the one noir film I watched reinforced the ideas that were mentioned in our readings. I don’t think noir becoming mainstream took anything away from it. In fact, it allowed it to become recognized across America which some would argue was the whole point. When people watched these movies, they relate them to Los Angeles and form their perspectives of Los Angeles based on them. The noir movement successfully depicted the uniqueness of Los Angeles.
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ReplyDeleteWorld War II set the country up for an artistic genre that wagered a jab at the American lifestyle. Disillusioned and tired, the United States was ready for a harsh critique of itself: the nation that welcomed back its soldiers with newly empowered women and the promise of nuclear crisis. But it’s likely a dark curiosity had always existed in Los Angeles. Glitz, glamour, stars, and luxury had invited exclusive, seductive scandal and corruption. By marketing itself as a city different from any other in the country, Los Angeles was elusive, unrealistic, and alienated. Mystery is a key ingredient of noir. Though cars, fur, and falsely victimized white men can be found in any city, Los Angeles had the advantage of being entirely in control of its own narrative. Literally out of someone’s story book, LA’s noir is fundamentally delusional, as are our city’s founding principles. Yet noir offers an entertaining version of the perspective we all experience: moral uncertainty, disillusionment, guilty interest, dark influence, entrapment. This cinematic noir, however, seems far from the complexities of reality the genre originally intended to portray. Where is the commonplace, accessible optimism to balance out an over-dramatic seediness of the city?
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ReplyDeleteI believe that the creation of noir in Los Angeles directly correlates with the popularity of the cinema industry. In the media, Los Angeles was seen as a paradise, containing famous celebrities, Hollywood, and amazing geological aspects such as the ocean. The cinema and media outlets encouraged this narrative of Los Angeles by depicting Los Angeles as this paradise in films. Also depicted in the films was the noir aspect of Los Angeles, making Los Angeles unique and different from anywhere else in the world. Due to the attractiveness of Los Angeles and due to its portrayal in the film industry, people from all around the world came to Los Angeles. This further added on to the noir aspect of Los Angeles because no city in The United States had this type of atmosphere, lifestyle, or cultural diversity.
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ReplyDeleteAs Mike Davis told us, noir is perhaps the only thing to be truly produced by the city of Los Angeles. As such, I believe that noir is unique to Los Angeles in that we are one of the only cities in the world to have such a twisted history rooted in juxtaposition. We were a city that was made from nothing, into an all-encompassing yet unattainable dream. I think noir is more memorable than the debunkers or boosters because in some ways, it presents a neutral truth about Los Angeles. Because it is a conglomeration of both the good and bad, the dark and light, it allows people to see the full depth of the city. However, I still think it should be acknowledged that while the words “booster” and “debunker” may not be used as widely as the word “noir” that there are still many individuals and institutions that fall into one of those categories. To me, noir is more easily digestible because it can present one side while acknowledging the other and subsequently provide a holistic view. Personally, I believe a movement does not need to be yuppified to be remembered. There are many movements like the hippie movement in the Haight-Ashbury district that acts as a strong juxtaposition against the yuppies. Everything the contributors of that movement stood for contradicted the personal tastes and aims of the yuppies. However, it still played a monumental role in US history and culture during the 1960s.
ReplyDeleteI think two weeks ago, cinema and media were some of the only things that affected my interpretation of noir. Before this class, I only vaguely had an idea of what noir was, and even what I did know was largely informed by noir media. Now, after learning more in this class, I know noir extends beyond film and Hollywood. However, I believe it was the presence of noir in the film industry that led to it’s becoming mainstream and in some ways contradicting its original aim. In the hands of certain people, I believe that the aethstetic of noir became just another culturally iconic phenomenon used to sell Los Angeles. As a result, it likely started to lean more towards the boosters side of the spectrum, rather than standing in the middle as it was supposed to. However, I am not sure that noir lacks perspectives. I believe that noir could mean something different to everyone, and as such, its perspective is limited by the perspectives of those who contributed to the movement.
I think noir is unique to Los Angeles in that LA is a city that relies heavily, if not entirely, on what others perceive it as. Mike Davis said it best when he stated that “film noir remained an ideologically ambiguous aesthetic that could be manipulated in dramatically different ways.” LA itself is constantly being manipulated and reimagined according to who is viewing it. Also, because noir is so heavily involved in the film industry and due to LA’s influence in the film industry, I think it was something that took off extremely quickly. I think people remembered the Noirs more than the Boosters’ and Debunkers’ points of view because the Boosters and Debunkers took to the extremes whereas the Noirs played the middle ground by drawing attention to both the highlights and lowlights of LA. Before reading Mike Davis’s piece, I assumed that noir and film noir was simply a genre that involved black and white filters and dramatic poses. I think this was in part due to the fact that I know very little about the film industry and the genres and themes at work in it, but also due to the fact that my only (and limited) exposure to film noir was the devolved, transformed version that was fascinated with evil, crime, and controversy, all the more dramatic aspects of LA. While I don’t think that noir becoming “mainstream” was necessarily bad for it, I think it might have been able to better preserve its initial intentions if it hadn’t taken to the spotlight. However, if it hadn’t become mainstream, I don’t think it would have had the same effect on Los Angeles. I don’t think it could have done both. In other words, I don’t think it would have been able to maintain its integrity and influence the culture of LA in the same way that it did.
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ReplyDeleteWhile I don’t think noir is unique to Los Angeles, our city has a variety of unique qualities to offer to noir itself. Los Angeles, essentially being the first mass advertisement of America, portrayed itself as a form of paradise: by the beach, in the sun, and with all the intelligentsia. Because of this impossibly high standard, it was easy to spot the many flaws within the city once settled. This set the stage for the emergence of noir. In my eyes, the reason why noir is more memorable than boosters and debunkers is because it encapsulates the full picture. Noir, when highlighting benefits and exposing flaws, allows either a debunker or a booster to learn something new. This made it intriguing for everyone, and in a world where we are as polarized as every, noir still stays relevant by taking the rare stance of seeing both sides.