Dames in the Driver's Seat: Rereading Film Noir / Edition 1

by Jans B. Wager

Overview

With its focus on dangerous, determined femmes fatales, hardboiled detectives, and crimes that almost-but-never-quite succeed, film noir has long been popular with moviegoers and film critics alike. Film noir was a staple of classical Hollywood filmmaking during the years 1941-1958 and has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity since the 1990s. Dames in the Driver's Seat offers new views of both classical-era and contemporary noirs through the lenses of gender, class, and race. Jans Wager analyzes how changes in film noir's representation of women's and men's roles, class status, and racial identities mirror changes in a culture that is now often referred to as postmodern and postfeminist.

Following introductory chapters that establish the theoretical basis of her arguments, Wager engages in close readings of the classic noirs The Killers, Out of the Past, and Kiss Me Deadly and the contemporary noirs L. A. Confidential, Mulholland Falls, Fight Club, Twilight, Fargo, and Jackie Brown. Wager divides recent films into retro-noirs (made in the present, but set in the 1940s and 1950s) and neo-noirs (made and set in the present but referring to classic noir narratively or stylistically). Going beyond previous studies of noir, her perceptive readings of these films reveal that retro-noirs fulfill a reactionary social function, looking back nostalgically to outdated gender roles and racial relations, while neo-noirs often offer more revisionary representations of women, though not necessarily of people of color.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292709669
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	09/01/2005
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	202
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

Jans B. Wager is Associate Professor of English and Literature at Utah Valley State College in Orem, Utah. This book continues the investigation of film noir she began in Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Dames and Driving
• Section One: Contents and Contexts
  • Chapter One. Manning the Posts: Classic Noir, Postclassic Noir, and Postmodernism
  • Chapter Two. Sexing the Paradigm: Women and Men in Noir
  • Chapter Three. Racing the Paradigm: The Whiteness of Film Noir
• Section Two: Prototypes in Classic Noir
  • Chapter Four. The Killers (1946): Quintessential Noir?
  • Chapter Five. Out of the Past (1947): Passive Masculinity and Active Femininities
  • Chapter Six. Kiss Me Deadly (1955): Apocalyptic Femmes
• Section Three: Return of the Repressed in Retro-Noir
  • Chapter Seven. L.A. Confidential (1997) and Casablanca (1942): Does Anything Change as Time Goes By?
  • Chapter Eight. Mulholland Falls (1996): Nuclear Noir as Numbskull Noir
  • Chapter Nine. Fight Club (1999): Retro-Noir Masquerades as Neo-Noir
• Section Four: Revision of the Repressed in Neo-Noir
  • Chapter Ten. Twilight (1998): Age, Beauty, and Star Power—Survival of the Fittest
  • Chapter Eleven. Fargo (1996): A Woman Who Is Not Herself Mean—Snow-swept Highways and Margie
  • Chapter Twelve. Jackie Brown (1997): Gender, Race, Class, and Genre
• Conclusion. Doing It for bell: Cultural Criticism and Social Change
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index