Toward Alphaville: Noir, Midcentury Communication, and the Management of Affect

This presents a genealogy of noir affect as it emerges alongside of and against midcentury humanism and the transformation of work from Fordism to the postwar logic of cybernetics. Tracing a filmic trajectory from Wilder’s Double Indemnity to Goddard’s Alphaville, Nieland also charts the changing fate of noir affect, which goes from a negation of midcentury Fordist humanism to becoming incorporated (and thus potentially defanged) in the global and cybernetic focus of the postwar moment. Nieland thus warns us early on about the complicated political effects of noir affect. It is rarely univocal or unambiguous in its political resonances.

Chick Noir: Surveilling Femininity and the Affects of Loss in Gone Girl

This chapter explores a surprising shift that has occurred in postfeminist popular culture and more specifically “chick culture” in the wake of the global economic crisis. Chick noir forms itself in opposition to those two standbys of twenty-first-century U.S culture, chick lit and the chick flick. If these latter genres perform a humorous remodelling of romance as the “happy object” around which young women should orient self-making or self-improvement projects for the promise of a good life and future feelings of happiness, chick noir has emerged across popular culture to chronicle widespread economic hardship and social decline under neoliberalism. Chick noir narratives are driven by negative affect and deal in the dark side of relationships, domesticity, and the public sphere for women. The chapter takes Gone Girl as its focus. This chapter pays particular attention to ways in which both texts shine a light on modern surveillance culture to explore the textual production of empathy and coercion and the ways in which these texts imagine femininity as a site of surveillance. What emerges is a form of noir affect that dramatizes the absolute lack of a stable or noncontradictory space for the contemporary female subject.

Public Violence as Private Pathology: Noir Affect in The End of a Primitive

This chapter argues that Chester Himes’s midcentury noir, The End of a Primitive, explores the forms of private violence produced by the repressive public sphere of what he terms the short 1950s. Like many of Himes’s narratives, the novel foregrounds interpersonal antagonisms around race and sex, emphasizing the way in which what is repressed in the public sphere (interracial political struggle but also interracial sex) returns with a vengeance in the private sphere. In attending to the novel’s dramatizing of noir affects, the essay also articulates the value of the negative political and historiographical vision advanced by Himes’s noir narrative.

Afterword: Melodrama, Noir’s Kid Sister, or Crying in Trump’s America

This chapter reflects on both the power and the limitations of noir affect as a global model for the neoliberal present, arguing that we also need to attend to noir’s younger sister, melodrama. If noir affect is a mode of contemporary culture, melodramatic affect may trump it as the present’s dominant mode. In a world in which right-wing strong men (starting with Donald Trump himself) are openly enjoying power and propagating sexual violence and in which respectability regularly is undone by exposed secrets, melodrama is the dominant mode. The contemporary social narrative takes the form of obscene fathers, family romances, and family secrets made public. If noir tends to be about a masculinized social world, in which the femme fatale plays by masculine rules and usually loses, melodrama has a different, potentially more feminist resonance: it articulates a feminine social world, which is structured around the revelation of violent sexual secrets existing behind the façade of respectability. Such forms of melodramatic affect shape important moments of contemporary political struggle as the #MeToo movement has demonstrated.

Playing with Negativity: Max Payne, Neoliberal Collapse, and the Noir Video Game

This chapter analyses the Max Payne series of video games (2001–2012) as an emblematic instance of the noir video game. The analysis focuses on the games’ relations to the anxiety, mourning, and anger associated with the decline of the public sector and the paired rise of globalization and neoliberalism. After the reading of the Max Payne series, the chapter turns to the relationship between gameplay and affect, arguing that various strategies of “counterplay,” as they have been undertaken through the series, offer another way to interrogate the games’ noir affects. The chapter thus introduces an influential example of noir in the context of mainstream video games, reads that series in relation to affects associated with the contemporary geopolitical order, and demonstrates how the gaming medium can afford critical potential through the affective investments we place in the activity of play.

Cyborg Affect and the Power of the Posthuman in the Ghost in the Shell Franchise

This chapter explores noir affect in Ghost in a Shell, a quarter-century-old, Japanese manga/anime franchise that spans several series in print, feature films, and television. Whatever the media, the different versions of the narrative conform to standard expectations of adolescent heterosexual masculinism. Yet such elements seem to form the series’ mystical shell rather than the conflicted and contradictory rationality of their central kernel (which itself springs from the serial logic of the noir police procedural). On the one hand, the chapter argues that representational aesthetics necessarily constrain even the radical and free association of an anime subculture; on the other hand, the series critically engages the forms of time articulated in the intersection of cyborg signification and seriality. Cyborg affect does not just ask the familiar question, where does a body end? It also interrogates the terms of technological reproducibility in relationship to political possibility. The synchrony of Major Motoko Kusanagi (the central character/cyborg) holds important lessons for how we read/see affect in relationship to the series, a formation haunted by the ghost of socialization itself.

The Shadows of the Twilight World: Beebo Brinker and the Circulation of Affect

This chapter argues that the presentation of queer life worlds in Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series reformulates the negative affects present in noir and offer spaces of succour and flourishing against a dangerous heteronormative backdrop. Reading negative affect in noir through this lens reorients the noir scene as one of potential for living outside the light and deep in the shadows of the twilight world. Thus, the gay bar, which often serves as a space of degeneracy in mainstream noir, instead becomes a space filled with possibilities for belonging, love, excitement, and desire.

Surplus Feelings: Neoliberal Noir and the Affective Economy of Debt

This chapter examines the dramatization of debt in two contemporary noir films by Danish-American director Winding Refn. A financialized obligation, debt is ceaselessly bought, sold, and securitized. At the same time, debt creates and sustains a social economy of affect that moves within and between people as it crisscrosses our planet. Drive and Only God Forgives tell stories about working-class families, drifters, and small-time crooks to explore the guilt, distrust, and despondency set in motion by a present that remains forever in debt to the past and cannot discern a future. Incapable of repaying what he owes, Drive’s nameless protagonist finds that debt breeds ever more debt. This constant increase, or excess, situates Refn’s characters as biopolitical relays for the monetized consumption and free production of sexuality and violence, and thus the surplus jouissance on which both capital and cinema feed. Set in Los Angeles and Bangkok at the intersection of migratory and financial flows, Refn imagines a global shadow economy of money laundering and drugs. Yet Refn's meditation on the relationship between debt and violence also ponders the possibility of forgiveness within a system determined to uphold financial measurements of social interaction.

Noir Pedagogy: The Problem of Student Masochism in the Classroom Economy

In “Noir Pedagogy,” Hatmaker draws on a range of different noir novels and films as well as Jacques Lacan’s conception of the four discourses, and Gilles Deleuze’s and Jean Laplanche’s differing accounts of sadism and masochism to theorize power and transference in the contemporary classroom. The chapter begins with the problem of the student who, in various ways, colludes with their own failure. Such a narrative of failure is classically noir. The chapter examines this dynamic as it plays out in the unequally structured classroom. It goes on to theorize different versions of noir affect in the classroom, including students who embody the sadistic masculine position (the detective or dick), the sadistic hysteric position (the femme fatale), and the masochistic feminine position (the corpse). The chapter concludes by pointing toward a collective praxis of working through trauma that can move the classroom out of the shadow of noir and transform it into a more affirmative and just environment.

Cold Kink: Race and Sex in the African American Underworld

Iceberg Slim is the godfather of African American street lit, a genre of gritty pulp fiction informed by the black noir tradition made famous by Chester Himes in the 1950s. Slim’s work has been heralded by a massive Black readership for decades. However, it remains obscure to literary critics, likely due to its brutal misogyny. While this chapter does understand Pimp as misogynistic, it pushes on its scenes of violent sex. It interprets them as representing eroticized power exchange, a noir trademark and phenomena of interest to negative affect studies. The chapter focuses on the female characters, arguing they have considerable power to not only render Slim subordinate, but abject. And by embracing their own abjection as a site of pleasure and agency, the female characters are often able to dominate Slim because he underestimates the extent of their kinkiness—and that of his own.