The Ecology of American Noir
Abstract
In The Ecology of American Noir, I investigate the relationship between the conventions of noir fiction and film and its sub-types in relation to environmental crises. Specifically, I address questions that not only allow us to (re)read early hardboiled literature and neo-noir films, but that also help us identify a new sub-genre of noir and develop an ecocritical methodology: I call this contemporary sub-genre and methodology “eco-noir.” I trace the development of strategies of mapping urban blight and environmental deterioration in classic hardboiled fiction of the 1940s, neo-noir films of the 1970s, and eco-noir texts of the post millennial period. Moreover, in introducing the eco-noir as both a sub-genre and fictional form, as well as a methodology, I develop a new way of understanding the relationship between noir and climate fiction texts. In my close reading of hardboiled, neo-noir, and eco-noir texts, including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Robert Towne, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Jeff VanderMeer, I ask and address the following question: how does each sub-genre of noir map noir atmosphere of the private investigator’s natural setting in terms of environmental toxicity? I conclude that while early hardboiled and neo-noir texts map environmental deterioration as a backgrounded, fragmented element of the noir atmosphere and setting, contemporary eco-noir texts map such decay in a rhizomatic manner that represents an alternative conceptualization of the relationship between humans and the natural world. Each text, in its way, indicates a connection between capitalist and patriarchal infrastructure and environmental blight. In each chapter of The Ecology of American Noir, I contribute to critical conversations in both noir and ecocritical scholarship, making clear how a new understanding of noir as defined through environmental and atmospheric conditions invites readers, viewers, and scholars of the genre to generate meaningful dialogues about our decaying and deteriorating environment.