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4. Noir Entanglements Black Music, White Women, and the Dark City Because of the location of the film industry in Los Angeles, the battle between black music and the Anglo establishment did not remain a mere local conflict but rather was transferred onto celluloid and broadcast around the world. Throughout its checkered history, Hollywood has held up a mirror, as distorting and one-sided as it may be, that has captured in filmic images and sounds the vicissitudes of race relations in Southern California. At one time, Hollywood was a relative latecomer to the movie business, entering the field of competition over two decades after Thomas Edison had invented the moving picture technology. According to Lary May, Los Angeles was the ideal setting for the budding mass media industry, with its cheap land, closed shops, moderate climate, and, not least of all, its claim on the myth of a new West, free from the hierarchical and tradition-bound social constraints of the East. Here, immigrants and children of immigrants, mostly of European Jewish origins, could create spectacles that offered working and middle-class Americans glimpses of the liberating possibilities of modern and urban life. In the wake of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’s phenomenal success, Hollywood stars embodied enticing alternatives to the Victorianism of old, replacing self-denial with conspicuous consumption, the Protestant work ethic with the celebration of leisure and recreation, and nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon values with modern notions of the melting pot.1 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, American popular culture both spurred and responded to the democratizing, pluralizing tendencies of the times. Even under the watchful eyes of censors and moral crusaders, Hollywood produced films that were inspired by the lower classes and vernacular arts, championed new models of femininity, and even occasionally allowed for i-xii_1-192_Yang.indd 80 1/7/08 9:52:09 AM Noir Entanglements 81 romantic relations between whites and nonwhites. In popular music and dance, first the jitterbug and then swing swept across the nation, bringing together black and white musicians and fans in limited but potentially revolutionary contexts. World War II swung the pendulum back: in the place of Benny Goodman’s integrated bands, Glenn Miller’s patriotic, all-white orchestra came to symbolize nostalgia for an imagined America; wartime consensus was made manifest in films that showed ethnic minorities only if they assimilated seamlessly into an idealized Anglo-Saxon mold.2 The social, political, and economic instability of the postwar period made its impact felt on the country as a whole and on the film industry more specifically . Those coming home from the battlefront adapted with difficulty to civilian life in a country that had been altered irrevocably in the war years. Soldiers returned to urban centers ravaged by racial strife, caused in large part by widespread migration to the cities by minorities during the boom and the resultant white panic. Women, having grown accustomed to working outside of the home, retreated to the domestic sphere and gave up their newly earned independence only with great reluctance. The economic boom of the war years sagged as war production came to an abrupt halt. The problems confronting postwar America were magnified many times over in Los Angeles. Because the region had won the lion’s share of government contracts during the war, the economic slowdown that followed was felt more excruciatingly here than in the rest of the country. New Angelenos, who had arrived in the city during a time of tremendous expansion, now found themselves without work and often targeted in the establishment’s crusade to conserve the city’s prewar socioeconomic status quo. The Zoot Suit riots of 1943 and the wartime internment of Japanese Angelenos were only the most sensational occurrences in a city torn asunder by police brutality against minorities, white flight into new municipalities designed to be exclusive domains of the white bourgeoisie, and the subsequent ghettoization of the inner city occupied by the nonwhite poor.3 Added to this widening rift in the social fabric was the paranoia that settled on Hollywood as the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings of 1947 and 1951 to 1952 destroyed careers and relationships and ushered in an era of industrywide blacklists. The Supreme Court ruling of 1948 ordering the breakup of the studio system, and the decline in ticket sales following the advent of television led inexorably to the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age. A new genre, film noir, articulated the anxieties that...

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