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Though it may have taken film noir to a narrative cul de sac, Kiss Me Deadly was not quite the generic endpoint Paul Schrader suggested. The cycle straggled on, with Touch of Evil (1958)—shot in Venice, California (as a stand-in for a Calexico border town), with an opening scene capped by a car bomb—marking the consensus expiration date. Even the “postnoir” interim of the early to mid-1960s, Foster Hirsch has shown, “far from being a limbo for noir, was a particularly rich period”: Psycho (1960), Blast of Silence (1961), Cape Fear, The Manchurian Candidate (both 1962), Shock Corridor (1963), The Naked Kiss (1964), and Brainstorm (1965).1 By the late 1960s, however, a confluence of historical, industrial, aesthetic, and cognitive changes produced a noir phase divergent enough from its classical forebear to warrant a new name: neo-noir. New “rips in the social fabric” caused by the Vietnam War and the counterculture provided a newly darkened social backdrop; the replacement of the Production Code by a more permissive ratings system enabled foregrounding of noir’s telltale sex and violence; stylistic innovation inspired by the European new waves encouraged formal experimentation; and, perhaps most significant, a hyperawareness of noir conventions promulgated by increasingly influential film schools engendered a generic self-consciousness utterly absent in the classical period among filmmakers, critics, and filmgoers alike. One thing that remained constant, however, was L.A.’s status as privileged noir site. Film Soleil The geographical constancy is particularly striking when comparing the “point of no return” of the classical period Kiss Me Deadly with the “first truly new post-noir noir,” Point Blank (1967).2 On opposite poles of the classical and neonoir spectrums, the two films are veritable companion pieces in their relation to L.A. noir, starting with their exemplification of the noir subset D. K. Holm terms “film soleil” (film sun).3 Favoring sunny, daytime settings as counterpoint to its 126 c h a p t e r 6  Neo-noir 127 Neo-noir shadowy, nightmarish themes, film soleil is preternaturally drawn, by default, to the bright and guilty place. As for the City of the Future’s exemplification of postmodern sterility, Point Blank takes Kiss Me Deadly’s early milking of the trope to new-wave extremes. Late1960s L.A. is “introduced” via a seemingly endless, kitsch-moderne airport corridor, along which the one-named protagonist Walker (Lee Marvin) strides, his trek intercut—to the rhythm and overlapped sound of his footsteps—with flash-forwards of his crosstown destination.4 Subsequent icons of alienation include a sleek downtown office tower (occupied by a conglomerate called “The Organization”); a Hammer-like Santa Monica upscale apartment building (with Ramona-like “Gates of Spain” restaurant); a hip Sunset Strip nightclub (replete with psychedelic light show and robotic go-go dancers); a high-tech Valley restaurant (patronized by glazed-eyed humanoids); an open sewer-like section of the L.A. River (at which two deadly shootings take place); and a Hollywood Hills mansion retreat overlooking Banham’s Plains of Id (“gridded with endless streets, peppered endlessly with ticky-tacky houses clustered in indistinguishable neighborhoods, slashed across by endless freeways . . . and so on . . . endlessly”).5 Cars make their obligatory appearance, if in pointedly mock-Autopian fashion. Walker, befitting his name, sends up both cars and freeways—most hilariously in the test drive of one of Big John’s new cars. With the eponymous mobster/car dealer riding shotgun, Walker pulls up at a freeway underpass and rams the car back and forth into the concrete pilings—though not just as a gag. Walker was double-crossed and left for dead in one of the mob-run Organization’s heists and is hell-bent on revenge. But like Hammer’s amoral gumshoe, Walker’s crusading gunman differs little from the inhabitants (or the surroundings) of this “souldestroying ” city. As Nicholas Christopher puts it, films like Point Blank (and Kiss Me Deadly) are “populated by characters so cold-blooded, existentially blank, and alienated—sundered, actually, from the disintegrating society around them—that the metallic, splashily lit nightmare cities of steel and glass they wander in seem most chilling for their matter-of-factness. They are presented not as heightened reality but as the norm.”6 The very unreality of the “norm” is the most uncanny resemblance between Point Blank and Kiss Me Deadly. Both the classical and the neo-L.A. noir share a protagonist who “is apparently...

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