Postfeminist Noir: Brutality and Retro Aesthetics in The Black Dahlia

In January 1947, the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short was discovered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. She had been tortured, bled, surgically dismembered, and then dumped. The case became known as the Black Dahlia murder, at the time the most infamous unsolved homicide in American history. The murder has been reported, retold, and reinvestigated hundreds of times in popular media, from true-crime journalism, books, and television features, to dramatised and fictionalised accounts in fiction, film, and TV. While the representation of the Short murder necessarily provokes questions about truth and historical authenticity, the Black Dahlia case is now so deeply immersed in layers of contradictory Hollywood mythology, conspiracy theories, reinterpretations of the evidence, and contested accounts of the case that such a project would be impossible.¹⁹ Instead, it is more productive to consider the Black Dahlia case in terms of its cultural presence as a form of spectral myth that permeates contemporary understandings of classic-era Hollywood and in terms of how the case speaks to the ways in which visual culture is compulsively drawn and re-drawn to the juncture of sex and death as embodied by Short.

To that end, this article examines the representation of Elizabeth Short in Brian De Palma's film The Black Dahlia (2006), which was based on the 1987 James Ellroy novel of the same title. Beginning with an exploration of the cultural history of the case, from which has arisen a very specific mythology about tragic starlets and the pitfalls of Hollywood, I consider how this narrative is supported by De Palma's film. I then outline the implications of the film's addition of a series of erotic artefacts in the form of black-and-white movie reels featuring Short before her death. I argue that this alignment of Short with the aesthetics of the 'new burlesque' exoticises Short's vintage credentials, while sidelining the very real markers of misogynistic violence. Through an analysis of the film's visual and narrative strategies to bypass the issue of Short's brutal death, I explore how The Black Dahlia reflects the apolitical postfeminism circulating around contemporary retro and mainstream burlesque iconography.

Despite the vast range and number of both fictional and non-fictional retellings of the Black Dahlia case, a very specific mythology has emerged around Short, with a particular focus on the narrative of the tragic starlet and on an iconic visual style. Although it is unclear whether the real-life Short had grand ambitions to be a film star, the case has become irrevocably tied to the Hollywood cinema of the time, and in particular, to classic-era film noir. The name 'the Black Dahlia' is derived from a noir text, the Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake vehicle, The Blue Dahlia (1946), and although it remains unclear whether Short first received the nickname from friends while alive, or via newspaper headlines related to her murder, the connection between Short and the murky, sexually charged world represented in the noir films of the period is consolidated in the epithet.²⁰ Further to this, many retellings of Short's life position her as an aspiring actress and glamour girl, with some accounts going so far as to align her with other tragic figures of old Hollywood. For example, the tagline for The Devil's Muse (2007), a low-budget crime film concerned with copycat killings on the sixtieth anniversary of the Short murder, reads 'Hollywood Murders Women'. Similarly, in the Black Dahlia Murder segment of KABC News' Historic L A. series (1990) - a retelling of the case that foregrounds the tragic-starlet angle - Mary Humphrey, a Dahlia case critic who claims to be a childhood friend of the victim, argues that Short was friends with the young Marilyn Monroe. This tendency is echoed by Laurie Jacobson in her tabloid-style book on Hollywood scandals, where she notes that 'Betty Short became a symbol for all the pretty girls from all the small towns who came to Hollywood with big dreams' (95), and echoed as well in the recent television drama American Horror Story (2011...