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chapter 3 RACING THE PARADIGM: THE WHITENESS OF FILM NOIR Racial Others . . . keep coming back into white lives in film noir. Untoward behavior and its seeming inevitable racial echoes indelibly mark the white homes—and films—for which race typically exists somewhere else. eric lott, ‘‘The Whiteness of Film Noir’’ Issues of race do not seem to dominate film noir narratives; issues of genderand class do. As noted in the introduction, these films usually narrate the efforts of working-class women and men who struggle to escape their economic situation not through legal and less profitable means but through scams, heists, and seductions that promise (but in classic film noir never yield) financial nirvana. The male noir protagonist, the homme fatal, often has nothing but disdain for the working man willing to punch a clock and bring home a small paycheck, and the femme fatales are equally unwilling to raise a brood of children and work in the domestic realm. As Straayer notes, ‘‘the American dream of home, family, and ‘security’ is precisely the feminine fulfillment which the femme fatale intended to elude.’’1 These characters resist a society that seeks to contain their desires for a better life, although the final reel of the classic films noirs makes sure that resistance is futile. Class and race are, of course, articulated intimately in U.S. culture. As David Roediger notes in The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, ‘‘working class formation and the systematic development of a sense of whiteness went hand in hand for the U.S. white working class.’’2 He 29 goes on to discuss how this sense of whiteness prevents large-scale class wars in which whites and other races unite. Roediger paraphrases W. E. B. DuBois, who suggests that ‘‘white labor does not just resist and receive racist ideas but embraces , adopts, and, at times, murderouslyacts upon those ideas,’’ adding that the ‘‘problem is not just that the white working class is at critical junctures manipulated into racism, but that it comes to think of itself and its interests as white.’’3 Working-class whites, the dominant characters in classic films noirs, must be read and understood relative to how other races and classes appear in the films. This project attempts to read these images carefully, in both classic and postclassic noir, and includes an examination of race that does not elide whiteness. The birth of classic film noir in 1941 also heralded the demise of an industry that produced race films in the United States. Although World War II opened economic doors for women and people of color by allowing them into employment areas previously dominated by white men, as these economic pathways opened up, others closed. As Thomas Cripps notes in ‘‘Hollywood’s High Noon: Moviemaking and Society before Television,’’ prior to World War II, in the 1920s and ’30s, ‘‘race movies challenged Hollywood movies in that they took black aspiration seriously and formulated it into generic melodramas of scaling a black ladder of success, struggling against demons of cupidity with the race (never any off-screen white demons), and reworkings of white genres such as musicals, westerns, and film noir.’’4 Cripps adds, these race movies would face ‘‘the same fate the Negro National Baseball League faced after Jackie Robinson signed on with the white Brooklyn Dodgers: both Hollywood and major league baseball, by holding out a promise of black integration into a classier product than blacks could provide for themselves , ensured that the black audience would desert in favor of an integrated future.’’5 In 1919, black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux expressed the desire to film ‘‘plays that deal in some way with Negro life as lived by Negroes in that age or period, or day.’’6 Instead, with social integration, black audiences settled for Hollywood cinema that represented them less negatively but only obliquely or as a small part of white narratives. As Anna Everett makes clear in Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909–1949, ‘‘Hollywood’s short-lived and limited reformulation of cinematic blackness was the result of a necessary capitulation to the demands of generating pro-war sentiments in the hearts of all Americans, including blacks.’’7 This partial glimpse of black culture is exactly what most classic films noirs offer. But a further marginalization takes place, as Judith Mayne suggests in her chapter on white spectatorship in Cinema and Spectatorship. In movies, ‘‘one of...

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