Doctoral Candidate
Writer, Editor, and Translator
Based in Berlin, Germany
Inter-States:
Infrastructure in California Noir Fiction and Film, 1956–92
Dissertation Project
Inter-States: Infrastructure in California Noir Fiction & Film, 1956–92 argues for the interstate era as an epoch of U.S. American culture. Using a methodology informed by the burgeoning field of humanist infrastructure studies, this dissertation links the proliferation of superhighway infrastructure in the United States to what has been called the “noir tradition” in twentieth-century American culture. The protracted years during which the Interstate Highway System was officially under construction, 1956–1992, witnessed the reemergence and transformation of a popular aesthetic of darkness that had come to mainstream prominence with the film noir of the 1930s–50s. The interstate nurtured fantasies of freedom and adventure that sustained a considerable number of novels, movies, and popular songs about the open road. But it also crystallized a reality of domination that noir narratives have long sought to represent and resist.
Courtesy of Caltrans
Inter-States deploys an infrastructural approach to the study of culture to recover a dialectic noir tradition in the second half of the twentieth century. It has been claimed that the classic era of U.S. American film noir came to an end in the mid-1950s, right as the interstate began to materialize. Meanwhile, the later, postmodern appropriation of noir would feature in the landmark critiques of postmodernism—appearing in the early 1990s, when the interstate was at last declared complete—as an example of the depoliticization of culture in favor of ahistorical pastiche. This study takes the coincidence of these inflection points—between the historical trajectory of the U.S. American noir tradition and that of the full integration of superhighway infrastructure into American life—as an invitation to approach the years 1956–1992 as a cultural-infrastructural epoch. The interstate highway links New Deal liberalism to the neoliberal present, offering an infrastructural case study of how one became the other, all while fleshing out the transition between periodizing categories like New Deal and Neoliberal, Fordism and post-Fordism.
The U.S. American noir tradition in the interstate era can be defined by its engagement with what this study proposes to call inter-states. Inter-states designate spatiotemporal occasions, staged on and through built infrastructure, for symbolic, political, and affective traffic between individuals and the greater American system, or the complex of liberal-capitalist production and mainstream ways of life that was presented as inevitable. The specific inter-states tracked in this study arise from the unique aesthetic, phenomenological, and epistemic affordances of the historically novel superhighway form. As this study shows, cultural actors seized on such inter-states for their counter-hegemonic potential, whereas certain political actors saw in them an opportunity to aestheticize and sublimate the arrangement between state power and capital that a national superhighway network helped to make concrete.
This study demonstrates that the infrastructural form of the automobile superhighway has been co-theorized by politicians, journalists, engineers, and cultural producers across diverse discourses, narrative modes, and aesthetic forms over the twentieth century. The objects examined in this dissertation's five chapters fall into two categories that make up two ends of a dialogue around superhighway infrastructure: the speeches, images, promotional films, engineering manuals, and architectural manifestos that helped manufacture consent for the interstate highway’s construction; and those fictional narratives within a broad California noir tradition that ask what the rapid introduction of multi-lane, grade-separated superhighway infrastructure into everyday life might mean for aesthetics, society, and politics. The case studies examined in this dissertation represent a cross-section of California noir subgenres: the postmodern conspiracy fiction of Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novella The Crying of Lot 49; Joan Didion’s Hollywood gothic novel Play It as It Lays (1970); the pastiche hardboiled detective cinema of Chinatown (1974) and its comic offspring, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988); and the Black dystopian sci-fi of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993). These texts swerve from the well-known corpus of road narratives to present a materialist vision of the road that is astonishingly dark.
In addition to its claims about U.S. American cultural history, this dissertation sets out to make a methodological intervention in both the burgeoning field of the infrastructural humanities as well as in the broader discipline of cultural studies. It attempts to mobilize the superhighway form—not only its history and reception but its distinctive material features as well—toward the development of an interdisciplinary infrastructural critique. In focusing on the superhighway and its uptake across diverse discourses, narrative modes, and aesthetic forms, this study depicts a long and rich dialogue between the politicians, journalists, engineers, and cultural producers who have co-theorized automobile infrastructure. It is through the reconstruction of this dialogue that the inter-state concept begins to realize its potential as a methodological tool. This dissertation concludes by proposing that a noir infrastructural critique might make valuable contributions to ecocritique, the energy humanities, and other scholarly modes currently grappling with the Anthropocene and its ever more present consequences.