Maxime McKenna

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.

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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.

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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.