From Sunshine To Noir (?): The Revisitation of Sixties Los Angeles in 21st Century Crime Narratives

Starting from the 21st Century, a series of novels and films, by using and renewing the distinctive traits of the noir genre, revisits the 1960s in Los Angeles, a crucial decade in American history from a political, social and aesthetic point of view. This thesis aims to investigate this major trend and to identify a new sub-genre in the vast and heterogeneous Los Angeles noir; the corpus of my analysis includes 5 novels and 3 films: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009) and its filmic adaptation directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (2014), Walter Mosley’s Blood Grove (2021), Nina Revoyr’s Southland (2003), Steve Erickson’s Zeroville (2007), Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2006) and Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino (2019) and his eponymous novelization of it published in 2021. By focusing on the intermedial and intertextual nature of these works, constantly in dialogue with their respective literary and film adaptations, I try to demonstrate how such novels and films revisit not only the history of Los Angeles but also the filmic and literary imagination which, up to the 21st Century, characterized the representation of the city. I argue that the detection has to do with the recognition and the rehabilitation of collective memory, what I define as a strategy of unforgetting, in regards to both Los Angeles and the Sixties, as an aesthetic reaction to the problem of the erasure of memory that had always characterized the history of the city. Particular attention is be paid to the critique of late capitalism and the political aesthetic of neoliberalism, for their relevance in the dialogue between the Sixties and the 21st Century, especially as regards the absorption of racial difference in post-Civil Right society and the incorporation of the Sixties countercultural politics. Starting from the tradition of Marxist critical theory, from Herbert Marcuse to Frederic Jameson, whose theories are reconsidered in the works of Mark Fisher, I analyze the trilateral relationship between the noir, the Sixties and the 21st Century American society. In particular, I focus on the multiculturality inherent to Los Angeles society which is mirrored in the heterogeneous corpus of the analysis; such diversity plays an essential role not only in the historical shifts in the genre but also in highlighting crucial issues of contemporary neoliberal society. In fact, through revisitation of the Sixties – that is, the end of the countercultural utopia, the crisis of Vietnam, the militarization of the police and the enforcement of ghettos, the War on Drugs – the noir of the Twenty- first Century interrogates the contradictions of the neoliberal society, a society based on the surveillance, control and incorporation of diversity within the capitalist productive system. In this sense, if the hardboiled originates from disillusionment with the idea of liberal democracy expressed by the New Deal Liberalism, the noir of the 21st century, while coming to terms with the political and social climate of the late Sixties, continues to question the significance of democracy and justice in American society in the aftermath of 9/11, the War on Terror and the crisis of policing.