¹ Cain, James M., The Postman Always Rings Twice (New York: Vintage, 1992), 86Google Scholar. Also quoted in Fay, Jennifer and Nieland, Justus, Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 7Google Scholar; and Osteen, Mark, Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 133Google Scholar.

² Detour, directed by Ulmer, Edgar G., Producers Releasing Corporation (New York: Criterion Collection, 2019)Google Scholar.

³ Commonly recognized features of film noir include Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's observation that noir “is essentially a translation of both character emotions and narrative concepts into a pattern of visual usage,” a pattern Janey Place and Lowell Peterson have explored as concentrated in low-key, high-contrast lighting, with prevalent shadows: see, for example, Pratt, Ray, Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001), 52, 51Google Scholar. But most important to definitions of the genre has been a description of its effect, encapsulated by Isenberg as “a mood, a tone, or a sensibility” of “a lurid, cheapened, morally depraved universe.” Isenberg, Noah, Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As reinforced by Belton, one of the most influential characterizations of noir has been the very first, which was Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton's 1955 insistence on noir's production of a “malaise” in the viewer. John Belton, “Film Noir's Knights of the Road,” Bright Lights Film Journal, 1 Nov. 2006, at https://brightlightsfilm.com/film-noirs-knights-road/#.XdQ0CldKiUk. Although many have debated whether noir is indeed a proper genre, I would like to use the term in this article as a way to track the “family resemblance” of a group of filmic texts that use a shared visual and emotional vocabulary to tackle a “slippery” subject.

⁴ The debate around film noir's identification and definition is a long and storied one. My approach shares concerns similar to those of Dussere, Erik, America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar, but it also adheres to what Dussere notes is “a rough consensus among critics that noir tends to position itself oppositionally, providing a critical viewpoint on American politics of the forties and fifties, portraying the underside of the American dream.” Ibid., 23.

⁵ LeMenager, Stephanie, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, After Oil!,” American Literary History, 24, 1 (Spring 2012), 59–86, 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, Bob, “‘An Upthrust into Barbarism’: Coal, Trauma, and Origins of the Modern Self, 1885–1951,” Journal of American Culture, 33, 4 (Dec. 2010), 265–79, 267, 265CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Yaeger, Patricia, “Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” PMLA, 126, 2 (2011), 305–10Google Scholar.

⁷ Mitchell, Timothy, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London and New York: Verso, 2011)Google Scholar; Buell, Frederick, “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance,” Journal of American Studies, 46, 2 (May 2012), 273–293, 273CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Szeman, Imre, “How to Know about Oil: Energy Epistemologies and Political Futures,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 47, 3 (Fall 2013), 145–68, 145, 163Google Scholar.

⁹ For the “psychic reality” of film – in particular, film noir – see Pratt, 46.

¹⁰ In this exploration, I am taking up the invitation implicit in Schuster's comment: “Let's face it, the absent presence of oil in modernist art is too compelling to not demand critical investigation, even as such inquiry is like the plot of a film noir, with the detective looking for the perpetrator who is everywhere woven into the fabric of the mise-en-scene but still confounds direct interrogation.” Schuster, Joshua, “Where Is the Oil in Modernism?” in Wilson, Sheena, Carlson, Adam, and Szeman, Imre, eds., Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 197–213, 199Google Scholar.

¹¹ Miklitsch, Robert, Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 120CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Crawford, Richard and Magee, Jeffrey, Jazz Standards on Record, 1900–1942: A Core Repertory (Chicago: Center for Black Music Research, 1992), 33–34Google Scholar.

¹³ Quoted in Isenberg, Noah, Detour (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer, 77, 85, 123. So too does the film echo some of the trajectory of its screenwriter and the author of the film's source novel, Martin M. Goldsmith, who as a struggling writer worked a grueling job as a cross-country automobile driver for Americans headed west. Goldsmith, Martin M., Detour (Floyd, VA: Black Curtain Press, 2013)Google Scholar. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. For a reading of the protagonist's trip as a reflection of the troubled Hollywood experiences of its main actors, Tom Neal and Ann Savage, see Kalat, David, “Detour's Detour,” in Herzogenrath, Bernd, ed., The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 137–58, 155–57Google Scholar. For more on Detour's direct address of the viewer, and the common feature of film noir that it is a “readerly text,” see Belton, “Film Noir's Knights of the Road.” See also Modleski, Tonia, “Film Theory's Detour,” Screen, 23, 5 (1982), 72–79, 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the element that the film's “spectator himself is treated as a persecutor by the hero.”

¹⁵ Burrows estimates that more than 40 films noirs use the combination of voice-over narration and flashback. See Burrows, Stuart, “Noir's Private ‘I’,” American Literary History, 29, 1 (Spring 2017), 50–71, 54Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Double Indemnity, dir. Billy Wilder, Paramount Pictures (1944). Ulmer once proposed a film by the title Single Indemnity, which was eventually made into 1948's Blonde Ice. Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer, 140.

¹⁷ The Postman Always Rings Twice, dir. Tay Garnett, Metro-Goldwin-Mayer (1946).

¹⁸ Black, Brian, Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History, updated edn (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 70Google Scholar.

¹⁹ “Energy sources have changed throughout the history of the United States,” Energy Information Administration, 3 July 2013, at www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=11951 accessed 30 April 2020.

²⁰ Jones, Christopher, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Touchstone, 1991), 87Google Scholar. The Texas crude that glutted the world market after the Spindletop gusher of 1901 was too low a quality to refine into kerosene, so it was repurposed away from lighting to “heat and power and locomotion,” spurring the immediate overhaul from coal-fired machinery to oil-powered engines that was to sweep across the globe. See also Keating, Patrick, “Film Noir and the Culture of Electric Light,” Film History, 27, 1 (2015), 58–84, 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the electricity industries’ encouragement of increased consumption.

²¹ See Black, 74.

²² Dant, Tim, “The Driver-Car,” Theory, Culture & Society, 21, 4 (Oct. 2004), 61–79, 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Raper, Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005; first published 1936), 175, 85Google Scholar.

²⁴ Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

²⁵ Morton, Timothy, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Jakle, John A. and Sculle, Keith A., Supplanting America's Railroads: The Early Auto Age, 1900–1940 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017), 29Google Scholar. Scott L. Bottles traces the competition between automobiles and the more practical trains and streetcars in Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

²⁷ Jones, 13. Yergin notes on the regime's protections, for example, that early California oil extraction was shielded from foreign competition through tariffs, even though the state's surplus oil was more often exported abroad than distributed domestically. Yergin, 82.

²⁸ Mumford, Lewis, The Urban Prospect (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956), 105, 93, 101Google Scholar; Bottles, 206.

²⁹ Sachs, Wolfgang, For the Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires, trans. Reneau, Don (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992; first published 1984), 38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Sheller, Mimi, “Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car,” Theory, Culture & Society, 21, 4–5 (Oct. 2004), 221–42, 225CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Sachs, 112, 48.

³² LeMenager, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum,” 72.

³³ Sachs, 112. As Mimi Sheller observes about “automotive emotions,” “The very passions that feed into certain kinds of love for the car or joy in driving may equally elicit opposite feelings of hatred for traffic, rage at other drivers, boredom with the same route, or anger at government transportation policies”; and with one's hands on the wheel, one had the power to make those emotions felt by others. Sheller, “Automotive Emotions,” 224.

³⁴ “Death by Automobile,” New York Times, 2 Feb. 1937, 22; “Death on the Road,” New York Times, 1 Dec. 1937, 22.

³⁵ Sachs, 22.

³⁶ Ibid., 116, 115.

³⁷ See, for example, Doolittle, James Rood, ed., Romance of the Automobile Industry (New York: Klebold Press, 1916)Google Scholar; but also Mandel, Leon, Driven: The American Four-Wheeled Love Affair (New York: Stein and Day, 1977)Google Scholar.

³⁸ Osteen, Nightmare Alley, 135, 150.

³⁹ See also Miklitsch, Siren City, 267 n. 56, on this strange device. On the question of “whose” song it is, see Isenberg, Detour, 53.

⁴⁰ “Death on the Road”; “Los Angeles Group Sets Safety Aims,” New York Times, 9 Feb. 1943, 21; Louis L. Dublin, “Our Menacing Toll of Accidents Attains a New Peak,” New York Times, 21 Dec. 1930, 117.

⁴¹ Frohardt-Lane, Sarah, “Essential Driving and Vital Cars: American Automobile Culture in World War II,” in Barrett, Ross and Worden, Daniel, eds., Oil Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 91–108, 98–99, 102Google Scholar.

⁴² Cantor, Paul A., “Film Noir and the Frankfurt School: America as Wasteland in Edgar Ulmer's Detour,” in Conard, Mark T., ed. The Philosophy of Film Noir (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 139–61, 154Google Scholar; Muller, Eddie, Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998), 178Google Scholar; Böhm, Steffan, Jones, Campbell, Land, Chris, and Paterson, Matthew, “Introduction: Impossibilities of Automobility,” in Böhm, Steffan, Jones, Campbell, Land, Chris, and Paterson, Matthew, eds., Against Automobility (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 3–16, 3Google Scholar.

⁴³ Miklitsch, Siren City, 74.

⁴⁴ Frohardt-Lane, 94, 104.

⁴⁵ Mandel, 87. Mandel is quoting Dr. Herbert M. Greenberg from Automotive News.

⁴⁶ Anthony Atkinson, Joe Hasell, Salvatore Morelli, and Max Roser, “Economic Inequality in the USA,” Chartbook of Economic Inequality (2017), at www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/inequality-by-country/usa.

⁴⁷ Rogers, Maureen, “Remaking the B Film in 1940s Hollywood: Producers Releasing Corporation and the Poverty Row Programmer,” Film History, 29, 2 (2017), 138–64, 142Google Scholar.

⁴⁸ Nikiforuk, Andrew, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2012), 2Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Yergin, The Prize, 220; Quam-Wickham, Nancy, “‘Cities Sacrificed on the Altar of Oil’: Popular Opposition to Oil Development in 1920s Los Angeles,” Environmental History, 3, 2 (Apr 1998), 189–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁰ “Before and After 1940: Change in Population Density,” United States Census Bureau, 16 Aug. 2012, at www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/010.

⁵¹ Molloy, Raven, Smith, Christopher L., and Wozniak, Abigail, “Internal Migration in the United States,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25, 2 (Spring 2011), 173–96, 181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² According to Brook, film noir afforded especially émigré directors such as Ulmer a way to perform cultural critique of the US along the lines of Horkheimer and Adorno; or, as he puts it, the style “offered exile filmmakers the nearest thing to dialectical exchange with the culture industry as was possible from within the belly of the beast.” Brook, Vincent, Driven to Darkness: Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of Film Noir (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ Burrows, “Noir's Private ‘I’,” 53, identifies noir's trademark “exhaustion” with something like cliché: “everyone knows everything.”

⁵⁴ Morton, Dark Ecology, 9; see also his The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 16, 111.

⁵⁵ Black, Crude Reality, 67, 79.

⁵⁶ Stephanie LeMenager makes the same point about celluloid and oil in Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), also suggesting that “oil … brilliantly brings the representational problem that is narrative to crisis.” Ibid., 185, original emphasis. For the common occurrence of explosions and fires in southern California oil fields see Quam-Wickham, 192–93.

⁵⁷ This observation about film noir is also made by Belton, “Film Noir's Knights,” and about Ulmer's PRC films as a group, in Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer, 132.

⁵⁸ Gas appliances were responsible for a high number of deaths annually in big cities (825 deaths in New York City in 1926), and the occasional catastrophe, such as the explosion that took the lives of 294 students and teachers in New London, Texas, on 18 March 1937. See Trichter, Jerome B. and Helpern, Milton, “Accidental Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Due to Domestic Gas Appliances and Gas Refrigerators: The Problem in New York City and Its Control,” American Journal of Public Health, 42 (March 1952)Google ScholarPubMed, 259–67; “The New London Texas School Explosion,” at http://nlsd.net/index2.html. Los Angeles was home to a high number of gas appliances, as 67.1% of its households contained such a source of heat in 1940, and films – and news stories about suicides and accidental deaths by asphyxiation – kept in public view gas's potential deadliness. See the relevant US Census data, at www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/census/historic/fuels.html.

⁵⁹ Smith, Imogen Sara, In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 14Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ For the “new servitude” of oil and a connection of its injustices to those of slavery see Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves.

⁶¹ “Fatal Crash Dim to Jackie Coogan,” New York Times, 6 May 1935, 20; “Film Dance Director Faces Murder Trial,” Washington Post, 2 Dec. 1935, 18; and “Howard Hughes Held in Motor-Car Death,” New York Times, 13 July 1936, 11.

⁶² Angel Face, dir. Otto Preminger, RKO Pictures (1953). Stories involving everyday people using cars to commit crimes include the sensationalistic “Nephew Poisons 2, Sinks Bodies in Sea,” New York Times, 27 Sept. 1935; and “Indicted in Car's Plunge,” New York Times, 20 Dec. 1939, 14. Those involving gas poisoning include “Dartmouth Sends Dead to Homes,” New York Times, 27 Feb. 1934, 12; “Family Saved by Baby's Cries,” Washington Post, 8 Jan. 1935, 2; “Monoxide Plot Hinted in Death of Miss Todd,” Washington Post, 20 Dec. 1935, 3; “Wife Kills Sleep Talker,” New York Times, 15 Sept. 1936, 33; and “Bride's Cocktail Party Suicide Covered by Veil of Mystery,” Washington Post, 26 April 1937, 3.

⁶³ As Smith, 106, points out about Detour's plot, “Hitchhiking is a barometer of trust: the act of offering or accepting a ride with a stranger implies confidence that people are decent.”

⁶⁴ For this assessment of the telephone see Christopher, Nicholas, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 92Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Jones, Routes of Power, 8

⁶⁶ Yergin, The Prize, 219–20.

⁶⁷ Quoted in Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer, 48.

⁶⁸ Reisner, Marc, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, revised edn (New York: Penguin, 1993)Google Scholar, is the definitive study of the efforts to make the American West's desert “bloom,” with Los Angeles's development the particular focus of its second chapter. For the connection of environmental and social damage see Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile, 183.

⁶⁹ Humphries, Reynold, Hollywood's Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁰ Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 32–42.

⁷¹ Ibid., 36, 42, 109, 154–56.

⁷² Kalat, “Detour's Detour,” 150.

⁷³ Humphries, 12, 16. For Ulmer's “allegiance” to “dos kleynementshele” see Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer, 108.

⁷⁴ Raper, Preface to Peasantry, 175; Eric Lott, “The Whiteness of Film Noir,” American Literary History, 9, 3 (Autumn 1997), 542–66, 562.

⁷⁵ Crawford and Magee, Jazz Standards on Record, 34; see also Lott, 558, on film noir's “racialized phantoms.”

⁷⁶ Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁷ Baldwin, Davarian L., Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 94Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Lott, 550; Pratt, Projecting Paranoia, 67–71.

⁷⁹ “Population Change by Decade, 1910–2010,” United States Census Bureau, 31 Jan. 2013, at www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/049/?cssp=SERP.

⁸⁰ Lott, 550.

⁸¹ Ibid., 562.

⁸² Baldwin, 153.

⁸³ Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer, 117.

⁸⁴ For film noir's interest in the “corrosive” power of money see Kemp, Philip, “From the Nightmare Factory: HUAC and the Politics of Noir,” Sight and Sound, 55, 4 (Fall 1986), 266–70, 269Google Scholar.

⁸⁵ Muzio, Tim Di and Robbins, Richard H., Debt as Power (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁶ Di Muzio and Robbins, 47–85. In Sinclair's Oil!, the character Bunny observes to his oil-magnate father about such a system, “We don't even own our souls!” Upton Sinclair, Oil! (New York: Penguin, 2007), 176.

⁸⁷ Isenberg, Detour, 55.

⁸⁸ Morris, Ian, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, ed. Macedo, Stephen (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015), 107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁹ See Dussere, America Is Elsewhere, 56, on the paradox of consumer culture's subject who must be “constantly moving and constantly stopping.” This compulsion was to be the focal theme of another Ulmer film, the 1948 Ruthless.

⁹⁰ For the disorientation provided by Ulmer's use of a map during a sequence plotting Roberts's travel see John Belton, “Film Noir's Knights,” but also Cantor, “Film Noir and the Frankfurt School,” 155.

⁹¹ Isenberg, Edgar G. Ulmer, 135.

⁹² Telotte, J. P., Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana and Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 217, 218Google Scholar.

⁹³ Imre Szeman, “Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries,” in Barrett and Worden, Oil Culture, 350–65, 362.

⁹⁴ Dussere quotes Dean MacCannell as observing, “The best way to characterize noir sensibility is as a ‘false nostalgia’ or ‘constructed nostalgia.’ What is produced is a sense of loss of something that was never possessed, something that never was” – which sounds to me the perfect description of the effect of the thwarting of a manufactured desire. See Dussere, America Is Elsewhere, 11.

⁹⁵ LeMenager, Living Oil, 11.

⁹⁶ Fay and Nieland, Film Noir, 12; Osteen, Nightmare Alley, 133.

⁹⁷ Szeman, “How to Know about Oil,” 163.