Devil in the Blue Dress (1994), the neo-noir film directed by Carl Franklin and photographed by Tak Fujimoto, reflects all necessary ingredients to the noir genre. Set in post-war Los Angeles, the film opens with an overture of protagonist Easy Rawlins’ voice, “A man once told me that when you step out of your door in the morning, you’re already in trouble. The only question is, are you on top of that trouble or not?” It’s a cynical world, full of cynical people, where being “on top of the trouble,” means getting your piece of the proverbial American pie before someone else steals it right out from under you. It is Los Angeles, 1948, and the post-war political and social climate is shifting the urban and suburban landscape across the country. We are immediately introduced to protagonist Easy Rawlins, an African American who is out of work after being wrongfully fired from a job as a mechanic. He soon teams up with DeWitt Albright, a white, lawless private detective, who commissions Rawlins to find a missing white woman, Daphne Monet. Monet, a femme fatale whose image lends her name to the film’s title, is thought to be hiding somewhere in the black community.
The plot mirrors the historic moment of post-War Los Angeles, where the mean, violent, racialized streets of downtown were synonymous with the urban decay that was fueling white flight towards the “safety” and “purity” of the suburbs. As a viewer, this historical context is inseparable from the role of desire throughout the film. Specifically, I identified Rawlins’ longing to secure home and neighborhood, as a central to his position as racialized, political subject. Part of the GI-bill generation, Rawlins returned home from war expecting an unobstructed pathway towards the American dream, or his version of it anyways. As the narrative of the film suggests, achieving that “dream,” specifically in regards to homeownership, is made increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for someone whose personhood is not defined by a white, middle class, male body. The camera pans across newspaper clippings, and picks up background audio clips from radios, all which are reporting on the emerging structural barriers between being African American and real estate security. We are witnessing redlining and racial covenants in action, as West LA and homeownership become synonymous with whiteness. This racialization of space becomes normalized through political and social structures, discursive systems of power that shape the professional, romantic and familial relationships across all characters in the film.
To make my positionality and biases as spectator entirely transparent, I approached this film with the desire to understand it’s construction of desire. It would appear then that my approach to, and conclusion of my investigation, were means to the same end. Similar to my intention with my emerging noir project, Devil in the Blue Dress plays with different representations of desire, most prominently, how we negotiate with, and are driven by deviant desires, or by un amor prohibido. In perfect dialogue with our critical class discussions of mapping, the film uses space, specifically racialized space, as a force that can both obstruct and satisfy our desires. The lyrics of the opening Jazz number sing, “Crazy about my west side baby, she lives way across town.” Immediately, we see how race and love become stratified, or structured, by class and space: the African American singer lusts after the west side women, a female subject who is (likely) racially, socially and spatially out of reach. Rawlins’ character is driven by this same longing for space/place/home that is constantly being threatened by a system of power that frames his desires as unattainable, unworthy, even deviant perhaps. Rawlins character effectively stays “on top of the trouble,” and his desire for home proves stronger than the system trying to displace him. The film ends with a panoramic shot of a utopic, familial, African American neighborhood, seamlessly carved into Los Angeles’ urban landscape. For the moment at least, his piece of the American pie is safe.
The plot mirrors the historic moment of post-War Los Angeles, where the mean, violent, racialized streets of downtown were synonymous with the urban decay that was fueling white flight towards the “safety” and “purity” of the suburbs. As a viewer, this historical context is inseparable from the role of desire throughout the film. Specifically, I identified Rawlins’ longing to secure home and neighborhood, as a central to his position as racialized, political subject. Part of the GI-bill generation, Rawlins returned home from war expecting an unobstructed pathway towards the American dream, or his version of it anyways. As the narrative of the film suggests, achieving that “dream,” specifically in regards to homeownership, is made increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for someone whose personhood is not defined by a white, middle class, male body. The camera pans across newspaper clippings, and picks up background audio clips from radios, all which are reporting on the emerging structural barriers between being African American and real estate security. We are witnessing redlining and racial covenants in action, as West LA and homeownership become synonymous with whiteness. This racialization of space becomes normalized through political and social structures, discursive systems of power that shape the professional, romantic and familial relationships across all characters in the film.
To make my positionality and biases as spectator entirely transparent, I approached this film with the desire to understand it’s construction of desire. It would appear then that my approach to, and conclusion of my investigation, were means to the same end. Similar to my intention with my emerging noir project, Devil in the Blue Dress plays with different representations of desire, most prominently, how we negotiate with, and are driven by deviant desires, or by un amor prohibido. In perfect dialogue with our critical class discussions of mapping, the film uses space, specifically racialized space, as a force that can both obstruct and satisfy our desires. The lyrics of the opening Jazz number sing, “Crazy about my west side baby, she lives way across town.” Immediately, we see how race and love become stratified, or structured, by class and space: the African American singer lusts after the west side women, a female subject who is (likely) racially, socially and spatially out of reach. Rawlins’ character is driven by this same longing for space/place/home that is constantly being threatened by a system of power that frames his desires as unattainable, unworthy, even deviant perhaps. Rawlins character effectively stays “on top of the trouble,” and his desire for home proves stronger than the system trying to displace him. The film ends with a panoramic shot of a utopic, familial, African American neighborhood, seamlessly carved into Los Angeles’ urban landscape. For the moment at least, his piece of the American pie is safe.