Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship

Jonathan Auerbach, Professor of English at the University of Maryland and regular presenter at film noir screenings,  has just published his much anticipated book on film noir,  Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship, a study which connects the sense of alienation conveyed by American film noir in the 40s and 50s with the anxieties about citizenship and national belonging in mid-20th century America, by providing in-depth interpretations of more than a dozen noir movies.  Professor Auerbach shows how politics and aesthetics merge in these noirs,  where the fear of  subversive “un-American” foes is reflected in noirs such as Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Border Incident, Pickup on South Street, Stranger on the Third Floor, The Chase, and Ride the Pink Horse.  These anxieties surfaced during a series of wartime and post war emergency measures, beginning with the anti-sedition Smith Act (1940), the Mexican migrant worker Bracero Program (1942), the domestic internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry (1942), and the HUAC hearings in 1947.

Professor Auerbach, in 2008 in an issue of the scholarly Cinema Journal (47, No. 4, Summer 2008) in an article anticipating his book and titled ‘Noir Citizenship: Anthony Mann’s Border Incident’, posits an ambitious thesis about national borders and the borders of film genres:  “Looking closely at how images subvert words in Anthony Mann’s generic hybrid Border Incident (1949), this article develops the concept of noir citizenship, exploring how Mexican migrant workers smuggled into the United States experience dislocation and disenfranchisement in ways that help us appreciate film noir’s relation to questions of national belonging.” The article offered a rich analysis of Border Incident, and developed a fascinating study of the sometimes antagonistic dynamic between the police procedural plot imperatives of the screenplay, and the subversive visual imagery fashioned by cinematographer John Alton.  The scene in Border Incident where the undercover agent Jack, is murdered by the furrowing blades of a tractor is one of the most horrific in film noir, and Professor Auerbach rightly observes that the agent “gets ground into American soil by the monstrous machinery of US agribusiness… [this is] a purely noir moment of recognition that reveals the terrifying underbelly of the American farm industry itself in its dependence on and ruthless exploitation of Mexican labor”.

The paperback is available for only US$20.48 from Amazon.  A great price for a book offering an original perspective that demands the attention of anyone interested in the origins of film noir.