ABSTRACT
This chapter treats neo-noir cinema as 'an amalgam of diverse historical and cultural elements'. It examines the notion of cinematic noir before discussing the continuities and breaks between noir and neo-noir. The chapter argues that Los Angeles is the archetypal neo-noir city, pointing to affinities between literary/cinematic noir and urban theory. This leads into a critical discussion of Los Angeles and urban history based around Devil in a Blue Dress and Drive, two films that reveal continuities and discontinuities with seminal neo-noir depictions of the city. The urban setting of noir is not incidental, but it appears as an 'interstitial supplement to detection, surveyed no less than its wrongdoers and criminals, explores an urban "body" that emerges as the product of intersecting cultural, cinematic, and technological discourses'. Noir has roots in the hardboiled crime fiction of writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, authors that Naremore describes as 'popular modernists'. technological discourses'.
