“It Tasted Like Gasoline”

This chapter undertakes a close reading of Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel (1953), examining how early noir fiction obliquely reflects on the rapid transformation of twentieth-century American life by the forces of oil capital. We see this not only in the material landscapes that these texts reveal, but also in their evocation of a particular type of desiring yet “alienated post-war subject”. Noir pessimism, in this sense, can be understood as a contextually specific response to the ways in which petro-modernity shifted the social, cultural and financial climate of the United States following the Great Depression.