Film Noir and Automotive Isolation in Los Angeles

This essay examines the emergence of a now dominant transportation system through the critical perspective of film noir. In the 1940s, Los Angeles began redesigning itself to better accommodate the automobile. At the same time, two films by Billy Wilder provided a subtle critique of this accommodation. The criminality of Double Indemnity (1944) depends on the same fantasy in technical rationality that legitimized highway planning. Sunset Boulevard(1950) mocks the planned obsolescence inspired by the automobile industry. Both films depict the landscape created by cars as deeply isolating. The analysis of T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who also lived in Los Angeles at this time, is used to draw out the theoretical implications of Wilder’s films and to further locate a pessimism toward the automobile lifestyle at the time and place of its rise to power.