Darkest L.A.: Film Noir, Greed, and Corporate Graft in LaLa Land

Darkest L.A.: Film Noir, Greed, and Corporate Graft in LaLa Land

with Dennis Broe

Friday Nights 7-8:30

Five-week course begins May 2.

$100 For the Course includes a special “bonus” sixth week

Register for the course at https://radicalimagination.info/

Co-sponsored by:

Marxist Education Program, LA Progressive, and People’s World

Orson Welles once called L.A. “a bright, guilty place,” and that is as true today as it was in the 1940s when Welles coined the description. This course is an examination, through a reading of five novels on L.A. in the film noir period of the late ’40s and early ’50s, of layers of corruption and double dealing.

The contradictions which we will unearth in that post-war period, the period of crime films that visually documented this seedy reality, have never been resolved, only continually papered over, and so they resound today.

We will look at five industries and moments in this period with a view toward explaining how the postwar period set the tone for what was to follow, leading to the present era of a vast income disparity, a crisis in housing, and frequent “natural,” though totally avoidable, disasters.

Week 1 – May 2 – Left of Eden, about the beginning of the Cold War and its intrusion into Hollywood at the moment of the beginning of the breakup of the studio system which had been so prosperous over the previous two decades. We’ll see the echoes of the Cold War ethos in today’s foreign policy.

Week 2 – May 9 – A Hello To Arms, about the renewal of the arms industry after the war in what was nominally a time of peace and how that affected the African-American community as wartime opportunities vanished. This will be an occasion to examine the current state of relations in the African-American community as well as the U.S. “defense” industry, a behemoth that today is utterly out of control and that dictates global wars.

Week 3 – May 16 – The Precinct With The Golden Arm about the LAPD and its changing modes of surveillance, particularly of the Mexican-American community, which in this period was starting to dominate Boyle Heights, an area that is now being gentrified. This novel also looks at Big Pharma and its relation to drugs in these communities and will prompt an examination of the origin of street drugs, of surveillance by what Mike Davis calls “the space police,” and of continued struggle and resistance in the city’s Latinx population.

Week 4 – May 23 – The House That Buff Built about the L.A. real estate industry and the design and spatial allocation of the city and its sprawling suburbs. This will be an examination of racial discrimination in housing and especially of the history and exploitation of the Chinese population as well as the role of the LA Times and its owners The Chandlers in divvying up the city.

Week 5 – June 6 – The Dark Ages about the second and more destructive devastation caused by McCarthyism in the form of HUAC in Hollywood. We will look at the history of unions in the entertainment industry and in the city as a whole and posit that it was union activity in the industry that brought HUAC to Hollywood. We’ll then look further at the history of unions in the city both in the past and today.

Bonus 6th Week – June 13 – Pornocopia, on corporate America’s penetration into the mob industries of porn in L.A. and gambling in Las Vegas.

About the instructor: Dennis Broe is a professor, journalist and novelist who has taught at The Sorbonne and whose books include: Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood; Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing America’s Dark Art; Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception; Birth of the Binge, Serial TV and The End of Leisure and Maverick or How the West Was Lost. He is the Parisian correspondent for Arts Express on The Pacifica Network and the producer of “Breaking Glass” on Art District Radio in Paris. He is the television critic for the British daily Morning Star and an associate editor at Culture Matters. His work has also been featured in LA Progressive, People’s World, Crime Time, Monthly Review Online, and Jump Cut. His series of five novels is continuing, with his latest, Pornocopia, about the corporate takeover of Las Vegas and the porn industry.