Robert Lehman
University of Florida
rlehman@english.ufl.edu


A Future All Used Up:  Film Noir, Modernism and the Borders of Utopian
Speculation

The paper I have developed will speak to a moment of trauma in the
collective imaginary of post-World War Two America.  Through a
synthesis of Marxism and the theories of linguistic performativity
associated with J.L Austin, I will address the relationship between
modernism and its primitive "others" (the African, the Latino) insofar
as this opposition grounds so much of the artistic production of the
early twentieth century.  I will then turn to Jacques Tourneurs Out of
the Past (1947), an example of film noir in its "baroque" phase, as
allegorizing this relationship's collapse.  Here, I will argue, we see
the film reflecting the closure of a (typically primitivist) utopian
imagining characteristic of modernism.  If, as Fredric Jameson argues,
the uniquely modernist obsession with re-envisioning the self was
symptomatic of a real faith in the possibility of systemic
transformation (Jameson 1991, 312), the pessimism of Tourneurs film,
even as it operates within a modernist problematic, reflects the
moment a t which these promises of otherness were evacuated; this
moment, I will argue, is synonymous with capitalism's move from its
monopoly to its transnational (postmodern, global) phase.  Recognizing
the films connection to this moment of utopian closure and its
overdetermination by a number of key political and economic factors, I
will position Out of the Past on a temporal border of sorts, neither
wholly modern in its concerns nor altogether a product of our
contemporary transnational formations.