Global Noir, Gangster Capitalism

some followups and the next meeting

For the next discussion group, we decided to look more closely at Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1973) as well as Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1981) for the expansion of the neonoir into science fiction and the Reagan/Thatcher years of lead and ash. In terms of readings though, I would like us to return to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, (1947) written in the Golden Age of American crime films, later dubbed film noir by French critics of the 1950s.

Next discussion group meeting will be October 6, 2024, 8:30 am PST. Look for Zoom invite. For paid subscribers. I have found the discussions engaging and free flowing. I have been more formal when discussing the Frankfurt School, which is good in a way, but the fil discussions have been very cool.

I also love the essay by Robert Warshow, Leftist cultural critic of the 40s and 50s ignored more or less by film and cultural studies, wrote The Gangster as Tragic Hero in 1948, a short, but beautiful piece of film criticism, in which Warshow writes from the point of view of the down and out gangster film fan, a helpless spectator and consumer of Hollywood content who is not afraid to accept political and aesthetic importance of the gangster/protagonist’s rise and fall.

I mentioned Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah, which is about the normalization of gangsterism in the port of Naple’s during the euphoric years of the early aughts and its promotion of globalization and the destruction of the Italian craftsman. I’d like to talk about Gomorrah, the book, but also the television series of the same name because it recreates an entire economic world based on Saviano’s work of non-fiction and situates it in one of Italy’s most notorious but once glorious brutalist housing projects, Le Vele dominated by the Comorra, the criminal organizations that preside over the once Utopic working class housing projects, now a death trap for drug addicts and a fertile recruiting ground for criminal organizations. The great thing about Gomorrah the television series is that it does not seek to glamorize or condemn Le Vele, where working class families still live and try to survive outside of crime rings in a rapidly deindustrialized and violent Southern Italy.

In fact, we could argue that during the first phase of 21st century globalization, gangster capitalism became normalized and gangsters began acting like capitalists, with narcos creating multi-national organizations and lengthy trade routes negotiated to reduce the costs of competition and streamline product and delivery processes. In this second, more violent phase of global trade wars, American monopolies and hedge funds and private equity entities with more capital that most countries in the world have learned that as capitalists, they can with impunity act like gangsters. Robert Woodiwiss’ Gangster Capitalism does a good job of laying out the gangsterism that led to the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

Some one sent me this Business Insider interview with former stock trader/banker talking about the gangster like behavior of big earners in London’s financial district.

We came up with certain ideas about why Noir is the genre for the anguished true Leftists of our time: like the noir protagonist, we think we see the total picture and now the rules of the game, but we are helpless to change the outcome, not without a mass movement that seems always threatening to emerge that liberals, even more than conservatives want to put down. Is it consoling? Is it mobilizing? Does it allow us to share more than grief? I think the tragic gangster films in the noir mode, are the stories we need to hear and to tell. Because that’s all we’ve got right now, in our fallen world, stories and we need good ones.