Darkest Los Angeles

Film Noir, Greed, and Corporate Graft in LaLa Land

A five-session reading group with novelist and scholar Dennis Broe, presented by the Institute for the Radical Imagination and co-sponsored by the MEP, LA Progressive and People’s World

Orson Welles once called Los Angeles “a bright, guilty place,” and that is as true today as it was in the 1940s when Welles coined this description. Dennis Broe leads a group reading of his five Los Angeles novels* set in the film-noir period of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The contradictions we will unearth in that postwar 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 and frequent “natural,” though totally avoidable, disasters.

*The novels – Left of Eden, A Hello to Arms, The Precinct with the Golden Arm, The House That Buff Built, and The Dark Ages – are detailed in this syllabus. They are available from various online booksellers.

Dennis Broe is a professor, journalist and novelist whose books include: Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood; Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing America’s Dark Art; and Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception. He has taught at The Sorbonne and is the Parisian correspondent for Arts Express on The Pacifica Network. Dennis also writes for LA Progressive, People’s World, Crime Time, Culture Matters, the British daily Morning Star and Monthly Review Online. His series of five novels is continuing with his latest, Pornocopia, about the corporate takeover of Las Vegas and the porn industry. Dennis has also just launched a new podcast, Culture and Barbarism, with Toby Miller.

Register for this class series at the Institute for the Radical Imagination