Genesis noir reflection8/31/2023 ![]() The noir films that focus on Los Angeles or San Francisco are also Orientalist, as they tend to emphasize and demonize their Asian collectives and locales. Naremore, Oliver and Trigo, and others have long noted the presence of the Orient in film noir. This essay investigates this touch of yellow in film noir, a touch that becomes a synecdoche for the entirety. Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo find in Noir Anxiety (2003) that "Different from the interior landscapes of Mexico, East-West noir shows its viewers its racial evil in parts: as jewels, as cabarets, as musical sounds, as theaters, as neighborhoods, as difference in skin color or lighting" (232). Assuredly, "south of the border" is one locale where film noir fetishizes the other. The menacing other-Mexican youth gang in black leather jackets-constitutes precisely what James Naremore in More than Night (1998) describes as the noir "male fascination with the instinctive (a fascination that was evident in most forms of high modernism)," expressed in "white characters who cross borders to visit Latin America, Chinatown, or the 'wrong' parts of the city" (12-13). The noir trademark of chiaroscuro associates Quinlan and the Mexican border town with darkness and evil. ![]() Overweight and alcoholic, the corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan (Welles) frames innocent people and commits murder. Evil, as it turns out, is highly contagious a slight touch would transmit wickedness to the whole filmic universe. The essay title stems, of course, from Orson Welles' A Touch of Evil (1959), which marks the end of the film noir era in the 1940s and 50s. Not cite without permission of the author.
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