Whiting

According to Krutnik1, the ‘noir’ text deals, typically, with issues of alienation and isolation in the individual protagonist, whilst also reflecting wider social concerns. This essay examines two texts of the 1950’s described as ‘noir’, both of which deal, in very different ways, with anxieties about consumer culture, identity, and the invalidity of the American Dream. The main focus throughout is the way in which the books address social unease surrounding consumerism, and the increasingly commodity-based society of twentieth-century America.

Although written in 1954, Goodis’ The Blonde on the Street Corner deals, retrospectively, with depression-era 1930’s America. By setting the story in a period when jobs were scarce and morale low, Goodis is able to create the bleak and hopeless atmosphere necessary for his noirish portrait of fragmented masculine identity, and individual alienation from society. As with many noir texts, the threat to the main protagonist’s sense of self can be seen to come from internal as well as external sources, but the primary external/social circumstances dealt with by the book have economic overtones. The adverse effects of a struggling economy and increasingly competitive consumer society on individual sense of self, are emphasised throughout the text, and the disillusioned attitude of the male protagonist can be linked to more widespread, general anxieties about both consumerism, and traditional gender roles, in twentieth century American society.

Goodis’ protagonist, Ralph, is alienated and marginalised by his lack of employment and economic power in a consumer society. He cannot find permanent work, and because of this he does not have the money or the social status necessary to build an independent life for himself. He lives with his parents, and has no income of his own, forcing him to adopt a position of infantilised dependence on his mother and father – a situation which severely threatens his sense of subjectivity and masculine identity. The fact that Ralph is pushed by economic circumstance into living out an unnaturally extended childhood is highlighted during claustrophobic descriptions of home life, in which the thirty-year-old Ralph is typically reduced to begging spending money off his mother. When she gives in to him, it is because ‘her baby wanted a pack of cigarettes’2.

Writing on consumerism and subjectivity, Rhodes explains that ‘[t]he question of individual agency is…tied to one’s position in the economy. Everyone is a consumer, but only those who are gainfully employed have any importance in the marketplace’3. For Ralph, the threat to individual agency caused by lack of economic standing is also perceived as a direct and explicit threat to masculine identity. His mother’s complaints about his unemployment often make direct links between his failure to get a job and his failure to live up to social expectations of masculinity – she tells him that ‘a man should work. And you’re a man – maybe’4. Despite this, it is his father’s opinion that most affects him, and the fear of his father’s unspoken disappointment proves to be most destructive to Ralph’s sense of self.

It also becomes clear that Ralph is unable to make the transition into independent adulthood by either moving away from home or marrying because, as his conversation with Lenore at the beginning of the text reveals ‘“it takes cash”’5. In addition to this, the fact that he lives at home means that he is confronted daily with images of what he should be like (his father is the hardworking breadwinner of the house), and evidence of his own failings (his sister has work whilst he does not).

Harvey writes that ‘it is the representation of the institution of the family…that in Film Noir serves as the vehicle for the expression of frustration’6. According to this view, the family unit can often be seen as a microcosm of society as a whole, and this way of thinking about representation can perhaps be useful when looking at Ralph’s family in The Blonde on the Street Corner. Ralph’s alienated and marginalised position can partly be ascribed to the fact that he is caught between two models of American culture, at a transitional phase in society – the traditional, nineteenth-century producer-orientated society, and the new consumer society of twentieth-century America. The old, producer-orientated society is represented by his father, with his production based blue collar job and honest family values, whilst his sister works in a department store, perhaps the ultimate symbol of the newly-popular consumer culture.

Paradoxically, Ralph is alienated from both cultures. He cannot find employment so cannot participate in the production central to a producer society, but at the same time his lack of work means that he is economically powerless and cannot become actively involved in consumer society. The result is a feeling of redundancy and hopelessness – a mental state echoed by the monotonous, largely stagnant plot of the novel.

The fact that Ralph’s sister has a job whilst he does not is significant in the text, because it draws attention to a general feeling of confusion and uncertainty surrounding expected gender roles in the post-war economic marketplace. Wager explains that, although America’s involvement in two world wars saw an influx of women into the national workforce, the post-war years prompted conservative Americans to call for a return to traditional values, and women were encouraged to give up their jobs and return to the domestic sphere. Many women found that ‘returning veterans took priority over wartime workers’, and male resentment towards female workers who were perceived to be taking ‘male’ jobs was not uncommon.7

This theme of threatened masculinity and female intrusion into traditionally male domains is picked up throughout the text, with exaggerated images of female workers and consumers providing a stark contrast to the portrayal of the marginalised and disaffected Ralph and his friends. Whilst Evelyn goes out to work each day, in the department store that represents the public face of consumer society, Ralph is listlessly redundant, forced to hang around on the street corner, on the edges of ‘respectable’ society. Whilst Lenore eats secret stashes of food and has an ample figure to indicate her tendency towards excessive consumption, Ralph’s friends are often hungry and underfed, reduced to taking peaches back to the shop to exchange for more filling foods such as bread.

The consuming women in the book are deliberately exaggerated and grotesque, meaning that the reader’s attention is inevitably drawn to the fact that the idea of the potentially powerful female consumer is a threatening prospect to Ralph’s already fragile sense of self. Rosenberg argues that fears of the female consumer have long been an issue in American patriarchal society. According to her, the twentieth-century phenomena of mass consumption has often been perceived as a ‘particularly female activity’8, meaning that criticism of the rise of consumerism in the post-war years was often negatively linked to the so-called ‘feminisation’ of American society that traditionalists blamed for the decline in patriarchal values. The result was an abundance of new and potentially threatening images of the voracious female consumer.

Modern mass consumption brought even darker visions of an American matriarchy. This view constructed a truly monstrous woman whose insatiable consumerism made her a parasite living on the production of males. Destructive of men, of families, ultimately of the very culture that was supposed to be her special domain, modern American women were “consuming” in every sense of the word.9

This nightmarish vision of female consumerism can be seen reflected throughout The Blonde on the Street Corner. Through Ralph’s distorted viewpoint, Lenore is made to stand for the consumer society that has effectively rendered men in his position economically emasculated. It is Ralph’s involvement with the parasitic Lenore that most urgently threatens his mental well-being throughout the book, and the images of grotesque, devouring femininity that are associated with her paint a bleak view of both the ‘modern’ American woman and the consumer society that she has come to represent.

The confused nature of Ralph’s perceptions of women is highlighted, however, by the contradictory fears that surface in his mind as the narrative progresses. Thinking about his lack of employment, Ralph reasons that the endless cycle of working and consuming – indeed, working in order to consume – is not for him.

What were all these guys working for anyway? The dough? So they spent the dough. What did they spend it on? … They spent it on ties and shoes and hats and coats and cigarettes and cokes and in the poolroom and bowling alley and taproom, guzzling beer and throwing darts. But most of all they spent it on females.10

By explicitly linking women with all the other commodities on the list, Ralph inadvertently reveals that part of his unease towards women is based on the fact that he sees them as commodities that he cannot afford. His encounters with women have led him to the conclusion that they must always be paid for in some way, and later events in the novel appear to confirm this for him. Although he does not have to pay financially for Lenore, his encounter with her costs him the last vestiges of his pride and self-esteem and, ultimately, his chance at a relationship with the more wholesome and virtuous Edna.

Of course, in reality, Ralph’s own actions are responsible for his downfall, but the fact that in his mind it is the women who are at fault, highlights the basic contradiction at the centre of his attitude towards women throughout the text. He resents them for being commodities that he cannot afford, but feels threatened by them when they move away from their commodity/object status to become consumers and autonomous subjects. In addition to this, Ralph finds that, despite himself, he is simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the strong, all-consuming Lenore, meaning that she becomes a strangely compelling fantasy figure as well as an unavoidable nightmare.

Krutnik confirms that this confused attitude towards women is a common characteristic of Noir protagonists experiencing crises of masculine identity. He states that ‘not only do such heroes quite clearly have problems in ‘relating’ to women but they also subject them to a chaotic process of both overvaluation (of their sexuality) and devaluation (of their subjectivity). Consequently, they find it difficult to stabilise their own identities’11.

When understood in this way, Goodis’ portrayal of the women in the text (and Lenore in particular) as exaggerated caricatures, begins to make sense. In effect, they can be seen as extensions of Ralph’s own disturbed and fragmented state of mind. Lenore appears to both Ralph and the reader as a grotesque parody of traditional representations of the sexualised female. Her exaggerated curves and bleached blonde hair are initially mistaken for genuine attractiveness when Ralph sees her on the street corner, but closer inspection reveals her to be ‘strictly bargain counter merchandise’12. The overdone makeup and generous curves come instead to underline her essential falseness and her unattractive tendency towards excess.

The references to money and merchandise in the initial descriptions of Lenore can be seen as a direct, unsubtle and deliberately obvious continuation of the traditional patriarchal depersonalisation and objectification of women in narratives and texts. Ralph comments that ‘her type was a dime a dozen’13, and Lenore is instantly positioned as a cheap commodity, available for Ralph to reject or purchase at will. By making the parallels that Ralph draws between women and commodities so crude and unmissable in the text, Goodis is able to make the reader aware of the widespread (but often more subtle) practice of objectifying women that occurs as part of mainstream ideological practice.

In his portrayal of exaggerated female consumers, Goodis is also subverting and developing the characteristics of the noir tradition in which he writes, taking to extremes the already established conventions of the genre. Place describes the femme fatale of the noir tradition as a ‘spider woman’, weaving a web to trap her male victims, but often similarly restricted by the web of social values and systems that surrounds them both. Generally characterised by the makeup, long hair and phallic images (such as cigarettes and guns) that signify her overt and slightly threatening sexuality, she induces male unease precisely because of the ‘unnatural’ sexuality that makes her attractive in the first place14.

Place’s observations relate mainly to the more understated portrayals of dangerous women found in earlier noir films and texts, but they could also be useful when looking at Goodis’ Lenore, who can be seen to function throughout the text as an exaggerated parody of the conventional ‘spider woman’. Unlike the traditional femme fatale, whose allure is only partly constructed through makeup and hair dye, Lenore’s beauty is revealed to be entirely artificial. She is described as ‘a ripe blonde who used peroxide on her hair and too much lipstick and mascara’15, and she induces ‘an unclean feeling’ in the male onlooker. In effect, the text plays with the idea that the femme fatale often acts as a site of juxtapositioned male fantasy and fear, presenting the reader with a character who is overtly, grotesquely, frightening and sexual.

The ‘spider woman’ imagery is perhaps most obvious in the final pages of the book, when Lenore seduces Ralph by physically ensnaring and overpowering him. Sensing that he is ‘trying to squirm away’16, she wrestles him onto her bed and, like the female spider who murders her mate, leaves him powerless to escape or resist.

Lenore is presented as a consumer of men, and it is this aspect of her character that proves most threatening to the male protagonist. The reader is told that ‘Lenore always made sure she had something on a man before she added him to her list’17, and it becomes evident that she sees men as little more than commodities, to be put on a list and used at will. Lenore is judged harshly for her behaviour, being reduced to a distorted caricature for much of the novel, but significantly, male characters who view women as commodities are treated much more sympathetically within the text, being given both comic and redeeming qualities. Ralph’s friend Dippy keeps a similarly objectifying list of women’s names that he has plucked from the phone book, and the questions that he asks them over the phone (‘how old are you and how tall and how much do you weigh?’18) make it clear that he too views the opposite sex as the equivalent of disposable commodities. Crucially, however, Dippy is presented as a comic character, and the phone book antics are shown as harmless and ingenious fun rather than grotesque or threatening behaviour.

The fact that Dippy is presented as a comic character whilst Lenore becomes an all-consuming monster can be linked once again to the damaged and distorted perceptions of the alienated and emasculated Ralph. Cowie argues that male anxieties about devouring women threatening masculine identity often found in noir texts, stem more from psychic unease than social reality19 – a fact that Goodis makes clear in his over-the-top portrayal of male paranoia in a depression-era nightmare.

One of the main ways in which Goodis subverts established noir conventions and explores the issues of consumerism that were important to a transitional American society, is through the doubling of the two main women in the text, Lenore and Edna. Cowie writes that ‘although Film Noir often features strong, independent women with determined and determinate desires, it has been argued that this figure is invariably destroyed, either literally or metaphorically, and replaced by her inverse, the nurturing woman’20.

In The Blonde on the Street Corner, however, the opposite is true. By the end of the text, the pale, insipid Edna has been discarded, and Ralph resignedly surrenders himself to the all-consuming force that is Lenore. If Lenore (and indeed, her prototype, the conventional femme fatale) is taken to represent Rosenberg’s ‘modern woman’, the face of the new consumer society in America, then the ‘nurturing woman’ who acts as her opposite could perhaps be seen as a representative of the old, producer orientated society that the rise of consumerism was threatening to destroy. The destruction of the femme fatale at the end of ‘typical’ noir films and texts points to a mainstream audience desire for the restoration of order, which can be seen in the form of the conventional, reassuringly traditional nurturing woman. By allowing Lenore to triumph, Goodis effectively turns this noir convention on its head. The reader is left with the feeling that the pale, barely there Edna is not strong or rounded enough as a character to ever provide a viable alternative to the unstoppable consumption represented by Lenore. Edna is the equivalent of a ‘ghost’ in the text, just as the old values of puritanical, producer-orientated America had almost faded to nothingness in the wake of twentieth century consumerism.

In essence, what Goodis appears to be saying is that the old American values and of producer-orientated society are so weak, that sentimentalising and mythologising them by repeatedly showing them as a replacement for the new and threatening consumer society is a useless and outmoded strategy of resistance. The only option available to Ralph is to totally surrender himself at the end of the novel, but this option is not given a positive spin. The mood of nihilistic despair that pervades the text makes it clear that the consumption-based future, for Goodis, is bleak.

Whilst Goodis presents the reader with a portrait of a marginalised and alienated male, whose place in society has been destabilised by a ‘feminized’ consumer culture, Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley deals, essentially, with Ralph’s polar opposite. Far from feeling threatened by images of consumption and twentieth century excess, Highsmith’s Ripley revels in the delights of postmodern consumerism, assuming fluid, bricolage identities as a means of rising to the top of a status-obsessed society, and functioning as an exaggerated reflection of the twentieth century consumer throughout the text.

Featherstone describes postmodern society as ‘a simulational consumer culture in which an endlessly reduplicated veil of images effaces the distinction between appearance and reality’21. According to this view, the postmodern consumer constructs identity through façade and superficial image, which obscures and masks the reality of the subject within. This means that consumer goods and exterior appearances come to replace in importance more conventional/conservative social values such as character or merit.

Ripley’s fascination with commodities and status symbols is emphasised throughout the text, and it becomes clear that he considers the markers of wealth that he acquires to have an almost mythical significance and power. He enjoys making catalogues in his mind of the high quality garments and accessories that he ‘owns’, taking pleasure from the act of possession/consumption. ‘The cuff links, the white silk shirts, even the old clothes…they were all his and he loved them all’22.

The twentieth century change from a producer-orientated to a consumer society, highlighted by Goodis in The Blonde on the Street Corner, has also impacted on Highsmith’s text. Unlike the hapless Ralph, however, Ripley is not caught between two cultures, and he assumes the role of twentieth century consumer with consummate ease. His values are perhaps best described towards the end of the text, as he muses on his liking for paintings and artwork. The reader is told that ‘[h]e did not want to be a painter himself, but if he had the money, he thought, his greatest pleasure would be to collect paintings that he liked’(italics mine)23. This basic desire to consume rather than produce can be seen, according to Featherstone, as one of the defining features of twentieth century consumer society.

Whereas in the past heroes were ‘idols of production’, now they are ‘idols of consumption’. The characteristic demanded of celebrities is to have a personality, to possess the actor’s skill of presenting a colourful self24.

Highsmith’s Ripley can perhaps be seen as a representation of the ultimate postmodern consumer – a contemporary personality type taken to the extreme. As a serial killer and social climber he consumes, not just products, but people and experiences as well. The murders that he commits allow him to completely change his identity at will, assuming a new mask each time he does so. When he kills Dickie Greenleaf he literally ‘becomes’ Dickie, adopting his mannerisms, wearing his clothes and corresponding with his family and friends. Indeed, he eventually becomes so immersed in the character of Dickie that he finds it difficult to remember how he himself used to talk, and he begins to think of ‘Tom’ in the third person (‘flustered, he said in Tom’s voice, ‘who’s this?’’25). For Hilfer, ‘the main thematic pattern in The Talented Mr Ripley is Tom’s confirmation in the belief that acting creates reality’26: a belief which can be seen as a product of consumer culture and its exterior-based values.

Ripley also avidly consumes experiences, adopting the typically postmodern and hedonistic strategy of living for the moment, and distancing himself from both past and future. Whereas Goodis’ Ralph has no influence over his own future, Highsmith’s Ripley is often so immersed in the moment that he genuinely does not care whether he jeopardises his future or not. His hedonistic tendency to see life as a series of adventures means that he seems to lurch from one extravagant experience to another, spending time calculating risks and working out strategies but also contradicting his plans by acting impulsively and abandoning himself to fate. Musing on the possibility of his capture, Ripley decides that he does not regret his chosen path. ‘Could death itself, at twenty-five, be so tragic that he could not say that the months from November until now had been worth it? Certainly not.’27

Featherstone explains that the postmodern emphasis on disconnection with past and future, and the adoption of a non-fixed, fluid set of identities, often results in ‘a decentering of the subject’ and a loss of ‘biographical continuity’28, and it is certainly true that Ripley begins to lose his original sense of ‘biographical continuity’ as the text progresses. His ability to completely immerse himself in the character that he is playing leads him to the belief that a change of character has the potential to absolve him of guilt for crimes committed whilst assuming another identity. Just like the typical postmodern consumer, Ripley is preoccupied with fresh starts and new beginnings, and his desire for a ‘clean slate’29 is revealed later in the text to stem from an obsessive compulsion towards ‘the real annihilation of his past and of himself’30.

In understanding this compulsion, it is useful to see the character of Ripley as an exaggerated extension of the ordinary twentieth-century consumer – instead of buying products that promise to be life-changing (and therefore in a sense annihilate/alter the ‘undesirable’ past self), Ripley literally does change his life by adopting another identity and persona. By the time he comes to carry out his first murder, the reader sees that he is no longer able to distinguish clearly between object/commodity and subject/Dickie. At one point in the death scene, Dicke is portrayed as a tree rather than a man (‘as if the oar was an axe and Dickie’s neck a tree’31). The reader sees that Ripley’s former friend has been depersonalised to such an extent that he appears to Ripley as nothing more than a tool with which he can access the lifestyle he wants to lead.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the ease with which Ripley moves through the social ranks, the reader comes to realise that there is in fact no true sense of self at the heart of Ripley’s many facades. The total immersion in character that allows him to ‘become’ Dickie so successfully, is revealed to be a telling indicator of the real extent of his detachment from himself, and on several occasions he becomes confused as he tries to make the distinction between the character he is playing and his actual identity.

Rorty argues that the postmodern self consists of a series of social roles, meaning that it is, in reality, a constant act to fulfil social expectations rather than a ‘coherent human essence’32. According to this view, the postmodern individual moves from one social experience to another, adjusting him/herself accordingly in order to fit in and play the required roles but, crucially, there is no ‘true’ self behind the carefully manufactured exterior. Ripley’s actions throughout the text can be seen to reflect this theory, for the murders that he commits and indicators of wealth that he acquires are best understood as exaggerated attempts to flesh out the empty core that lies at the heart of his fragmented, and ever-changing, identity.

Throughout the text, Ripley’s sense of detachment from his inner self is illustrated using mirrors and mirror images. The fact that his interior self is almost completely separated from the exterior that he presents to the world is highlighted by the surprise that he often feels on catching sight of himself in a mirror. Jackson explains that ‘by presenting images of the self in another space (both familiar and unfamiliar), the mirror provides versions of self transformed into another, become something or someone else’33.

The sense of alienation and otherness that Ripley initially experiences on glimpsing his reflection in Greenleaf’s mirror, indicates at a very early stage in the novel his potential for complete separation from his ‘true’ identity. During the conversation with Greenleaf, the reader is told that ‘when he looked into the mirror he saw that his mouth was turned down at the corners’34, and it becomes apparent that he often does not realise the expression he has on his face until he sees his own reflection. Interestingly, the only way that he can be sure of the expressions that he adopts is to step into the role of somebody else, when the façade that he maintains is impeccable.

The significance of external appearance to the characters that he plays is indicated by the fact that Ripley’s changes of roles/identities are frequently precluded by scenes in front of a mirror, during which he typically ‘tries on’ the new parts by experimenting with props and mannerisms. He describes his own face as a blank canvas, ‘the world’s dullest face’35, and constantly attempts to alter his interior self by changing his exterior appearance, essentially seeing his newly altered appearance as a reflection of his new and improved self.

An important aspect of Ripley’s search for an ‘ideal’ reflection is that he also sees people as mirrors in which to discern his potential self. On becoming friendly with Dickie, he convinces himself that Dickie is a similar person to himself, or rather, the person he would like to be. He tries to ignore negative aspects of Dickie such as his awful paintings, telling himself that he wants Dickie to be better than that, and he attempts to interest himself in Dickie’s banal conversation and trip to the music hall in Rome (‘Tom got very little out of the music hall show, but he tried his very best’36).

In essence, Ripley relies on Dickie to fulfil the role of double-only-better (the ideal self), fixating himself on the similarities in physical appearance between the two, and explicitly making the connection between Dickie and his own reflection as he sits alongside his friend. The reader is told that ‘it seemed to Tom that he was looking in a mirror when he looked at Dickie’s leg and his propped foot beside him’37, and it becomes horrifyingly clear that Ripley feels more connected to the ‘mirrored’ double, Dickie, than he does to his own reflection. From the start of the friendship, Dickie represents the individual that Ripley would like to see in the mirror instead of his own impersonal reflection – an image of the person he could have been under different, more affluent circumstances.

Ripley’s desire to be Dickie initially results in over-identification with his new friend, but, as the relationship sours and Dickie turns against him, he begins to realise that he did not really know Dickie at all. Almost inevitably, he decides that the only option available to him is to kill Dickie and assume his identity. Knowing that the imminent dismissal from Dickie’s life that he suspects is coming would force him to revert to his old lifestyle and face up to his real self, Ripley chooses to discard his old identity, and attempt to enter the mirror world that is the object of his envy. As Jackson points out, ‘‘self’ cannot be united with ‘other’ without ceasing to be’38, and in this case ‘self’ completely consumes ‘other’, almost losing touch with the original self in the process.

Writing on this type of killer-protagonist within the noir thriller tradition, Horsley explains that ‘the protagonist is aiming not to reduce but to augment himself. He wants to take on the substance and, often even more importantly, the trappings of a higher social status’39. Of course, within consumer culture the individual is constantly urged to ‘augment’ him/herself by commercials positioning various commodities and products as the means to achieve this. This means that, unlike the ‘typical’ psychopathic noir killer, social climbing protagonists such as Ripley, who use murder as a means of social advancement, can perhaps be seen as exaggerated versions of the average twentieth-century consumer – ‘the epitome of an aggressively materialistic society’40- rather than simply deviant or deranged misfits.

According to Lasch, the twentieth-century culture of consumption typically produces narcissistic, hedonistic individuals, with no sense of social conscience or ties. Lasch’s narcissist often thinks of himself as an outlaw, assuming that everyone else in the world is also ‘basically dishonest and unreliable, or only reliable because of external pressures’41. Highsmith’s Ripley can perhaps be seen as an extreme representation of this personality type, with his lack of social conscience, disregard for others and craving for acceptance amongst the elevated social circles in which he attempts to move.

As with The Blonde on the Street Corner, the text contains characters representing both old and new social values. Whilst Ripley can be compared to the consumer/narcissist described by Lasch, Mr Greenleaf can be seen as the opposite of this personality type. The reader is told that ‘Mr Greenleaf was such a decent fellow himself, he took it for granted that everybody else in the world was decent too. Tom had almost forgotten that such people existed’42.

In many ways, Greenleaf can be seen to represent the last vestiges of dying social values such as the American success ethic, which has earned him his wealth. The contrast between the amoral Ripley and the ‘decent’ Greenleaf becomes particularly marked and poignant as the reader watches Ripley cruelly convince Greenleaf that his son has committed suicide.

Both Goodis and Highsmith deal with social anxieties surrounding the essential falseness and unachieveability of the American Dream. Goodis’ Ralph harbours half-hearted fantasies of escaping the mundane reality of depression-era America by becoming a boxer or a songwriter, but the stagnant and unchanging mood of the book makes it clear that the dream of escape is likely to remain just that. For Ralph and his friends, the optimism of the American success ethic has been lost to the misery and helplessness of unemployment and displaced masculinity.

The text highlights the contrast between the cultural myth of the American Dream, and the everyday reality for most American people during the depression. Klein comments that ‘in the 1930’s, the very idea of the happy, stable consumer society portrayed in advertising provoked a wave of resentment from the millions of Americans who found themselves on the outside of the dream of prosperity’43, and this feeling of resentment and anger is present in the background throughout the text.

Highsmith’s Ripley could, by contrast, be said to have realised the American Dream of transcending social class and leaving behind ‘the entangling influence of the past’44. The brutal and inhuman killing that becomes necessary to achieve the dream, however, serves as a reminder of the harshly competitive reality that lies behind national delusions of a free and equal American society.

Both texts point to links between the beliefs epitomised by the American Dream, and the newly ubiquitous commodity culture that has, in many ways, replaced them. Lasch explains that the illusions created by the advertising industry to sell commodities and products to the twentieth-century consumer draw heavily on the, already culturally ingrained, ideologies of the American Dream. Just as the myth of an equal American society in which anyone can achieve anything leads, inevitably, to a feeling of failure when the dream does not translate into reality, so the promises made to the optimistic consumer can lead only to disappointment.

The modern propaganda of commodities and the good life has sanctioned impulse gratification and made it unnecessary for the id to apologise for its wishes or disguise their grandiose proportions. But this same propaganda has made failure and loss unsupportable.45

In effect, the old belief that anything is possible has simply been repackaged, with commodities standing in for hard work as the route to achieving the dream. This change in ideological belief is highlighted by the contrast between Greenleaf and Ripley in The Talented Mr Ripley, and by the generational differences within Ralph’s family in The Blonde on the Street Corner.

Both texts tackle complex social anxieties and issues but, crucially (and perhaps typically for texts classified as ‘noir’), neither offers a solution or viable alternative to the existing state of affairs. Highsmith’s reader is drawn into an unwitting complicity as Ripley’s unusual social advancement progresses, whilst Goodis creates an unavoidable sense of hopelessness and despair that is enhanced by the reader’s fore-knowledge of the impending second world war that will affect all the characters in the text.

Both writers employ the subversive tactic of presenting the reader with a surface plot line that is not as transparent as it may initially seem. The feeling of complicity experienced when following Ripley on his nail-biting adventure only becomes truly disturbing when the reader takes a step back and realises that he/she has been lured into willing a murderer to escape justice. Similarly, the fact that the text’s portrayal of Lenore is distorted by Ralph’s own psychological demons is not immediately apparent in The Blonde on the Street Corner, meaning that it could, initially, be misinterpreted as genuinely misogynistic. Perhaps the greatest achievement of both texts lies, not in solutions offered or judgements made, but in the fact that they present the reader with issues that affect his/her own society using characters and situations that are, disturbingly, merely exaggerated reflections of everyday life.

Bibliography

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Notes

1 Krutnik, Frank, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity, (1991), Routledge, London.

2 Goodis, David, The Blonde on the Street Corner, (1954), Lion Books, USA, p.12.

3 Rhodes, Chip, Twenties Fiction, Mass Culture and the Modern Subject, in American Literature, vol.68, no.2, (June 1996), p.392.

6 Harvey, Sylvia, Woman’s Place: The Absent Family of Film Noir, in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, (1998), British Film Institute, p.36.

7 Wager, Jans B., Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir, (1999), Ohio University Press.

8 Rosenberg, Emily S., Consuming Women: Images of Americanisation in the ‘American Century’, in Diplomatic History, vol.23, issue 3, (summer 1999), p.480.

11 Krutnik, Frank, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity, (1991), Routledge, London, p.64.

14 Place, Janey, Women in Film Noir, in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, (1998), British Film Institute.

19 Cowie, Elizabeth, Film Noir and Women, in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec, (1993), Verso, London and New York.

21 Featherstone, Mike, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity, (1995), Sage Publications, London, p.44.

22 Highsmith, Patricia, The Talented Mr Ripley, (1955), Vintage, London, p.109.

26 Hilfer, Tony, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre, (1990), University of Texas Press, Austin, p.133.

33 Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, (1981), Routledge, London and New York, p.87.

39 Horsley, Lee, The Noir Thriller, (2001), Palgrave, Hampshire and New York, p.111.

Oh! You Pretty Things: Narcissism, Identity and the Culture of Consumption in Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley and Goodis’ The Blonde on the Street Corner.

Bibliography

Notes