From Sunshine to Noir

Why does twenty-first-century noir keep returning to 1960s Los Angeles? This book shows how contemporary novels and films – from Inherent Vice to Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood – use noir to investigate memory, power, and resistance under late capitalism. It examines how Sixties Los Angeles becomes a privileged terrain for detection, from the Watts Riots to the Manson murders, enabling noir to recover erased histories of race, surveillance, and counterculture. Combining American Studies with Marxist critical theory, the book invites you to rethink noir not as a mere nostalgia for the past, but as a renewed cultural form through which the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism become legible.