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The plot of Strangers on a Train revolves around a crisscross murder scheme in which a psychotic playboy (Robert Walker) suggests trading murders with a tennis player (Farley Granger). He offers to murder the tennis player’s cheating wife if, in return, the tennis player will murder the playboy’s rich father. The tennis player fails to take the offer seriously, until the playboy strangles his wife and awaits the tit-for-tat murder of the playboy’s father. In the Patricia Highsmith book on which the film is based, the tennis player is blackmailed into committing the reciprocal murder. But this plot element could not survive the Code’s admonition against letting murderers go unpunished, altering the scope and tone of the source material. After influencing this major plot change, the Production Code office was relatively quiet on other points, suggesting that the blame for the tennis player’s failed marriage be laid clearly on the cheating wife, and warning against attempts to portray the playboy’s attraction to the tennis player as homosexual, an attraction that Hitchcock planted, nurtured, and did not excise.

This chapter is devoted to the neo-noir phenomenon in Hollywood, and it bears remarking that a similar renovating secondariness manifests itself as well in some other national cinemas, whose post-classical noir traditions are dealt with in other chapters in the this volume of this series, International Noir. Beginning with the genre revisionist work of noted Hollywood Renaissance auteurs in the early 1970s, American neo-noir is much too extensive, having endured now for more than four decades, more than twice the temporal reach of the original series, to be surveyed adequately in a brief essay. Here, I trace some of the general features of the phenomenon through a sustained focus on two noteworthy and exemplary releases, Body Heat and The Man Who Wasn’t There. Both of these films connect to James M. Cain’s novels Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. The neo-noir Cain revivals speak eloquently about the urge to begin again with materials and visual styles initially developed and popularized about fifty years earlier. Like classical film noir, the neo period is heavily dependent on literary adaptation, with some underexploited earlier writers —such as Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, and David Goodis—even finding greater interest from film producers. Neo-noir viewership is also a readership interested in and intrigued by contemporary crime writers whose work deliberately evokes the série noire tradition, including James Ellroy, Elmore Leonard, Michael Connelly, and Lawrence Block, all of whom can claim Cain as a formative influence.

In response to two of the most celebrated philosophical texts on twentieth-century automobility – Jean Baudrillard’s America (1986) and Paul Virilio’s Negative Horizon (1984) – this chapter argues against the notion that driving at speed ‘suspends thought’ and is thus symptomatic of the blindness, amnesia and nihilism of post/modernity. By contrast, and through close readings of two North American ‘road trip’ texts written in the 1950s (Patricia Highsmith’s Carol (1952) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)), the chapter proposes that it is the pre-existing and/or psychological objectives that drivers and passengers bring to their road-trips (and other driving-events) that will determine the intrinsic quality of the experience. The symbolic association between cars and the desire for escape – especially in literary and other texts – overlooks the fact that that it is not speed per se that turns a driving-event into a ‘flight’ but rather the state of mind of the driver when he or she enters the car. While the drivers and passengers of one car, travelling at speed, may be notionally ‘blind’ to the landscapes through which they pass, those in another (or, indeed, the same driver on another occasion) may be fully aware of their surroundings.

Patricia Highsmith’s anti-hero Tom Ripley, who first appears in her 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, is made the focal point of this concluding chapter. Among Ripley’s more obvious talents is his ability to impersonate others, this being pursued to an extreme degree as he murders, and then takes on the identity of, his friend Dickie Greenleaf. Analysing Ripley’s imposture of Dickie through the lens of performativity theory (Austin and Derrida), this chapter demonstrates why this is an apt way of reflecting upon the previous chapters of the book for three reasons. Firstly, rather than focusing solely upon identifications as constative utterances which verify a pre-existing identity, this book has interpreted them as modes which perform identities in specific ways. Secondly, these performances are deeply connected to the precise form of an identification technique but are also determined by the contexts in which techniques arise and individual identifications take place. Thirdly, the book concludes by emphasising how it is the performativity of narrative prose which is at the heart of the connections traced in the preceding pages. Literature performs identities that reflect but also project and imagine what identity is and could be: subjectivity is not represented in literature, it is constituted by its forms. In this sense, the importance of literature to this project is the fact that it is only in its realm that the truly performative nature of identificatory methods can be seen.

This chapter considers the effects of psychoanalysis, existentialism, and existential psychology on American intellectual culture. The chapter frames the history of these broad movements by reference to the fiction of Patricia Highsmith during the 1950s. The effects of these movements upon American intellectual life were detrimental to liberal support for an activist-managerial state. In addition to Highsmith’s novels, the chapter also considers work by Richard Yates, Alfred Hitchcock, Philip Rahv and the Partisan Review, Raymond Chandler, Gwendolyn Brooks, Theodore Dreiser, the reception history of modernism, the reception of Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, and changing perceptions about literary naturalism. The intellectual history of these authors and movements shows how structural reform became subordinate to psychological templates for societal problems.

Highsmith published two novels in 1955, both celebrating liberation from traditional moral values. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith deals with central subjects of the New Sensibility—madness and violence. Most importantly, the criminal, a man without fixed identity, manages not only to kill others and profit from it but to keep his ill-gotten gains. In Strangers on a Train, Highsmith digs into the seductive power of madness and how it can draw innocents into its web. The chapter also examines Highsmith’s personal obsession as captured in a pulp fiction novel, published two years earlier, The Price of Salt (published under the name Claire Morgan). Here Highsmith depicted a lesbian love affair which, contrary to common portrayals of the era, does not end with disgrace. The chapter fits these novels within the context of lesbian and sexual liberation in the period.