![]() Addie and her family wrap up their summer with a trip to Ireland for her aunt's elaborate destination wedding. Heartbreak, secrets, and trust are at the core of LOVE & LUCK. Parents can also discuss the wisdom of meeting online friends in real life, as Ian and Rowan only know each other online but meet up in person in Ireland. The book offers good discussion points around honesty, trust, and the oversized expectations often placed on teens. Addie and Ian physically fight each other, lie to their family, and have big secrets they've been keeping from everyone in their lives. Addie's secret with relationship with a teen boy factors into the story, with an incident coming to light that isn't described graphically. The content is tame, in that there's very little swearing and no drinking or drugs. Due to a few mom-issued ultimatums and some serious subterfuge, Addie finds herself on a surprise road trip across Ireland with Ian and his friend Rowan. For more on Detour's direct address of the viewer, and the common feature of film noir that it is a “readerly text,” see Belton, “Film Noir's Knights of the Road.” See also Modleski, Tonia, “ Film Theory's Detour,” Screen, 23, 5 ( 1982), 72–79, 79 CrossRef Google Scholar, on the element that the film's “spectator himself is treated as a persecutor by the hero.Parents need to know that Love & Luck, by Jenna Evans Welch ( Love & Gelato), tells the story of Addie, an American who's visiting Ireland with her family while trying to get over not only a broken heart but also a rift with her closest brother, Ian. For a reading of the protagonist's trip as a reflection of the troubled Hollywood experiences of its main actors, Tom Neal and Ann Savage, see Kalat, David, “ Detour's Detour,” in Herzogenrath, Bernd, ed., The Films of Edgar G. Subsequent references are given parenthetically in the text. Goldsmith, Martin M., Detour ( Floyd, VA: Black Curtain Press, 2013) Google Scholar. ![]() Goldsmith, who as a struggling writer worked a grueling job as a cross-country automobile driver for Americans headed west. So too does the film echo some of the trajectory of its screenwriter and the author of the film's source novel, Martin M. Although many have debated whether noir is indeed a proper genre, I would like to use the term in this article as a way to track the “family resemblance” of a group of filmic texts that use a shared visual and emotional vocabulary to tackle a “slippery” subject.ġ4 Isenberg, Edgar G. John Belton, “Film Noir's Knights of the Road,” Bright Lights Film Journal, 1 Nov. ![]() As reinforced by Belton, one of the most influential characterizations of noir has been the very first, which was Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton's 1955 insistence on noir's production of a “malaise” in the viewer. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 169 CrossRef Google Scholar. But most important to definitions of the genre has been a description of its effect, encapsulated by Isenberg as “a mood, a tone, or a sensibility” of “a lurid, cheapened, morally depraved universe.” Isenberg, Noah, Edgar G. The shadowy and fated network to which film noir gestures, the article thus argues, is not some abstract metaphysical contemplation or generalized conclusion on a period of war, but a felt recognition of the ways the rapidly expanding network of extraction, distribution, and consumption was compelling Americans to remake their lives in dramatic ways that felt beyond their control.ģ Commonly recognized features of film noir include Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's observation that noir “is essentially a translation of both character emotions and narrative concepts into a pattern of visual usage,” a pattern Janey Place and Lowell Peterson have explored as concentrated in low-key, high-contrast lighting, with prevalent shadows: see, for example, Pratt, Ray, Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film ( Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001), 52, 51 Google Scholar. These features of the new life, in turn, were understood within a racialized narrative of whiteness to be productive rather than extractive habits. The automobile gave rise to “automobility,” seemingly an expansion of democratic freedoms, yet that new way of life also entrapped its participants within destructive habits of consumption involving an entire suite of beliefs, practices, habits, and other technologies. Drawing on the work of energy-humanities scholars, the article finds the film, and by extension the genre, providing a much-needed ground-level perspective on the efforts of industry and government to stimulate oil consumption by creating desires in a public struggling with the inherent paradoxes of new technologies, foremost among them the car. Ulmer's Detour (1945) as an example of film noir's exploration of the affective dimension of early oil-regime America.
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