Refashioning Noir: Do Dead Girls Still Live in L.A.?

Abstract

This article compares two works picked by celebrity book clubs in the summer of 2018 for their dissection of mainstream America’s ongoing obsession with the violence inflicted on beautiful young bodies of those who identify as female: Alice Bolin’s essay collection Dead Girls and Maria Hummel’s mystery Still Lives. In reading them together with Melanie Pullen’s High Fashion Crime Scenes (2003–2017), a series of monumental, five-feet-by-six-feet photographs in which well-known actresses and models dressed in haute couture were staged as murder victims in elaborately designed settings mostly in and around Los Angeles; Rosi Braidotti’s accounting of the two competing notions of life, bios and zoe, and how they coincide on gendered human bodies; and W.J.T. Mitchell’s understanding of images’ uncanny ability to live on and to animate bodies, my analyses consider the way different forms of artistic representation emerging in Los Angeles work for and against the biopolitical control of objectified, gendered life.