Noir fictions tend to a binary form of representation in which society is shown divided into light and dark sides, with the latter casting its shadows onto the former. Key to this discussion is Irving Howe's notion of the city as a narrative device for representing society in all its contradictions and fractures. In film noir, the abstract notion of “society” is transformed into a concrete spatial schema: the Naked City, a ground where dispossessed groups congregate and interact with “straight” society. The city becomes a locus for (and geographic metaphor of) the idea of a fallen world hidden just behind the façade of bland social harmony. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the music written for films that explore this trope of representation was often a cinematic version of jazz. More exactly, it is music that attempts to conjure filmic images of the urban demimonde associated with jazz and the narrative subject that traverses it. In its traffic in filmic image, cinematic jazz resembles exotica, a kind of pop music that deploys a code of standardized musical gestures to evoke imaginary exotic paradises. But jazz exotica replaces jungle settings with images of the “Naked City,” which narrate motion across the borders separating the light and dark sides of film noir's divided America.