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This chapter is the first of two which consist of a detailed discussion of the central work of Ellroy’s oeuvre, the Underworld USA Trilogy, a masterpiece of weird noir and of the literature of conspiracy and parapolitics. Essentially a monumental extension of Don DeLillo’s earlier novel on the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, LIBRA (1988) provided Ellroy with the impetus to reconfigure the contemporary history of the United States as the escalating decomposition of “containment” resulting from a number of interrelated political murders committed by the Bad White Men. The Byzantine complexity of the Trilogy’s plot resists concise summarization; rather, consistent with the aesthetique de schlock of weird noir (and Confidential magazine), the novels have to be read and experienced as a chaotically expanded overlapping episodes of psychological and cognitive trauma, all originating from Kennedy’s false-flag execution in Dealey Plaza by the denizens of the Deep State. And the “shock” aesthetics of Ellroy reveal the true reason why compartmentalization fails and the Deep State is (perhaps) doomed: the parapolitical nature of policing and containment transform all of the Trilogy’s protagonists into the bearers of multiple and conflicting identities—cop-criminal, criminal-cop, CIA-Mafia, Mafia-CIA, White-Black, Black-White—so that every-one becomes a no-one and any-where is every-where at all times. This “unspeakable” truth is conveyed through two key signifiers of de-compartmentalization. The first is the Tiger Kab taxi-stand in Miami, owned by Jimmy Hoffa and serviced by anti-Castro paramilitaries in the service of both the Mafia and the Central Intelligence Agency. Tiger Kab becomes a metaphor of the complete inter-penetration of domestic and foreign spaces and forces which renders the certainty of identity and motivation impossible. The second is the pathological entrepreneur Howard Hughes, the supreme signifier of the state of decomposition and, not coincidentally the proprietor of Hush-Hush magazine. Hughes is the gatekeeper of the wonder and he is the un-living proof that the price of gaining knowledge of the clandestine realms of parapolitics is the extinction of containment which is formlessness.

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The Decomposition of the Bad White Men in the Underworld USA Trilogy

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  • 发表日期：

    2026年

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  • Eric M. Wilson

摘要

This chapter is the first of two which consist of a detailed discussion of the central work of Ellroy’s oeuvre, the Underworld USA Trilogy, a masterpiece of weird noir and of the literature of conspiracy and parapolitics. Essentially a monumental extension of Don DeLillo’s earlier novel on the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, LIBRA (1988) provided Ellroy with the impetus to reconfigure the contemporary history of the United States as the escalating decomposition of “containment” resulting from a number of interrelated political murders committed by the Bad White Men. The Byzantine complexity of the Trilogy’s plot resists concise summarization; rather, consistent with the aesthetique de schlock of weird noir (and Confidential magazine), the novels have to be read and experienced as a chaotically expanded overlapping episodes of psychological and cognitive trauma, all originating from Kennedy’s false-flag execution in Dealey Plaza by the denizens of the Deep State. And the “shock” aesthetics of Ellroy reveal the true reason why compartmentalization fails and the Deep State is (perhaps) doomed: the parapolitical nature of policing and containment transform all of the Trilogy’s protagonists into the bearers of multiple and conflicting identities—cop-criminal, criminal-cop, CIA-Mafia, Mafia-CIA, White-Black, Black-White—so that every-one becomes a no-one and any-where is every-where at all times. This “unspeakable” truth is conveyed through two key signifiers of de-compartmentalization. The first is the Tiger Kab taxi-stand in Miami, owned by Jimmy Hoffa and serviced by anti-Castro paramilitaries in the service of both the Mafia and the Central Intelligence Agency. Tiger Kab becomes a metaphor of the complete inter-penetration of domestic and foreign spaces and forces which renders the certainty of identity and motivation impossible. The second is the pathological entrepreneur Howard Hughes, the supreme signifier of the state of decomposition and, not coincidentally the proprietor of Hush-Hush magazine. Hughes is the gatekeeper of the wonder and he is the un-living proof that the price of gaining knowledge of the clandestine realms of parapolitics is the extinction of containment which is formlessness.