Heavy breathing, bare feet running on the asphalt, and a desperation so intense that it makes a woman put herself in front of a vehicle barrelling towards her at 50mph. Robert Aldrich’s 1955 noir Kiss Me Deadly begins where many other films would find their emotional and narrative climax: psychiatric hospital runaway Christina (Cloris Leachman) runs along a road recklessly attempting to flag down passing motorists while trying to evade unseen pursuers. Though she eventually finds refuge in the sports car of private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) this does little to relieve the tension. As the credits roll over their nighttime drive, the camera looking over their shoulders from the backseat, Christina’s terrified sobs ominously mingle with the Nat King Cole tune blaring over the car radio. When the pair are later ambushed by a group of gangsters, the flimsy illusion of safety finally comes crashing down and the roughneck Hammer briefly awakes from unconsciousness only to witness Christina being brutally tortured to death.
Aldrich’s live-wire overture doesn’t just set the stage tonally but thematically, philosophically, and politically as well. Hammer, having survived the thugs’ attempt on his life, decides to investigate Christina’s death, sensing there must be “something big” connected to the crime. His hunch proves to be correct, of course, and he ends up embroiled in the hunt for a mysterious box which is supposedly connected to the Manhattan Project. The case’s connection to the infamous military research program isn’t a coincidence; the world of Kiss Me Deadly is one that exists in the shadow of nuclear weapons and the film’s rendering of the Atomic Age isn’t one of post-war optimism but rather one in which the Trinity test and the subsequent bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki formed a political, moral, and cultural destabilizing event.
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In fact, the tendrils of Little Boy and Fat Man have twined around every sphere of American life and the puzzle-box storytelling screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides makes use of in this loose adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s 1952 crime novel of the same name (give or take a comma) serves not as a showcase for his skills as a crafter of dense mysteries, but rather as an extension of the opaque nature of life in the midst of what is sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of Capitalism. The film burrows so deep into its own gloomy, paranoid, hysterical logic that it comes out the other side bearing a deeper, more ecstatic truth: not only is there an underside to the carefully manicured facade of 1950s America but that underside also bubbles uncomfortably close to the surface. More than that, it constitutes an integral part of the societal structure it dwells beneath.
It’s a tension that would come to permeate the ensuing decades of genre (and genre-adjacent) filmmaking. Tobe Hooper let post-Manson, serial killer and Vietnam War-era America loose on a group of laid-back hippie kids in his 1974 horror milestone The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; that same year Roman Polanski crafted his own hellish vision of Los Angeles with Chinatown. Nearly a decade later, Videodrome saw David Cronenberg transpose nuclear paranoia to the burgeoning information age by nesting conspiracies within even grander, more elaborate conspiracies. Famously, David Lynch’s nastiest film, 1997’s Lost Highway, took direct visual cues from Aldrich’s infernal coda for its own beach house-set finale wherein Fred Madison’s (Bill Pullman) macho guilt becomes the reality-distorting void at the center of the film.
