Edinburgh Napier University

  Set in the late 1990s, against the backdrop of the Rampart scandal that impacted the LAPD, Oren Moverman's Rampart centres on a rogue, corrupt cop, Dave Brown, whose unwillingness to let go of the ‘old ways’ turns him into a perfect scapegoat for a department in desperate need of good press. Yet, Dave’s failure to adapt is not the failure of one flawed individual. In the same way as the original noir cycle used urban space to address shifts in the social and cultural texture of post-war America (Sobchack 1998; Dimendberg 2004), Rampart turns to the Los Angeles of the 1990s as a representational proxy. Dave’s impasse, the paper contends, is a mirror image of the malaise affecting the American nation in the 2000s. Rampart conjures up the fragmented spatiality of the 1990s postmetropolis (Soja 2000) to suggest a ‘post-Western scenario’, in which frontiers have collapsed, and the world is not quite changing as much as it has already changed. At once carceral and polycentric, the neo-noir city simultaneously decries and defies the bordered spaces of the classical American narrative. As it does so, however, it quietly signals that something has been lost: the Utopian and transformative impulse of the settlement fantasy (Jameson 2005). As Dave desperately turns to conspiracy to make sense of a world slipping away from his grip, we realise there is more to the character than private failure. His symbolic map – twisted and repudiated as it is – is the last echo of a great American fantasy.