One of the things I really liked about L.A. Noire was its exploration of the mostly overlooked period of the late-40s, and how...
One of the things I really liked about L.A. Noire was its exploration of the mostly overlooked period of the late-40s, and how that set the stage for the more familiar 50s-60s-70s cycle that followed. That America as a country was at the top of the world but the experience of living through the Roaring 20s-Great Depression/Dust Bowl-mobilization and participation in the last Napoleonic total war* cycle left individual Americans immensely traumatized on a personal level, and that if the domestic consumerist fantasia of the Atomic Age ’50s was just escapism, well it was at least viable escapism, and Americans had some serious shit to escape.
* Napoleonic in the sense of being ultimately decided by huge massed formations of ground troops. The Korean War was really the last Napoleonic war albeit not total, and it was so “forgotten” largely because no one really knew how to conceptualize a Napoleonic war that didn’t ultimately resolve with a clear hegemony-producing victory for one side and collapse and liquidation of the other.