In this article, Gillian Harkins explores how the noir genre informs 1990s and 2000s films depicting pedophiles as predators indiscernible to the naked eye. Harkins provides an overview of how the “virtual pedophile” emerges through a combination of filmic and forensic forms before providing a detailed analysis of Clint Eastwood’s 2003 film Mystic River, which uses the dominant image repertoire of pedophilia to recraft “minority” white masculinity as apposite yet somehow also oppositional to the encroachments of neoliberalism. Mystic River recombines residual forms of noir with emergent forms of white predation to revitalize the noir genre as the antidote to contemporary modes of predation and exploitation associated with neoliberalism.
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© 2013 Duke University Press
2013
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