A Idea to get back to:

In my introduction, a history of the thriller is maybe necessary -- if only in order to offset the negativity of my issues with noir. This discussion could revolve around Chesterton, Todorov, and Martin Rubin. Rereading Rubin just now I am seeing that he argues, following Chesterton's idea about the mythic within the detective story, that the nature of the thriller's urbanity is to redeem the mundane and banal elements of modern life, to revivify them. I'm not quite sure I agree with this though. Isn't this even maybe a bourgeois kind of neo-flaneur position? As in: "I'm so bored with the city that I need a thriller to help me imagine that there's something sublime in city life." I'm not sure how strict he is about this, but it neglects the epistemological bent of urban thriller narratives, the way the provide knowledge about the city. No? 

Martin Rubin's Thrillers may deserve a reconsideration. In his section "Supercops" (137) he notes that an influx of police thrillers in the 70s may be due to law and order issues being foregrounded in 1968 and 1972 political campaigns and to "a general (though transitional and deeply conflicted) swing to the right in American politics. "Transitional and conflicted" is interesting to me here. Is there a sense in which the fear of city deployed in these films is politically ambiguous? Also, police films of this period seem to be where social issues of the day get there most nuanced and for the most part, liberal working through.