metaphors for the "wonderful" world of Classic Hollywood. But at the end of the

nineteenth century, L. Frank Baum was primarily focused on finding a new face for

merchandise display. The year that he took a trip down the yellow brick road in his

children's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), he also outlined aesthetic

techniques for captivating shoppers' attention. In The Art ofDecorating Dry Goods,

Baum argued that objects did not need to be crowded in the windows. "'Tastefully

display a single apron,"' he urged; although their purpose was to make the sale, he

encouraged merchants to reveal "'possibilities lying dormant in the beautiful goods"'

(qtd. in Leach 60). That display could invoke not only consumer desire but also, perhaps

inadvertently, an experience that made the objects "'come alive"' (qtd. in Leach 60). By

animating individual objects, Baum's show windows mobilized the shopper's gaze.

Rather than becoming passively absorbed in the series of displays or buying into the

narrative of capitalist consumerism, the shopper could look at certain details in the

window distractedly. The shop window could be experienced, as Walter Benjamin puts it

in relation to viewing architecture, "much less through rapt attention than by noticing the

object in incidental fashion" ("The Work of Art" 240).

 The shop window and the window gazer, then, hold the potential for an alternative

relation with material objects-a potential that could be activated for thinking differently

about the mysterious objects of film noir. If we approach a film still like a display in a

shop window-or like Epstein's instance ofphotogenie-we might find a way to address

the things that movies are made of. Indeed, the shop window's capacity to activate the

"possibilities lying dormant in the beautiful goods" was fully realized onscreen, where, as

Walter Benjamin significantly remarked, "by focusing on hidden details of familiar