Under the Silver Lake (2018): It’s a movie that loves the art of decades past, and hates who perverts it. It reminded me of both David Foster Wallace and Raymond Chandler. David Robert Mitchell described the Cannes premiere as difficult. “I always knew the film would be divisive, but you never know quite to what degree,” he says. “But if I have a frustration, it’s that some people have perceived the film to be misogynistic, which is personally very painful. I just so strongly disagree. This character is disconnected from the world and is struggling with feelings of misogyny — that’s a core element of what this movie is about. I assume that most people will see him beating up children and staring at women’s bodies as offensive behavior, and I don’t think I need to constantly tell everyone that. For people to imagine that we’re celebrating it is just disappointing.” The names Sam and Sarah plus the Kurt Cobain poster in Sam’s bedroom are references to the Samsara and Nirvana of Buddhism, which could mean the whole movie is Sam’s dying fever dream.
Is Sam a private dick, or just the common of garden variety? In a discussion about the pervasiveness of pop music, Sam glances up from a Fender Mustang guitar and says “I don’t believe you”– the same words Bob Dylan used in response to the heckler who branded him a Judas for going electric? In a daring and brilliant coup, the movie conspires finally to show Sam stranded outside his own life, staring in at it like the homeless people he admits to despising. The plush orchestral score maintains the connection to LA film noir, and Sam does his bit, too. He’s the big sleepwalker, stuck in a lonely place, about as much good as the corpse in the pool in Sunset Boulevard. And the film’s barrage of dream-logic surrealism should pay royalties to the Lost Highway-era David Lynch. Source: www.newstatesman.com
Film noir is often referred to in spatial terms, as a world or a universe. The classical canon is itself replete with enigmatic aphorisms about it, whether “a blue, sick world” (Dead Reckoning, John Cromwell, 1947), or “a bright, guilty world” (The Lady from Shanghai, Orson Welles, 1948). In The Big Sleep (1939), the novel in which private investigator Philip Marlowe makes his first appearance, Raymond Chandler gives us this condensed version: “The tyres sang on the moist concrete of the boulevard. The world was a wet emptiness.” As the novel reaches its climax, the wetness has gained momentum: “The tumbling rain was solid white spray in the headlights. The windshield wiper could hardly keep the glass clear enough to see through.” At some point, Marlowe reaches an outer limit where social space ends, yet something is evoked beyond it. The hallmark of Chandler’s prose, Fredric Jameson argues (in his essay 'The Synoptic Chandler'), coordinates this social environment against “the presence of some vaster, absent natural unity beyond this ephemeral set of episodes in punctual human time.” Jameson demonstrates how the novels move toward such fringe areas at the end of the road, or, in the Heideggarian sense, at the end of the world. The “cognitive map of Los Angeles,” charted through his investigations, “has no grounding or resonance unless it circulates slowly against the rotation of that other, deeper anti-system which is that of the Earth itself.” -'The Phenomenology of Film Noir' essay by Henrik Gustafsson, included in "A Companion to Film Noir" (2013) by Andrew Spicer & Helen Hanson
In The Long Goodbye Marlowe has changed: he has the total realisation that not only is he alone in the world, but that the connection he had thought he had found was a fallacy. What hope he had for true friendship is extinguished in the last pages of The Long Goodbye. In Marlowe’s eyes, Terry Lennox seemed to share his vision of the world. Part of Marlowe does want Lennox to turn back because he is so lonely but, in the end, his moral conscience wins out. He knows that he is on his own and he recognises that his own choices have brought him here, and he is content that he has done the right thing. Chandler wanted him to be betrayed and to understand why. Marlowe was a knight with a code of honour that was unshakable, even in the most testing times. Chandler recognised that he had put him in a situation that might be hard to understand for many of his readers. The honourable martyr was, of course, also the sort of man Raymond Chandler imagined himself to be. In a letter to Hamish Hamilton in 1951, Chandler expressed his admiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald: "Fitzgerald is a subject no one has a right to mess up. If the poor guy was already an alcoholic in his college days, it’s a marvel that he did as well as he did. He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, a real distinction, the word is charm – charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It’s not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartets. Yes, where would you find it today?" -"A Mysterious Something in the Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler" (2013) by Tom Williams
Richard Slotkin emphasizes the Western provenance of the hardboiled detective as exemplified by Marlowe. He posits, intriguingly, for example, that Chandler's detective, like James Fenimore Cooper's Hawkeye, is first and foremost a "rescuer" of the innocent, that both heroes are "engaged in unmasking hidden truth." Chandler avoids the opposite extreme of nihilism as found in Hammett, whose Continental Op in Red Harvest, for Sinda Gregory, "is made to appear as guilty and morally reprehensible as the rest of the gangsters". One might then expect Chandler's class bias to have endeared him to a Marxist critic such as Ernest Mandel, who, however, feels that Marlowe is a sentimentalist who wastes his energy on pursuing criminals who wield only "limited clout". It is doubtless Chandler's reluctance to make any global condemnation of the capitalist system that bothers Mandel. Chandler consistently and symbolically sought redress for social ills within the democratic system as he knew it in the United States, within the liberal tradition. In "The Simple Art of Murder," for example, he insisted that no social or political hierarchy is truly divorced from the "rank and file" in a democracy, and thus cannot be completely blamed for its failures. Ross Macdonald misreads Chandler's call for "a quality of redemption" in "The Simple Art of Murder," overemphasizing Chandler's moralistic tone.
Unlike other hardboiled heroes, Marlowe is acutely critical of his own thoughts and actions; he questions his own role and the power he wields, and his actions reflect changes in attitude as he learns from others; In a world in which the police are as guilty of egregious violence as criminals, Marlowe roundly condemns both; his toughness is measured not by resorting to such extreme measures, but by his refusal to respond violently to the threats of gangsters (Eddie Mars in The Big Sleep, Laird Brunette in Farewell, My Lovely) or the police (Christy French in The Little Sister, Detective Dayton in The Long Goodbye). Chandler's deepest concerns - his interest in the community as well as the individual, his hatred of the abuse and the abusers of power, his conviction that ethical conduct cannot be reduced to simplistic formulae and must be continually scrutinized - are inevitably what Hollywood was most concerned to change. Cynthia S. Hamilton insists that, in keeping with the genre, "Chandler's misanthropy demands an absolute separation between Marlowe and the moral squalor of his society". In her view Marlowe is antisocial, an "alienated outsider who vindicates that stance by his demonstrable superiority in a society unworthy of his services." Chandler took on the daunting challenge of using the highly individualistic figure of the private eye to explain how and why American rugged individualism has failed. In transforming the figure of the hard-boiled detective, he created a new paradigm, not only for a new detective, but for a new individual as well. -"Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: The Hard-Boiled Detective Transformed" by John Paul Athanasourelis (2011)
Producers, Raymond Chandler found, were generally ‘low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat and the artistic integrity of a slot machine’, though there were enough ‘able and humane’ ones to give hope. The same proportion of integrity applied, Chandler decided, to the world of agents, directors and publicists: there were abundant bad ones to make Hollywood stink, but always enough decent, friendly and amusing ones to make working there enjoyable. Had that not been the case, he insisted, the money alone would not have been enough to keep him there. "I used to like this town," I said, just to be saying something and not to be thinking too hard. "A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual, used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn't that, but it wasn't a neon-lighted slum either."
"Now we get characters like this Steelgrave owning restaurants. We've got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city. Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood-and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail-order city." -"The Little Sister" (1949). The transformation of the city and the feelings it engenders in Marlowe are made clear when he spies a club with a packed terrace and parking lot. It is so overcrowded, that the people are “like ants on a piece of overripe fruit.” The image immediately tells the reader what has changed Los Angeles: the population boom of the early twentieth century. Marlowe, too, is reminded of what Los Angeles has become, and begins to name its faults. Source: ue.ucdavis.edu
Dick Powell is often mentioned as Chandler's favorite incarnation of Marlowe, praise that was rightfully earned. Powell's Marlowe is both jaded and optimistic, world-weary yet open to life. He delivers certain lines with cutting self-deprecation, others with calculated softness. His Marlowe is always pushing buttons, probing people for weakness, wresting control of the situation. Though he isn't physically imposing (something about his face is too gentle to completely intimidate) his confident delivery and compromised sense of values sell his dangerous side. "Dick Powell is even dryer in the part than Bogart, erasing entirely the crooner's geniality that had made him a popular fixture in Warner musicals. The only echo of the earlier Powell is the actor physical's grace -he has a dancer flowing ease. Powell's voice is flat, his face taut and frozen in the masklike noir vein, and he plays Marlowe as a blunt, no-nonsense professional. His work is wonderfully tight and economical; he is guarded and sardonic, but he falls short of projecting Bogart's aura of absolute integrity." -"The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir" (2008) by Foster Hirsch
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