Raymond Chandler seldom painted word portraits of his heroes, perhaps because of the falter in his first story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot.” We know what the Chandler hero Philip Marlowe looks like; tall, dark, masculine, attractive to all society types, but if you read closely you will notice that complete as he is, Marlowe's face has no a precise depiction of his features. That wasn’t a problem for Chandler, but it would become one in Hollywood when they took notice of Chandler’s work: What did Philip Marlowe look like? Even Chandler struggled with that, veering from Cary Grant to Dick Powell—Chandler’s favorite, from Fred MacMurray to Humphrey Bogart, but not when he described Marlowe in a letter that made him sound suspiciously like Fred MacMurray and Dick Powell, with a bit side of Robert Mitchum.
Dick Powell is much as we imagine Philip Marlowe, a very bright, very attractive man, a bit shop worn, a bit defensive, and too human for his own good. To that Powell brings a post-war cynicism common to many ex-G.I.s, an ironic voice tinged by sarcasm, and a leery eye toward the idea he is so devastating that women like Claire Trevor will just throw themselves at him, at least without a distinct curve on the act. Brash, ironic, and surprisingly gentle, Powell seemed to find every niche of Marlowe’s character, and would even play Marlowe again of television in an adaptation of The Long Goodbye. Source: mysteryfile.com
Burden of Proof: Hollywood has always been at odds with the truth. Studios love capitalizing on the public’s interest in real-life stories by adapting them for the big screen, but as we all know, real life is too complicated to fit a three-act structure. Concessions are made, whether it be in the form of an imagined character or a shuffling of historical events to reach a more dramatic conclusion. As long as the reshaped story bears a resemblance to what actually happened, and the fictionalized elements are entertaining, studios assume that audiences will be satisfied. Satisfaction becomes elusive, however, when the real-life story has no conclusion. There have been numerous attempts to make films about unsolved crimes, but the thing that makes these cases appealing in theory is the very thing that makes them difficult to adapt. They invalidate the three-act structure. They provide a tantalizing premise without any of the payoff. These films—let’s call them “cold case adaptations”—have been especially prevalent in recent times.
Of these cold case adaptations, The Black Dahlia (2006) has the most complicated relationship with the truth. The film is based on the James Ellroy novel of the same name, which in turn is based on the grisly murder of Elizabeth Short. The investigation that follows takes a lot of creative liberties, most notably finding a culprit for that infamous crime in January 1947. The real Elizabeth Short was a regular girl with aspirations to domesticity who was living around Hollywood Boulevard. The fictional Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner) is at the fulcrum of Hollywood decadence, making stag films and fraternizing with old money when she isn’t performing clumsy screen tests. The Black Dahlia makes no bones about which version is more scintillating, both for the viewer and the fictional detectives assigned to the case. -Noir City magazine (September 2023)
A recent study has proved that seeing and imagining seeing involve similar processes in the brain. This leads to a conundrum: ‘If the brain is treating imagination so similar to how it treats reality, why are we not confusing the two all the time?’ says Nadine Dijkstra, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. In a modern-day exploration of what’s become known as the ‘Perky Effect’, published recently in Nature Communications, Dijkstra and her colleagues asked more than 6000 people to look at a static-filled screen, to imagine diagonal lines on the screen. As the experiment went on, similar to Perky’s study, the researchers secretly introduced real diagonal lines, to test how it affected what people thought they saw. Dijkstra says their findings imply that people check what’s real and what’s imagined against a ‘reality threshold’, in a process called 'perceptual reality monitoring.' Dijkstra found further evidence of this principle by re-analysing one of her earlier brain-imaging experiments: when study participants imagined seeing something, their brains showed similar patterns of activation in the visual cortex as when they were looking at that same thing, but the activation was generally weaker. This means that people who have very vivid mental imagery could find distinguishing between reality and imagination more difficult; there has been some association between having vivid imagery and an increased likelihood of experiencing hallucinations. Source: aeon.co
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