Killing Owen Taylor: Cinema, Detective Stories, and the Past

Dean DeFino

Journal of Narrative Theory, Fall 2000 (30:3)

It often seems to this particular writer that the only reasonably honest and effective way of fooling the reader that remains is to make the reader exercise his mind about the wrong problems, to make him, as it were, solve a mystery (since he is almost sure to solve something) which will land him in a bypath because it is only tangential to the central problem.

--Raymond Chandler, “Casual Notes on The Mystery Novel”  

To determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema.

--Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form”

In Raymond Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by a rich old man named Sternwood to protect his reckless young daughter, Carmen, from a blackmailer and pornographer named Geiger.  But before Marlowe has any lead into the case, Geiger turns up dead.  Shortly after, the Sternwoods’ chauffeur, Owen Taylor, is fished out of the ocean in the family car, with sap marks on his head and his foot tied to the accelerator.  Marlowe learns from a friend in the district attorney’s office that Taylor was an ex-con who had once run off with Carmen and fallen in love with her; then, when she tossed him aside, stayed on with the family to protect her.   Marlowe figures the case like this: Taylor murdered Geiger when he found out that Geiger had been taking dirty pictures of Carmen, then either committed suicide by driving into the ocean or, more likely, got himself killed by one of Geiger’s associates.  We do not know for sure because the novel never tells us.  Satisfied with his theory, Marlowe lets the matter drop midway through the text.  Where Taylor’s alleged murderous act serves a plotting function (Geiger’s death exposes a network of corruption that implicates the Sternwood family at several levels), his own death merely symbolizes the folly of a man consumed by a lost love.  Taylor, and his vision of Carmen, is finally swallowed up in “the big sleep,” death, toward which all the novel’s illusions speed. 

When Howard Hawks set about adapting Chandler’s novel to film in 1946, he made substantial changes to the text.  Warner Brothers had bought the property as a romantic vehicle for its two stars, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and so Hawks added several scenes to accommodate a love story between detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart) and Carmen’s older sister, Vivian (Bacall).  He also removed all references to drug abuse and pornography, in accordance with the Hays Code, and did away with Chandler’s brooding pessimistic coda on “the big sleep” when studio executives insisted upon a morally uplifting ending.  Though the film maintains much of the tone of Chandler’s novel--the menacing criminality, the cynical humor--it makes something of a patchwork of the plot.  But one piece Hawks finally decided to include in this patchwork was the strange death of Owen Taylor.  Hawks recalls:

We were having an argument one time about who killed Owen, and no one ever knew who did it.  After we had argued about it a lot I sent Chandler a wire and said, ‘Who killed him?’ and he said ‘So and so.’ He couldn’t have, he was down at the beach at the time.  So we didn’t bother about it--we just tried to make good scenes. (Goodwin  31) 

Hawks might have easily invented his own explanation for Taylor’s death, or even written the character out entirely (the chauffeur is never mentioned until he turns up dead), but instead he chose to include it.   But why, when all it offered (particularly without the larger context of “the big sleep”) was another confusing plot detail?  Hawks’ flippancy about the matter--that he “didn’t bother about it” and “just tried to make good scenes”--suggests a sort of contempt for the laws of narrative continuity.

In order to begin to answer that question, we need to look still further back: back before the brief affair between Carmen Sternwood and Owen Taylor, before Chandler and before the invention of hard-boiled detective fiction, back to the sources of narrative film.  These film historians traditionally place with D. W. Griffith who, in the first decade of the 20^th century, articulated a system for communicating complex stories in a medium that had, until then, not advanced much past trick and chase films.  If Griffith did not invent the techniques that would allow film to communicate narrative meaning (close-up, shot/reverse-shot, fade-out, etc.), he did invent a narrative code that is still largely in use today: what film historian Tom Gunning describes as the “narrator system.”

Gunning’s excellent study of Griffith’s 1908-9 films with the Biograph company, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, describes this system as a catalogue of editing techniques, mise en scene and plot devices used to establish a spatio-temporal logic within a film, which the cinematic apparatus naturally disrupts and fragments by framing and cutting “reality” into disjointed images and sequences.  Cinema innovators before Griffith had already begun to devise ways of reconciling these disparities: linking shots according to a visual logic (full-length shot of a character cuts to close-up of face), a logic of diegetic action (in the first shot an alarm clock rings, and in the second a sleeping man’s eyes open), and a logic of camera mechanics (panning, tilting, fading).  But while these innovations made for instances of consistency and meaning, they could hardly sustain a complex story. Griffith’s narrator system sought to re-establish the classical dramatic unities of time and space, as the proscenium stage does in theater and the narrative voice in literary fiction.  He achieved this by focusing the system around three cardinal points, based on the classical thematic unities: suspense, psychology and morality (Griffith 28).  I read these as three levels of motivation.  Suspense essentially belongs to the realm of spectator motivation.  Our willingness to forgive certain obvious breaks in “real” time or space (intentionally restricted view, flashbacks, etc.) is based upon our willingness to suspend disbelief or cognition on the promise that our faith will eventually be rewarded by a moment of recognition.  But if suspense makes us want to know what will happen, our desire to know is based upon emotional or intellectual commitment to the story, which in turn is based upon a sustained reference to character psychology as a “motive” or “justification,” not only for the narrative actions but, again, for spatio-temporal breaks.  Why did the image suddenly jump from a bedroom to a prison?  Because we know a petty criminal character is visualizing his fear of getting caught.  For this reason, Hollywood film so depends upon character “types.”  Since the story begins as soon as we enter the diegesis (that is, as soon as the film begins), we need to identify these motives and types immediately, so that we can navigate our way through the story, through the temporal and spatial leaps.  Characters are marked by such things as clothing (the man in black with the scar is a “bad guy”), occupation (so too corporate raiders) and typecasting (so too James Cagney).  Morality justifies the “meaning” or “context” or “value” of the story as a whole: as in a fable, where good conquers evil, or a scorpion stings a frog because it is in his nature.  

Griffith’s narrator system is predicated on the principle of redemption or return.  In order to create a narrative cinema that audiences would be able to follow, and a diegetic “real” that worked with, rather than against, the tendency of film to break up space and time, Griffith invoked classical unities, identifiable moral tradition, and an economy of suspense borrowed from the novel and short story forms.  He linked a modern chaotic medium to the traditions of an earlier time, even choosing for his masterworks--Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)--historical subjects.  His greatest innovation, then, was to subsume the new and strange into the traditional and familiar.  So situated, cinematic technique--framing, cutting, etc.—would appear no more intrusive or unnatural than the proscenium arch or the chapter break.

But if Griffith codified many of the devices for this system of “invisible editing,” as it is called, its currency is due largely to two inventions of the 1920's.  The first of these is named for a place that, until a decade before, did not even appear on a map: a rural outpost set in the hills beyond Los Angeles called Hollywood.  Though the decadent age of “Hollywood Babylon” had bloomed before World War I, and Griffith himself transplanted Biograph to California in 1910, it was not until after the War, and the resulting economic boom, that Hollywood became the movie-making center of the world.  Massive, self-contained studios went up nearly overnight, and big companies consolidated to become even bigger.  Drawn to Southern California by the abundance of good weather, cheap skilled labor and the wide variety of locales (desert, mountains, the sea), these studios centralized their production apparatuses—and so the seat of American film—to make the production of films more efficient: a requirement of survival, considering the pressure from the growing viewing public for new material.

One of the contingencies of this massive consolidation and expansion was the need for an abundance of stories that could be made in a patterned, efficient way that would allow over-lapping productions and rigid shooting schedules.  The key to the success of the Hollywood studio system, particularly in the age of vertical integration,^[i] lay in genre filmmaking.  Because genre is based upon repeatable forms--character types, visual styles, fixed narrative progressions--it allowed for just the sort of steady, repeatable movie making that would maximize studio efficiency.  It is also the reason cinematic technique became more and more invisible as Hollywood entered its Golden Age.  Working with character types and audience expectations, the genre filmmaker had most of the work of narrative efficacy done for him.  The audience knew before watching a western what to expect from the narrative and characters.  It was cookbook storytelling, the ultimate example of Hollywood’s sophisticated illusion.

The second major cinematic invention of the 1920's, synchronous sound, went still further to perpetuate this illusion.  Sound offered not only new technical continuities (sound delay over a cut to de-emphasize the spatio-temporal break, music to build suspense or suggest a certain mood), but most of all speech, dialogue.  Sound was revolutionary, not in the sense that it changed the way films were made (most of Griffith’s classical film making devices remain today), but in that it moved narrative cinema still closer to the realism Griffith had been working to achieve.  In The Classical Hollywood Cinema, David Bordwell speaks of Hollywood’s “excessively obvious cinema,” borrowing from Dupin’s remark in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” that the document “escapes observation by dint of being excessively obvious” (Bordwell 11).  The slick, smooth style we associate with Golden Age Hollywood cinema is really just a by-product of our learned expectations: one of these being a false sense of “the real,” which sound film did more to perpetuate than any other invention in the history of cinema. 

But where does the detective story, a popular generic form intimately involved in issues of verity and redemption, fit into this scheme?  One of the problems filmmakers have traditionally had adapting detective fiction is that it tends to focus on the intellectual activity of logical deduction: mental and verbal activities, which little lend themselves to a primarily visual medium.  This problem posed a particular difficulty in the silent era, where verbosity meant a lot of tedious reading for the audience.  In effect, silent detective films were compelled to circumvent the primary feature of the form.  The long explication of Sherlock Holmes gave way to action-adventure heroics and romance.  When in 1929 then-rookie director Howard Hawks’ contract with Fox studios obliged him to make a silent version of E. C. Bentley’s classic whodunit, Trent’s Last Case, his solution was to handle the text as a farce.

At the center of the problem is the detective story’s backward glance.  Rather than showing what happens, it explains what happened.  Here the cinematic flashback would be put to good use, as well as dramatic re-creations and pantomimes.  But while these techniques made it possible to describe events of the past, they were less successful explaining them.  Cinema tends toward representation rather than exposition.  Film flashbacks could easily show (or at least speculate) by linking scenes and creating a unity of action, but we do not read detective stories merely to see what happens.  We read them to see how and why the detective makes the links that establish the unity of action.   Where a genre like the historical novel is primarily concerned with history--how events and characters relate to each other--the detective story’s main focus is historiography--how and why the detective discovers these relationships.  This poses a complex problem for cinema.  Short of picturing every thought in the detective’s head (which undercuts the suspense of the story by giving things away too soon), how might one dramatize the mind of the story?

In 1927, detective writer S. S. Van Dine penned an introduction to an anthology of detective stories in which he argued that the “difficulties confronting a motion-picture director in the screening of a detective tale are very much the same as those he would encounter if he strove to film a crossword puzzle . . . for there is neither drama nor adventure, in the conventional sense, in a good detective novel” (World’s Great 10-11).  Van Dine was not the first or last to note these “difficulties,” but the timing of his remarks is a significant one.  First, they come in the same year that sound film began to reach a mass audience.  The importance of this revolution to a literary genre so steeped in dialogue cannot be underestimated.  Second, less than a year after Van Dine wrote these words, he signed a contract with Paramount Pictures to make three of his Philo Vance detective novels into films, to begin the most successful detective film series of all time.  Over the next decade, Van Dine’s twelve Vance novels (most written to fulfill contract obligations with film studios) would see a total of seventeen screen adaptations, making Van Dine a best-selling author, Vance a rival to Sherlock Holmes for most popular detective, and William Powell (who played Vance in seven of the films) the debonair detective actor of the 1930's.^[ii] 

In 1927, when Van Dine wrote his introduction, only three detective films were made in Hollywood, but in 1929, the year the first Vance film appeared, fourteen found their way to theaters.  But if the popularity of the detective story in the 1930's can be partially explained by the advent of sound technology, what about Van Dine’s stories in particular?^[iii]  Surely the broad appeal of Van Dine’s books, and the even broader reach of the Vance films, did much for the popularity of the genteel amateur sleuth solving parlor-room murders, but to what do we account that popularity? 

Jon Tuska’s study of the American detective film, In Manors and Alleys, argues that Van Dine’s stories focus “aesthetic and philosophic theories on how a crime, just as a work of art, bears the indelible imprint of its creator’s personality and temperament”:

This methodology, eased by Van Dine’s caricature of the police and deliberate blunting of their scientific routines, allowed Vance alone to identify the murderer while at the same time it permits the reader to experience an acute sense of pleasure when, suddenly, he perceives a generating line through the miasma of misleading information and conflicting evidence. . ..  The reader does not have to labor beneath the needless complexity of odd clues nor must he resort to endless fanciful speculations which ratiocination cannot really suggest but only confirm after the fact. . ..  Rather the crime or crimes, the web of circumstance and the generation of murder in a Van Dine novel are grasped quite suddenly as a unity.  Our appreciation is aesthetic in character and the appeal is more to the sensibility than to merely deductive mental processes. (65)

The sense of objective removal or detachment Tuska describes is the key to narrative control in the classic whodunit.  Sherlock Holmes is a genius because he is able to see the logical thread behind the seeming-chaotic action, the symmetry beneath the bloody horror.  Only here the process is described at an imaginative rather than mathematical level.  Where logicians like Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Jacques Futrelle’s Professor Van Dusen assume an ideal linear logic and work only upon what the former calls “legitimate deductions,” Philo Vance operates at the level of inspiration or revelation, trusting his higher aesthetic sense to find a unity (Complete Works 4: 172).  Holmes compares detecting to constructing a skeleton from a single bone--an act of archaeology--but Vance sees his role as anthropological: “Just as a sculptor, who thoroughly understands the principles of form and composition, can accurately supply any missing integral part of a statue, so can the psychologist who understands the human mind, supply any missing factor in a given human action” (Benson 342: italics mine).  Where the older style of detective treats everything objectively as “hard data”--sterile pieces in a sterile puzzle--Vance studies psychology in action, thus presenting a drama--even adventure--suitable for moving pictures.  In The Kennel Murder Case, for instance, Vance sics a dog upon the accused to see whether or not he reaches for the murder weapon to drive it off, trusting that the deed, rather than a stale recollection of clues, will reveal the killer.  The reason Vance so well suits cinema is that his method of detecting “unities” is exactly the same sort of dramatization of psychology, suspense and morality that Griffith embeds in the techniques of narrative cinema, where plot turns on the cognitive act.  Vance’s detective method is analogous to the process of cinema viewing, where the eye perceives a pattern of sensory data from which the mind decodes meaning.

But what about detective stories that intentionally shatter these underlying illusions of suspense, psychology and morality upon which Griffith’s “narrator system” depend?  The case of Owen Taylor is an excellent example of this.  Though Marlowe spends a great deal of time collecting data concerning Taylor’s possible motive for killing Geiger and anyone else’s for killing Taylor (or Taylor’s for killing himself), we are never told who done it.  The psychological profile illustrates a point which resolves nothing: suspense is left suspended to the point that our interest in the question dissipates and any moral that might have been suggested by the crime or crimes is completely demoralized by its nullification in “the big sleep.”  This is the trend in most hard-boiled stories, where suspense is left as such by story’s end, when the “resolution” of the crime simply results in more confusion and dissolution.  We are never repaid for our suspension of disbelief: no order--solipsistic, diegetic or otherwise--is ever achieved.  Nor do we ever fix a positive motive.  At the end of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, detective Sam Spade tries to puzzle his reasons for handing Brigid O’Shaughnessy over to the police, but comes away more confused than ever.  When Philip Marlowe tries to answer detective Randall’s question at the end of  Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, why a woman who had escaped criminal prosecution should want to kill herself, the best he can come up with is a quote from Othello, which even he must admit is “just sentimental” (292).  And, of course, for all the discussion of a code of honor or an ethical system, only similar sentiment can recover any from stories that lead to nothing but more criminal behavior, false promises and “the big sleep.”  The coveted falcon turns out to be lead, the girl kills herself before she can answer for her past actions, and the detective slinks away in misery and shame from the destruction he has brought upon others.

Of course, not all cinematic storytellers shared Griffith’s and Hollywood’s “unity” of purpose.  A growing number of film makers disparaged this sense of unity, of a fictional reality, in pursuit of other ends.  Documentarians like Robert Flaherty and directors influenced by Expressionist and avant-garde cinema sought more overtly subjective realities over the illusions of mainstream Hollywood.  One such was Josef Von Sternberg, who combined expressionist and documentarian sensibilities in a 1927 silent masterpiece called Underworld, which film genre historians typically refer to as the first gangster film.  But while it is a film about a seedy and corrupt world occupied by criminals, watching it next to such 1930's gangster classics as Mervyn Leroy’s Little Caesar (1930) and William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931), one is likely to find little resemblance beyond subject matter.  Where these later films are character-driven dramas focused on socially-determined psychopaths told in a spare, almost primitive style and accented by machine-gun fire and the staccato dialogue of Cagney and Robinson tough guys, Von Sternberg’s film is a work of extraordinary visual and psychological complexity that explores the vicissitudes of a Nietzschean superman in a corrupt world. 

Underworld is a transitional film.  It is what Hollywood cinema did not become, just as these later films stand for what it did.  Made in the same year that sound film revolutionized cinema, it stands both as a major achievement of silent film and an anachronism next to the more realistic sound films of Hollywood’s Golden Age, which would trade Von Sternberg’s expressionistic vision for formula drama.  Still it offers an important bridge into these later films, and into the history of the hard-boiled detective film.  That bridge, again, involves Howard Hawks, who co-wrote Underworld, along with several other Von Sternberg films, and who made his own gangster masterpiece, Scarface, three years later.^[iv]   The shadowy visual depth and kinesis of Scarface owes a great debt to Von Sternberg, as do The Big Sleep and most other American films noir.

In his 1965 autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, Von Sternberg refers to Underground as “an experiment in photographic violence and montage” (216): a remark that suggests a perhaps unexpected link to a theoretical mode of film making that developed in tandem with the Golden Age Hollywood style.  Its chief proponent, Soviet film maker Sergei Eisenstein, ironically considered himself a student of Griffith.  In fact, he credited Griffith with inventing the system that he saw as the “nerve of cinema,” montage.  In his 1929 essay, “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” Eisenstein compares the construction of cinematic meaning to the evolution of Asian written languages.  A combination or “copulation” of pictographs or hieroglyphs, which depict objects, forms an ideogram, or abstract linguistic symbol.  In other words, connotative images are formed from denotative ones.  The placement of the pictogram for “dog” next to that for “mouth,” for example, connotes “to bark.”  This laconic passage from denotation to connotation is the basic signifying gesture of montage.  Each individual shot “frames” an object or an image, and when these are spliced together, a concept results.  We see a bird, then a budding branch, then a muddy stream, and construct the concept, “Spring.”  Of course the concept that a sequence of images communicates depends entirely upon the structure or ordering of the sequence--its logic (chronologic, teleologic, etc.)--for film is not only a durational but unidirectional medium.   A sequence beginning with the image of a duck flying overhead, then a hunter with his gun on his shoulder, then a path, for example, suggests the frustrated end of a day, but in reverse order it suggests a fortuitous beginning.  As such, Eisenstein’s theory of montage is an elemental example of what Stephen Heath calls “narrativization”: roughly, the transformation of showing into telling, which cinema achieves by “seeking to maintain a tight balance between the photographic image as a reproduction of reality and the narrative as the sense, the intelligibility, of that reality” (109).

For Eisenstein, cinematic meaning is created by the collision of imagery or “visual counterpoint.”  His idea is a natural extension of Hegelian dialectics, where sequence is a constant negotiation of value between opposing elements.  Where other theorists of montage (most notably Eisenstein’s countryman Vsevolod Pudovkin) understand it to be an acquisitive activity, where meaning is literally built by the unrolling of a sequence of images--Eisenstein calls this “epic” form--Eisenstein’s idea of montage is a collision of independent shots, or what he calls “dramatic” form.  Extending this idea to narrative, plot is the negotiation of meaning from the collision of events or descriptions.  It is not bound by “real” time or “real” space, but by oppositions.  The meaning of a film like Griffith’s Intolerance, for instance, is based not upon a strict linear order (Intolerance tells four parallel stories from four different ages of human civilization), but upon the matching of certain actions or gestures.  But where Griffith’s narrator system conceives of this meaning as a unity, where the gestures reveal a psychological order or morality, Eisenstein sees the role of cinema, and art in general, “to make manifest the contradictions of Being.  To form equitable views by stirring up contradictions within the spectator’s mind, and to forge accurate intellectual concepts from the dynamic clash of opposing passions” (“Dialectic Approach” 46).  Eisenstein’s ideal cinema is confrontational, disruptive, forcing one to consider the way meaning is constructed at the same time that it offers a construction of meaning.

Eisenstein’s theory speaks to specific political objectives (born out of Marxist ideology), but is modeled upon the physiology of sensory experience: the vibration of light on the eye that makes color, and the blocking of it that defines shape and depth.  Cinema, too, is a vibration of images and blackness, achieving the illusion of motion only because the eye is slower than the shutter that divides the still film frames with intervals of blackness.  We see motion because still images shift beneath the veil of the non-image, and meaning exists in the dialogue between presence and absence: the order of the image, and the disorder of the chaos around it.  The appearance of things is only part of that dialogue.  As Walter Benjamin, another Marxist critic, put it in his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” (237).  Though Benjamin’s use of the word “unconscious” dates his model of human psychology, his point--that the camera’s tendency to record all within its range of vision, while the human eye is far more selective--is a valid one.  We have all had the experience of watching a film more than once and recognizing things we hadn’t noticed previously.  What we are witnessing is the hierarchy of our own visual processes: how we are initially drawn to certain compositional elements, and later to others.   The great virtue of cinema, according to Benjamin, is that it allows us to isolate and analyze these different reactions.  We can watch a film over and over again--even pore over its individual frames--because it is a fixed record.  But each viewing reveals more and more of the way we see it.

Eisenstein theorized the elemental way film transformed showing into telling, replaced dramatic action with syntactic action, and so revolutionized the way we think about seeing.  His impulse is similar to modernists like Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos, who explore the boundaries of descriptive juxtaposition, to study language--be it filmic or verbal--at the basic level of enunciation, the word and the image.  Here, too, we locate theoretical art movements like Supremacism and Dada where, again in Benjamin’s words, art becomes “an instrument of ballistics” meant to shock the spectator out of complacent acceptance or artistic unity (238).  But in less polemic work, it offers a laconic way of constructing texts--filmic or otherwise--based upon the kinetic juxtaposition of imagery rather than exposition.  Texts create dramatic situations--“copulations”--in the very act of imaging a world, rather than by relying upon explicit psychological or moral motivations.  It suggests the possibility of a new form of narrative, one not based upon classical unities, but upon the cognitive processes. 

This point is highly significant to our present discussion, because in both classic and hard-boiled detective fiction “plot” or “drama” as such is often subsumed into the functionality of being.  The classic detective story isn’t concerned with plot, per se, but with resolution or “unplotting.”  The very word “plot” is used in mystery fiction as a form of derogation--characters “plot against” each other, or hatch “evil plots”--and the detective’s job is to “foil the plot,” or expose it.  If the standard narrative negotiates plot through what Roland Barthes calls “risky moments” or “hinge points,” the classic detective story promises to dissolve or nullify them by revealing the one and only possible scenario.  The text does this by drawing together evidence--objects, bits of dialogue, hard data--by linking otherwise independent images or fragments.  The detective, of course, plays the operative role as an editor, taking seemingly disparate elements and fusing them into a concept, an “answer.”  What the detective “proves” is that one need not have a “plot” to discover a story.  The denotative elements--a shoe, a footprint, a broken window--will reveal “meaning,” which is finally all that a detective hopes to accomplish, and all that he promises.  

In hard-boiled detective fiction, the movement away from plot towards an expression of “meaning” through the copulation of imagery is harder to see, since hard-boiled detective novels are notorious for the complexity of their plots.  But perhaps this is to the point.  Chandler explains:

A long time ago when I was writing for the pulps I put into a story a line like “He got out of the car and walked across the sun-drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.”  They took it out when they published the story.  Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing--just held up the action.  I set out to prove them wrong.  My theory was that the readers just thought they cared about nothing but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, the thing they cared about, and that I cared about, was the creation of emotion through dialogue and description.  The thing they remembered, that haunted them, was not for example, that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death.  He didn’t even hear the death knock on the door.  That damned little paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers. (Speaking 219)

Chandler sees action as a sort of staging for a deeper symbolic discourse, which is revealed in the details.  His choice of actions in this description--picking at a paper clip--implies a sort of ritual of being.  But the same is true of larger actions within the plot.  The death of Owen Taylor leads only to “the big sleep.”  It has no direct residual effect on the events of the narrative.  But more interesting is Chandler’s sense of “the creation of emotion through dialogue and description”: a phrase that brings us right back to Eisenstein, where the conceptual message (what Chandler calls “emotion”) is delivered through the evocation of concrete details.  This effect is perhaps easiest to see in detective Philip Marlowe’s description of Moose Malloy in the first two pages of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (1940):

He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck. . ..  He was worth looking at.  He wore a shaggy borsalino hat, a rough gray sports coat with white golf balls on it for buttons, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, pleated gray flannel slacks and alligator shoes with white explosions on the toes.  From his outer breast pocket cascaded a show of handkerchief of the same brilliant yellow as his tie.  There were a couple of colored feathers tucked into the band of his hat, but he didn’t really need them.  Even on Central Avenue, not quite the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food. (4)

Marlowe’s description of Malloy reflects exactly what Eisenstein meant by the “contradictions of Being” that the arts are meant to expose: a vari-colored giant in a black-and-white world, a noise louder than noise, “a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

Malloy, like Owen Taylor, rarely appears in the novel, but his phantom presence profoundly influences its development.  He sets the story in motion by hiring Marlowe to find his former sweetheart Velma (the “Lovely” of the title) and accidentally shooting the owner of a bar, then all but disappears until near the end of the novel.  But we feel his presence throughout because Marlowe’s description of him, and the brief dialogue between the two men that follows concerning “Little Velma” who is “as cute as lace pants,” leave an unforgettable impression upon the reader (not to mention Marlowe).  We see a man larger than life and a fool in love, caught in a twisted romance called Farewell, My Lovely.  The dialogue in this section operates in much the same way: not expressing abstractions or describing feelings, but serving a sort of ritual function.  Malloy keeps repeating the phrases, “Little Velma” and “cute as lace pants,” not to forward plot, but to establish his emotional position to her.  Hard-boiled detective fiction, so named for its laconic, unsentimental tone, reveals these features both in description and dialogue.  Like the images in Eisenstein’s laconic montage, they state facts: not without subjectivity, but certainly without exposing them to abstract discourse.  They do not get at answers, but the collision of details.  Marlowe’s own sarcastic remarks at the beginning and end of this passage reflect this sense of collision: one does not make sense of them, but wrestles them together.  Marlowe constantly reflects upon the appearance of things, but always in that reflection is the sense of the absurdity or complexity the thing represents.  Why do we remember Moose Malloy?  Because he is so extraordinary, we do not know exactly what to make of him.  And Marlowe’s way of expressing that confusion is hyperbole, as if to say, this is the best I can do without admitting defeat.

Perhaps because hard-boiled never admits defeat, never succumbs to the impulse to unify perceptions in some model from the past, it has had such a difficult history in normative, unifying, Golden Age Hollywood.  When we speak of detective films as a genre, we usually think of John Barrymore or Basil Rathbone puzzling their way through a Sherlock Holmes adventure, or a BBC production of some Miss Marples story.  But the hard-boiled detective seems ever to enter the screen in borrowed generic robes.  In the 1930's, adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s novels were made as social dramas after the then-popular gangster formula (Dangerous Female 1931, from The Maltese Falcon, and The Glass Key 1935), sophisticated comedy (The Thin Man series which began in 1934) and farce (Satan Met a Lady 1936--again from Falcon).  Four versions of as many Raymond Chandler novels were made in the 1940's, but these too resisted easy categorization.  Along the way, hard-boiled certainly spawned several film genres.  I have already mentioned the gangster cycle of the 1930's, which in turn gave way to crime stories, and finally to a form that was responsible for perhaps the best hard-boiled adaptations of all (Huston’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon and Dmytryk’s 1944 Murder, My Sweet, from Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely): film noir.   Noir’s visualization of the consuming theme of hard-boiled--the drawing together of illusions past and present--in its celebrated flashback sequences and repetition of visual motifs seemed, for a while, the ideal place for hard-boiled stories.  But noir quickly became consumed in its Cold War despair and forgot the thick-faced gumshoe who somehow managed to survive the sharp edges of the wheel of fortune. When Howard Hawks came to The Big Sleep in 1946, all of this was either behind him (gangster films and social farces had gone out with World War II) or beneath him (he spoke with contempt of the B-grade, poorly-lit projects that were the infancy of film noir).  He had the problem of telling an already-convoluted story for which Golden Age Hollywood had devised no particular system of telling--no genre conventions, no protocol--a pair of stars who simply had to fall in love, and a dead chauffeur named Owen Taylor who didn’t seem to fit into any of it.  How to resolve these difficulties? 

In Howard Hawks, Storyteller, film historian Gerald Mast argues that by deliberately leaving out information and answers, Hawks intended to force the viewer to confront the same confusion and irresolution as the detective, himself, who by story’s end holds only enough of the pieces to guess at the truth (290).  Maybe this is what Hawks meant when he said that they wouldn’t bother about the Owen Taylor problem and would just try to “make good scenes”: to offer juicy pieces that the viewer would have to put together for him or herself.  But I would go Mast one better, and say that the Owen Taylor story describes the very system of cognition that makes possible the reading of the text and the viewing of the film: that is, the illusion of unity and order from which “memory” becomes “meaning.”  By choosing to include it, Hawks blatantly eschews the laws of narrative unity for a more local variety: one implicit in these “good scenes.”  Hawks once told Joseph McBride in an interview for the Directors’ Guild of America,

There are about thirty plots in all dramatic literature which have been done by very good people and if you can think of a new way to do it, you’re pretty good.  But if you can put characters in there, you can forget about the plot.  Let them tell your story for you and don’t worry about the plot. (2)

“Good scenes” are “written” by the chemistry of the characters and the actors playing them.  The sight of Owen Taylor’s feet (all we see of him) and the expression on Bogart’s face when he sees them make for a “good scene,” as does Bacall’s reaction when Bogart asks her about Owen’s death a few scenes later (Bogie playing cool, Bacall poker-faced).  I cannot help but see a connection between this “story” and the sort that Hawks helped Von Sternberg tell in his epic of “photographic violence and montage,” or Hawks’ own gangster classic, Scarface, so full of the gestures (the mug flipping a coin) and kinesis (explosive scenes of violence) we associate with the genre.  Nor with Hawks’ whodunit-turned-farce, Trent’s Last Case, which resolves the problem of verbal dialogue and plot with kinetic comedy.  Are these classical unities or the inventions of a director who eschews that formal order for “good scenes”: carefully ordered collisions of character and image that express, in as direct and laconic a manner as possible, meaning?

If the death of Owen Taylor represents folly in the face of “the big sleep” (the same might be said of any of the deaths in the novel, or any hard-boiled novel), it also serves notice to these unities.  Hawks’ camera reveals in its “unconscious optics” the very assumptions upon which our own comprehension of the story is based.  Like any hard-boiled text, it shows us “the contradictions of Being” out of which we construct meaning, not to destroy meaning (such theoretical work quickly exhausts itself) but to redeem it.  The thirty plots that Hawks claims comprise all dramatic literature are the accepted tradition, which the artist must either transform or overcome if he wants to avoid being swallowed up by said tradition.  They are not anomalies but warnings about what happens to those who never make it out of the past.  Even fiction cannot sustain them.  Even in a world of men just like them, they are disembodied phantoms--images flickering momentarily on a screen--that fade away almost as quickly as they appear.

NOTES

WORKS CITED

Barthes, Roland. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative.”  Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath.  New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1977.  79-124.

Benjamin, Walter.  “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 1936. Illuminations.  Trans. Harry Zohn.  Ed. Hannah Arendt.  New York: Schocken, 1985.  217-51.

Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson.  The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.  Chandler, Raymond.  The Big Sleep.  1939.  New York: Random House, 1992.

---.   Farewell, My Lovely.  1940.  New York: Random House, 1992. ---.  Raymond Chandler Speaking.  Eds. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Eisenstein, Sergei.  “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram.”  1929.  Film Form.  Ed. and Trans. Jay Leyda.  New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949.  28-44.

---.  “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.”  1929.  Film Form.  Ed. and Trans. Jay Leyda.  New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949.  45-63.

Goodwin, Naomi and Michael Wise.  “An Interview with Howard Hawks.”  Take One 3:8 (Nov.-Dec. 1971).  31.

Gunning, Tom.  D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film.  New York: Columbia, 1991.

Hammett, Dashiell.  The Maltese Falcon.  1930.  New York: Random House, 1992.

Hawks, Howard, director.  The Big Sleep.  Warner Brothers, 1946.

Heath, Stephen.   Questions of Cinema.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.  Mast, Gerald.  Howard Hawks, Storyteller.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Poe, Edgar Allan.  The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vols. 1-17.  Ed. James Harrison.   New York: Crowell, 1902.  New York: AMS Press, 1965.

Tuska, Jon.   In Manors and Alleys: A Casebook of the American Detective Film.  New York: Greenwood, 1988.

Van Dine, S. S.  The Benson Murder Case.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

---.  Introduction.  The World’s Great Detective Stories: A Chronological Anthology.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931.

Von Sternberg, Josef.  Fun in the Chinese Laundry.  New York: Macmillan, 1965.