The Big Sleep: Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade embody reluctance

 The Big Sleep, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, film noir, psychoanalysis, psychology, heroics

We were driving to yoga last week, listening to NPR, and Scott Simon was interviewing Clive Owen, the British Actor who is playing Sam Spade in a new series, Monsieur Spade, now streaming on AMC.  In the series, Sam, now in his sixties, and in the 1960s, has retired to the South of France, but gets called on to do the business of being a private detective, because that’s what happens when you are Sam Spade.

As we listened to Clive describing how he wanted to play Bogart playing Sam Spade; not to reconstruct the character and as he described and we heard clips of both Bogart and he playing Spade, I said to the reluctant wife that Spade’s character is very similar to mine.  She agreed.  Rare for her to do that so readily…

You see, my being a psychoanalyst is one of the things I am most enthusiastic about.  Truth be told, I’m reluctant to do just about anything.  Given the option, I would probably be inert.  But I’m not given that option, and neither is Sam – we both feel a sense of obligation.  Someone needs help, so a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do when someone needs help, and I know how to help people – or I can figure out how to.

Now I don’t think I’m quite as jaded as Sam, though I can be pretty judgmental, and I’m certainly not as brave as he, but I became interested in exploring his character further.  The reluctant wife, because she is, in Sam’s parlance, a good dame, indulged me.  She suggested we watch The Big Sleep – because it was not one of the film noir detective films we had seen before.  Philip Marlowe is the main detective character, and, unlike Sam Spade who was created by Dashiell Hammett, he was created by Raymond Chandler. Both, however, are played by Bogart and our sense was that the differences between the characters would be outweighed by the similarities.

A little Wiki sleuthing led me to understand that the book on which the film is based is a mash-up of two short stories, and one of the mysteries of The Big Sleep (and of The Big Lebowski, which is loosely modelled after it as an homage of sorts), is that the plot does not hang together particularly well.  Chandler and I are apparently alike in not editing the material we write as closely as we might.  So, for instance, when the screenwriters, who included none other than William Faulkner, were confused about whether a chauffeur whose car was fished out of the bay had committed suicide or been murdered, they asked Chandler which was the case, he replied that he did not know, and that seems to be a reasonable response because the death is not tied in any way that I can figure out to the rest of the story in the movie.

So, what is the story?  It is a complicated piece.  There is a retired general, whose protégé, who was having an affair with his younger daughter, ran off.  The general hires Marlowe to “take care of” some gambling debts that the younger daughter has accrued.  It seems like the general is flirting with Marlowe, to see if he will become the new protégé, and perhaps take up with the younger daughter, who throws herself at him, but on the way out, it is the older daughter who stops him and interrogates him about whether he is looking for the protégé.  Marlowe doesn’t say.  He investigates the debts which emanate from a “bookstore” that turns out to be a front for a small-time blackmailing operation.  He goes to the home of the hood who ran the bookstore to discover that he is dead and the younger daughter is there, out of her mind on drugs.  A picture has been taken and someone has run off with the negative.  I assumed the picture would pin the murder on her.  In fact, it was more blackmail bait.  It was a pornographic picture, but the censors interfered with depicting that in anything like a straightforward way.

Marlowe goes back to stake out the “book store” and trails the person who is looting it – and discovers that the trail leads to the apartment of the person who was the last person to blackmail the general.  Marlowe goes in to talk to him, is held at gunpoint, talks his way out of that and discovers that the older sister is already there.  By the way, if you haven’t seen the film, I expect that you are lost about now.  If you have seen the film you may be just as lost, and we haven’t even started into the serious body count.  I have not given the names of these characters because it seems like no sooner do they show up on film than they die and we go up the chain to the next hood, more serious than the last, until we end up at the most serious of all. 

So, let me skip some of the intermediate steps and get to the payoff (I think I will leave missing three murders or maybe four if the fourth is murder and not a suicide).  Marlowe becomes convinced that the biggest racketeer – the guy who runs a casino, whorehouse and drug parlor out of his palatial home with a huge parking lot in front – has the goods on the older sister but she’s not saying.  He goes out to save her and gets knocked on the head and tied up.  He is at her mercy (Btw, the sister is a 22-year-old Lauren Bacall who had been married to Bogart for two years already).  Much to my surprise, and I think Marlowe’s, the older sister decides to play ball with him.  You see, it turns out that her younger sister could take the rap for murder unless she helps the gangster, but she wants to get out.  She decides that Marlowe might just be the hero to save her and her sister.

Marlowe and his new – what? Best friend? Love interest? OK, its got to be the latter, even though he really didn’t want to get dragged into all this (the guy must be reluctant if he can’t get excited about Lauren Bacall), anyways, Marlowe and his new doll drive back into town to the scene of the first murder, the one with the photograph, and lure the big bad guy there, tricking him into thinking that they are out in the country, giving that bad guy time to set up a trap.  He shows up to set the trap, but they trap him instead and trick his goons into shooting him.  So Bogey and Bacall are alone in the house uncertain whether the goons will come to get them, but sure that whatever happens next, they will do it together.  Curtain.

Throughout, Marlowe keeps getting dragged deeper and deeper into a viper’s nest of stuff that is more and more problematic.  He was just hired to do a simple task by an old man who was sitting in an overheated greenhouse with a bunch of orchids, unable to leave that room because he no longer has the internal fire to keep himself warm – he has to be heated from the outside – like the two other hothouse flowers who live in that house – the daughters who seem to thrive on excitement – though the older daughter appears to, much to our surprise, have more substance than we gave her credit for initially.

Marlowe was just trying to earn a buck, but it turns out he has to bring down not just one, but maybe two or three increasingly shady and dangerous rings of bad guys to protect the younger daughter, fall in love with the older one (and we know what a burden that can be) and solve the riddle of what happened to the protégé. 

If the trick to making a successful movie is having a hero the audience can identify with, Warner Brothers has my number with this one.  A nice guy, someone who can’t deal with authority, someone who is a bit of a loner but hopeful that some dame with a heart of gold will recognize his virtues, keeps on doing what needs to be done, because that’s what the good guys do, and in the end, he gets rewarded, though that reward, we sense, will be complicated.

I think I can identify with this as a psychoanalyst, a guy who just puts his shingle out and hopes he can help a person or two with difficulties and then finds himself pulled into unimaginably complicated internal and relational lives of the people who seek him out (and in the political worlds of academia and psychoanalytic institute politics).  But I could also identify if I was a plumber, a guy who took a job with someone who taught him the ropes and is now up to his neck in equipment and billing and paying his taxes and has a wife and kids, but he’s going to do right by them, and if I was a..., well, you get the idea, fill in the blank.

We all believe – or want to imagine – that we are one of the good guys.  We are fighting for God and Country and to take care of the kids.  It is a nasty and cruel world out there – we don’t want to go out there and set it right, but by golly, we’re gonna.  I don’t mean to be making fun of this – I really do believe this about myself.  With my organizational hat on, as department chair, when the upper administration would decide to do something that I was not in favor of, my Dean would counsel me to just take it as a loss and think about my won loss record.  I couldn’t do that.  I wasn’t playing some sort of game.  My way of doing it was the right way and if they couldn’t see that, well, it was a travesty.  To recognize that there are multiple ways of accomplishing goals – well, that is a big ask.

In order to maintain the belief that I am the good guy, the world has to be populated with bad guys, and I have to be prepared, despite my being essentially a nice guy, to figure out how to get the bad guys killed.  With all of the bodies stacked up in this movie, I think that Bogey might have directly killed only one of them – and that one was a really bad guy.  At one point, a farmer Joe goon was sent after him, and Bogey immediately sensed that the poor guy was in over his head and fired his gone off to the side knowing the scaredy cat would run off, which is, of course, exactly what he did.  We good guys only kill the really bad ones, and we know the difference between the good and the bad, and mostly we trap the bad guys in their own snares and they get what’s coming to them.

This is a very primitive way of functioning in the world – when we split the world into good guys and bad ones.  In fact, a researcher who studies such things puts this defense, splitting, near the bottom of our defenses – it is an immature way of dealing with the world.  That same researcher, when he analyzes the ordinary conversations of healthy people, finds that about twenty percent of our conversation can be coded at that primitive level. 

My hope is that my character, like that of many people who enjoy Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe, is just spending some time in that more primitive space – taking a vacation from my more typical mature functioning (when I am not in a position of being a middle manager – as I was as chair).  I hope that I am more balanced, most of the time, when I am functioning as an analyst.  That said, the analytic relationship, like a marital relationship, a work relationship, or a friendship pulls both the best and the worst out of me – hopefully, by recognizing that and figuring out how to repair the damage that my human functioning does in all of those relationships, we can limp home, enjoy each other’s company, and the body count will stay at a more reasonable level.

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Maestro: I run into Lenny again...

 Maestro, Leonard Bernstein, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Homosexuality, Intimacy, Marriage

This seems to be the year of the bio pic.  Not that there aren’t bio pics every year, but there just seem to be more this year, and many of the award contenders seem to among them.  Oppenheimer on the big screen stole the summer, the end of The Crown on the small screen involves many bios being pic-ed.  The Fabelmans qualifies as a Roman a Clef bio pic.  In the fall, we had Napoleon.  I was thinking that Killers of the Flower Moon was also a bio pic, but I suppose it is somewhere between Oppenheimer and The Crown as a history pic.  In any case, other than Barbie, what passes for a blockbuster these days seems more rooted in history than in, for instance, fiction.  So, wouldn’t you think that we would get a veridical representation of a life?

Perhaps it has always been the case, but the bio pic about Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) seems rushed.  We zip from his introduction to his future wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) where they recite their bios, through various highlights in their lives, and seem to arrive at their deaths without quite having had enough time to really get to know them.  I think, perhaps, I have been spoiled by series like The Crown that have the leisure to develop individual characters across multiple episodes and then to set up a finale with characters that you care about and really have a sense of who they are.  Even though a bio-pic focuses on only one character – or, in the case of Maestro, two – having just two or three hours to narrate a life suddenly seems like not quite enough.

Leonard Bernstein has, inadvertently, been a part of my life for a long time, and I was looking forward to seeing certain themes that I had picked up on in other areas.  That said, I have recently written about unreliable narrators in the novel Trust, and I should have been prepared for a new and different perspective…

Like many kids my age, my first experience of Leonhard Bernstein was with the New York Philharmonic’s children’s programming.  At least I think I watched those programs.  What I remember most is listening over and over again to his recording and description of Peter and the Wolf.  I remember the quality of his voice, and the way that each of the instruments played a part – Peter, the Wolf, Peter’s Grandfather, the duck, etc.  But the story, as fascinating as it was, did not hold together for me.  I never quite got the plot – don’t have it to this day.  My fascination with his voice, the details of the instruments, didn’t allow me to integrate them into a coherent narrative.  Oh, at some point, as an adult, I listened again and got the story, but it is gone now – and what I remember is the experiential and unintegrated bits.

As an adolescent, I became enamored of West Side Story.  I don’t think I ever saw the film, but again, listened to the soundtrack over and over again.  This time I felt like I got the story – and when I later saw the film in bits and pieces, I didn’t need to see the whole to understand it, I already had it in hand.  Of course I had Romeo and Juliet as a guide.  But I was brought up short by a performance of Bernstein’s music by a psychiatrist who is also a concert pianist, Richard Kogan.  Dr. Kogan studies the lives of various composers and plays their music while tying it to the composer’s life. 

In the case of Bernstein, Kogan used West Side Story to highlight Bernstein’s use of the tritone, which he also called the Devil’s chord.  This chord is inherently discordant – unlike a major chord, which feels settled and comfortable, the tritone screams tension.  It feels unresolved.  Technically, it is two notes three whole tones apart.  Kogan explained that it is rampant in West Side Story.  Think of the song Maria.  The first two notes in Maria – Mah and Ree – are a tritone apart, and the tension between them is resolved on the Ah. 

Kogan pointed out myriad examples of the tritone in West Side Story and he connected them to the tension that Bernstein was feeling about his sexuality during the time that he was writing West Side Story.  According to Kogan (as I recall, this was some years ago), Bernstein had sequestered his family in Puerto Rico while he wrote the musical as a means of shielding them from the conflict that he was feeling – the tension between the Sharks and the Jets could be understood as the tension between the straights and the gays – or between Bernstein’s loyalty to his family and his loyalty to his sexuality.

The next intersection occurred at a National Meeting of Psychoanalysts.  There a group of us who are interested in the relationship between Music and the Mind were treated to a presentation by Leonard’s daughter, Jaimie.  She is a performer, author, storyteller and composer.  She was at the meeting to talk about her Dad and his career.  When she was explaining about the tritone, one of the analysts raised the issue of her father’s sexuality and wondered about the tritone as an expression of the tension that he felt about that.  There was a long, awkward pause and, in my memory, Jaimie went on to talk about other aspects of the tritone without addressing the question.  At the time, I was proud of the restraint of my analytic peers who did not press the issue.  I somewhat naively wondered, “Did she not know?”.

So this bio pic becomes yet another way of observing Bernstein.  The screenplay, as hurried and rushed as it is, depends heavily on Jaimie’s memoir, “Famous Father Girl”.  That said, the very first scene involves Bernstein lying naked in bed with his male lover when he gets the call to conduct the New York Philharmonic later in the day – a performance that would catapult him into becoming the Bernstein that I (and so many others) would have a relationship with.

The vantage point of the author of a biography/biopic is very important.  I wrote about Ray Kroc in a post about a movie, The Founder, that portrays him (and my thesis was consistent with the picture) in a negative light.  A friend who read it and was a big fan of the Krocs, in part because of their generosity to causes like NPR, was dismayed that I did not have a more balanced view of him.  And I didn’t.  The view that I took was the one presented in the movie, and it was not balanced.  Neither, though, is the view of a child of her parent balanced. 

Marriages are complicated.  They are public – and, especially in the upper classes and the royalty from which those classes are descended, they are political arrangements.  Bernstein, according to Wikipedia, arranged a marriage for the man we met in the first scene with a woman who would serve as the man’s beard.  Being married, for a gay man in the post war years, was an important means of public display around his sexuality.

Marriages are also private affairs.  And they are messy.  And the mess gets observed by the children.  The children see the mess at various points in the lives of their parents and through the various lenses they become capable of using as they grow up.  Divorces are much less messy when they happen early in a child’s life.  When they happen when the child is an adolescent or even a young adult, the children in the marriage tend to take sides and to idealize one parent and denigrate the other.  Partly, though, this tension is a means of addressing an underlying wish, in many cases - the wish that the parents would reconcile and the family could be restored.

Bernstein was, as he states to the Thursday Philharmonic practice audience in the film, an artist.  And as the Sixties dawned, Bernstein declared that the artist, perhaps more than anyone, is aware of his impending death.  And the artist, he goes on to say, must be afforded the freedom to live an unfettered life.  Heck, he said, everybody is doing that now – and I must do it as an artist even if it were not the current fashion, but since it is, I can be truly free.

Freedom, though, comes at a cost.  Felicia (his wife – sorry to have wondered so far afield that I feel I must remind you of her), is, perhaps through the eyes of Jaimie, and certainly through the eyes of the film, much more than just a muse.  She is an anchor – a rock.  A point of stability in a world that, without her, becomes immediately chaotic and unstable.  But his cruelty to her has been met by her cruelty and, I suppose – though this is a supposition on my part – he cannot admit that he needs her when he is in the space of justifying the advantages of his freedom.

So, it is Felicia that makes the move to repair the rupture between them.  She attends his legendary performance conducting Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral with the London Philharmonic.  This rapturous performance – one where Bradley Cooper throws himself as fully into the role as Bernstein himself did – maybe more so – is prelude to his rapturous reconnection with Felicia.

This is pretty heady stuff, through the eyes of a child – and through our eyes as the audience.  We recognize the true love that he has for Felicia, and she takes back her taunts about the falsity of his love.  And then we see Bernstein demonstrate his love for her, tending to her when she is ill and acknowledging her value after she is gone.  There is a fairy tale component to the reunion that feels more authentic than I think I am painting it here.

We see that Bernstein is not a cad.  I don't think we see him as torn so much as unintegrated.  He cannot experience the tension of the tritone.  If it is there in West Side Story, it is perhaps because he wishes that he could feel it.  Instead, he is brought to life by his love for whomever is in the room at the moment, and he loves them deeply, powerfully, but also indiscriminately - and leave it up to them to hold him in check against his passions, but resents them when they do exactly that.

When Felicia dies, Bernstein, not surprisingly reverts to his chaotic life, but in a way that is unbecoming an old man.  He seems to sort of crumble without her and plays on his position of power as a star and as a teacher to pursue younger men and there is something tawdry – but primarily sad - about his descent. 

When Felicia is taunting him, one of the things that she throws his way is a criticism that others have made but one that she has shielded him from to that point.  Others have claimed that he has wasted his talent.  She takes a subtly different tack, stating that he has used his talent to exert power and influence rather than to connect with others.  She accuses him, I think, of confusing being enamored with himself to overcome the ways he feels marginalized.  She would have him sit squarely within his genius and using that as a means to transform the world.

I think she may be entreating him to integrate his narrative, and he may demonstrate that he needs help doing that – that without her (admittedly likely perhaps through the eyes of Jaimie), he cannot keep Peter, and the Wolf, and the other characters straight enough to have the story make sense.  He is distracted by the notes of the oboe and the French Horn – caught up in them, swept away by them, so that he doesn’t get how they all fit together.

One other fact about children of divorce is that, when their parents remarry, the children are twice as likely to divorce as children of divorced parents who do not remarry.  Perhaps we need to believe that it is possible for adults to go on loving each other – even if circumstances keep them apart – for us to accomplish the difficult task of sustaining a marriage.  Perhaps we need to be sheltered from the chaos that our parents must manage – or it helps to see them survive it – for us to internalize a sense of the possibility of something like true love in all its gritty and chaotic splendor.  We have to be strong enough to withstand the gaze of someone who sees us both as they would like us to be and as we actually are.

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