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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