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As the predicted and real-time effects of climate change grow more dire by the day, and Covid-19 continues to devastate the world\u2019s most impoverished (predominantly black and brown) populations, due in large measure to a commercially oriented global vaccine regime, the prospects for communal life, collective liberty, and non-coercive happiness seem increasingly elusive.<\/p>\n
Lately, however, I\u2019ve sought solace, and sometimes found enlightenment, in so-called post-war American films that dramatise the appeal, ubiquity, and ramifications of social violence in the lives of nobodies, who are also everymen (and occasionally, women). Most of these movies were made between or alongside the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, and the prolonged American carpet-bombing of North Korea, during the Korean war of 1950-53. They all tend to feel sick about the world, for one reason or another, and excited at the versatile potential of cinema to explore why.<\/p>\n
The Big Sleep<\/strong><\/p>\n Set in a universe that might be our own, where exploitation and murder are common fare, and mendacity is ripe, Howard Hawks\u2019s The Big Sleep <\/em>(1946) excels primarily in provoking delight in its viewers: at the frisson of its scripted sparring, and at the complicated glamour of cinema and its stars, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall among them. Raymond Chandler\u2019s style of literate, sardonic street-speak is elevated, by Hawks, to film-content, and much of the plot is buoyed by the fast-talking perspicacity of Bogart\u2019s world-weary Private Investigator, Philip Marlowe. The result is a thriller that charms, in which even the most disturbing crimes lead, sooner or later, to deadpan poetry.<\/p>\n Throughout the film, dramatic (and sexual) tension is sustained through quips and verbal ricochets. Even when drenched in sweat, Bogart is steady, his embered gaze and rhythmic delivery anchoring the neurotic lavishness of Marlowe\u2019s dialogue. His retorts are relentlessly ornate and performative, and yet oddly beguiling. On being rebuked by Lauren Bacall\u2019s Vivian, \u201cI don’t like your manners\u201d, he replies:<\/p>\n I’m not crazy about yours. I didn\u2019t ask to see you. I don\u2019t mind if you don’t like my manners. I don’t like \u2019em myself. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them on long winter evenings\u2026.<\/em><\/p>\n Marlowe\u2019s is the excessive eloquence of a man who doesn\u2019t know how to talk, i.e. with other people. Following a \u201chunch\u201d, Marlowe impersonates, with spoofy and even campy precision, a rare books collector, up-folding the rim of his hat and donning a pair of black-lensed glasses. His tone changes, but his sculpted, abrasive garrulity remains the same. \u201cYou could go on forever, couldn’t you\u201d, Vivian later remarks, all smoky intelligence and innuendo: she has his measure.<\/p>\n Bogart is the ideal player for the part. With his lean, nervy gait, and his thin, strangely malevolent smile, he makes Marlowe both tough and iconic; he wins our hearts. \u201cYou begin to interest me, vaguely\u201d, says an assistant in a bookstore, speaking for all of us, as the weird charisma of Bogart-Marlowe fills the space between them, the faint grin on his face poised between languid attraction and suppressed menace. Most of Marlowe\u2019s digressions are flirtatious, some are violent: Bogart\u2019s magnetism is grounded in his ability to keep both of these dynamics alive for viewers, no matter the context.<\/p>\n