I spent a wonderful day on Saturday with Matt and John where I cooked a great new chili recipe and we got Dairy Queen Blizzards, much to John's chagrin…he had been craving the Blizzard for months and had no idea there was a Dairy Queen five miles away. I'm enjoying moments like this as I prepare to leave L.A. in seventeen days, moments where we lounge around drinking white wine, talking , and watching a darn good movie. In this case, Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946).
My favorite legend about The Big Sleep is that Hawks and his screenwriters, William Faulkner and Leigh Brackett, were working on the adaptation and realized they never knew who killed Owen Taylor, the chauffeur. So they asked Raymond Chandler, who responded he didn't put that piece of resolution in the novel because he completely forgot about it! (There is no solution in the film either.)
Chandler's confusion is not surprising. The Big Sleep is arguably the greatest noir detective story ever written, but it has a mindbender of a plot with multiple murders and multiple murderers, plus a few twisting red herrings. Of course, it also introduced Philip Marlowe to the world, and perfectly evoked a Los Angeles of orange groves and smogless skies which no longer exists. The film version, even in the Production Code era, is equally great…mainly because Hawks and his writers respect the audience's intelligence and keep the plot almost exactly as it is in the novel, while leaving out none of the complexity. Their faithfulness extends to recapturing Chandler's details: stretches of dialogue are intact, the characters all look the way Chandler described them acting (except Agnes is a bit too classy), and even the minor actions are treated with fidelity. When Marlowe chats up the bookstore clerk, future Oscar-winner Dorothy Malone's appearance and mannerisms immediately reminded me of how Chandler described her in the novel as "an intelligent Jewess," and that's the last time you'll ever see that word on the blog.
The film is also great because of Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. Not taking one deserved bit of credit away from The Maltese Falcon, but I liked Bogie's Marlowe better than his Sam Spade. For all his morality, Spade is an ice-veined SOB who will discard people as soon as they've outlived their usefulness or his desire. Marlowe, though a cynic, has a heart and a conscience, and Bogart hits this very well: his guilt over failing to stop one of the murders is touching. And of course, Bogart still gets to be "unbelievably cool" (in the apropos words of the usually exaggerative Damien Bona), tossing off Chandler's one-liners and taking on the villains in the third act with style.
Two major differences. In the movie, Marlowe's sex-attraction-tinged antagonism with Vivian Sternwood becomes a full-throttled romance, which makes sense seeing as Vivian was played by a SMOKING 21 year-old Lauren Bacall. But this necessitates a restructuring of the character of Regan, and making Regan an old friend of Marlowe's doesn't match the original, more to-the-bone story. Pairing Marlowe and Vivian also changes the ending to a more upbeat one which STILL manages to work out a significant plot point which might easily have been lost. Second, when Marlowe finds Carmen Sternwood (thumb-sucking Martha Vickers) over Geiger's corpse in the novel, she's wearing a pair of drop earrings and nothing else. In the movie, she's fully clothed. Can't have everything.
Also in the artistic world, had a bit of a jolt today. I made a mix a few months ago called "Andrew Rostan's Music for Bookstores," a collection of my favorite songs from the B&N in-store plays. Most of the songs were written and/or sung by some terrific female artists…Amy MacDonald, Lucy Woodward, Leona Lewis…we get much more interesting female musicians than male ones. Camera Obscura is the prime example.
Anyhoo, those who know me well know I love to sing along with songs while driving. For songs by women, I usually change the lyrics so they are now from a man's point of view. The only song which doesn't get this treatment is Carole King and Aretha Franklin's "A Natural Woman." You CAN'T tamper with that and make it sound the same, it needs those two syllables. I had never thought about my gender-bending until today, when, fueled by my increasing studies into the techniques of literature and storytelling, I realized that, like the oblivious Eric Cartman in the "Faith + 1" episode of South Park, you can try to substitute a few words and keep the lyrical idea the same…but it doesn't work.
I was listening to and singing along with Aimee Mann's "Thirty One Today," a sad, lovely song from her last album, @#%&*! Smilers, got to the second verse…and stopped short.
"Called some guy I knew
Had a drink or two
And we fumbled as the day grew dark
I pretended that I felt a spark"
Now, when Aimee Mann sings this, the picture it creates in my mind is that of a lonely human being who, wanting a brief escape from the disillusionment she's facing right now, chooses a lover she doesn't really care for and aims at a night of physical passion. But when I sing this, or think of another man singing this, I think…"hmmm, picking up a girl, drinking with her, trying to score although there's no feeling either way…" and it sounds, well, shitty.
This may be a reflection of the post-feminist age or the ultra-political-correctness Emerson indoctrinates you with, but it made me think that there might be a new sexual double standard reflected in her and others' songwriting from a woman's point of view. A woman can make sexual decisions like this and it appears empowering. I would call it empowering. But a man making a similar sexual decision is wrong. Maybe it's similar to how we always tread carefully around non-whites and allow them to spout racial epithets against themselves and others while any white person making even a suggestion of a slur is vilified. But I'm going to think twice a little the next time a song comes up. Especially Tori Amos…oh, man, there's someone I think men would have a HARD TIME interpreting.
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