“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” – Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944)
“Excuse me, I don’t see any Courry Brand cat food here.”– Phillip Marlowe, The Long Goodbye (1973)
“At this point in my life, I just really feel like I could destroy some mother fuckers.”- Ronnie Barnhardt, Observe and Report (2009).
Raymond Chandler opens his 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder” with a claim: “Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic.” In this spirit, Chandler goes on to systematically demolish the formula and conventions of the detective story up to this point, directing specific ire at the dominant English school of whodunits for their obsession with plot contrivance and negligence for the truth of real life. Chandler praises a group of authors led by Dashiell Hammet, who “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse,” for recognizing the potential for art in the detective story. For Chandler, the nature of art rests in the presentation of human truth, achievable only by slavish attention to life-like characters, rather than through the intricacies of twisted conspiracies. Hammet freed the detective story from the traps of “an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues”, and Chandler latches upon this freedom to dissect “a world in which gangsters can rule nations…the world you live in” (ibid). To achieve any truth about this world inhabited by his reader, then, the author required a protagonist belonging to the real world in which he lived.
Phillip Marlowe, Chandler’s hardened private detective with a heart, if not made entirely of gold, at least of real human tissue, presented readers of the period with a detective character they could respect. Marlowe’s first appearance came in 1939, a year that found America sandwiched between the last legs of the Great Depression and the hanging dread of the impending World War. His hard-nosed realism, resourcefulness, humanism, and intelligence resemble what one must imagine to be the ideal American of this time. Chandler imbues his hero with all these qualities but denies him perfection, keeping his work grounded in reality through dead ends, beat-downs, and comeuppances throughout his navigation of the underworld’s unanswered questions. Marlowe resonates because he is admirable but relatable, and the popularity of Chandler’s work and the rise of film noir in its wake demonstrate the brilliant compatibility of the character type with the time period, and the strength with which Chandler tapped into the values of his society.
As Chandler writes, the detective “must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man,” and a reader harbors rare doubt about the presence of these qualities in his Marlowe. However, as repossessed by subversive independent film director Robert Altman in 1973’s The Long Goodbye, Marlowe comes to scarcely resemble any but the unusual. Altman presents his Marlowe with the basic plot from Chandler’s 1953 novel, but the character as portrayed by Elliot Gould navigates the labyrinth with a style and technique seemingly exclusive to 1970’s film. Especially when juxtaposed with Humphrey Bogart, the definitive screen actor of Hammet and Chandler’s detectives, Gould can’t help but appear sloppy, downtrodden, and nonchalant in his manner. Perhaps one could imagine Bogart’s Marlowe keeping a cat in his home, but the cat sending him on a late night shopping trip for a particular brand of cat food seems out of the question. Gould’s Marlowe not only obliges his cat’s every whim, he does so in the film’s opening scene, immediately establishing him as a very different sort of P.I. The Greatest Generation-era masculinity and cool of Chandler seems to have vanished with the 60’s and the World War II victory lap of Eisenhower’s presidency. While the novel’s Marlowe lives alone with no qualms, Altman’s version seems loathe to function without his feline companion, asking neighbors if they’ve seen his cat every time he returns home. The ownership of the cat itself, in particular compared to a dog, seems a concession to general notions of subtle femininity and sensitivity. A dog is a man’s best friend; a cat just keeps a person from being alone all the time. When, in the final scene, murderer Terry Lennox tells Marlowe he’s a loser and the detective responds, “Yeah, I even lost my cat,” one senses an admission of weakness and pain, masked thinly by a half-hearted attempt at Chandler-esque verbal humor. Gould’s Marlowe inhabits an America on the verge of defeat in Vietnam, an unelected president, and an all-out descent into national agency panic. Who wouldn’t feel a bit down with hints of that coming down the road?
Additionally, where Chandler’s protagonist skates along the L.A. underbelly with a combination of tough grit and smooth wit, Altman’s seems to bumble about, lacking subtlety in his movements or his questioning and scarcely feeling the need to comb his hair. If Chandler is known for one thing, it is the darkly evocative first person narration that would come to identify hard noir. In the film, Altman parodies this (by then) cliché by having Gould speak mostly through often-unintelligible mumbles, throwing out hard-boiled insight for eccentric casualness. Altman recognizes that a modern viewer would laugh at a line of voice-over like, “it was so quiet at Victor’s that you almost heard the temperature drop as you came through the door,” dialogue in which Bogart would feel at home (Chandler LG 160). Indeed, where Chandler’s hero could command a room with his tongue, Gould’s labors to command his own thoughts. Altman here comically highlights the absurdity of the genre’s conventions, showing how the less-eloquent (normal) American of the 1970’s might go about narrating his life to himself, continuing his mission to destroy an audience’s ideal of detectives on film. At the same time, perhaps the obvious deficit in verbal prowess shows Altman getting a little serious with his subject, opining a cultural decay and lapse in pride felt since Chandler’s stories saw their high point in the post-war 40’s and 50’s. That he chooses to do so while making his viewers laugh at the hero rather than cry seems symptomatic of the forced emotional detachment of post-modern art, itself a symptom of the barrage of epistemic violence inflicted on the liberal American by the historic evens unfolding around him in the late 60’s and early 70’s.
Furthermore, while Chandler himself belittles the importance of plot in favor of an emphasis on humanity, Altman seems totally fed up with even the diminished aspects of contrivance conceded by Chandler for plot-hungry mystery readers. While Chandler’s Marlowe meets up with his (innocent) friend Lennox for a long-winded and Holmesian explanation of the story’s events, Altman jettisons the relatively happy ending for a blunt conclusion and swift justice. Gould doesn’t explain to (the conveniently guilty) Lennox how he found him or why he cares, he simply takes out a gun and shoots him in the chest, wrapping up the loose ends before they’re even apparent with the twitch of a finger. While Chandler’s convolutions suggest plot doesn’t matter, Altman’s disposal of them through violence suggests, rather bleakly, that maybe nothing matters. Marlowe has lost his cat, his restraint, his friend, and his patience for moral nuance, skipping away from his murder victim down a street lined by palm trees. The President is a crook, inflation is rising, and Cambodia is burning. “Hooray for Hollywood!”
If Altman’s Long Goodbye expresses the frustrations of a post-modern artist with Hollywood and the violence in the world surrounding him, Jody Hill’s Observe and Report depicts a man raised on and reveling in the violence of post-modern Hollywood. Ronnie Barnhardt, Chief of Mall Security (as he insists on being called) represents the detective as distilled to the concept’s lowest common denominator: he solves, or at least desires to solve, crimes. The nature of the film’s central crime presents the first indicator of the changing of the times since Chandler conceived Marlowe or even since Altman re-imagined him. In this film, the detective is called into action not by a murder, but by a pervert in a trench coat flashing unsuspecting women on mall grounds. Although Hill does not probe the psyche of the flasher, one suspects that he, like Hammet’s killers, commits his crimes for a reason, not just to provide a cock. Hill chooses perhaps the defining public act of the 21st century, the psycho-sexual compulsion to expose one’s self to as many people as possible, as the launch pad for Ronnie’s investigation. However, like most of his counterparts in post-modern detection, the mystery he’s investigating may be his own.
In The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler observes that, “in reading The Maltese Falcon, no one concerns himself with who killed Spade’s partner (which is the only formal problem of the story) because the reader is kept thinking about something else” (Chandler 991). In using Chandler’s basic plot, Altman follows this lead, and Hill does the same in Observe and Report. The investigation more or less book ends the true story, which is the pursuit of agency by Ronnie Barnhardt. Unlike many of the genre’s protagonists, including Altman’s Marlowe, Ronnie cannot be said to suffer agency panic, as his entire life experience up to the pervert’s rampage has consisted of a total lack of personal control. He suffers instead from a reversal of that plight, in which the breakdown of his environment presents the illusion that an entry into society as a responsible human might be possible. As Ronnie says in the film, he “never really wanted to be a cop before [the flashings],” attaining this desire only after witnessing the respect and control awarded to a real detective, Harrison.
When Harrison arrives to “assist” Ronnie in the investigation of the flashings and a robbery, the latter seeks to impress the true cop with his television-based knowledge of the trade, telling a shoe-store employee to “bag and tag” a shoe laying on the ground. Despite the wealth of media in which such phrasing is thrown around, even the viewer feels embarrassment for Ronnie in his self-conscious search for approval from an actual expert of a field he truly knows nothing about (despite what he’s seen on TV). While Marlowe is probably a cultural echelon too high for Ronnie to recognize, he has been entrenched, like most modern Americans, in imitation after imitation of the detection process through nightly programming on CBS and NBC. Ronnie’s desire to solve the crime is a transparent sheet over his real desire for the respect and admiration due to a TV hero, and the specific rewards that come with stardom.
Ronnie’s interest in the investigation, which he describes as his “chance to be great,” stems entirely from his desire for the two quintessential foundations of 21st century entertainment: sex and violence. Upon first learning of the flashings, Ronnie warns the object of his desire, cosmetics merchant Brandy, that she could be next. Here Ronnie does of his own accord what his predecessors couldn’t help but be drawn into: he creates conspiratorial drama around a nothing incident for his own personal (read: sexual) gain. He has been raised on films and television to such an extent that he even guarantees Brandy that the pervert will come back and kill her, reveling in clichés of cinematic hysteria to increase her dependence on him. A large portion of the film deviates entirely from the investigation plot to show Ronnie’s pathetic romantic pursuit of Brandy, a character study of which Chandler may or may not have approved. That her reluctant dinner with Ronnie culminates in a sexual consummation resembling date rape (although consent is implied) demonstrates Ronnie’s complete reliance on popular culture for his cues. Just like in a 90’s film, a romantic night out to the mall’s Mexican joint must end in sex. In his essay, Chandler is “quite certain [his hero] would not spoil a virgin,” and while Brandy is no virgin, Ronnie certainly walks down a street too mean for either of the Marlowes to tread. Ronnie’s outrage at the site of Brandy having sex in the mall parking lot with Detective Harrison signifies the ultimate pedestal on which he places sex (and the total objectification with which he views women), a stark contrast to his predecessors and a clear result of his upbringing in the American decade that opened with Pretty Woman (1990) and closed with American Pie (1999).
While the dominant romantic subplot most directly grounds Ronnie’s motivations as a detective in his disaffected sex obsession, it can be linked through his subconscious with the ultimate motif of detective masculinity: gun fixation. While perhaps Ronnie would not admit his obsession with sex, he would feel no shame in expounding on his fascination with firearms and his intense desire to carry one legally. Ironically, this hobby of his (one shared by many a fictional law-man) exposes his most Freudian sexual insecurities. When Ronnie visits the shooting range with his fellow security guards and opines for the authorization to carry a weapon on duty, the three may as well be complaining that their occupation repulses potential sexual partners.
That Ronnie longs to become a real cop has more than a little to do with that job’s association with guns, and his animosity towards Detective Harrison ultimately amounts to a chronic bout of penis envy. This is a trait shared with both of the Marlowes, but their different means of dealing with it separate them distinctly into their eras. Chandler’s hates cops, but not because they have a bigger gun than him, and though he carries a firearm, a classy man of his generation wouldn’t just pull it out in front of anyone. He’d rather use his fists. Similarly, Altman’s audience never sees or hears of Marlowe’s gun until the final scene, unsurprising for a man seemingly disinterested in sex in an era fed up with the saturation of real-life violence. That he ultimately kills his friend in cold blood only serves to highlight the pronounced ambivalence of the era and the clouding of notions of masculinity in the 70’s. When Ronnie follows Gould’s lead and shoots the pervert in Observe and Report’s climax, he really just wants Brandy to know, finally, who has the biggest dick around. It is this profound sexual insecurity that defines Ronnie Barnhardt as a true product of his time. In a time when the saturation of the mainstream with pornography’s outlandish proportions has never been higher, men need their own virility validated. And that is why Ronnie must become a detective.
“In these times, people need something to believe in. I believe good will win out in the end…History will remember my name… Right now, the world needs a fucking hero.”-Ronnie Barnhardt, Observe and Report
Since the creation of detective fiction, the detective and his cases have constantly adapted to the times. When post (World) war America needed the “greatest man in the world” to walk its mean streets, Raymond Chandler responded in kind with Phillip Marlowe. In the 70’s, Robert Altman and Elliot Gould were fed up with the bombast of Hollywood and the destruction at the hands of America on the world stage, and their Marlowe embodies the confusion, outrage, and directionlesness of an era with no end in site. Jody Hill gives post 9/11 America a sleuth from amongst their own: overweight, sociopathic, and irreparably self-conscious. Despite their differences, a good detective of any era accomplishes one thing in the end: catching the bad guy and causing his death. Even if this villain commits no crime outside of indecent exposure in front of adults, America needs a man unafraid to shoot to kill. In this sense, Ronnie Barnhardt is a detective in a class of his own, and who needs class when you carry deadly steel? As Barnhardt’s performer Seth Rogen states in another law enforcement roll, “having a gun is like having two dicks,” and any detective, no matter how good, can always use a side-kick.
