VLVL2 (10) Pastness, 192

[Paul Nightingale]

(192.9-10) "... an old-movie private eye's office, seedy and picturesque
..."

Sam Spade's office, or perhaps that of Philip Marlowe? Either way, Takeshi
isn't Bogart, although DL has done time as a (would-be) femme fatale.

In this chapter, the mythology and iconography of classical Hollywood
feature strongly from the outset; but one shouldn't overlook the
relationship between film and novel, between 'then' and 'now' as constructs.
For example, Frank Krutnik (In A Lonely Street, 1991) notes that, even
though 'hard-boiled' novels (Hammett, Woolrich, Cain, Chandler) were popular
in the 1930s, there was no comparable cycle of films until later. He offers
Hays Office censorship of sex and violence as the reason. Cain's The Postman
Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, for example, were bought by studios
in the mid-30s but only filmed in the mid-40s. Hence adaptation becomes
translation; and the exposure of narrative to a cinematic gaze becomes
potentially subversive.

The reference to "old-movie" icons brings to mind another kind of gaze, in
what Jameson has called "nostalgia films": since the 1970s, film (he cites
American Graffiti and Chinatown, as well as Body Heat, the remake of Double
Indemnity) no longer aims to represents the past; it "[conveys] 'pastness'
by the glossy qualities of the image, and '1930s-ness' or 1950s-ness' by the
attributes of fashion (Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, 1991 19-20). Elsewhere in the book (Ch9) Jameson describes what
he calls "nostalgia for the present" through David Lynch's appropriation of
"1950s-ness" in Something Wild and Wild at Heart.

Hence, "old-movie private eye's office" might refer to a location in an
'old' film (ie from the 1940s). Or it might refer to a film from the 1970s
or 1980s. As an adjective, therefore, "old-movie" is somewhat ambiguous,
leading to the proposition that seediness might be picturesque; which
emphasis on reading/scopophilia takes us back, in turn, to the censorship of
narrative that made filming impossible.