Davis on Chandler

[Robin Landseadel]

On Aug 18, 2009, at 7:08 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> I might have a different unserstanding of 'fascist within' than you  
> do....

I think mine's derived from "Vineland" and from seeing plenty of left- 
wing activists developing fascist impulses once they found themselves  
in the thick of battle.

Marlowe is a knight of olde times who finds himself time-travelled  
into the corrupt future of Hollywood's dream factory. There is no way  
he can keep true to his code as a knight, but a man must survive.

This central figure in the fictional realm of the Private Investigator  
is misogynist, homophobic, & a touch of a kill-joy. Though Philip  
Marlowe tries to do the honorable thing, the world as it is prevents  
him from doing so. He spends too much time around cops, spent too much  
time in their environment, couldn't survive in such a suffocating  
atmosphere. In the 1940's/50's definition of macho, he was an icon and  
a vicarious bridge to the underworld of drugs, gangsters, drunken  
binges and careless sex.

One senses that Philip Marlowe feels like he knows this world too  
well, that too much of this world has rubbed off on him, that there is  
no longer any way to be a knight in this sort of a world. His gestures  
towards love all feel doomed to failure, efforts towards acting  
gallant are all wasted on those too oblivious or oversexed to notice.  
Ultimately we come to realize that he is isolated, cut off from the  
rest of the world. Try as he might, he can't help but create  
additional damage to this world by virtue of his mere presence, that  
shadowing and corruption he brings to every scene he steps into. It's  
a wonder he's still alive.

I'm reading "The Long Goodbye" now and realize that there's a shared  
element in Inherent Vice, The Big Lebowski and Chandler's novel; The  
P.I. in each case more or less stumbles into the dénouement of their  
respective tales. Though crimes are "solved", the P.I. is more  
observer than participant and his interventions for the most part are  
of little avail. Things are so corrupt that there's little to do about  
it anyway. No matter how many individual crimes they can bring to  
justice, injustice howls 24/7. If the tower is everywhere and the  
knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?