The Long Goodbye

A man who pictures himself as the one who has got it all figured out, or who is at least on a quest “to know”, to find out what there is to figure out, where everyone else seems to be just too enmeshed in the daily busyness of life to see what’s really going on, and so imagines himself as coolly riding somewhere above the wave of petty motives that govern just about everyone’s self-interested schemes and dramas, is in fact a guy who cares in a way that means he easily becomes caught up in trying (in vain) to satisfy the desires of others, becoming in this way the pawn of others (and, first of all, of his cat), such that the quest only ends up as a kind of downwards spiral into the unknowing at the base of it all – and, first of all, the unknowing at the base of himself. In short: the opening scene tells you just about everything.

Falsely accused of betraying Raymond Chandler’s novel – and not just the novel, with Maltin (2014), for example, claiming that “Altman’s attitude toward the genre borders on contempt” (p. 844) – this seems to me to be a genuine interpretation of its spirit, transported to the world of the 1970s. For me, it is probably Altman’s second greatest masterpiece, after CALIFORNIA SPLIT (1973). Cf., Leigh Brackett, quoted in Peary (1982), p. 213:

“The ending of the book was totally inconclusive….You feel that Marlowe has been wounded in his most sensitive heart as it were – he’s trusted this man as his friend, the friend has betrayed him, what do we do? We said let’s just face up to it. He kills him. In the time we made The Big Sleep you couldn’t do that because of censorship, had you wanted to. We stuck very closely to Chandler’s own estimate of Marlowe as a loser, so we made him a real loser – he loses everything. Here is the totally honest man in a dishonest world and it suddenly rears up and kicks him in the face, and he says: ’The hell with you.’ Bang!“