The Uses of Confusion: "The Long Goodbye"
Recently, I've been watching what they call a "prestige television" show – high concept, big budget – and I've noticed something interesting: the director feels free to move the camera wherever and whenever he wants. This isn't a matter of creating crazy tracking shots, because he tends to prefer mostly fixed-camera stuff; instead, it's a matter of where he's placing the camera in relation to the actors, and it's most noticeable in conversation sequences (of which the show, to its detriment, seems almost entirely to be composed.)
There are standard methods of shooting sequences like this, most of which revolve around the idea of establishing a kind of imagined perspective from which the viewer is watching. So, for example, there is the so-called "180 degree rule," which involves creating an imagined straight line or plane that runs through the set and keeping the camera on one side of it. What this means, visually, is that one character is usually framed on the right side of the screen, looking to the left when they look at the other character; the second is framed on the left, and looks to the right. The effect is to situate the viewer in a more or less consistent place in relation to the characters; if the scene breaks the 180 rule, it's as if the viewer has just jumped to the other side of the room, becuase the character who was on the right and looking left is now on the left and looking right.
Of course, in practice, things often become more complicated. Directors shooting a two-person conversation will often break the 180 rule for one reason or another, and if you have multiple characters who are, say, sitting around a table, then it becomes nearly impossible to stay on one side of the room if you want to show all their faces. Like all rules, this one is made to be creatively broken for effect.
But the rule beneath the rule, as it were, the imperative that good directors tend to follow, is that there should be a reason for every new shot or shifting in the placement of the camera. Visually, the goal of the director is to try to lead the viewer through a piece of narrative. This involves figuring out how to film the characters as they deliver their dialogue, in addition to trying to capture elements like facial expressions, physical movements, and the relationship of bodies in space; but it also involves continual choices about what angle to shoot all of this from.
And every choice the director makes about how to put all of this on the screen is a choice about how to tell the story.
What struck me about the conversations in the show I was watching was how bizarre and unintentionally destabilizing the director's choices were. The scene that stood out the most was a sequence in which a was seated around a table. In terms of establishing a spatial feel of the location, and/or an edited rhythm of shots that drew the viewer into the scene, the sequence felt as though it had been constructed essentially at random. Sometimes the camera was placed on one side of the table, sometimes on the other; sometimes it moved in for a tight one-shot in which only one of the characters was visible, sometimes it jumped to a two-shot we hadn't seen before.
The effect was disorienting: the characters were all hanging in midair, in a sense, each shot feeling just slightly disconnected from the ones before and after it, so that the whole felt like a collection of images and lines of dialogue not occurring in an actual space but rather taking place purely on a screen.
And this made me think of Robert Altman, one of the masters of confusion, of disorientation, of images and audio overlapping one another. Because for Altman all of this confusion leads not to artificiality but to authenticity, serving both narrative purposes and at the same time to pull us into the story he's telling. And that, my friends, is magic.
The Long Goodbye, from 1973, is based on a 1953 Raymond Chandler novel which is easily the most meditative, and in some ways the most mature, of all his works. The screenplay is by the wonderful Leigh Brackett, who had a long-running collaborative relationship with Howard Hawks – she co-wrote another Chandler adaptation, The Big Sleep, for him – and who was so revered by John Carpenter that he named characters in not one but two films (Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween) after her; this screenplay condenses the novel considerably, while still maintaining the elegiac feel that defines it.
It tells the story of private eye Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould), now living in 1970s Los Angeles in an apartment opposite a kind of commune of hippy girls who dance around naked and make candles for a living. At the beginning of the film, an old friend of Marlowe's named Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) shows up, having had a physical altercation with his wife (he has scratch-marks on his face) and asks Marlowe to drive him to Tijuana. So Marlowe does.
(The novel's introduction of Terry Lennox, in its opening paragraph, deserves to be quoted here, if for no other reason than its beauty: "The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and no other.")
When Marlow returns from Tijuana, there are police detectives waiting for him, who announce that Lennox is wanted for the murder of his wife. They bring Marlowe in and rough him up, but he refuses to tell them anything because he knows Lennox is incapable of murder.
In the classic hardboiled tradition, things spin out from there. Marlowe starts trying to figure out who really killed Lennox's wife, and discovers that she may have been having an affair with an alcoholic writer named Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden) who lived near Lennox in Malibu. A hot-tempered gangster named Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) appears on the scene, also roughing up Marlowe because he's convinced Marlowe’s in possession of some money Lennox owed him. And then, word comes from Mexico that Lennox has committed suicide.
Through it all, Marlowe maintains a kind of bemused, slightly goofy affect that only barely covers the fact that he thinks all of these people – Augustine, the cops, Wade and his wife Eileen (Nina van Pallandt) and the rest of their Malibu set, the corrupt doctor who claims to be curing Wade of his alcoholism, etc. – are tottering on the edge of the bleakest and most absurd inhumanity.
The film's denouement begins when Wade kills himself by wading into the ocean at night; the implication is that he has done this out of guilt over his murder of Lennox's wife…or perhaps because he had been convinced that he killed her when he was drunk. On the heels of this comes Marlowe's realization that Lennox may not be dead after all, but instead has faked his own death so that he could continue an affair with Wade's wife Eileen.
At the end, Marlowe journeys to Mexico, finds Lennox, and forces him to admit that he did indeed brutally murder his own wife. After Lennox admits this, Marlowe kills him. The film ends with Marlowe walking down a tree-lined road (in a sequence that's a direct homage to the end of The Third Man from 1949) as Eileen drives past, on her way to meet Lennox.
At the core of Raymond Chandler's work, The Long Goodbye included, is an extraordinarily precise balance of sentimentality and cynicism. His Marlowe is a romantic, a believer in friendship and love, who at the same time is sadly clear-eyed about the weakness and depravity that inhabit human beings. He's eternally hopeful and thus eternally heartbroken, believes that each mystery will give him the chance to do some small good in the world and finds again and again that there is little good to be done.
One of the joys of Altman's film is that it takes this balancing act and updates it for the 1970s, while also not being afraid to give it a new edge. In part, this is a result of the way it deals with the mechanics of the plot and with the secondary characters, but it also comes from Altman's filmmaking technique and his relationship with confusion.
Altman's (and Brackett's) Marlowe, for example, has a habit of talking to himself, in a voice that's just a single degree above a mumble. Throughout the film's famous first sequence, which involves him going to extended pains to feed his cat (who will then run off, not to be seen again) he talks to himself, to the cat, about the cat, about the girls next door, and about just about everything else he comes across, all in this pseudo-mumble. This is perhaps a kind of cheeky allusion to Chandler's first-person writing style, yes, but it it's also a way of instilling into the viewer a feeling of the faintest confusion or uncertainty. We catch some of Marlowe's lines, but not all of them; we understand some of what he's thinking, but a good deal of it does not come through to us.
Altman mirrors this effect, in a sense, in a number of visual and auditory ways. Early in the film when Marlowe gets pulled in to the police station for his interrogation, Altman shoots the scene from a pair of rooms.
The first is the one in which Marlowe is sitting, with a detective circling him and barking questions; the second is the room on the other side of the scratched one-way mirror, in which other detectives are watching the interrogation. The cuts back and forth between the locations are erratic; sometimes Altman chooses to film Marlowe with a camera that's in the room with him, and sometimes he chooses to film him through the scratched one-way mirror, thus blurring the image; he also shoots some of the sequence with the characters in the listening room in the foreground while Marlowe is in the background, again visible through the one-way mirror.
On top of this (as he's famous for) Altman also overlaps the dialogue tracks at certain points – so that Marlowe is answering questions in the interrogation room at the same time the detectives in the observation room are talking. The sounds merge, intermingle; we can follow one line of conversation, but not both. At one point, a bell rings from somewhere else in the station, drowning out what's being said.
Altman uses much the same technique later on in the film, when Marlowe goes to Malibu to talk to Wade and his wife Eileen at their beach house. Wade and his wife get into an argument and send Marlowe out onto the sand to wait until they're finished; Altman shoots this argument from a variety of camera positions, both inside the room where they're arguing and outside, with the reflection of the widows (sometimes showing Marlowe's figure on the beach) in the foreground. At the end of the same sequence, when Wade and Marlowe share a drink on the deck with the ocean behind them, Altman brings up the sound of the waves high enough that it threatens to drown out their conversation.
In these moments and throughout the film, the effect can be disorienting. We are not given a stable position in relation to the action; our sight is obscured, as is our ability to hear what's being said. And this does not take place for only a moment or two, but for the duration of the scenes in which it occurs.
But, unlike the diner sequence from the prestige TV show, the effect of Altman's technique is to heighten our sense of actuality, to make us feel as though what's taking place on the screen is taking place in a real world, or as if we're actually present in the world these characters occupy.
Both the TV show and the movie are, of course, composed of images projected on a two-dimensional surface accompanied by sound. And both are, I think, similarly distant from the standard storytelling conventions of the medium that feel familiar to us.
So why do they vary so greatly in their effect? Absent the opportunity to work through both sequences for you shot-by-shot, perhaps the most I can say here is simply that Altman is a better director than the director of the TV show. His choices, one after another, work. The other director's do not.
This seems an unsatisfactory answer, though, so I will also say that I think there’s something deeper going on.
For Robert Altman (as for many great directors) the materials of cinema, the language of it, if you will – and here I'm talking about everything from the image on the film, to the sounds on the recording equipment, to the movement of human bodies on set, to the location of camera and light sources in relation to those bodies and the other objects in the set – all of this is tangible, as three dimensional as modeling clay.
It is all to be used in an almost sculptural way to create something. All of the overlapping of image and sound, all of the movement of camera from one shot to next, all of the attempts to obscure or highlight certain elements;– all of it is an effort to craft a world, an experience, a multivarious object that the viewer encounters, or perhaps enters into. Confusion is thus an aide to creation.
For the director of the TV show I've been watching, on the other hand, my sense is that all these materials exist as a kind of second-hand language.
His is a world of screens. It is, for him, a fully digital medium. There is no film running through a camera, no magnetic tape that records sounds. The actual objects of the world – Altman's windows and one-way mirrors and ocean – are in some sense impediments to this digital world, this world of purely pixelated images, of one-shots that follow two-shots that follow other one-shots.
And because the director understands cinema as something existing on the screen, rather than as a sculptural attempt, the screen becomes paramount. Images become disconnected, because the director is thinking only in terms of images, not in terms of real things in a real world. The result of this is that the world he creates is not a world at all, but something thin and electronic, something replicable and disposable, a world of shots that follow shots. It does not occur to him that what he's creating is confusing, I think, because he does not understand himself to be creating reality so much as what is termed, these days, content.
And so confusion becomes, well, confusing.
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