Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (1940)

Urban Alienation

Long history of anti-urbanism: Sinful, corrupting, morally degenerate, dangerous, psychologically alienating and socially incoherent

Nineteenth/twentieth-century visions of the city:Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)

‘Anomie’: Feelings of alienation and purposelessness often brought about by a change in the economic conditions of society

Emile Durkheim, Suicide (1897)

Automat, 1927

Office in a Small City, 1953

New York Office, 1962

Nighthawks, 1942

1. Unsentimental2. Morally/legally ambiguous protagonist3. Strong masculine roles4. Women as downfall: Femme Fatale5. ‘Heightened realism’6. Published first in pulp magazines: Black Mask7. Invariably urban settings (New York, Chicago, Los

Angeles)

Genre 1: Hardboiled Detective Fiction

Genre 2: Noir

Hollywood crime dramas:• 1940s/50s• Stark black-and-white visual style• European influences: German Expressionism• Quick dialogue, subdued lighting, sexual tension, psychological fragility, setting and form intimately linked

Raymond Chandler and screenwriting

The Naked City (Dir. Jules Dassin, 1948)The Asphalt Jungle (Dir. John Huston, 1950)

Weegee [Arthur Fellig], Naked City (1945) and Naked Hollywood (1955)

Raymond Chandler and Los Angeles

When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and listened to the ground swell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big, angry city.... Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell.... Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy car tyres. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped and murdered. People were hungry, sick, bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.

The Long Goodbye

Chandler’s “particular ‘map’ of the social totality is a complete and closed semiotic system: unified by the category of the ‘office’, its various positions and inversions are able…to span the breadth of the social system from wealth to poverty and…from public to private. This is, to be sure, an ideologically motivated vision or scale model of the social, which strategically omits or represses production as such, along with the law-abiding, average, peaceful middle-classes themselves.”

Fredric Jameson, ‘The Synoptic Chandler’, 44-45