Watching the Detectives
I want to be Philip Marlowe. Or maybe Nick Charles. My favorite kinds of movies are film noir, particularly the hard-boiled detective genre. I love the interplay of shadows and light in black and white. I love the cynical worldview, the disdain for scruples, morals and basic decency. I love that the characters drink rye and gin, smoke Chesterfields, wear fedoras and ties, consult the phone directory for research and do any number of other terribly old-fashioned things. I love the women – tall, thin, legs for miles, usually dressed in black and up to no good.
But, mostly, I hero worship the gumshoe protagonists. The hard-boiled detective is the ultimate male fantasy. He is how we would all like to envision ourselves: suave, a sense of style, quick-witted and sarcastic, a healthy appetite for liquor that actually serves to sharpen his senses, seemingly irresistible to women, knows when he’s being played and always saves the day. Dashiell Hammett, the ultimate master of the genre, acknowledged this male fantasy aspect in the creation of one of his most famous characters, Sam Spade:
“Spade has no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not, or did not ten years ago when he was my colleague, want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.”
The protagonist from Hammett’s early novels, the nameless Continental Op, was just such a Holmes-like solver of riddles. These – “The Dain Curse” and “Red Harvest” – are true mystery novels, emphasizing clues and plot twists over character, as the Continental Op has none. It was with Spade in “The Maltese Falcon” that the detective story developed true heroes. The detective hero in Hammett’s final novel, Nick Charles, has character in spades. Seen as a mash note to his lover Lillian Hellman, “The Thin Man” presents a male fantasy of a committed relationship: to a saucy heiress half his age, who mixes his drinks, massages his shoulders, countenances a fair amount of hanky panky with the novel’s femme fatales and helps him compile the clues to the mystery.
Raymond Chandler, the author who is credited as carrying Hammett’s hard-boiled mantle, did not improve upon his predecessor’s economy of words nor his gripping plots, as most of Chandler’s stories were obvious and perfunctory. But he did create the ultimate Hollywood detective: Philip Marlowe. With a back story that involves getting fired from the D.A.’s office for political reasons, Marlowe has charm of the renegade hero that Hollywood has been trying to imitate in action and adventure movies ever since. Always too quick to mouth off to cops and criminals, Marlowe frequently takes his punches and his nights in the clink. His bottle of whiskey is conveniently available to loosen up a suspect or an already loose woman. Usually hard up for cash, he nevertheless passes up opportunities to shake down his clients and often shields them from the wives, daughters and mistresses who are scandalizing them. Still, he’s no softie (“I don’t like your manner, Mr. Marlowe.” “That’s all right. I’m not selling it.”).
Playing Marlowe in the movies is a kind of drag. The early actors – Robert Montgomery, Dick Powell, George Montgomery and the best of the lot, Humphrey Bogart – played him as the traditional tough guy of noir stereotype. James Caan played an older, wearier Marlowe in “Poodle Springs.” Robert Mitchum brought his unique brand of cool to a British adaptation in the 1970’s, perhaps because the stiffness and properness of the 1940’s U.S.A. could only be recreated in the 1970’s by transporting the tale to England. Elliott Gould, also in the 70’s, played Marlowe as a man out of time in sunny L.A. That portrayal, in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye” is perhaps most intriguing for the purposes of this article. Following his iconoclastic “M*A*S*H*,” it was hoped that Altman would do for noir genre what he did for the war movie and make a kind of a “Trapper John, PI.” While Gould maintains his roguish charm, Altman maintains a certain reverence for the Marlowe archetype. He tips his hat to the nudists next door and refuses to loosen his tie even on the beach. All the characters around him tease him for his old-fashioned ways.
The film was not a success, although a recent revival at the Film Forum landed Elliott Gould on the cover of the Village Voice decades after his curious period as a smart-ass Jewish matinee heartthrob. Instead of a revival of noir, the 1970’s saw the rise of Dirty Harry and other vigilante heroes, who in turn gave rise to that loathsome archetype, the action hero. In place of black suits and fedoras, we get ripped t-shirts and bulging muscles. In place of flirtatious banter and crossed legs, we get an inarticulate bodybuilder gnawing on some starlet’s tits at around the 50 minute mark in a well-choreographed bedroom romp. In place of investigation and deduction, we get explosions and lots of them.
Why has the action hero replaced the hard-boiled detective as the male fantasy? I would chalk it up to sort of generalized anxiety that men feel about their role in society these days, except that the hard-boiled fantasy is also about being in control (of the situation, of life, of women). Maybe the difference between the two stock types is too little to fret over, and I’m just guilty once again of being nostalgic for a time before I was born.
Remembering Sophie Gerson
I learned today from a comrade that Sophie Gerson passed away on March 20, 2006 at the age of 96. Sophie was a lifelong Communist activist whose own work was overshadowed by her husband, Simon W. Gerson, the writer, champion of proportional democracy and shoulda been City Councilman from Brooklyn. At Si’s memorial a year earlier, speaker after speaker (including yours truly) paid tribute to his illustrious career as a public Communist and lightning rod for controversy, but only one (not me, perhaps it was Tim Wheeler) took the opportunity to point out that Sophie was notorious–indeed, framed for murder–before Si’s name was ever known.
In early 1929, 19-year-old Sophie Melvin joined striking National Textile Workers Union members at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, NC. The Gastonia strike, one of NTWU’s smallest at the time, was part of a larger southern organizing campaign initiated by the Communist-led Trade Union Unity League. The T.U.U.L. presaged the C.I.O. movement in the 30’s, training many of activists whose work made that mass upsurge possible. The strike was called in January over some of the lowest-paying, most sped up and stretched out working conditions in the entire south.
Sophie organized a children’s support section in the strikers’ tent city and was present on June 7 when a carload of armed police invaded and declared war on the strikers. In the melee, one union organizer was seriously wounded, three police deputies were slightly wounded and the chief of police, O.F. Aderholt, was killed. Seventy-five strikers were arrested for the murder of the police chief and sixteen were eventually indicted. Among these were three women, Vera Buch, Amy Shechter and Sophie Melvin (this was not, notes Philip Foner in his History of the Labor Movement…, young Sophie’s first arrest connected to her union agitation). The three young women became an immediate cause celibre, their hefty bail raised by Communist charities and national speaking tours serving as strike support fundraisers. Public outcry caused local officials to drop the charges against the three young women, who continued their propaganda work in spite of the losing campaign. By September, strikers were returning to work without a union, although the Loray mill had reduced the work week to 50 hours(!). The real value of the strike was that it laid crucial groundwork for New Deal and C.I.O. organizing that was to shortly follow.
Si Gerson was a cub reporter for the Daily Worker when he was assigned to the Gastonia strike, met and fell in love with Sophie. Of course, they married and were a lovely couple. Sophie continued to be a political activist, in addition to being a mother and grandmother, but Si’s work cast a long shadow. It is a shame that while news of Si’s death reached me by notices from comrades in the Socialist Party, colleagues in the Coalition for Free and Open Elections and general e-mail listserve forwards, I had to learn about Sophie’s passing in passing conversation with a comrade, a year and a half after the fact. Sophie Gerson (nee Melvin) is truly an unsung American hero and deserves more of a monument than this little blog post.
Ga Ga for the Last Next Big Thing
In 1976, Lester Bangs greeted the Rolling Stones minor album Black and Blue with a sense ironic relief. “They really don’t matter or stand for anything, ” he wrote, “which is certainly lucky for both them and us. I mean, it was a heavy weight to carry for all concerned. This is the first meaningless Stones album, and thank god!” Slightly less witheringly (but only just so), The Onion’s Noel Murray writes of Spoon’s latest long player, “For those who thought Spoon’s one-two punch of Girls Can Tell and Kill The Moonlight marked the group as a contender for the ‘Best American Band Of The ’00s’ label, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga may be a disappointment.
It’s not as bad as all that. But it doesn’t sound like the Next Great Statement from a band that has been making instant classics since 1999’s Series of Sneaks. But, now that I think about it, none of Spoon’s records have ever grabbed me on the first listen. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was on its fifth spin on my HiFi while I was writing and deleting much of what was going to be this review. It’s a lot better than all that.
The usual hallmarks of a Spoon record – tense rising action punctuated by the occasional raveup, and a minimalist style that emphasizes the silence in between the musical notes – are largely missing. What we have instead is an album by a band in transition. Building upon “I Turn My Camera On,” half the songs on this record – “Don’t You Evah,” “Rhythm & Soul,” “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” and “Finer Feelings” – ride a similar icy cold R&B groove. These songs are pure Sex – perverse, sweaty, disaffected Sex. The triumph of groove and feeling over song craft perhaps marks Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga as Spoon’s Black and Blue. Would Lester Bangs hear the end of Spoon’s trailblazing period in this disc?
Like no band that I can think of, Spoon was completely made by a single piece of rock criticism, Camden Joy’s millennial summing up of the 90’s varied Next Big Things and how they all ultimately came up short of reinventing rock and roll. Joy, of course, pinned her hopes on Spoon after Elektra dumped them and their power pop record, Series of Sneaks. Who could have predicted the left turn that was the minimalism of Girls Can Tell? Perhaps Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is the beginning of a similar stylistic change, Spoon’s own “plastic soul” period. Or, perhaps, having failed to reinvent and save rock n roll, Spoon has settled down to put out good records that make the pretty girls dance and swoon.
Portrait of a Charming Man
It’s hardly unusual to find a glowing hagiography of a corporate CEO in the pages of a major newspaper. I’m not, per se, opposed to feting J.W. Marriott. If you can get past the creepy fact that he’s a high elder of the Mormon church, he’s just a charming old man who values family, tells hokey jokes and makes a point of being personally courteous to his workers. However, when the Washington Post goes so far as to twist the words of a leader of the hotel employees union to make the CEO of one of the most viciously anti-union companies in the country sound like a good boss, well, that’s when I get mad.
The Marriott corporation runs an anti-union operation as pervasive and sophisticated as Wal-Mart’s. First-line managers are trained to call the corporation’s central union-busting office at the slightest sign of discontent. Corporate’s union busters fly in and do the usual mix of firings, captive audience and one-on-one meetings, and maybe even a slight raise in wages – all in order to keep the status quo of “on-call” employment with no job protection.
The author of the piece, Michael Rosenwald, interviewed the hotel division president of UNITE HERE, John Wilhelm, for the piece. Wilhelm presumably used the opportunity to speak at length about Marriott’s anti-union track record – such as the fact that only ten percent of its operations are unionized compared to better than 30% of Hilton and Starwoods, or the briefly-alluded-to 20 year fight to unionize San Francisco’s flagship Marriott hotel – but the author shallowly focused on the few positive things that Wilhelm could say about J.W. Marriott.
Like, for instance, his common man touch when dealing with employees on a personal basis. Okay, so the man introduces himself and engages in chit chat with the bellmen and doormen when staying at one of his hotels. Well, that’s nice…I guess. But is this only notable because most corporate suits act like total dickheads around the “hired help?” How about the doozy that in the three cities where UNITE HERE has managed to make dealing with the union a cost of doing business that Marriott “live[s] up to the terms of the contracts?” When does living up to the legally enforceable contracts you have made become laudable, or even notable? Only in the context of a company that breaks the law with impunity when resisting its workers’ rights to organize and improve the job.
The Washington Post owes readers a complete picture of Marriott’s union-busting human resources policies, or else it owes us their traditional silence on wrong-doing when praising a charming elder statesman.