By Gad, sir, you are a character, indeed you are
You know what I haven't done often enough? Mused about gay gangsters, that's what. Time for a book roundup post.
Lately I've been reading a lot of detective stories (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett) and hardboiled fiction (The Postman Always Rings Twice: why hello there, disturbing sex scenes, somehow I'd almost forgotten you existed). This is one of those areas where my tastes have changed since I was a kid. I can distinctly remember being alternately bored and frustrated by all three authors, but now I like them a lot.
See, I used to get upset over The Maltese Falcon (book, not movie), and this is why. It has a truckload of characters, none of whose private thoughts or opinions are related to us. All we know about them is what they say aloud and what they do. That, right there, was deeply off-putting for me, when I was younger. I can deal with it now, because, well, that's how the book is supposed to be; it may not be my favorite style, but I can live with it. A worse problem was that the characters did strange, pointless, unbelievable stuff, for no good reason that I could see. Here are just a few of said strange things.
A guy gives back a gun to the man who was just threatening him with the gun five minutes earlier. Three criminals who have no reason to trust the hero, trust the hero and do everything his way. The hero happily taunts an armed and overexcited young dude, apparently under the impression that the young dude won't lose his temper and shoot him for the hell of it and think better of it later. And, what do you know, the hero comes to no harm. He's as unfazed about all this as though he were bulletproof. Later on, the same criminals have nothing to gain by letting the hero live and everything to gain by preventing his testifying against them, but they not only fail to kill him, they give him some money and then leave, gushing about how great he is the entire time.
The thing is, I thought this was simply my own problem. Obviously the whole book must make sense to everyone but me: it was published, wasn't it? That meant it must be a good book in every way. I was just too unobservant to pick up on some unspoken subtext that would explain everyone's odd behavior. That subtext must be there in the book if only I was smart enough to see it. And I read and reread certain chapters of The Maltese Falcon, trying to see what I was missing.
Now I've just reread the book, because I wanted to do that before I watched the movie. And you know what? I wasn't missing anything. There is no there there. It's not perfect, and there is no better explanation for anything, no matter how carefully you read the book. It's a detective story with motivations that are sometimes unbelievable, and it has a Gary Stu for a hero. This was a strangely freeing realization. Suddenly, I didn't need it to be perfect or believable. I just needed it to be fun, and it was fun. I could even accept that it was rubbish at times, because at other times it was engaging.
I'm trying to decide what it's actually about. It's supposedly about solving the murder of Archer, but, as Raymond Chandler said, everyone forgets about Archer during most of the book. It's also supposedly about the Maltese Falcon, but any other valuable and grotesque item would have done as well. That isn't important. What the book does make important, and what occupies a lot of air time, is Sam Spade disarming and humiliating Wilmer. I mean, even in my short-term memory that part goes on and on. Homophobia: methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. More on that in a sec.
The homophobia is a sight to behold. The movie is much, much better than the book in that respect: Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook lend their characters some personality beyond the "Joel Cairo is a swish, Wilmer is a queer, nyah nyah" which is basically all the book gives you. That aspect of the book is very hard to get through, because of the authorial contempt for his own characters. Being strongly directed by an author to hate and despise a character is often counterproductive. In my case, it often makes me feel sympathetic towards the poor unloved creation of the author. I certainly felt for "the Levantine" more than I ever did for Spade, and that's not even taking the movie-verse into account. (BTW, what's "Levantine" supposed to mean? Okay, I know there's an area called the Levant, but there must be more to it than that. It sounds like a snide not-quite-ethnic-slur, like saying "Hebrews" for "Jews" and "Hibernians" for "Irishmen".) I have trouble seeing Gutman as intended to be homosexual, though that's what people tell me. Perhaps it's just that I don't like to think of Sydney Greenstreet having sex with anybody. (Sorry, Sydney. You're quite cute with your clothes on.) I have more of the impression that Gutman hires his minions in matched sets, and Wilmer came with Cairo.
This time around, I did actually buy the scene where Sam Spade gets Gutman to sell out his henchman. Gutman is pretty well-written. He seems like an academic type, someone who would study crime in theory but be weak enough on the actual practice to let Spade push him into a corner. I wasn't identifying with either of them, though. I liked Wilmer. He may be a murdering teenager, but he's a naive enough murdering teenager that he trusts Gutman and Cairo, and he's taken quite aback when they hand him over. It's hard not to feel for somebody who winds up that thoroughly screwed over. I picture him as reading too much pulp fiction--Black Mask magazine and the like.
Around the same time, I read a whole anthology of Raymond Chandler novels. The Big Sleep, plus various other Philip Marlowe novels and miscellaneous crime-drenched short stories. I like Chandler's style much better than Hammett's; Chandler is very funny when he wants to be. You hear a lot of Chandleresque hyperbole used just for kicks, but the actual original stuff holds up pretty well after all this time. You all ought to read a story of his called "Pearls Are A Nuisance", which was freaking hilarious. I'd be doing it an injustice if I tried to quote it here--well, all right, just one:
"Drunk, Walter?" he boomed. "Did I hear you say drunk? An Eichelberger drunk? Listen, son. We ain't got a lot of time now. It would take maybe three months. Some day when you got three months and maybe five thousand gallons of whiskey and a funnel, I would be glad to take my own time and show you what an Eichelberger looks like when drunk. You wouldn't believe it. Son, there wouldn't be nothing left of this town but a few sprung girders and a lot of busted bricks, in the middle of which--Geez, I'll get talking English myself if I hang around you much longer--in the middle of which, peaceful, with no human life nearer than maybe fifty miles, Henry Eichelberger will be on his back smiling at the sun. Drunk, Walter. Not stinking drunk, not even country-club drunk. But you could use the word drunk and I wouldn't take no offense."
He sat down and drank again. I stared moodily at the floor. There was nothing for me to say.
The common thread with Hammett aside from genre: Chandler's heroes are defensively heterosexual he-men who show off their masculinity by beating up limp-wristed criminals. Somewhere in one of the novels, and I forget which one, the hero brags about how easy one of the opposition was to beat up: "He went down easy, like all pansies do."
And at the same time, even while Chandler is making me deeply uncomfortable with lines like that, his heroes are going around falling in love with other guys and not owning up. It's the classic explanation for homophobia, isn't it? The guy is going out and hitting what he fears in himself. It may be an oft-used explanation, but it seems to me that it applies here. Philip Marlowe is a sight more healthy and well-adjusted a person than Sam Spade, who goes to bed with some very unpleasant women. Spade's only halfway healthy connection with a woman is with his secretary, Effie. They give off the impression that they used to go out and are still close even if they're no longer a couple. There's a rather cute scene where Spade feels frustrated and he latches onto Effie and sits there cuddling her the way a child would cuddle an oversized teddy bear. Marlowe, on the other hand, has a set of standards that take a lot more living up to. ("The Simple Art of Murder", an excellent essay, finishes with Chandler patting himself on the back for having written so wonderful a character as Philip Marlowe. "I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin".) In one of the full-length novels, Marlowe encounters a guy simply called "Red", who works on the waterfront, and who helps out Marlowe pretty much just because they're both nice guys and they fall for each other at once. If there had been slashers in the days when the Marlowe books first came out, they would have been sharpening their pencils and dashing for their Underwoods. And yet the author never apparently notices the irony.
Oh, well. Most authors don't notice certain ironies about their work. If Chandler had ever been challenged about it, he'd probably just have said, "In a pig's valise. Marlowe's not a pansy," or something less witty and more to the point, such as, "They're not gay, they just love each other" or "Buzz off, you prurient fangirl". And I can't go and dig up Hammett and tell him to get a clue. I think I'm just going to watch The Maltese Falcon again.
Lately I've been reading a lot of detective stories (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett) and hardboiled fiction (The Postman Always Rings Twice: why hello there, disturbing sex scenes, somehow I'd almost forgotten you existed). This is one of those areas where my tastes have changed since I was a kid. I can distinctly remember being alternately bored and frustrated by all three authors, but now I like them a lot.
See, I used to get upset over The Maltese Falcon (book, not movie), and this is why. It has a truckload of characters, none of whose private thoughts or opinions are related to us. All we know about them is what they say aloud and what they do. That, right there, was deeply off-putting for me, when I was younger. I can deal with it now, because, well, that's how the book is supposed to be; it may not be my favorite style, but I can live with it. A worse problem was that the characters did strange, pointless, unbelievable stuff, for no good reason that I could see. Here are just a few of said strange things.
A guy gives back a gun to the man who was just threatening him with the gun five minutes earlier. Three criminals who have no reason to trust the hero, trust the hero and do everything his way. The hero happily taunts an armed and overexcited young dude, apparently under the impression that the young dude won't lose his temper and shoot him for the hell of it and think better of it later. And, what do you know, the hero comes to no harm. He's as unfazed about all this as though he were bulletproof. Later on, the same criminals have nothing to gain by letting the hero live and everything to gain by preventing his testifying against them, but they not only fail to kill him, they give him some money and then leave, gushing about how great he is the entire time.
The thing is, I thought this was simply my own problem. Obviously the whole book must make sense to everyone but me: it was published, wasn't it? That meant it must be a good book in every way. I was just too unobservant to pick up on some unspoken subtext that would explain everyone's odd behavior. That subtext must be there in the book if only I was smart enough to see it. And I read and reread certain chapters of The Maltese Falcon, trying to see what I was missing.
Now I've just reread the book, because I wanted to do that before I watched the movie. And you know what? I wasn't missing anything. There is no there there. It's not perfect, and there is no better explanation for anything, no matter how carefully you read the book. It's a detective story with motivations that are sometimes unbelievable, and it has a Gary Stu for a hero. This was a strangely freeing realization. Suddenly, I didn't need it to be perfect or believable. I just needed it to be fun, and it was fun. I could even accept that it was rubbish at times, because at other times it was engaging.
I'm trying to decide what it's actually about. It's supposedly about solving the murder of Archer, but, as Raymond Chandler said, everyone forgets about Archer during most of the book. It's also supposedly about the Maltese Falcon, but any other valuable and grotesque item would have done as well. That isn't important. What the book does make important, and what occupies a lot of air time, is Sam Spade disarming and humiliating Wilmer. I mean, even in my short-term memory that part goes on and on. Homophobia: methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. More on that in a sec.
The homophobia is a sight to behold. The movie is much, much better than the book in that respect: Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook lend their characters some personality beyond the "Joel Cairo is a swish, Wilmer is a queer, nyah nyah" which is basically all the book gives you. That aspect of the book is very hard to get through, because of the authorial contempt for his own characters. Being strongly directed by an author to hate and despise a character is often counterproductive. In my case, it often makes me feel sympathetic towards the poor unloved creation of the author. I certainly felt for "the Levantine" more than I ever did for Spade, and that's not even taking the movie-verse into account. (BTW, what's "Levantine" supposed to mean? Okay, I know there's an area called the Levant, but there must be more to it than that. It sounds like a snide not-quite-ethnic-slur, like saying "Hebrews" for "Jews" and "Hibernians" for "Irishmen".) I have trouble seeing Gutman as intended to be homosexual, though that's what people tell me. Perhaps it's just that I don't like to think of Sydney Greenstreet having sex with anybody. (Sorry, Sydney. You're quite cute with your clothes on.) I have more of the impression that Gutman hires his minions in matched sets, and Wilmer came with Cairo.
This time around, I did actually buy the scene where Sam Spade gets Gutman to sell out his henchman. Gutman is pretty well-written. He seems like an academic type, someone who would study crime in theory but be weak enough on the actual practice to let Spade push him into a corner. I wasn't identifying with either of them, though. I liked Wilmer. He may be a murdering teenager, but he's a naive enough murdering teenager that he trusts Gutman and Cairo, and he's taken quite aback when they hand him over. It's hard not to feel for somebody who winds up that thoroughly screwed over. I picture him as reading too much pulp fiction--Black Mask magazine and the like.
Around the same time, I read a whole anthology of Raymond Chandler novels. The Big Sleep, plus various other Philip Marlowe novels and miscellaneous crime-drenched short stories. I like Chandler's style much better than Hammett's; Chandler is very funny when he wants to be. You hear a lot of Chandleresque hyperbole used just for kicks, but the actual original stuff holds up pretty well after all this time. You all ought to read a story of his called "Pearls Are A Nuisance", which was freaking hilarious. I'd be doing it an injustice if I tried to quote it here--well, all right, just one:
"Drunk, Walter?" he boomed. "Did I hear you say drunk? An Eichelberger drunk? Listen, son. We ain't got a lot of time now. It would take maybe three months. Some day when you got three months and maybe five thousand gallons of whiskey and a funnel, I would be glad to take my own time and show you what an Eichelberger looks like when drunk. You wouldn't believe it. Son, there wouldn't be nothing left of this town but a few sprung girders and a lot of busted bricks, in the middle of which--Geez, I'll get talking English myself if I hang around you much longer--in the middle of which, peaceful, with no human life nearer than maybe fifty miles, Henry Eichelberger will be on his back smiling at the sun. Drunk, Walter. Not stinking drunk, not even country-club drunk. But you could use the word drunk and I wouldn't take no offense."
He sat down and drank again. I stared moodily at the floor. There was nothing for me to say.
The common thread with Hammett aside from genre: Chandler's heroes are defensively heterosexual he-men who show off their masculinity by beating up limp-wristed criminals. Somewhere in one of the novels, and I forget which one, the hero brags about how easy one of the opposition was to beat up: "He went down easy, like all pansies do."
And at the same time, even while Chandler is making me deeply uncomfortable with lines like that, his heroes are going around falling in love with other guys and not owning up. It's the classic explanation for homophobia, isn't it? The guy is going out and hitting what he fears in himself. It may be an oft-used explanation, but it seems to me that it applies here. Philip Marlowe is a sight more healthy and well-adjusted a person than Sam Spade, who goes to bed with some very unpleasant women. Spade's only halfway healthy connection with a woman is with his secretary, Effie. They give off the impression that they used to go out and are still close even if they're no longer a couple. There's a rather cute scene where Spade feels frustrated and he latches onto Effie and sits there cuddling her the way a child would cuddle an oversized teddy bear. Marlowe, on the other hand, has a set of standards that take a lot more living up to. ("The Simple Art of Murder", an excellent essay, finishes with Chandler patting himself on the back for having written so wonderful a character as Philip Marlowe. "I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin".) In one of the full-length novels, Marlowe encounters a guy simply called "Red", who works on the waterfront, and who helps out Marlowe pretty much just because they're both nice guys and they fall for each other at once. If there had been slashers in the days when the Marlowe books first came out, they would have been sharpening their pencils and dashing for their Underwoods. And yet the author never apparently notices the irony.
Oh, well. Most authors don't notice certain ironies about their work. If Chandler had ever been challenged about it, he'd probably just have said, "In a pig's valise. Marlowe's not a pansy," or something less witty and more to the point, such as, "They're not gay, they just love each other" or "Buzz off, you prurient fangirl". And I can't go and dig up Hammett and tell him to get a clue. I think I'm just going to watch The Maltese Falcon again.