Chinatown System Today

The irony of the film title, Chinatown, is that the corporate-government syndicate is something like the opposite of Chinatown. Here's a story in today's NYT that shows the development model is alive and well: buy and control a natural resource whose value you increase through government connections.  (Don't think about Trump here, think about Milken, a real California story.)

(Photo is of Milken's Opportunity Zone in Nevada under a federal program "designed to spur economic development and job creation in distressed communities.")

The Love and Loss Example for Paper 1: Thursday's lecture

My basic claim was that Chandler's novel adds the effects of bad love to those of the aftermath of world wars.  But how would I turn this into a paper topic and thesis based in a particular passage?  Here's the assignment.

I used one of my main interests in this novel as an example of how one can generate a paper topic and thesis.  I started with my question about why Marlowe seems to have such a hard time having stable relationships.  I put it more generally on the slide but I'm really thinking about Marlowe.  I found my passage -- the almost-sex between Marlowe and his client Eileen Wade.

Then I describe my search for cultural materials and ideas that would form my framework and help me come up with a thesis.  That took most of lecture.  I read the "blonde of blondes" passage that describes Marlowe's first reaction to Eileen Wade (page 90).  I emphasized the specific words he used to describe her, as is normal with a close reading. 

 That last line: it's about moving from text to context, as we often do in this course (which combines literary and cultural study). Then I described research that tried to identify different kinds of blondes and how they mean different things in US culture.  There were a lot of pictures that wound up with this summary slide:

I'm interested in point 3, but I don't have great concrete evidence for it. I could develop more, and link Marlowe's racist cracks about Candy to his fascination with Eileen Wade through more textual close reading.  I could also bring in cultural materials -- the history of efforts to keep the US segregated in the aftermath of World War II, the segregated history of Los Angeles, the whiteness of Hollywood glamour, Chandler's backstory, etc. 

But with Marlowe I'm more focused on point 4.  The whole book is shaped by his "lone wolf" isolation, and his repeated insistence on it.  The book also narrates a series of events in which Marlowe takes up with people but doesn't stick with them.  He has a thing for two people in the book (Terry Lennox and Eileen Wade) and sleeps with a third (Linda Loring, Terry's sister-in-law).  He can't stay attached to them.  There's love-hate here: he is ambivalent. He is also somewhat mournful about relationships, or, more correctly, he is melancholic.  Both his ambivalence--his love-hate for Eileen Wade in that scene) and his melancholia, point to psychological models developed by Sigmund Freud.  Freud's theories about our divided psyches, our powerful yet opaque unconscious mind, our formation in repressed sexual attachments, for starters, pervaded the postwar US culture in which Chandler wrote. 

No time for detailed psychoanalytic theory! But there's always time for

Once I start talking about Vertigo I really can't stop.  Watch it- it's one of the great 20th century movies by a director who was (1) channeling Freud and (2) brutally realistic about white postwar masculinity.  This business of the Jimmy Stewart character losing his partner (blaming himself), finding Madeline then losing her, finding Judy and needing to make her into the lost Madeline (and then . . . ok no spoiler here), got us to this slide where my version of Paper 1 has setttled on its frame.

There's a lot on this slide. It's the very short version of Freud's intense and fascinating attempt to understand the sources of depression in which people lose interest in the world and withdraw the energy for attachment (or "cathexis") into themselves. He used clinical evidence to get to a version of the somewhat crazy-sounding final line of the slide, in which the melancholic no longer has an ego that is independent of their loss (and the lost person).   (I mentioned the "introjection" (or bringing-into) of the lost person into the self).  Freud insists it's not crazy and is all too common.  The concepts -- ambivalence (love-hate), loss, melancholia--get me to this translation of the framing slide above.

And so now I'm ready to go back to the passage from The Long Goodbye.  Note the recursive process: topic, then on to finding a passage, or maybe having a passage that really stuck in my mind and then figuring out the topic, then contextual and textual material that solidfies a frame, then the passage again.

 

Now I start to build the argument, and because it will improve my structure I write it out formally using our beloved observation-inference pairing.  

We didn't have time to go through this, so check it out now and we can discuss it on Tuesday.  The last two lines say, basically, that Marlowe associates attachment (starting with sex with Eileen Wade) with humiliation, so he would rather drink himself into oblivion than risk the attachment.  (Remember, Freud is the guy who says this is less weird and unusual than we would like to think.)  This gets me to a thesis, seen on a version of the first slide that I've filled in (under 4 and 5). 

I'm not yet satisfied with the formulation, but there's progress--and a plot line through a lot of material.  You held up very well under a lot of material. 

We'll Fix this Question Together in Lecture on Tuesday

remember that there's more than one right answer.

Power of Evidence

We're talking about the role of colonialism and then World War I in turning US and UK culture "noir." We're also stressing the importance of evidence in making assertions and coming to conclusions about whodunit, not to mention everything else.  A major New York Times investigation brings these two issues together.  The story points out that, "Recklessly or intentionally bombing hospitals is a war crime, but proving culpability amid a complex civil war is extremely difficult, and until now, Syrian medical workers and human rights groups lacked proof."  The NYT investigation has proof that the Russian Air Force, in support of the Assad government in Syria, intentionally targeted the four hospitals in question.  The proof consists of several kinds of evidence, which they detail at the bottom of the article. I'll cite the whole thing because I'm such an evidence nerd:

Our reporting began by collecting social media posts, interviewing witnesses and speaking with organizations that support hospitals in opposition-held Syria. They gave us the approximate time each hospital was struck on May 5 and 6.

We obtained access to tens of thousands of flight observations kept by spotters who watch the skies and warn civilians of incoming airstrikes. Each observation logged a time, location and type of plane.

Most crucially, we also obtained thousands of Russian Air Force radio transmissions never before made public. We spent weeks deciphering their code words. By the end, we knew when Russian pilots were receiving coordinates, locking onto targets and dropping their bombs.

Finally, we reviewed the videos of three of the four bombings and consulted with military experts. We concluded that the videos showed the hospitals being bombed at the reported times, and in two cases that they were hit with precision bombs that the Russians possess but the Syrians don't.

Combining all this information revealed that Russian pilots were flying at the time and place each hospital was bombed, that they released their weapons at the same time we'd been told the strike occurred, and that at least two of the strikes were too precise for the Syrians to have even accomplished.

This is an enormous amount of dedicated work.  It's also expensive, which is why most newspapers, including my hometown newspaper the Los Angeles Times, do a lot more cutting and pasting of internet stuff than they do investigating.

In addition to money, there's the problem of savvy replacing truth as the ethos of high-end reporting, at least according to this interesting analysis.

Sherlock Lecture Slides From Friday

We were talking about 2 theories of human intelligence, which we simplistically polarized as Theory 1, Only Sherlock is Sherlock, and Theory 2, Anyone Can Be Sherlock, But Almost Nobody Does the Work.  Here's a slide I raced through about how his personality helps.  Theory 1 or Theory 2? I know you know.

Also there was the kind of closure the "whodunit" or "mystery" offers, particularly before all hell breaks loose for the UK and Europe in World War I.  It gets much harder to make convincing in crime fiction later on.