Example of Anti-Noir: Accepting Negative Feelings (vs. Cause 2)

In this post I'm going to connect Philip Marlowe to Mr. Rogers.  Bear with me.

It's that time of the course when we look for antidotes.  There's Noir Cause 2, "unprocessed romantic loss." What does that mean? The example I gave was the passage in The Long Goodbye where Marlowe thinks Eileen Wade is coming on to him, gets interested, changes his mind, flips out, runs away, and then drinks until he passes out.  It's one of those anomalies that needs explaining. A slide from October 15th:

My claim was that if Marlowe doesn't see himself as the dominant figure in the situation--the head guy in charge-- he flips instantly to feeling humiliation. That's what he'll feel if he loses control, or isn't the person in control.   He then experiences himself as the inferior person in the very unequal structure typical of being "in love."  He is terrified of the possibility of being rejected.

Of course this is a common condition: we're all susceptible to having our feelings massively hurt when somewhere we're attracted to isn't attracted to us.  It's not so bad, however, if we have attachments to other people to whom we don't feel inferior and who won't humiliate us.  In lecture, I argued that Marlowe doesn't have these attachments, and he tends to sabotage all prospects of them (with Terry Lennox or Linda Loring).

I inferred from his behavior that Marlowe is attached to some lost person.  In this sense, he is a classic melancholic, enduring that condition in which the lost object is brought into the self and preserved there. It becomes confused with the self, and it's hard for someone like Marlowe to find his identity as separate from that lost object and not missing it. (This struggle happens to many of us when we pine for someone for months or years, long after we are supposed to have "moved on with our lives"--moved on to an attachment to someone else.)

The key outcome is weakness of self-identity, or a sense of inferiority.  This increases the tendency to latch on to (apparently superior) people, in this case the "unclassifiable" blonde. This doesn't strengthen the self, but keeps it in the same state of dependency, inferiority, and resentment.  This in turn can lead to behaviors like Marlowe lunging at Eileen Wade and then running away.

It's possible to overcome this condition--it happens all the time. But it requires facing negative feelings, particularly the sense of inferiority.  This sense surfaces in that passage in The Long Goodbye. This won't change for Marlowe as long has he doesn't face his negative feelings (like fear of humiliation) but keeps them repressed.  Facing them would involve identifying the lost object(s) whose permanent, unacknowledged loss produces his sense of sadness or weakness, and gradually letting go of it (them). Instead, what Marlowe does is find temporary substitutes, and acts out being in charge and dominant.  This masks inferiority, temporarily.  Then the whole thing happens again.

You probably know that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is in theatrical release, with Tom Hanks playing Mr. Rogers.  My favorite commentary so far is, It's a Terrible Day in the Neighborhood, and that's OK.  It's worth reading in full. Here's a good moment:

Despite his sweet pastor’s demeanor, Rogers was tuned into our souls’ darkest feelings. He had an uncommon appreciation for anger, fear, stress, sadness, disappointment and loneliness. He respected the range of emotions and encouraged children to accept all their feelings as natural. . . . Rogers believed that variations of the “sticks-and-stones” adages intended to get kids to “shake it off” are stifling; they abandon children to their pain instead of teaching them how to process it. In contrast, Rogers encouraged children to face their dark feelings.

After a couple of paragraphs on Aristotle (also interesting), the author, Mariana Alessandri, continues:

Aristotle would discourage us from shaming ourselves over feeling sad when we “should” feel happy. He rejected “shoulds” altogether when it came to feelings, since he believed them to be natural and, without accompanying wrong action, harmless. All feelings, for Aristotle, are potentially useful in that they provide an opportunity to practice behaving well. Feelings alone can’t jeopardize virtue, he believed, but actions can and often do. Mister Rogers agreed: “Everyone has lots of ways of feeling. And all of those feelings are fine. It’s what we do with our feelings that matter in this life.”

Rogers believed that all children (and adults) get sad, mad, lonely, anxious and frustrated — and he used television to model what to do with these difficult and often strong emotions. He wanted to counter the harmful message kids typically receive, some version of the ever-unhelpful you shouldn’t feel that way.

Mr. Rogers is talking about "processing" emotions, or what Freudians call "working through."  We don't have easy, direct access to these feelings or their causes--hence the value of other people, particularly professional therapists, who help.   But it's a start on what we're looking for-- a reversal of Noir Cause 2.

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.