The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep -- Everyone agrees that this Howard Hawks' film from 1946 is a Hollywood classic. I have seen it a dozen times and always fall asleep forty minutes from the start of the picture. Of course, the plot is famously confusing but I wonder whether viewers are always baffled because their snooze has obscured certain plot points made at the start of Act III in this five act tale -- the point when I inevitable fall into the arms of Morpheus. I'm not sure what accounts for the fatal lethargy that seizes me after the film's first half-hour. Certainly, the picture is ominously flat, exhausted, tenebrous -- the movie seems oppressed by post-war gloom, an attempt at escapism that doesn't escape the weirdly post-coital absence of affect that arises after strenuous and heart-wrenching exertion. The war, never mentioned in the film, seems to have drained the picture of its vital bodily fluids. Nothing in the movie is emphasized -- a meet and greet in an office has the same emotional charge as a murder; the film resolutely refuses to provide any stylistic highlights -- it is all precisely cut from the same crepuscular cloth. Humphrey Bogart's acting exhausts the viewer: he is always doing something with his eyes or his smirk or the slump of his shoulders -- nothing escapes his attention -- at one point, he tells Lauren Bacall to scratch the itch on her upper thigh that seems to be bothering her -- and he makes a simple action, such as opening the door to parked sedan, seem as ponderous, weighty, and difficult as the solution to an abstruse problem in ballistics. Bogie is always sneering, or looking baffled, or world-weary, casting sidelong glances, pouting, looking over his shoulder -- even unconscious after a beating the poor guy seems to be acting. There is nothing wrong with this -- it makes his performance irresistably entertaining, but one must observe that if someone acted this way in real life, the poor fellow would be commited to an insane asylum. By contrast, Lauren Bacall is completely impassive -- she never relaxes her marmoreal expression of slightly amused contempt. The clash between the two acting styles, perhaps, gives the film part of its sexual charge which is, in any event, highly abstract and schematic. Bacall isn't sexy -- she's a tall cipher, a long-stemmed rose, improbably skinny and lanky, swirls of silk, it seems, cascading like Angel Falls down her flanks. Hawks has every single woman in the film, all of them pretty and perky and even voluptuous except for Bacall, attempt to seduce Bogart -- this also seems improbable, but is funny and the sexually rapacious women offering themselves to the hero impart a quirky erotic sizzle to the otherwise rather geometric theorem of the romance between the two principals. (It's as if Hawks is compensating for the angular, off-kilter love scenes between Bogart and Bacall). The film is lavishly over-designed, over-designed to the point of delirium -- every wall has a picture or an array of pictures and the eye is irresistably drawn to the vast multitude of knickknacks on display: onyx panthers, stallions, and hunting dogs, various idols, ancient figurines, vases full of fake fruit, framed pictures of boxers, horses, football teams -- even Bogart's bachelor flat is stuffed with tschotskys (who is his decorator?) as if the set designer could not help himself. Since the images tend to become monotonous -- the same old "plan Americaine" shot over and over again, Hawks congests the background with all sorts of weird and improbable objects. Sometimes, these things play a role in the plot -- there is an impassive Buddha in one of the dismal bungalows serving as a locale for the movie and, inside the Buddha's ceramic head, there is a camera. This motif rhymes with Bogie's pistol, kept in his car in a sort of spring-loaded hiding place and the expressionless Buddha, drowning in nirvana, looks disconcertingly like Ms. Bacall in certain scenes. The dialogue is snappy screw-ball comedy stuff, one-liners, wisecracks, sharp rejoinders -- the old man in the famous opening scene, looking like one of Faulkner's malign Civil War veterans sits in the terrarium-like greenhouse and says that "(he) lives from the heat like a spider." He asks Bogart how he takes his rum. "In a glass," the gumshoe replies. The film puts our voyeurism in the foreground -- the camera in the Buddha's head is our eyeball; the old man tells Bogie that "you are drinking for me -- I like to watch" and, later, Elisha Cook, Jr. watches Bogart being beaten without reacting. Later, he says about watching the thrasing: "I don't want to interfere when someone's playing his hand. I'm not a kibbutzer." Bogart watches him die, poisoned, and, then, curiously makes the dead man the moral center of the film, a strange off-center narrative development since the little thug has nothing palpable to do with the plot. LA is visualized as a black swamp, perpetually rainy, foggy, oozing toxic dark mist, bungalows sprouting from hedges like toadstools, impenetrable murk fogging the lens. The climax -- and it's really not climactic because Hawks' refuses to underline with emphasis anything in the picture -- takes place in an interior choked with strange spiny examples of chinoserie -- weird coral-like mementos vaguely glistening in the gloom. No house or room in the world ever looked like these immaculate interiors crowded with Chinese or equestrian rubbish -- it's like a Martian imagining how human beings might live. In fact, the whole film is like a Martian's vague supposition about how humans might live and act.