Mark,
Re your comment on Chandler's quote below:
"'If being in revolt against a corrupt society consitutes
being immature, then Philip Marlowe is extremely immature. If
seeing dirt where there is dirt constitutes an inadequate
social adjustment, then Philip Marlowe has inadequate social
adjustment. Of course Marlowe is a failure and he knows it.
He's a failure because he hasn't any money. A man who without
any physical handicaps cannot make a decent living is always
a failure and usually a moral failure. But a lot of very good
men have been failures because their particular talents did
not suit their time and place.'
"Loser, failure, hardly seem incompatible to me. In fact, my
thesaurus lists them both as synonyms for
'unsuccesful person.'"
You're really stretching things if you mean to suggest that
this constitutes agreement with Altman's assessment of
Marlowe as "a loser, not the fake winner Chandler made of
him, but a loser all the way."
Chandler stateS, in the first phrase, that Marlowe is a loser
if, and only if, "revolt against a corrupt socety constitutes
being immature."
Clearly, though, Chander does NOT think that resisting
corruption is immature. Further, as he makes clear, Marlowe
is a "failure" in the financial sense by delibarate choice,
by his own stubborn insistence on living life on his own
terms.
Consequently, he is NOT a failure in Chandler's eyes, but
someone to be admired, someone, perhaps living in a time he's
not really fit for, but still living by his own code and his
own inviolable sense of right and wrong.
That's not the way he was depicted in Altman's film.
JIM DOHERTY
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