by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

Happy birthday to Robert Altman, who would’ve turned 99 today. There are too many angles to take on the director’s oeuvre—in and out of Hollywood; working for TV and the silver screen; flops and hits alike; pioneer work in the ensemble film, the revisionist western, neo-noir—that it’d be foolish to do a full survey.

And as we bear in mind that it’d be impossible to encapsulate Altman’s cinema, there still was a singular Something that while never quite catching, he nonetheless chased after. During a 1972 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, he expounds on a feeling of being in a still-unformed medium: “I think that when we started film we took it from theatre, literature, and we were an extension of another art form. And it’s still that way—it’s getting away from it—and I think that eventually somebody will make a film that is purely a film and the audience can respond to it as such.” Cavett balks at the idea of a film without, say, dialogue, before realizing his gaffe and carrying along. While being paid tribute by the BFI in 2001, Altman would say much the same: “we give awards for the best film and awards for the best soundtrack and one doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other. It’s a strange, bastardised type of artform and it draws on all this.”

Altman worked in a more explicitly abstract mode in the Bergman-inspired Images (1972) and Three Women (1977), films that are both well worth your time. But what excites me about those movies is the same thing that excites me about any Altman film, which is their stunning lucidity.

To be more specific, what excites me most about an Altman film is the use of zoom lenses which shifts the traditional narrative directionality of tension into one of examination. On multiple occasions the director has stated that sleeper hit The Player was filmed as “sort of an essay on the business that I’m in.” Calling a Hollywood film an essay might seem like an odd distinction to make, but it helps encapsulate a feeling that his films were always on their way out of the mode we call fiction. In that picture, Tim Robbins’ scumbag film exec gets to produce an in-universe The Player while his pregnant wife smiles from the verandah and his life wraps around itself. But what of that great escape? It’s one thing to comment on the artificial, compartmentalized, bastardised films of Hollywood; quite another to comment on even the idea of something better.

The Long Goodbye, as with many great films noir, builds off of a subtle, subversive plotlessness. Elliot Gould’s rendition of Philip Marlowe finds himself in a whodunnit, and while we may reach a definitive answer, the logic of events and investigation is a red herring. Everything that happens is for the sake of reinforcing an idea of loserdom—of losing and getting lost—while the actual investigation is initiated by Vilmos Zsigmond’s curious camerawork.

During the aforementioned BFI appearance, interviewer Geoff Andrews brings up Altman’s pre-film career as a dog tattooist—the director of M*A*S*H* et al can also boast to giving Harry S Truman’s dog a serial number. Andrews asks him, “do you regret having given that up for filmmaking?” To which Altman replies, “well ... they’re both about the same.” The same in terms of what? No matter how he meant the comment, I feel that Altman went about making movies the same way he went about tattooing dogs: nothing more than a signifier for preexisting material. Not to make the artistry sound ignoble; a subject like LA is so knotty, both physically and economically, that sometimes art really needs to be a big red dot reading “YOU ARE HERE.” Here in The Long Goodbye the frame is a little washed out; shadows are indistinct. Zsigmond exposed the film stock to varying degrees of light prior to shooting, and to a shockingly subtle effect. The object of any mystery is clarity, and as the camera pans and zooms freely it rubs a brass etching, a commemoration.

The film primarily oscillates between two locations: Marlowe’s apartment and Wade’s lakeside home, sheltered within a gated community; high and low, broke and rich, open and shut. Marlowe shares his floor with a women’s hippy commune. The spend their days stoned, doing topless yoga, making their own candles to pay the rent. Marlowe, 40’s anachronism, floats colloidal among the vestiges of counterculture. Contrasting the ad hoc community, Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden) is held hostage by a scam rehab centre. So-called “open” water is steely, cruel—the site of his eventual suicide. As this wet hell’s Cerberus sits a toll booth attendant, fond of his Hollywood impersonation repertoire. The stalwart idols of Marlowe’s heyday lingering in liminal space.

Marlowe, thrown in the interrogation room because he unwittingly chauffeured his friend Terry Lennox south after Terry did his wife in, starts wasting the cop’s time. Freshly printed, he dips his fingers into the ink once more, drags them across his face. “I’m here cause I’m gettin’ ready for the big game Saturday.” This is Gould’s widest ad-lib, a fragile round of locker-room talk—the cop thinks Marlowe’s got a “fag name” before he puts on the masculinist drag, then says he’s putting his makeup on, keeps going with the facepaint. “You got a banjo? I’ll do my Al Jolson.” He starts singing “Swanee” and he and the cop begin to agree that Jolson was “okay”—“Damn right he was.” All these retroactive ideals, they come with baggage. Some icons are best left buried. When one lingers too long on the fact that The Jazz Singer was America’s talkie debutant, the whole business begins to feel impure. Sometimes the camera begin a zoom and write a whole narrative adrift from our current hard-boiled purgatory: a maid walking stoically down the gated community’s back lane, her apron puffing in the wind; two dogs fucking then fighting in a Tijuana market. The Long Goodbye wades through wades through this mixed up, screwed up cacophony of lost time, same damn song playing on every radio, in the vain hope of straining that impurity out. Marlowe must be slowly pushed towards disillusionment at his own misplaced trust in Terry, and we all are abounding with narratives we need to grieve.

“So I think Marlowe’s dead,” Altman writes for Film Comment. “I think that was “the long goodbye.” I think it’s a goodbye to that genre—a genre that I don’t think is going to be acceptable any more.” This a year before Chinatown, mind you. Roger Wade and his wife Eileen are near the end of a tumultuous marriage by the time Marlowe passes through their lives, and the reality is that some disintegrations can only be seen from afar. “Why don’t you call your friend the Marlboro man in here and ask him a couple of questions?” Roger condescends to Eileen, trying to wrestle with the impotence of being a writer while facing thunderous void surrounding him, of being an alcoholic and a fool and a clown. “Ask him, Marlboro, ‘When was the last time you made love, in the lighthouse at Point Venus in Tahiti? Or out in the Lagoon?” These memories of his, posed rhetorically, form a mosaic too colourful for the California Sun.

The scene is shot partially through the bungalow window from the outside. From one angle, the frame is saturated with two perfectly clear scenes: one of the marital dispute, the other of Marlowe stomping through the wet sand to pass the time. As a superimposition, Marlowe fragments the picture, turns it sea green and becomes something of a dream himself, the sort of carefree spirit he will never live up to otherwise, and that only exists as a point of contrast in the first place. At this point, words are slurred, mumbled, or otherwise drowned by the noise outside. The image is becoming miasmic. Cinema never really had enough of its detectives, but Altman at least went from one thing to the next, because once you’ve seen things one way, you can’t just continue on like that.