Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

This is a small thing, but it happened in a time when we were content to hang on the marvel of moving photography. In 1946, without undue fuss or fraud, the medium could record actual things and say, look, this happened. That’s what we were up for then, the appearance of a changing now. Even if it was just being on a street in Los Angeles and waiting for the afternoon to subside.  A man comes out of one bookstore and looks across the street at another: was this the heyday of American civilization? The street is moderately busy, passersby et cetera, and there is subdued Max Steiner music in the air, alert or wary, call it background italic, as if in 1946 such readiness was as detectable as smoke in the city‘s crisp fragrance. In a dark suit and a fedora, the man walks across the street. He seems headed for this other bookstore. But as he comes to the far sidewalk he passes a fire hydrant, and then, without a need in the world, but as if he has an inner life we’ll never know, he pats the top of the hydrant and moves on. If you want a glimpse of how good we were then, and what it meant to us — the movie thing — you could find worse than this. I forgot to tell you: there is a roll of thunder as the scene unwinds. It could be from out by Pasadena, but getting closer. No, this is not a disaster film about weather, or an earthquake splitting the street. But in a film called The Big Sleep you may wonder in the back of your mind whether some sleeper is stirring. It’s in that back of his mind that a man could think about thunder as he taps a hydrant on its head. Like touching wood for water. Or maybe the director Howard Hawks thought, Well, if this fellow is going to cross the street, we need a little extra to fill the time. Get me a dash of thunder, will you? Like putting mustard on a hotdog. But then perhaps the man in the fedora queried the director: Tell me, why am I crossing this street? And Hawks could have answered, Well, we need enough visual to make room for the thunder — and I like to watch you walk. We are attending to The Big Sleep, from the Raymond Chandler novel. This actor is Humphrey Bogart and he is playing Philip Marlowe, the private eye. Marlowe is on a case, so you’d assume that this street scene has to be significant — don’t we know that movies are loaded with all the big things about to happen? Isn’t it the rule on screen that every last thing is vital? The details are clues, and that’s how we are always the private eye. The process of a story is us finding something out, and over fifty years or so that became claustrophobic — as if every damn detail was weighing on us. The visual is so single-minded as a construct. It can’t breathe without insisting on focus and action. No one on a film set ever called out, “Inaction!” And yet there were listless streets in Los Angeles, or anywhere, where not much was happening. Certainly not enough for a movie. Think of it as life. And that’s a loveliness, like Mrs Dalloway saying to herself, “What a lark! What a plunge!” as she sets out walking on that summer morning in London to buy the flowers herself. That is a lyrical if unimportant moment, so exciting yet so ordinary, and it’s the kind of thing that is hard to get on film. Oh, the grind of all that relentless purpose! Making sure everything is underlined. When another wonder in photography is how it can be open to the light, to chance, to just the persistence of vision. Open like a window on a good morning. If you watched The Big Sleep over the years, you saw that the scene coming up at the Acme bookstore is blissfully unnecessary. That is curious, since it is among the most delectable scenes ever managed, even in the work of Howard Hawks, who loved to be casual yet provocative at the same time. It’s a good thing this is a classic, because it would never get made now: two bookstores on one block, and flirtation for its own sake? What happens is that Marlowe goes into the Acme bookstore (it is empty except for a young woman who works there – she has “the look of an intelligent Jewess” in Chandler’s novel). He talks to her; he impresses her to take off her spectacles and let down her hair (not in the novel). She knows her books and teaches Marlowe that the bookstore across the street is a sham. Not that that matters; we already knew that its owner was a crook. But this woman (she has no name or story, apart from her pliancy and letting her hair down) is persuaded to put up the “Closed” sign, find a bottle, and let the thunderstorm that was coming pass away. We have to imagine what happens next (that’s where the Code was terrific), but this may be disconcerting now because the film takes it for granted that she is smitten and just a lark and a plunge in male fantasy. Most of this is Hawks, not Chandler.  I don’t mean to forgive the scene. I can’t rule out the possibility that it exists because Hawks had found this young actress, Dorothy Malone, and wanted to have something for her to do, some flowers they could sniff together. But I’m not shocked by it. I’m looking at it to reinhabit the miracle of movie things that hardly need to happen, and the radiance of the nest-like places where they occur. You see, it’s not just that the medium is in a cul-de-sac now, where it cannot condone