Pools of Darkness: Lady in the Lake and the Eyes of Philip Marlowe

Detours, episode 15
Pools of Darkness: Lady in the Lake and the Eyes of Philip Marlowe
Stephen Broomer, November 29, 2024

In the wake of the massive success of The Big Sleep - first as a novel, then as a film - Raymond Chandler became the dean of American hardboiled fiction. In 1947, Robert Montgomery set about adapting another of Chandler’s Marlowe novels, The Lady in the Lake, and in doing so pursued a form that seemed, hypothetically, to suit the presentational mode of Chandler’s writing. As the Marlowe novels were written in the first-person, in a serpent’s tongue of cutting insight, Montgomery would use a subjective camera, such that the audience, like the reader, became a passenger in Marlowe’s consciousness. 

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer considers the subjective camera in Lady in the Lake in relation to naturalism and stylization, and the position of the audience (or passenger). The eyes of Philip Marlowe are imperfect vehicles for truth, for the world of Chandler’s novels is one of machined distrust and deception, straining the limits of the observable and the verifiable, a romantic vision that does not merely enter the eyes, but is projected back from them, casting shadows and doubt. There, even the pictures lie.

SCRIPT:

In The Big Sleep, Philip Marlowe observes of Vivian Regan, “her eyes were pools of darkness, much emptier than darkness.” Raymond Chandler’s private detective has a bruised soul, but more than that, he’s a creature of honed observation, accustomed to returning stares, looking into and judging the eyes of others. Chandler’s novels, presented in Marlowe’s voice, did much to advance the literary cause of a hardboiled wit. His predecessor Dashiell Hammett had funnelled his life experience, his background as a Pinkerton, the heat from the soles of his shoes into an outraged and outrageous, violent vision of America. By comparison, Chandler was an armchair fantasist writing to a form, one who combined the clever banter of H.L. Menken with the convoluted palace intrigue of Wilkie Collins. To offer all of this in the first person was to transport others into this shadow world, imitating the weary voice of eyes-that-have-seen.

In the wake of the massive success of The Big Sleep - first as a novel, then as a film - Chandler became the dean of American hardboiled fiction. In 1947, Robert Montgomery set about adapting another of Chandler’s Marlowe novels, The Lady in the Lake, and in doing so pursued a form that seemed, hypothetically, to suit the presentational mode of Chandler’s writing. As the Marlowe novels were written in the first-person, in a serpent’s tongue of cutting insight, Montgomery would use a subjective camera, such that the audience, like the reader, became a passenger in Marlowe’s consciousness. Montgomery, better known as an actor, was building an actor’s vehicle, one that resists the entrenched style of Hollywood, the ‘invisible editing’ approach to continuity that featured conventions—an interspersing of master shot, close-ups, two-shots, reverse shots—that made screen drama into an editor’s game. By making the film from Marlowe’s literal perspective, Montgomery was removing the traditional dynamism of cutting from the equation, offering instead occasions for actors to deliver monologues, in direct address, straight into the camera; he was also exploring a form that, he theorized, would offer the audience a greater sense of interactivity, allowing them to see as a detective sees, to smell through the bloodhound’s nose. These noble ambitions result in a film that is compromised by its novelty, hindered in its illusion, but which is unique in its commitment to the romantic, subjective voice of a hardboiled literature.

In the film’s opening scene, the character of Philip Marlowe addresses the camera directly, talking about his efforts to undertake a career transition, to abandon detective work in favour of dreaming up murders, to become a writer of detective stories. This is a strategy of the film, not inherited from Chandler’s novel, in which Marlowe is gruff, sarcastic, street-smart, decidedly uncreative. It is posed to explain the first-person perspective of the film: it draws character Marlowe, author Chandler, and actor-director Montgomery into a single agent of story. Marlowe is not the passive, world-weary detective, but a creative actor in his own right, less Philip Marlowe than Christopher Marlowe, an avatar of creative projection. Marlowe further burdens the character by addressing you, the second-person passenger who will be travelling through his eyes, you, the backseat sleuth, us, hunters of clues, who lend Montgomery’s program this unprecedented illusion of interactivity. Montgomery will occasionally appear in reflections, to remind the passenger that Marlowe is not just a disembodied voice, to remind them that they are occupying the eyes of a performed character. Likewise, Marlowe’s hands will reach out from behind the camera to gather clues, and his shadow will be staged to intrude on the scene, cast by intention in a harsh light.

A police detective, quickly identified as a conspirator, one of the thriller’s classic archetypes, a citizen above suspicion, continuously refers to Marlowe as ‘peeper’, a professional slur against the private eye. The nickname suits him: the private eye is a voyeur. Invited into the confidence of his vision, so is the audience. According to J.P. Telotte, “in reaching for a new way of seeing, the subjective narration of Lady in the Lake privileged the spectator in an unprecedented way … but it opened up a disturbing vision, revealing how much always remains unseen, particularly how much of the self persistently eludes our understanding, remaining elusively within the ‘blind space’ of life itself.” Indeed, the temporal demands of fiction remain an obstacle for the comprehensive truthfulness of subjective narration: such perspective may be simulated, but the story is still advanced through gaps and elision and summary, far from the boredom of empirical experience.

The subjective camera in fiction film declares its own construction and artificiality. The effect is often stiff and artificial: rather than feel that the audience occupies Marlowe, they instead occupy a phantom passing through the scene. Their attention is dragged towards speakers, distracted by pretty women, strayed to clues. The camera must, inevitably, be guided by a series of hosts, characters who offer expository information, speechifying except for when Marlowe interrupts to contradict them. The punchiness of the dialogue is, at times, greatly improved by the general disembodiment of Marlowe’s voice, allowing the camera itself to attack and interrupt these expositors. Despite all of this construction, a strange aspect of naturalism creeps into their performances: the long takes and lack of editorial intervention allows the cast an uninterrupted theatricality. They freely milk the histrionic emotions of the film. Emotion is a curious thing to consider in the midst of all of this technique. When Ms. Fromsett tells Marlowe that she “plans to slash the emotion right out of” his manuscript, there is an irony to the film’s own stiff theatrics. For all of its ambitions, the form of Lady in the Lake reveals the emotional shortcomings of Chandler’s novel, his fondness for convoluted motives and streams of names and details and red herrings; and the shortcomings of performances that are given under the duress of the film’s subjective conceit. Between ceaseless eye contact and histrionic delivery, the cast are given nowhere to hide; without the cut to shape and tighten the drama, the long takes of Lady in the Lake make it a highly accomplished, star-studded account of the novelty of dinner theatre. The drawbacks of simulating such a level of naturalism in a film culture that had not yet embraced overlapping dialogue is knowingly articulated, when Captain Kane, while hollering at Marlowe and talking on the phone, admits that he “can’t talk to two people at once.”

If it was Montgomery’s intention to prioritize the hardboiled grit of Raymond Chandler’s detective with his bleak and cynical world view, this stands in sharp contrast to the seasonal themes of the film, which suggest instead the social conciliations of the holidays, the quiet and peace of a White Christmas fantasy. This is announced in the cloying opening, as a choir rushes a medley of carols and the film’s titles are revealed on a series of Christmas cards, a punch thrown like the broken fourth wall of a curtain call. If anything, the use of Montgomery as an on-camera host, rather than merely a narrator, allows the film to cut some morbid corners, as when Marlowe’s inspection of the corpse in the lake is substituted with his telling of it, exposition to lead the viewer back into the next dramatic confrontation—with the living, if you can call that living.

Montgomery’s film is often, by sheer utility, lacking in dynamic form or visual interest, for example, when Marlowe makes a phone call and, staring downward, looks at this side table for thirty seconds… In moments like these, Lady in the Lake becomes a game of patience, desperate for visual rests, a setting for the voice of literature rather than a cinematic pursuit in itself. There remain within it a number of sequences that vindicate the subjective camera: Montgomery’s rare appearances in reflections and those gestures effected from behind the camera break the phantom vision of the camera and provoke us to consider the act of occupying a character, and in such moments, an actor’s vehicle becomes a universal fantasy of playing a part. Acts of sudden violence set the eye of the camera reeling, and in these moments, the potential of the project is revealed, to create a truly dynamic simulation of consciousness, cushioned, unfortunately, on the staid trajectory of dimestore fiction. The inhuman, artificial nature of the camera’s smooth movement contradicts its purpose, but gives the affair a haunting atmosphere, as when the camera unnervingly surveys an empty apartment, slowly revealed as a crime scene, lingering on clues presented by the hands of the host. In these rare moments, even the choral score affects a tone of menace, one that reinforces the effect of the subjective camera, its seamless, gliding aesthetic. It is not a subjective, ambulatory camera, but an omniscient construct, guided by a path, propelled by curiosity and revelation.

In its final act, Lady in the Lake becomes a strange gauntlet for the subjective camera, beginning with a car chase that balances a foreground of Marlowe’s hands on the wheel, the receding road, and a pursuing car in the rearview mirror. After the resulting crash, the camera follows the inebriated, concussed vision of Philip Marlowe as the composition shifts, from the gliding interrogations and expository digressions that had thus defined the eyes of Marlowe, to something more natural, less stylized, and equally artificial: on the run, Marlowe’s subjectivity assumes a more desperate tone. Stumbling and crawling away from a setup, his peril becomes the passenger’s. From here it is a short distance to the climax, and in its final scenes, Marlowe is more explicitly made a witness, as characters interact with one another instead of with him, as he becomes less a focal point. In this climax, Marlowe has become audience to the violence of Chandler’s fantasy. The suspects cannibalize each other. The choice of a subjective camera is, like the push towards docudrama that would occupy the film noir within a few short years, a dream that the distance between storytelling and lived experience can be bridged. But the eyes of Philip Marlowe are imperfect vehicles for truth, for the world of Raymond Chandler’s novels is one of machined distrust and deception, straining the limits of the observable and the verifiable, a romantic vision that does not merely enter the eyes, but is projected back from them, casting shadows and doubt. There, even the pictures lie.