Author: seanmoran

Starting on the first day of class when I did not even know how to pronounce the word “noir,” I feel like this course has continually challenged me in exactly the manner that I had hoped for when I signed up for it. In the first place, it has exposed me to literature that I am certain I would have not come across in any other class that is offered here at Notre Dame. While I have appreciated the very classical education that the English degree here has given me, there is no doubt in my mind that it is important to expand beyond the typical American and English literary canon. This class, as one that was listed as non-American and non-English literature, certainly gave me a good sense for exactly why it is important to expand beyond the aforementioned canon; the rich, if unorthodox, literature that I have been introduced to in this class will stick with me (and stick out in my mind for years to come when I think about my English degree) because of its difference from almost everything else I have read for school and for personal enjoyment. The books felt distinctly modern (even the oldest books that we read are comparatively modern) and often distinctly American.

The city culture that we read about with shady figures everywhere and things happening in the shadows all the time is something that has always been familiar to me, but never in a literary context. Moving from seeing these sort of news stories to seeing the same type of plots written in novel form has been an incredibly fun and rewarding experience. I think that when we read a news story we do so with a much different eye than we do when we read a work of fiction – even when that work of fiction directly reflects reality. As a result, I have become much more aware of the types of motivations and incentives that go into some of the personal stories and news stories that I have grown accustomed to. In this way, the fiction of noir – and specifically the black noir that this course has focused on – has paradoxically given me a better sense of reality, especially in the context of African-American city life. Many of my posts have reflected this personal experience that I have since I spent many of my formative years in Brooklyn (a setting that I believe is ripe for a great noir novel!), and how the characters in the book are identifiable to me by their backgrounds, opinions, or motivations. In fact, as this course went on and the books got more modern and less shackled by wanting to fit into the typical hardboiled detective genre associated with noir, the books became easier to read. I know that many of my classmates perhaps felt as if the material became harder to engage with, but I think that there is something much more familiar about what we read in the second half of the course than there is with someone like Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. I do not know a single private detective, and I have never even heard of one similar to Sam Spade. For better or for worse I know plenty of people gripped by addiction, poverty, and a desire for a better life that leads them to make questionable decisions. Again, seeing these types of characters in fictional works has given me a whole new perspective on the same sort of people in the real world.

As a final note on the course, and more specifically the blog posts, I was very satisfied with the structure of the weekly assignments. The open-ended nature of the blog posts (and the final paper) have given me the opportunity to engage with the parts of the text that I find most intriguing. While this approach by a professor can be double-edged (since sometimes students struggling to grasp material want nothing more than some prompting questions or ideas), I find it to be incredibly useful at this level of my academic journey. Being that I am a senior, I appreciate being trusted to engage with the text appropriately and in a constructive manner, which I felt like I was in this course.

For my paper I am going to be writing about the interaction of labels that are traditionally ascribed to people in the United States. In particular, I have chosen to focus on the labeled race and class of the characters in some of the books that we have read this semester. Of course, most of the characters that we have read this semester are considered black, so my paper will focus on the difference in experience for the “poor” and the “rich” black characters that we have read. For that reason, Hugh from The Expendable Man is going to be a pivotal character for me as he is really the only upper class black man that we get to know well in our books. Moreover, he is written by a white woman, which as we discussed can complicate whether or not the experience of the character can be considered even remotely authentic.

As I have begun to draft my paper, I think this has been the biggest point of consternation: how applicable are the experience of Hugh to that of upper class black men? How about King David’s experience for the poor black man? While my original thesis was that I would widely apply their experiences to the black experience, I have realized that this is mistaken, and that instead it is best to analyze the chosen characters’ experiences to determine what part of the upper or lower class black experience might be like while acknowledging that no character from a fantasy novel can perfectly encapsulate it. Essentially, the labels that I refer to in the title are too nondescript, yet in America we often feel like we know everything we need to know about that person when we know their race, class, and gender.

A final point that I have thought about as I am writing my drafts is that I do not feel that I have had the opportunity to consider the third label that I mentioned above: gender. By the nature of noir, women are certainly not given center stage, and it makes it difficult to compare the women to the men because they simply serve different roles in the genre. I briefly considered trying to do it, but it feels as if I would then be comparing apples to oranges because the fictional characters are not meant to serve the same roles within the novels; with such established roles in noir, it seems useless to simply explain a well-known paradigm.

In class on Wednesday part of our discussion focused on the unique setting in Blanche on the Lam that is unlike any we have encountered in this class before. Farleigh, North Carolina is described as a rural town that is even less of a city than place like Durham or Chapel Hill which are said to at least have academics. Adding to the nuance about why such a setting may have been chosen by the author, Blanche is said to have spent time living in New York City, from where she moved back to Farleigh. As a black woman, the conventional thought from an outsider’s perspective would be that she would do better in the large city than the rural southern town, the likes of which are often perceived to be “behind the times” allowing for the legacy of southern slavery to live on in discreet but signifiant ways.

Interestingly, Blanche is said to have comparatively thrived in New York City economically speaking. The city provided more opportunity for her to hold down a job that paid well, and had opportunities for advancement. However, the good of the city seems to have been outweighed by the downsides because she moved her and her two children back to Farleigh after they were approached by a man in a van promising Run-DMC music for them. In comparison, the troubles she faces in Farleigh appear much greater. She is not nearly as economically secure by her own admission, and she faces the more imminent threat of overt racism in the rural area; even if it was not necessarily a more historically racist area, she cannot blend in nearly as well as she would be able to do in a crowded and diverse city. Such an issue is highlighted as she flees the courthouse – she describes wanting to walk at just the right pace so as not to stand out as a black man or woman would if they were running in that area. To think that someone had this sort of concern in America in the 1990’s (and perhaps still has the same concerns in many parts today) is terribly sad, and makes the reader wonder what motivated the move back to Farleigh.

As I said in class, and have thought about since, I truly believe it comes down to familiarity with the worst of what each setting has to offer. As awful as some of the things that Blanche has to face as a black woman in the south, she at least knows what they are. When someone approaches her children offering Run-DMC music from a sketchy van, she is shocked mostly at the unfamiliarity of the relatively normal incident. While I am not sure that this will play into the rest of the reading, I think it is an interesting thing to note about humans in general that we are willing to deal with objectively worse situations because we are familiar with the pitfalls they have. In this way, I think we can be more tolerant of people’s decisions that we believe to be poor from the outside. Change is not easy, and familiarity (even with the worst of situations) will cause people to make seemingly irrational choices.

Reading the selections from Kinohi Nishikawa’s Street Players along with our last two novels has been an interesting supplement as it has given us a non-fiction context in which these (at least somewhat) fictional books were published. Although I have not read the entire book, it seems to me that Nishikawa felt that it was not until Goines that black authors were able to truly thrive as they were. Iceberg Slim, Nishikawa argues, was limited by his white-owned publishing company that only allowed him to get out stories that they felt like would sell to a white audience. As a result, Slim was not freely writing, and instead looked mostly to please editors that were white (and, importantly, only interested in selling to a white audience). Using Slim as inspiration, however, other educated black writers were able to eventually liberate their writing so that it could be by black people, for black people, and about black people instead of by black people but for white people. As Nishikawa says, Donald Goines was one of the first authors to achieve this jump from black sleaze to black pulp fiction.

What I would like to argue in this post is that while the sort of story that came from this movement may have its roots in the late 1960s, the same sort of stories can be written today with similar themes, motives, and plots. Never Die Alone draws a lot on what we know to be the typical male motivations within noir. That is, King David, Moon, and Mike – like most other male main characters in other books we have read – are motivated by the attainment of money, power, and respect. The pursuit of these things drives the novel and its plot forward from start to finish. It is money that pulls King David to California and money that has Moon send for King David (ultimately resulting in his death). It is the desire for power (and money) that causes King David to manipulate women into becoming hopelessly addicted to heroin, and it is the desire for power that causes the extremely sad string of shootings leading to at least six deaths. As for respect, we see King David treat his second California lover much more harshly than his first because of her lack of respect – he cites her spitting in his face when he offered to have her live with him as his motive for killing her. While these examples are complicated and money, power, and respect do not fully explain anything, it seems clear to me that these three elements are always in play in the novel. In class, it seemed that we were undecided whether or not such motives were still omnipresent within men, or if we have moved beyond the typical gender stereotypes allowing men to no longer have to display such characteristics as those that led to the violence in Never Die Alone (I am not sure if this is exactly the opposite position as the one I am taking, but it seems to me that it is something like that).

Personally, I believe that the former is true – the motives of money, power, and respect are still the principal driving factors among men, and I think that this is especially true in a place like New York City. Although we are 50 years removed from the social environment in which Goines wrote Never Die Alone, it takes a hardly thorough Google search to discover instances of recent shootouts in New York City just like the one described in his book. Moreover, if the motives get uncovered, it is so often related to the pursuit of money, power, respect, or a combination of the three. While this rings true in so many neighborhoods of New York City, it is even more prevalent in the areas full of projects similar to the one described in Never Die Alone where Paul lives (which in many areas are still predominately African-American, as the building was in the book). It is abundantly clear to me that impoverished communities are more susceptible to this sort of violence, and I believe that it has a lot to do with the men in those communities lacking the three things that I discussed before: they have no money, no power (often because of their lack of money), and no respect from anyone. These men, then, direct their efforts towards obtaining all three, and what often results is tragic violence. As someone that lived in Brooklyn myself, I cannot remember a time in my life where I was not acutely aware of this dynamic. Although I was fortunate enough not to live in the projects, I lived in an area that very much operated in a “if you’re from here, stay here; if you’re not from here, don’t come here” attitude, as much of New York City does. Again going back to the three motivating factors I have argued for, it is so often perceived as somehow disrespectful if you go into someone else’s neighborhood and try to do something as simple as play in a park there. While perhaps this analysis is not so much literary or statistical as it is anecdotal, I am certain that numbers would support what I am saying if such numbers existed. For this reason, I think that Never Die Alone is as much a tale for 2022 as it was for 1970 whether it was written by a black man from Manhattan, a Latino man from the Bronx, or a white man from Brooklyn. The story unfortunately remains the same in many parts of New York for many people of all races and religions.

As our class has made the full transition away from the more classical noir novels involving some form of mystery to be uncovered by the reader, often alongside a detective main character, I have done my best to come up with an expanded idea of noir, and a fresh perspective on the value of one person’s life story of itself. With both of these goals in mind I have begun to come to what I believe is a fuller understanding of the general thesis for this course itself, and of what it means for a story to be told simply for the sake of the story itself. After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that both of these aspects of my thought process are intertwined. That is, I think that the idea for this course and the book list rely heavily on the fact that one’s life story, of itself, has value and can pick up on thematic points that are often purposefully and skillfully made opaque by pure fiction writers. Take, for example, the work of Dashiell Hammett; Hammett was a writer whose fiction had a clear plot line with thematic underpinnings that are generally only hinted at a few of which are that there is a coded gay character (perhaps two) and that there are foreigners at work in the novel often driving the most nefarious aspects of the story. Hammett does not explicitly discuss homosexuality, but perhaps there is insight to be gained from how the likely homosexual character is described and treated in the book. On this account, there can be multiple interpretations for said character since, first of all, his homosexuality is not explicitly mentioned, and, second of all, different readers may focus on different aspects of his character in relation to his homosexuality. Furthermore, with the characters who all have foreign names and come from different places, like Bridget O’Shaughnessy, the reader is left to decide for themselves what Hammett may be trying to say about foreigners in general. The point here is that we have grown accustomed to literature showing and not telling, lending itself to myriad interpretations that foster discussion and debate.

A novel like Trick Baby, in contrast, does a lot of showing and telling. Picking up on the common thread of homosexuality, we see very clearly in Chapter 10 the topic discussed and argued about. There is no coding, there is no opacity. The text is see-through and it is jarring for readers (at least for me as a reader) because it almost feels as if our job has been done for us. At first glance, if there is no interpreting for the reader to do, it feels as if there is there anything at all for us to do. It was at this seeming dead end, though, that I began to realize something that I know to be true outside of formal English classes – there is inherent value in a life story. Especially when the story revolves around someone as lowly as White Folks is, the reader’s job becomes less about interpreting and more about simply learning from the story. Perhaps different people will connect with different parts of the memoir-like story that White Folks gives, but nonetheless we can use our gut reactions to his story to learn something about ourselves and the nature of the story. For example, when White Folks describes the altercation between Midge and Blue over her homosexuality, many modern readers are perhaps repulsed at Blue’s words and feel sympathy for Midge. This simple reaction to the story on the part of a reader helps us realize many things, among which are that not everyone’s views are like our own, not everyone’s experiences are like our own, and perhaps that sometimes people who end up in tough situations end up there by no fault of their own. It may be the case that a reader already recognized all of these things, but I am sure that they would still garner something out of listening to another person’s story.

As for the second part of what I discussed earlier regarding how noir relates to the sort of memoir that we get in Trick Baby, I think that it was summed up well in the syllabus: “We shall investigate how the noir genre is altered when “noirs” are the subjects and the authors.” For me, this line gave me the most insight into how this book made it into the book list. While there is no mystery present in the book necessarily, there is darkness, moral ambiguity, and cynicism that is rampant in White Folks’s own life. White Folks himself, then, along with his life story becomes the noir. White Folks’s existence is in the darkness – through no fault of his own he occupies a space of darkness in the world. Such a character is about as classically noir as it can get, but because I am more used to genres being present only in the context of the entirety of the text rather than centralized in a single character through his life’s story, I did not initially understand how this novel was particularly noir. Now, though, having combined the insight of the inherent value in one’s own life story with the idea of noir being the subject/character himself, I feel like I have a firm understanding of the book and how best to read it.

The noir genre calls explicitly for a departure from what Christian teaching deems “right” and moral. By their nature, noir works of fiction live in a world that Christianity does not exist, so when it ends up in a book or film, the contrast between the two worlds should be examined. In both Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and the portion of Trick Baby that we read for Wednesday’s class, Christianity makes an appearance.

A notable similarity between Christianity’s role in Sweet Sweetback and Trick Baby is how they play a role in familiarizing the audience with the otherwise unrecognizable world of the margins. We have constantly hearkened back to this concept of the margins as at least partially defining noir. The reality of that part of society, though, is that it is known by relatively few. In a way, the foreign nature of it is part of the reason for the genres success – the audience is taken into a world that does not have the same rules and codes as they are used to. The appearance of Christianity brings the audience back towards a more familiar world. When Sweetback ends up back at a church, for example, the audience understands the setting better than when he visits the safe house of the biker gang or when he is in the brothel as a boy. Similarly, when Blue and White Folks encounter the man yelling about Jesus Christ, the audience meets their first familiar character. That is, people are generally more familiar with someone preaching and yelling about Jesus than they are with jewelry scammers.

An interesting point of contrast between both instances is how the preeminent Christian of each story treats the main character. In the case of Sweetback, he is turned away by the pastor who is worried that harboring the fugitive will get his parish and its rehab center shut down. Sweetback’s reception is one of unqualified rejection. Blue and White Folks are welcomed into the home of the Christian man though. Such obviously different receptions of criminals on the part of Christians appearing in these stories is certainly interesting because it makes one consider whether this perhaps sheds light on a difference of opinion on Christianity between the authors or if it is simply a narrative choice in each case that the authors felt was best for their respective stories. Personally, I believe it is the former, and I think that this is unfortunate because I think it points toward a larger view of Christianity that has taken hold of America in the last century. Sweetback’s rejection at the Church, if an intentional critique of churches by the author, indicates the rejection that the author believed someone like Sweetback would most likely receive. Such a belief stems from the natural imperfection of humanity that many call “hypocrisy” on the part of Christians because they wonder how could someone who claims to follow Christ reject someone in need like Sweetback. The Gospels make it clear that Jesus draws sinners and the poor close to him – he invites those who are weary to find rest in him.

While it is undeniably true that the living church on Earth falls short of this calling constantly, I think it is unfortunate that this is often used as an indictment on the church as a whole. Rather than allowing for the imperfection of the humans within Christianity, the attitude today seems to be something akin to throwing out the baby with the bath water. An obvious modern example is the sexual abuse scandal within Catholicism. Many have reacted to this scandal by writing off the Catholic Church as fully evil and without any merit. In reality, we are experiencing the imperfection of humanity as stewards of the faith that Christ left. The idea of Christianity as bearing no good fruit whatsoever seems, to me, to be the approach that the writer/director of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song takes. While this may well be his lived experience, I remain hopeful that faith can make a comeback despite the imperfections of those who profess it, but do not live it.

In America we generally divide ourselves along two very specific lines. That is, we traditionally group ourselves up by class and race/ethnicity. If you are poor and black, for example, you will feel like you share almost no common experiences with someone who is rich and white. This is easy for us to understand as these two people would have no common ground along the two great American divisors, as I call them. The question arises, then, what about when two people share one of these things in common? Which divisor holds more weight – class or race/ethnicity? Does a rich black person have more in common with a poor black person or a rich white person? While the question may seem tasteless, I think that it is exactly what Dorothy B. Hughes is exploring in her novel The Expendable Man.

As we discussed in class, the entire purpose of this class is to take the classical racial and moral ambiguity of noir and thrust it on to the main stage. By construction, this means that the books we read will have race playing a major role in them. In If He Hollers Let Him Go, race was so central to the plot that it would be impossible to imagine any similar story without it, and while class was part of the story, it was not the main operator. Hughes, however, brings class much more in focus alongside race. Simply from a chronological standpoint, the book immediately makes clear what the class of Hugh Denismore is and how it contrasts to the class of Iris Croom (aka Bonnie Lee Crumb). While potential signals are given for what race each belongs to, nothing explicit is mentioned until the plot has already gotten well underway. Such an order of operations seems absolutely deliberate, and I believe that it may signal Hughes’s belief that class is a larger divisor in America than race is.

Whether someone is apt to agree with this assessment is largely based on personal experience, and writing in the 1960s would certainly not lend itself to the idea that class mattered more than race. With that said, I think that today in America (at least in the area that I know best) class really does play a bigger role in dividing us than race does. While there is no question that this is a debatable claim, I am interested to see how both aspects of American life play out in this book and the books moving forward. I think I would be very interested in writing about this for my larger paper towards the end of the semester.

I was recently rereading the syllabus as I was checking the reading schedule and noticed something in the course description that has a new meaning to me after reading three novels in this class. It is said that we will look at “how the noir genre is altered when “noirs” are the subjects and the authors.” This helped me put into words the feeling that I was getting when reading If He Hollers Let Him Go in the context of our noir-focused class.

In reading this novel, I was unable to understand how it was that this might fit into noir as neatly as the previous two did. It was not simply the lack of a detective – which I realize does not define noir – that threw me off and challenged me to find links between this novel and the previous two. The aspects of noir that we talked about as the main characters would descend into darkness and operate on the margins of society did not seem to be operating in Himes’s novel.

Reading the description on the syllabus about the rationale for the inclusion of certain books, I have gained a new appreciation for how this book is noir. I think that Bob and Himes are both individually noir. First of all, Himes wrote this novel while in jail. As a convicted criminal, he clearly operated on the margin of society even if that’s not actually how he grew up. Likewise, Bob is a marginalized figure who, while he does not descend into darkness, lives in darkness nonetheless.

Since focusing on the noir within the characters themselves and the author who wrote the characters, I have been able to better understand how this book fits into the larger curriculum of the course. That is not to say that there is no more overarching feeling of noir from the book, but I think this new perspective has given be a different angle from which I can investigate noir as a whole.

Paranoia has two definitions in the dictionary. The first deals with the type of paranoia that is classified as a “mental illness” in which a sufferer experiences delusions of persecution. The second definition describes paranoia as a tendency, rather than a mental illness, of someone toward excessive distrust of others. During class this week, the question about whether our narrator, Ben, in Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go is paranoid. Judging by both definitions that have been put forth above, I believe it to be the case that he is not portrayed as paranoid, at least when it comes to white people, in the text.

First of all, I think it is important to establish the reason for why I am discussing his paranoia with respect to white people rather than another thing or group of people. Up to this point in the story, Ben’s negative experiences have been almost exclusively in his interactions with white people. One notable exception is the conversation that he has with Alice’s mother, Mrs. Harrison. Alice and Mrs. Harrison are both black, but as Ella Mae points out, Alice is the “whitest coloured girl [Ben] could find.” Beyond Alice’s whiteness, her mother can be described as, at the very least, a white apologist. As a rich woman with a $3,000 carpet (which today is close to $60,000), Mrs. Harrison more closely resembles white people of her day than most black people. Most importantly, Mrs. Harrison repeatedly blames black people for their own mistreatment from white people. Her rationalization of the Los Angeles racism of the day comes across as severely out of touch with reality. This naturally rubs Ben the wrong way and represents the only significant negative experience that he has with non-white people thus far.

Since race, up to this point, has been the main driver of conflict in the novel then, it makes sense to consider the white people as the main object of Ben’s potential paranoia. In order to dispel the notion of Ben’s paranoia, I will focus in on two scenes in which he has interactions with white people. The first scene to focus on is Ben’s gambling session with the white men – one of whom knocks Ben out and becomes the object of his murderous fantasy. In this scene, Ben is shooting dice and is running very well to the point that he has earned over $30. A blonde white man, infuriated by Ben’s perceived luck, resolves to “cool” him, which turns out to be his way of saying that he will knock Ben out. The important part of this scene for my purposes, though, is Ben’s actions before getting assaulted. After winning several times, a paranoid narrator would almost certainly reveal his internal fear to the reader, and probably display it through their actions as well. Ben, however, shows no fear. When someone yells out that the game is invalid because the last roll was determined by reading “cocked dice,” Ben responds forcefully. He says that he will not give away a “goddamned thing.” Doubling down, he continues, “I made my goddamned eleven and now I’m gonna take my goddamned money.” This, as far as I am concerned, is not the response of a paranoid black man that is scared of the white people he is surrounded by. Perhaps it can be argued that he is paranoid in this scene, but is so fed up with the day that he has had that he digs his heels in and decides not to back down this one time, but I believe that the next scene serves to further dispel the narrative of his paranoia.

The second important scene to discuss is when he is riding in the car with the two white men – one from San Francisco and the other from Memphis. In this scene, not only does he have a civil conversation with the two men, he actually reveals that he genuinely likes them. This scene, coming chronologically after he is knocked out, demoted, and belittled by white people, would be a narrative impossibility if Ben was already paranoid. Ben wonders when “white people started getting white.” He is grasping with the reality that you can look at two white people from the same place, and end up with one who carries his whiteness like a “loaded stick” and one who carries his whiteness “as if he didn’t have anything to do with it.” Such a cerebral observation by Ben, I am arguing that this absolutely dispels the argument that he is paranoid at this point in the book.

A black narrator paranoid about white people does not react in the ways that Ben did when confronted with the two previously discussed scenarios. As the story moves forward, I will keep a close eye on whether or not evidence of paranoia begins to surface, or if Ben remains simply cynical (but not paranoid) about white people.

In my personal experience, nostalgia does not revolve around “better” times compared to the present as much as it revolves around more familiar times than the present. An obvious example from my life is the commonly reported nostalgia for the days during the COVID lockdowns. I have seen several articles and social media posts discussing how people find themselves yearning for the time when they were in their isolated routine at home during 2020. While very few people would attempt to make the argument that the COVID lockdown represented a better period than we are currently in, the desire to be back in that time remains. Why? I think it revolves around the certainty with which we view that time through the lens of the present. In other words, while we definitely do not know what today or tomorrow holds for us, we know positively what those days held for us during COVID lockdowns because we have the added benefit of those days having already been completed. Therefore, the nostalgia that we feel for the past is really just a desire to be in a familiar situation, even if that situation is objectively worse than our current situation.

In Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (and the 1944 movie adaptation Murder, My Sweet) the audience is thrown into a world in which nostalgia is a driving force for the actions of several central characters. First of all, the opening scene of the book sees an ex-convict, Moose Malloy, searching for his girlfriend who he had been dating eight years ago before he went to jail. It is apparent that Malloy is looking to rekindle what he had in the past, before his jail time. While this is a less subtle form of nostalgia driving the plot, it is still worth mentioning. Beyond Malloy’s search for Velma, our narrator, Philip Marlowe, fills the first chapter with nostalgic language. Marlowe tells the reader in the opening line that he is on “one of those mixed blocks” on Central Avenue in LA that is “not yet all Negro.” Describing a neighborhood in such a manner screams nostalgia – “not yet all Negro.” There are many ways to communicate the same message about a demographically changing neighborhood, but Marlowe chooses a communication method that seems to contain a sense of disappointment at the new/yearning for the old. The establishment into which Marlowe goes is now owned by a black owner and filled with black patrons – something that was not the case in years past. This change, and the subsequent murder that takes place within the changed establishment, work together to indicate that it used to be better when the bar was owned and frequented by white Americans. While film code of the 1940s kept this exact scene from making the final cut in the movie version of Chandler’s novel, directors instead played with the sign of the name of the bar, Florian’s, by blacking out the “L” and “A” in the name leaving a sign that read “Forin’s” to get a similar message across. It is a subtle detail, but important in the context of nostalgia and how it drives the plot of the story.

What I think is important to recognize, as stated earlier, is that this nostalgia is not really a desire for a “better” time. In Farewell, My Lovely, the new black owner and black customers likely have very similar life stories as the previous owner and customers that were white. After all, they live in the same neighborhood and are similarly situated from an economic perspective. What Marlowe and Malloy are yearning for, then, is simply a sense of familiarity. It’s not that the new owner or customers are fundamentally different people with regards to their lives than the old owner and customers were, but rather that Marlowe and Malloy do not know them. In fact, it could well be the case that life was worse in some ways for Marlowe and Malloy when they knew the owner and patrons well. In spite of this possibility, however, Marlowe and Malloy yearn for the past in the same way that many yearn for the days of the COVID lockdown. I think that we can learn from this to always consider fully what we desire from the past rather than ignorantly stating that it was better “back in our day.”