Next up in the Amazon Prime list of what to watch came a film starring Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange. It is called “Marlowe” and it came out in 2022. Surely this is not some attempt to re-create Raymond Chandler’s character made famous by Humphrey Bogart in “The Big Sleep” and “The Maltese Falcon”?
Indeed it was. Recall that Ms. Lange starred in the remake of “The Postman Always Rings Twice” alongside Jack Nicholson, so her presence here was certainly reminiscent of a time.
Audiences who love the forgotten genre of film noir might have watched and waited for the other shoe to drop. When will we be hit with the expected nonsense of all 21st-century movies? It never happened. It was a straight-up re-creation of the entire ethos except in color rather than black and white.
Otherwise, it was all here: the chain-smoking, whiskey-swilling, and tough talk. The plot was new but oddly familiar: dangerous women, corrupt men, blackmail, underworld conspiracies, and a complicated plot that only our favorite private detective can unravel. Despite the R rating (probably because of the smoking!) the movie was not unsuitable for general audiences in any way. Also, there was not a hint of “woke” ideology.
Amazing.
Marlowe is a fascinating figure, burnt out, wizened, knowing, daring, impervious to all sexual advances, and somehow never killed despite often finding himself in harm’s way. Sure, he gets a bump on the head or drugged from time to time but always comes to just in time. It’s one thing that fascinates us about him. He lives an entirely public life, using his real name as he goes about his investigations. We are frightened of the danger in which he finds himself, but he is never scared.
I would count the movie a success, though, apparently, the critics hated it. I’m more interested in the meaning of the art form in general. It is a symbol of something more pervasive in the culture at large. It is about finding ways to put back together what is broken, and doing so through nostalgia, yes, but also grasping at something or anything that seems orderly, coherent, true, and maybe even beautiful.
Putting this thesis together requires knitting together many different threads among current trends. Among them: the restoration of standardized tests in university admissions, the surreptitious defunding of diversity, equity, and inclusion actions on campus, the new popularity of homeschooling and raw milk, the consumer blowback against woke corporations, the popular rejection of censorship on social media platforms, and even the new foundationalism in popular fashion (Armani is said to have told people who gathered for fashion week in Italy that men belong in dark suits, period).
Here’s the possibility that we are looking at: The past four years have revealed the end state of deconstructionism and postmodernism. No one much likes what we’ve become. Lacking clarity on the next stage of cultural, social, and economic development, we have nowhere to go but back in time in search of truth. It’s either that or forever suffer under the yoke of woke tyranny.
I’m writing this while listening to a mix of popular American music from the 1930s, thanks to a fancy streaming service that can create any ethos in your home instantly. So my bias is rather pronounced here. Still, we might be seeing something important going on here.
Consider this background on the relevant cultural history.
Do you remember a piece by the great American composer Aaron Copeland called “Appalachian Spring”? It’s a true classic and wonderfully exciting, first performed in 1944 (if you can believe it). Using a small orchestra with a piano, the piece brings to life the Shaker hymn called “Simple Gifts.” The piece is glorious and enduring, a genuine elaboration and beautification of an older tradition.
But there is a complication to the story of its birth. The piece was commissioned by the famed dance innovator Martha Graham, who is credited alongside Isadora Duncan with revolutionizing beyond the strict confines of traditional ballet. I happened to see “Appalachian Spring” performed with a restored film of the original choreography by Graham in which she performed the leading role. It was in black and white with strangely minimalist sets.
Here’s what is interesting. Graham’s choreography was engaging but also somewhat disorienting, taking apart classical ballet and presenting it in different ways. It was obvious to my untrained eye that the only way these dancers could have performed this was by being trained in the older tradition. In other words, the performance depended on the preservation of what came before.
In this sense, the choreography and the music seemed born of cross purposes: the music to develop and build, the dance to deconstruct and dismantle. Putting the two next to each other revealed the strange ambiguity of the culture moment: Are we here to create something more wonderful or merely to trash what used to exist? I’m not sure that modernism ever decided.
This was already in 1944. Every postwar trend seemed to follow in due course. Architecture became brutalist. Home decor scrapped moldings and adornments. The new excitement and dependency on technology (washers, TVs, cars in every garage) indicated the possibility that the old world was being swept away as we created a new one out of the brilliance and creativity of the new generation of intellectuals.
Over the decades in the second half of the 20th century, everything came to be reinvented. We took the accouterments out of architecture, the nutrition out of food, the harmony and melody out of music, the elegance out of fashion, the representation out of painting, the standards out of education, the craftsmanship out of furniture, the plots out of movies, and the inspiration and drama out of novels.
They even tried to invent religion without faith.
This was modernism as it came to be in the second half of the 20th century. It’s fun to tear up the pea patch. That’s what they did with every hope that something more wonderful would emerge. But did it? The record of achievements of post-modernism is spotty at best. The pea patch is a mess, but where is the new food that was supposed to take its place?
The lockdowns of 2020 were conceived of as a test of the greatness and brilliance of bureaucratic, digital, and pharmaceutical titans. It was supposed to be the Great Reset, the apotheosis of postmodernism. They would take over completely from the people, managing information, biology, public attention span, economic production, and politics, finally eliminating the last vestiges of popular government.
What have they created? Look around and you see vast destruction. We are left with nostalgia for what came before. More than that, we should be infused with a passion to rebuild what the intellectuals destroy.
It was charming in 1944 to watch Graham reinvent classical ballet for modern times. It’s not so charming to see today’s elites make such ghastly messes reinventing food, biology, energy, family, religion, education, social connection, gender, and constitutional government.
Where does all this end? With 3D goggles strapped to our heads as tech titans ding our credit cards as we pay up to avoid real life?
In the big picture, postmodern life has exposed modernism itself as millenarianism without an exit plan. We are left wondering—desperately trying to recall—what is orderly, fulfilling, beautiful, and true. We are awake now in ways we were not in the past. The only real port in this storm are the remnants of tradition and truth that we find only by looking hard and carefully curating our lives until this mess can be cleaned up.
As Chandler himself wrote in the voice of Marlowe: “They live over-strained lives in which far too much humanity is sacrificed to far too little art.”
