by Alice Bolin
I was in a poisonous mood when I drove to West Hollywood, bought Raymond Chandler’s 1949 novel The Little Sister at Book Soup, and went to a Thai restaurant across Sunset to sullenly stare at its cover and eat noodles. In it I found private detective Philip Marlowe at his most bitchy and pessimistic. “I’m just sitting here because I have no place to go,” he tells a client. “I don’t want to work. I don’t want anything.”
Probably a majority of the appeal of Chandler’s novels revolves around Marlowe, a jaded and impossibly savvy outsider whose general disdain for women makes him irresistible to them. “What a way you have with the girls,” the beautiful movie star Marlowe is working for in The Little Sister says to him. “How the hell do you do it, wonderful? With doped cigarettes? It can’t be your clothes or your money or your personality.” How Marlowe does it is certainly a valid question. In the world of Chandler’s fiction, the answer mostly lies not with him but with the women: they are craven, sex-obsessed, and ambitious, qualities Marlowe has learned to expect and play to. I find this pattern fascinating: Chandler’s novels are so misogynistic that the resentments they betray veer back in on themselves, pointing toward a complex in Marlowe.
Marlowe’s ambivalent sexuality always becomes a mechanism of the novels’ plots: if he is attracted to a woman—whether she is beautiful or plain, seemingly worldly or innocent—it means she is troubled, hiding dark secrets, and quite probably amoral and dangerous. In The Little Sister, he is enlisted by a nerdy and prudish teenager from Manhattan, Kansas, named Orfamay Quest to track down her older brother. Marlowe finds her corny and uptight, and she can offer him only twenty dollars for his services, but he still takes the case. “I was just plain bored with doing nothing,” Marlowe says to explain why he agreed to work for her, but then he adds, “Perhaps it was the spring too. And something in her eyes that was much older than Manhattan, Kansas.”
Marlowe chases this glimmer of sex in Orfamay’s eyes, stealing a kiss from her along the way to discovering that she is involved with blackmailing her sister and murdering her brother. Heterosexual relationships are dangerous: one must balance the necessity of sex with the impossibility of trust. In fact, one of Marlowe’s only positive relationships in all of Chandler’s fiction is with a man, Terry Lennox, in The Long Goodbye. Like with his female paramours, Marlowe finds himself strangely drawn to Lennox, a war hero and alcoholic who has been accused of murdering his wife. Marlowe helps Lennox flee to Mexico and ends up going to jail for him. Although Marlowe has mixed feelings about the lengths he goes to protect Lennox, he is more purely devoted to him than to any of the women he is sexually involved with. At times Marlowe makes me think of Patricia Highsmith’s great sociopathic hero, Tom Ripley. But the connection between Ripley’s emotional problems and the horrors he is driven to commit is spelled out more plainly: it is closeted homosexuality pushed to pathology.
Of course, Chandler is also just participating in the noir genre’s greatest trope: the femme fatale. In detective stories, the femme fatale appears as seductive and seemingly helpless, when she is in fact self-serving, traitorous, and possibly bloodthirsty. It is a trope that reveals a deep fear of women and sex. There is the fact that many of these women are described as nymphomaniacs: for instance, the sex-crazed and deranged younger Sternwood daughter in The Big Sleep, and, in The Little Sister, the sultry, sinister film star Dolores Gonzales. “You always wear black?” Marlowe asks Gonzales. “But yes. It is more exciting when I take my clothes off,” she replies. “Do you have to talk like a whore?” he says. “I wear black because I am beautiful and wicked—and lost,” Gonzales eventually explains, in one of the more breathtakingly obvious descriptions of a femme fatale in all of literature.
Some femme fatales knowingly use their sexuality to get ahead. “I do not draw a very sharp line between business and sex,” Gonzales says in The Little Sister. “Sex is a net with which I catch fools.” But others are unconsciously, mysteriously driven to ruin and manipulate men, modern sirens enticing them to rocky shores. This is the case with Faye Greener in Nathanael West’s great Los Angeles novel The Day of the Locust. She is a shallow and amoral teenage actress who inspires every male character in the novel with a crazy, infuriating desire. “She lay stretched out on the divan with her arms and legs spread, as though welcoming a lover, and her lips were parted in a heavy, sullen smile,” West writes, describing a photograph Faye has given the book’s protagonist, Tod Hackett. “She was supposed to look inviting, but the invitation wasn’t to pleasure.”
The Day of the Locust is a deeply, almost hysterically misogynistic book. The men in it are desperate to physically control and punish Faye, purely because of the desire she elicits in them. This male paranoia in West’s and Chandler’s work does seem related to their vision of Los Angeles as alien territory ruled by no knowable order. The fact that women in Los Angeles could be deceitful, ambitious, and in control confirmed it as a kind of bizarro-world—and confirmed that any hero who braved its borders, no matter how many Los Angeles eccentrics surrounded him, was truly alone.
I was staying in Long Beach with my friend James and his brother, John, in their bachelor pad furnished only with two deck chairs, two air mattresses, a forty-two-inch flat-screen television, and an inflatable raft for a sofa. James and John were both railroad conductors, and they worked insane hours: they got called in to work in the middle of the night, and every trip, they would be gone for days at a time. I was sitting around their apartment alone one night when I came across The Big Lebowski in a pile of DVDs. I had somehow never seen it, so I put it on the big screen and settled in on the raft.
The movie’s slacker hero, the Dude, is drawn into a kidnapping case in which a millionaire with the Dude’s same name, Jeff Lebowski, asks him to track down his nymphomaniac (!) wife. As he unravels the mystery, he has encounters with various Hollywood weirdos. The Dude is a league bowler, unemployed, and terminally laid back, but just like Philip Marlowe, trouble finds him. In fact, I was struck by how much of The Big Lebowski was reminiscent of Chandler, an insight that, it turns out, is either pretty perceptive or totally obvious. In the second paragraph of the movie’s Wikipedia article, I learned that the Coen brothers had “wanted to do a Chandler kind of story—how it moves episodically, and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery, as well as having a hopelessly complex plot that’s ultimately unimportant.”
The Big Lebowski is infused with Western genre elements, like its mysterious cowboy narrator who waxes folksy at the beginning and end of the film and shows up twice at the bowling alley bar to order a sarsaparilla. The Dude’s nickname brilliantly recalls both the cowboys of the Old West and the stoners of the New West. Los Angeles has a strange dual relationship to the cowboy, given that cowboys were a real part of the history of Southern California and California is still an agricultural state, but Hollywood also created and propagated the John Wayne/Lone Ranger archetype. It’s the mess of reality and fantasy embodied by the buckaroos in The Day of the Locust, who live in real cowboy camps in the canyons surrounding L.A. but make a living by playing extras in Westerns.
It seems the Los Angeles of Chandler, West, and the Coen brothers still retains something of the frontier feeling that has defined the myth of the American West. It is dominated by settlers and transplants, prospectors trying to strike it rich, and the rules can always be rewritten. This is why the hero always finds himself interloping on ever-stranger pockets of the Los Angeles population: in Chandler, it’s movie stars, drug dealers, and gangsters. In The Day of the Locust, it’s cowboys, cockfighting midgets, old vaudeville clowns, and Hollywood madams. In The Big Lebowski, it’s millionaires, conceptual artists, German nihilists, and pornographers. These stories riff on what has always been sold as the American frontier’s most attractive and most terrifying quality: anything can happen.
West understood this mandate for reinvention when he said with tongue in cheek that he changed his name from Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein following Horace Greel
ey’s famous enjoinder, “Go West, young man.” But this potentiality also knocks our Los Angeles heroes perpetually off-balance, keening in astonishment and disgust at what God hath wrought. West describes Los Angeles’s manic architectural sensibilities in The Day of the Locust: “Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon.” Chandler, in his descriptions, moves beyond West’s exhaustion to disdain when he talks about “the luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.”
As I took the 405 from Long Beach to Carson to Hawthorne to Inglewood to Mar Vista to Culver City, then east on the 10 to Mid-City and downtown, doubling back on the 101 through Chinatown to Echo Park to Silver Lake to Koreatown to Hollywood to West Hollywood to Beverly Hills, I was impressed by the unnerving sense of a city that sprang up overnight and sprawled like an invasive species over the landscape. “There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights,” Marlowe says in The Little Sister. “Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.” Marlowe’s wry hopelessness is reminiscent of the “nihilists” in The Big Lebowski. The archetype isn’t called the lonesome cowboy for nothing.
On Labor Day, James, John, and I celebrated workers’ rights by spending the day at Redondo Beach. James wore his Railroad Workers United T-shirt, and John wore a shirt he bought at Disneyland with a picture of the villain Gaston from Beauty and the Beast looking in a mirror and text reading Relationship Status? Single. As the train conductors frolicked in the surf, I sat on the beach, taking pictures of myself with my phone and letting the sun bake me brick red. The air churned with a weird hot fog and kids dragged masses of sea plants from the water and piled them up on the sand. At one point a seagull took a shit on my shirt.
Didion, Los Angeles’s great scribe, insists that the city made her see narrative as a sentimental indulgence. It’s a symptom of L.A.’s disjointedness, its center that won’t hold, its lack of a meaningful focal point or thesis. This is what sends Marlowe, the Dude, and Tod Hackett spinning from one corner of the city to another, alone and driftless. And this is why the detective story, which of all genres provides the audience with a concrete resolution, in Los Angeles feels ironic, anathema: the plot is “ultimately unimportant.”
Watching the swimmers at Redondo Beach, I found the ocean played a trick of perspective: the hugeness of the water flattened horizontal distances, so everything—the beach and the surf and the tiny swimmers—hung vertically in the sky. The ocean also runs contrary to our desire for something comprehensive, for a solution. It is a network progressing mysteriously without a discernible center. It’s massive and it’s moving.
Los Angeles Diary
Lolita is a burlesque of the confessional mode, the literary diary.
—Alfred Appel Jr., in his introduction to The Annotated Lolita
My first roommate in Los Angeles was offering a room in an Echo Park bungalow/rapper crash pad. He was an indie hip-hop producer who is in his own way pretty famous. I’d wake up to find rappers on the couch, rappers on the living room floor, rappers in the shower or making grilled cheese in the microwave. One night a rapper called my name through the window when I was listening to Mariah Carey in my room. I screamed bloody murder. He was only wondering if I wanted to drink a beer with him on the porch.
One week my roommate and his girlfriend went to Humboldt County in Northern California to camp and cut marijuana. I enjoyed having the house to myself for maybe twelve hours, wandering around in my underwear and watching my roommate’s VHS tapes. Then J, a rapper, showed up. He had come from San Diego to spend a week mastering his new album. J was a funny, gentle weirdo with a Kramer haircut and a tattoo of Emiliano Zapata. “In San Diego they call me EPM,” he told me, “Epiphanies Per Minute.” One night when J was there, my poet friend in Nebraska texted me an audio file of a poem called “Drizzy.” I placed my phone on the kitchen table, and J and I gathered around it. “Why why why am I crying alone on my bed with Xbox Live home screen glow,” my friend read. “I am for everyone to smile bigger than any city they fell in love with after college.” J buried his head in his hands. “Let’s listen to it again,” he said. It was funny to see that the essence of twentysomething sorrow was no different between the stoner poets I met in the middle of nowhere and the stoner rappers I met in the middle of somewhere. This was my first indication that life in Los Angeles was odd but possible. A few days later, when my roommate came back from the wilderness, he told me that a rapper friend had just gotten into town from Chicago and he was going to stay in my room. I packed up my stuff and left on October 1.
When I drove into Hollywood for the first time that summer, I blasted “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus, the pop masterpiece about a girl leaving Nashville and arriving in L.A. “with a dream and my cardigan.” “Look to my right, and I see the Hollywood sign,” she sings, and I looked out my window, and there it was. This was exactly what pop music was invented for: to score pure moments, like a girl’s first swing down the 101 onto Hollywood Boulevard. A few months later I was on a crowded city bus riding to work before dawn listening to Cyrus’s album Bangerz, shortly after the former child star sparked a moment of mild pop culture delirium by twerking on Robin Thicke at the VMAs. “I’ll show you overexposed,” she seemed to say with her “Wrecking Ball” video, where she swung around naked on, yes, a wrecking ball.
The contrast here was not lost on me. But the break between Cyrus’s Hannah Montana years and her new adult persona on Bangerz was not as stark as it appeared. To begin with, Cyrus has always been an expert at trolling her public, saying at the time that “Party in the USA” came out that she had nothing to do with the release of the song and had not even wanted it on her album. Despite what the song’s chorus says—and what would seem to be nearly impossible considering her years in the music industry—she claimed in 2009 that she had never heard a Jay-Z song. And on Bangerz she seeks transparently to succeed her queen, Britney Spears, who even as a teen star was not that innocent.
Los Angeles was the perfect place for me to probe pop contradictions, not least because I was spending hours of my day in the car and on the bus, where, I thought wickedly, no one could even guess I was listening to “. . . Baby One More Time.” That fall I wrote about new albums by Lorde and Cyrus. I wrote a love letter to Spears. Pop starlets had always been my favorites, but now they were the angels at my side, accompanying me as I made my bewildering way through the city. From drama queens like Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift to pop machines like Rihanna and Katy Perry, I believed many of my Top 40 sisters spoke about my situation in sad, secret ways. I had no boyfriend and a terrible job and I kept losing my wallet, so I ordered a new driver’s license and then accidentally threw it in the trash, and I was sure, for some reason, that these women who had achieved unthinkable success as teenagers and were worshipped for their perfect beauty would understand. It was similar, I guess, to why people buy candles with pictures of saints on them. I wrote about pop stars in secret ways, too, taking comfort that no one would find me in the brisk music reviews I compulsively wrote.
That fall, defeated by a day of serving expensive sandwiches to television executives, I was driving on Union Street leaving downtown L.A. when I first heard “American Girl” by Bonnie McKee on a new music show on Top 40 radio. It’s a juicy pop jam structured around guitar riffs brazenly ripping off “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” I later learned that it was not properly “new music” at all — it had been released in July in a bid for the title of summer anthem, reached number 87 on the Billboard Hot 100 Charts, and then fell back below the radar. The fact that the height of American patriotism coincides with the height of the summer—and the mega-success of “Party in the USA”—might explain the popular ga
mbit of name-dropping America in your summer pop single. But what makes “American Girl” remarkable is how laced it is with pop cliché irony. McKee’s vision includes the prodigious tackiness of the United States. “I fell in love in a 7-Eleven parking lot,” the song begins. She gets only more biting about our national character, as in the best line in the track’s chorus: “I was raised by a television. / Every day is a competition.” The picture she paints of an American girl is someone ambitious, independent, rebellious, and trashy.
The “American Girl” music video is even cheekier and more frenetic than the song: McKee and her gang of white girls do porny dances in a 7-Eleven and in front of a vending machine. They play the retro board game Girl Talk and hang out at the mall. McKee chills by a pool wearing American-flag-print Lolita sunglasses. They drive a red Mustang to In-N-Out, then out past the Hollywood Sign to the canyons surrounding Los Angeles. At the end, the Mustang inexplicably explodes into flames, so McKee and her friends roast marshmallows. McKee illustrates Los Angeles’s special boredom — there is nothing to do, but so much trouble to get into. She’s not the only one who has believed the essential invocation of the American (and more specifically Californian) spirit is the bored, sexually mature suburban teenager.
My second roommate in Los Angeles, K, was a twenty-one-year-old who had a cat named after Joan Didion. That was the main reason I moved in with her. She was offering a two-month sublet in her apartment on the far western edge of Echo Park. She had gotten the apartment with her best friend, who never moved in. The complex raked up from the crowded street in a series of rose-filled terraces. K showed me sheepishly how the place seemed to be made out of Styrofoam and cardboard. “I got drunk, fell down, and kicked a hole in the wall,” she said, pointing out an opening in the thin plaster. The first night I moved in, ants came out from cracks in the closet and swarmed my backpack. She gave me Lysol, which I sprayed over the entire surface of the floor and on many of my belongings. I had no furniture. A few days after I moved in, the bulb in the overhead light burned out. K told me hers had stopped working months before, and she had been using candles ever since. I was at my waitressing job seven miles away in Century City from ten a.m. to nine p.m. most days, and when I got home, I watched Dateline and ate hot-sauce-flavored potato chips by the light of my laptop. I slept on the floor the whole time I lived there.