[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.It makes sense, then, given Kristeva s analysis, thatthe moral, sexual, and gender ambiguity of Murder, My Sweet wouldrecall the threat of maternal abjection with its blurred borders andthreat to identity.In order for the male child to shore up his identity,particularly his identity as masculine, he must abject the maternal body.The maternal sex, from which the infant was born, becomes the fasci-nating and horrifying object of its repressed incestuous desires.The missing, mysterious, fascinating yet deadly jade/mother inMurder, My Sweet can be read as the return of a repressed incestuousdesire that both terriWes and excites.That the necklace is deadly ismade explicit by Mr.Grayle at the end of the Wlm when he passionatelytells Marlowe that it must stop, that a man is dead because of hisnecklace and now he is losing Helen because of it.Repeatedly Mr.Grayle yells, It must stop! almost as a warning that if it doesn t morewill die because of the deadly necklace, almost as if the necklace couldstrangle on its own.The Chinese jade has a mysterious and fascinating, POISONOUS JEWELS 45irresistible yet deadly, power, which, like Helen/Velma, is associated withquestionable exotic origins.At the end of the Wlm, as if too hot to handle, Helen s precious FeiTsui jade necklace is practically tossed back and forth between Marloweand the police.Marlowe refuses to keep the necklace because it is wrong for his complexion (too green? too Oriental?) and becausehe didn t Wnish the job (he wasn t man enough to possess it).WhenRandall asks Marlowe what he expects him to do with it, Marlowereplies, Give it to your girlfriend.Send it back to China.Strangle your-self with it.I don t care! Marlowe makes it clear that he wants nothingto do with the deadly jewels.His reply suggests that the only choicesare to give it away to a girlfriend who can wield its sexual power andperhaps still be restrained by the patriarchal chain, to send it back to itsorigin and those incestuous rulers of the East, or be strangled by itsdeadly powers.Marlowe, for his part, leaving behind the jade, prefers the kid, the orphaned daughter, to the deadly mother.The kid s Sundayschool picnic face and cute Wgure don t (yet) threaten with the abjectexcess of maternal/feminine sexuality.As long as he is blindfolded to hersexual difference and pretends that she is like him, one of the boys, heisn t subject to the abject power of her sexuality.We can diagnose the recurring Orientalism in Murder, from theCoconut Beach Club s allusion to the South PaciWc to the jade reveredby the rulers of the East, as the return of the repressed otherness andambiguity inherent in the identity formation of the West. While therulers of the East know the proper value, the invaluable value, of jade,which they revere, this indeterminate jewel is a threat to the West.Within this Orientalist paradigm, the East represents a maternal/naturalWgure in relation to the West s paternal civilizing inXuence. The East represents not only something unknown and unappreciated but alsoan ambiguous threat.The fascination and terror evoked by the East in Wlm noir in general (e.g., The Lady from Shanghai, Chinatown), andMurder in particular, are symptomatic of the abjection of the other as a defense against ambiguity necessary to form a Wxed and stable 46 POISONOUS JEWELSidentity.The West abjects its other to defend itself against the East-ern other within.By projecting the threat of indeterminacy, ambigu-ity, and otherness outside, both individual and national identity attemptto shore themselves up against the inevitable return of the repressed.4Murder s Missing RaceIt is noteworthy that in Murder, My Sweet, unlike the novel on which theWlm is based, with the exception of the dancer in the Coconut BeachClub and a couple of other Asian characters in Chinatown, all of thecharacters are white.Whereas Murder s Marlowe is hard-boiled in hiscynicism about women and femininity, the novel s Marlowe is hard-boiled not just in his cynicism about sex but even more so in his cyni-cism about race.Murder s Marlowe appears the tough guy becausehe spouts quick-witted remarks about sex and Xirts with the badguys calling them cute and little, and referring to their harshtreatment of him as showing him a good time or dancing with him.Farewell, My Lovely s Marlowe, on the other hand, appears tough for themost part because of his hard-boiled attitude toward race and racial dif-ference in a novel peopled with dinges, shines, smokes, niggers, hunky immigrants, Chinamen, Japs, deferential Mexican bell-hops, smelly Indians speaking pig latin, and short dirty wops. Here Marlowe s disdain for these characters is his defense; he isn t afraidof them because he isn t afraid to call a spade a spade. These racialstereotypes protect him from racial ambiguity and racial difference byensuring Wxed racial borders between Marlowe and the other smelly, dirty, ignorant racialized abject characters that he encounters.In an important sense, Wlm noir is born out of the hard-boiledracism of Chandler s style.Several classic noir Wlms were based on hisnovels (The Falcon Takes Over [1942], Time to Kill [1943], Murder, MySweet, The Big Sleep [1946], Lady in the Lake [1947], The Brasher Doubloon[1947], The Blue Dahlia), and he wrote the screenplays for others (DoubleIndemnity, And Now Tomorrow [1944], The Unseen [1945], Strangers ona Train [1951]).Although it is arguably racial stereotyping that givesChandler s protagonists their hard-boiled edge and contributes to their POISONOUS JEWELS 47cynicism and the dark mood of his novels, in the Wlms, this racialstereotyping is displaced onto sex or to the margins or condensed intocomplex racialized women or maternal characters or objects (the jadenecklace in Murder).SigniWcantly, in the 1975 Wlm version of Farewell, My Lovely thehard-boiled racism is displaced onto a corrupt cop played by HarryDean Stanton, and Marlowe (Robert Mitchum) becomes so sensitive torace relations and racism that he gives all of his money and his favoritebaseball to a fatherless mulatto boy (Andrew Harris).The 1975 pro-tagonist does not use racial slurs, which are instead put in the mouthof an unsympathetic bad cop.Characters around him represent racistattitudes, but Marlowe rises above them with his sensitivity to race andracism.The Marlowe of the 1975 Wlm maintains his integrity by risingabove the explicit racism of those around him, but he continues to oper-ate as a hard-boiled character by virtue of his hard and cynical attitudetoward women and the law.In the novel, on the other hand, Marlowe sattitudes toward race and racial stereotypes are integral to his integrity;he is a straight shooter and doesn t mince words, which in Chandler sworld entails using racial slurs and invoking racial stereotypes.It istelling that the Wlm noir genre, in an important sense developed outof the stereotyped world of Chandler s novels, displaces the racismessential to the logic of that world and to the integrity of its protago-nist onto sex, maternity, and a few marginal characters, along with its dark style. This page intentionally left blank C H A P T E R 3Stereotype and Voice inThe Lady from ShanghaiThe Lady from Shanghai displays the ambivalent process of subject for-mation through which we produce cultural narratives and social andpsychic identity
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]