Unlike Cain’s ordinary man who falls prey to a woman’s allure, the male characters in Raymond Chandler’s novels expose themselves to dangerous, life-threatening
situations. In The Lady in the Lake, Philip Marlowe gets caught up in a complex and
jeopardize societal harmony. It was when the Catholic Legion of Decency held enough power to influence the government into the establishment of Hays Code, which literally banned movies which contain any content jeopardizing social conformity (Black 3-12).
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puzzling case that features the confusion of the killers’ and the victims’ identities. The body of the woman found at the bottom of the lake had been mutilated by her female murderer; it is just a deformed corpse, a thing. The body of the other woman was beaten and bloodied by her male killer. Thus in both cases the identity-body as well as
victim-murder connection is made problematic: the female victims’ identities, like their bodies when they are found, have been transgressed and transformed.
David Savran in Taking it Like a Man claims that tough guys tend to view
themselves as victims who need to recreate their self-value through voluntary corporeal suffering. After surviving each dangerous situation, the tough guy feels a new and unique sense of power and self-control. Theodore Reik speaks of the mechanism of “reflexive sadomasochism”: a man creates an illusion of omnipotence through his self-destructive actions, for he is now both the spectator (voyeur) and the spectacle of the crime scene (182-225).
In some chapters in the novel, Marlowe seems to willingly subject himself (as object and witness) to the sadomasochistic violence of Lieutenant Al Degarmo, the husband of the novel’s true murderess, just to see how much he’s able to stand Degarmo’s savage abuse. Later Degarmo, who kills his wife (the murderess) in a deranged rage fueled by her betrayals, brutally kills himself by intentionally crashing his car. Both Marlowe and Degarmo (a dark knight in dirty armor and a villain hiding in his police uniform) are defining the caliber of their machismo by the degrees of physical and emotional pain they can endure. Here we see how the tenacity of one’s manhood in the world of Raymond Chandler is measured by man’s capacity for pain. The bodies of Chandler’s hard-boiled
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men, especially Marlowe’s, are performative bodies now on stage in a seedy underworld of human torture (unlike Cain’s reflexive male bodies).
On the one hand, within a world of male-male violence, heterosexual sex often becomes another means of physical (bodily) exploitation: the man either allows himself to be harmed by the woman or harms her, either way satisfying a twisted form of sexual desire. On the other hand, the representation of female bodies in this genre is purposely fragmented as the detective traces the remains of the dead women, and so the reader as voyeur is introduced into a diabolic world of disembodied female flesh. As the
detective-protagonist sets about reassembling the bits and pieces of the dead women and eventually solves the two crimes, the author leads the reader to visualize the actual crime(s) in his or her imagination. Kaja Silverman mentions the “phallic economy” of traditional cinema: man is the subject “Je” (I) and woman is the object “moi” (me), and man needs to “repudiate” (the) woman in order to have a completely “gendered” self.
What I try to show here is that the novelist’s technique can bring forth an even more potent visceral response from the reader, whose imagination of evil can guide him or her further and deeper into the domain of human darkness. In this case, the fully alive and sexually powerful woman becomes the embodiment of das Ding (the Thing) while the crudely “disposed of” dead woman is die Sache29(the Thing in another sense) as in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic. That is, the woman as femme fatale is either deified or fetishized (Silverman, The Threshold 10-32).
29 Both das Ding and die Sache refer to the female objectification: das Ding is the embodiment of courtly love as the woman is placed upon a pedestal while die Sache means the fetishization of the female as sexual object to de demeaned.
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In addition to the femme fatale, the homme fatal is also an important element in hard-boiled crime fiction (though one less often discussed), and the wanton women in The Lady of the Lake meet their doom because they cannot control their craving for Chris Lavery, whose livelihood in Bay City Los Angeles relies entirely upon such ladies’
patronage. Later on, Lavery gets shot in the shower by one of his jealous patrons. In other words the corpse of Lavery, the homme fatal, joins the corpses of the two women victims in the novel. Chris Lavery has every objective attribute of the femme fatale: he is a beautiful man, suave and well-gloomed with an air of southern gentility, and he doesn’t hesitate to achieve his goals by using his sex appeal, but the (re)presentation of Lavery is devoid of the Hegelian dialectics of master/slave (das Ding/die Sache). There’s no
“murderous sociality” in Lavery, and he’s never fetishized by being presented in bits and pieces but rather marginalized as a living admonition against nymphomania. That is, woman is forbidden to actively covet or desire man and the only way to have (a) man is to turn yourself into a tantalizing body, a spectacle desired by the man of your preference.
Women who ravenously desire Lavery in effect become self- destructive
“nymphomaniacs”: one woman risks her marriage to satisfy her desire for him, while the other lays herself open to a murder charge due to her extreme hatred of him. Lavery is never exactly either master or slave (as he has not really possessed or been possessed) but rather an opportunist who makes the best of his circumstances. The flesh of the homme fatal Chris Lavery in The Lady in the Lake is a narrative-body, one which supports or brings forth the rest of the story.
This dissertation will make comparison between Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake
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and Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943), which was simultaneously published with Chandler’s novel, for sharing similar motifs and a great many parallels on the issue of femicide (the killing of women) in crime fiction. Caspary’s Laura is narrated from a relatively more feminine perspective by this female author, and I’d like to contrast Chandler’s masculine perspective with Caspary’s feminine touch.
Laura tells the story of the glamourous life and horrendous death of the striking New York socialite Laura Hunt, who is alleged to have been shot in the face by a ferocious admirer who fails to achieve his amorous objective. In the first half of the novel the reader manages to catch glimpses, like a voyeur, of Laura Hunt through the fragmentary recollections of her fervent admirer Waldo Lydecker, and also through the observations of homicide detective Mark McPherson, who is in charge of Laura Hunt’s murder investigation and who becomes increasingly attached to, indeed obsessed with her (with her body) in a way that could almost suggest metaphoric necrophilia. Then in the novel’s second half Laura is resurrected, reincarnated, because the victim had been wrongly identified and the wretched creature whose face got blown off turns out to have been the mistress of Laura Hunt’s fiancée, whom the killer had assumed was Laura.
Laura Hunt, in the reveries of Waldo Lydecker and Mark McPherson, is deified (das Ding) while the headless corpse, laid on a table in the morgue, is fetishized (die Sache), and Waldo Lydecker, the upper-class tycoon who catapults Laura into the world of polite society, is the malicious culprit who had wished to defile Laura’s flesh and transform, metaphorically speaking, a divine living woman into a tragically disfigured, lifeless thing.
Lydecker, depicted as an antique-collector in the novel, would rather have a precious art-object be destroyed if he cannot keep it as his own and thereby satiate his lust to
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possess. While in the Greek myth Pygmalion an artist (sculptor) satisfies his desire by creating a statue of a beautiful woman, one so lifelike that the goddess Aphrodite makes it come to life, here the “perfect” living woman has to be “killed” in order to satisfy a rich art-collector’s lust to possess. The impotent (senile, obese, and sexually undesirable) Lydecker could only conquer his love-object by “killing” her while he goes on collecting in his antique house many dead things, including himself: to be his true companion the divine woman of his dreams must be dead since he’s incapable of loving any actual living things. Thus the film may be seen as a sort of reversal of the Pygmalion myth. The flesh of Laura Hunt, Lydecker’s reluctant Galatea, is a phenomenological body given meaning by the love and hate she inspires in men.
Speaking of the woman’s (femme fatale’s) phenomenological body, in the 1947 Black Dahlia murder case in Los Angeles, the beautiful starlet-wanna-be Elizabeth Short was surgically transformed into “a disassembled mannequin” as well as “a discarded marionette.” Short, a.k.a. The Black Dahlia, was the real-life personification of a femme fatale posthumously deified/fetishized as das Ding/die Sache. Authors like Jack Webb and James Ellroy have turned this singular event into a socio-semiotic symbol of the rotten world of midcentury Los Angeles where wealth and glamour are ominously disavowed by death and the horror of misogyny.
Paul Ricoeur notes in The Symbolism of Evil that the idea of defilement is a
“symbolic stain re-enacted” by the existing concept of purity: here he says that the sacred and the profane coexist in the domain of “semantic innovations.” The spectacle of
Elizabeth Short was a pure embodiment of feminine beauty (adorned as she was by her ebony hair and fragrant dahlia) before her flesh was “bisected and fragmented” so that it seemed to be “in a state of reverie,” and the defilement of Short has given birth to a
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surrealistically ritualized “image-word” that “transverses and transcends” the
“image-representation” of her own body (qtd. in Kearney 1-20). According to George Bataille, existence itself is discontinuous while the excessiveness of sex and death
dissolve our “discontinuous being” into a “continuous state of super-abundance” (97-110).
In such “super-abundance,” Elizabeth Short, the grudging muse of more than a few hard-boiled crime-fictions, metamorphoses into the Black Dahlia—who is both sacred and profane in the context of the American cultural narrative, her body becoming an
“image-word” that opens up an oneiric or dream- dimension in the world of noir.