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serpicojones · 7 years

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Letter to My Grandma

I wrote the following a longtime back on here and then I never posted it. I am working on a new essay and I noticed this now. There are some things about this letter that have evolved for me. For instance, in the letter I refer to my pronouns as They/Them/Their and while I am generally still fine with these pronouns, I now also use She/Her/Hers. I think that my perspective on presentation is changing some (even while genderqueer still feels like an accurate term even as I also accept trans woman), but all of the details included in this letter were very truthful to the moment that I wrote it. I hope you can enjoy it and maybe learn a little about me as well as my particular experience with my gender and identity:

Dear Grandma,

I hope that this letter finds you well! I thought this would be an interesting way to communicate with you. Perhaps you would like to write or have my mother write a letter back to me. I am writing to you rather than calling because of the importance of the content of this letter and I wanted to make sure that it was all communicated clearly. As you know, sometimes communication over the phone can be challenging and I didn't want you to miss anything or feel like you missed anything!

All of my life, my relationship with you has been very important to me. You have always been a great person to talk about anything in the world with! My sister and parents are happy to listen to what I have to say about serious world stuff because they love me, but sometimes I've gotten the feeling that they are often just humoring me :-D. When we have talked it has been different. I think something that we share has been an overwhelming curiosity about the world. And nothing has ever been off limits. I feel sad that in the last few years, we've been unable to spend more time together because of where I live and how often I come to New York. I'm sorry about that. Some of the major ambivalent feelings I have about living across the country are cause I wish I could spend more time with you!

So anyway, I'm also sorry if I've been unable to keep you 100% abreast about what is going on in my life. I appreciate that my mom shares with you a lot of my goings on. I love you very much and so I really want you to know what's what. Maybe we can be pen pals! So let me share a little something with you that I would be happy to talk to you about in depth. Perhaps you would like to call me or write me questions in the form of a letter. That is absolutely welcome.

So here it goes...

I will start from the beginning of my pathway of discovery and fill in the details as I go along.

WYOMING

The sad truth about when I moved to Wyoming is well represented in this quote from Moby Dick:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

I was running from something. Everything in my life seemed like it had the potential to be a happy one, minus the tough economy for finding work, and yet, I was almost desperately unhappy. Something was clearly not right and I was restless about it. I allowed for myself that it was my job prospects that kept me so unhappy, but it definitely felt deeper than that. Perhaps it also seemed my inability to deal with my own sexuality and relationships, but this was a bit under the surface--deliberately ignored by my conscious mind. I needed to get away from it all and Wyoming was my Pequod.

Accepting a job in Wyoming, a place I'd never been and could barely even imagine was a perfect experience for me. And for awhile, I was way happier! I was working on a creative job where people respected me, massaged my ego constantly, in a place that was foreign to me: ripe for discovery and exploration. In addition, after acquiring my own apartment, it was also a new sort of opportunity for me; it was one in which I could experience isolation and solitude. There were fewer pressures from the outside world in my 2 bedroom 2 floor apartment all to myself.

And so truthfully, I was surprised and shocked that the restlessness was still there even when so much in my life had been transformed. I was a different person in Wyoming. I was the easterner city "boy" that everyone marveled at. There was no pressure from my parents, no pressure from school, no pressure from friends. Work contained only pressures that I felt confident that I could deal with. So why was I feeling so restless that I would abandon my apartment in the middle of the night to stare at the star filled high desert sky?

Being truly alone with myself in a post-school, post-future world was devastating. I call it post-future, because up until that point in my life, I had always held out hope that things would be better in the future. I had markers of time and progress like tests and grades and watermarks like getting bar mitzvah-ed, graduating high school, etc.

Without those watermarks, suddenly I realized how incredibly long a lifetime is. As a kid, I could ignore my feelings with the expectation of a greater future and no concept of time in a life beyond childhood and adolescence. All time could be filled with distractions, mixed with endless hopes and dreams for the future, made safe by a loving family.

Alone with myself for the first time, I could feel the pain that I had been masking in my soul and had refused to face. AND for the first time, I decided that ignoring the problem as I had tried to do for so long, was MAYBE a satisfactory way to live my short life up until that point, but in the larger scheme of things was immensely painful. The prospect of living with that masked personal discontent unexamined for up to 60-70 more years if I lived a full life was a daunting and unbearable. And so finally, I looked inward.

Previous to this moment at subconscious and conscious intervals, a part of myself was always judging every action I did and every feeling I had. According to this voice in my head, something was wrong with me.

And so, I stopped judging for the first time. What was actually going on in my head? Well to start with, my problem that had no name related to my sexuality among other things, but it wasn't purely about my sexuality. Much of it related to how I saw myself in relation to others socially. SELF-EXAMINATION

The sun rose on a clear September day in Cody, WY. I heard my neighbor's horse whinny, and quietly I reflected that I had actually never had a single sexual fantasy that involved myself as a man. Many of them simply involved that act of turning into a woman and imagining masturbating or making a sexy video for the male version of myself.

Sometimes, the fantasies wouldn't even be sexual in nature. They would involve finding myself unexpectedly changed into a women and going into work the next day, trying to deal with the consequences or finding that everyone had already interacted with me as a woman, known me as a woman and this was an alternate reality that I would have to adjust to. Even this, I found titillating for the sexually repressed person that I was.

In elementary school, it was incredibly important to myself internally that I was different from the other kids. I didn't mind being different! I craved it. I loved it, but first and for most, I KNEW IT. Different how?

I didn't exactly know, but I definitely didn't like to be categorized. I wanted other people to know it also and it hurt when they didn't. My worst fear was that I was wrong about myself and I was the same as everybody else. This was before I learned that being different in the ways that I was was a problem. I couldn't really put my finger on it at the time. The reason as I can surmise was that I couldn't get out of my own point of view. Gender was a made up category that made a simple distinction between body parts. I assumed that everyone basically knew what I did. Boys and girls were literally the same asides from this one almost taxonomical difference. I was interest in the difference as one of my earlier elementary school memories was when I asked my mother with fascination and obsessive interest what my name would have been if I had been born a girl. She told me Jillian and I held onto this memory all the way up to my days in Cody. I was regularly jealous of my sister for some minor gender related reasons that seemed normal, and I also admired and loved her so much so I would let them go!

The ways that I was different became a problem in middle school when all of the kids started acting differently and as puberty set in. Puberty and the ways that kids began to socialize were super confusing to me!

Everyone else was in on a secret that I had never been privy. Boys and girls started acting in crazy ways that made no sense to me. All of the boys, even the shy ones started being sorta goofier about girls. Most boys were acting on feelings of attraction to girls, even if that only meant by just sharing their thoughts and acting a stupid way with each other.

I didn't understand. I didn't get the big deal over the difference between boys and girls. Most boys were acting in ways that I didn't like and wanted no part in. Truthfully, they were mostly doing stuff that made me not really want to be friends with them anymore. I wanted to have friends. Friends were important to me, but the ways in which guys started behaving made me uncomfortable to be around them a lot of the time. I regularly made exceptions, but was definitely confused and extremely stressed by these developments and in these environments.

Meanwhile, I had (what I felt like was a weird) obsession over girls. There was some sexual attraction as I started developing sexually later in middle school, but the attraction was always mixed with a sort of envy. This envy made NO SENSE to me. I was so confused! Did other boys have this envy? They probably didn't? They didn't seem to have the same feelings I did but maybe I simply hadn't sexually matured as far as they had. This is when I learned that my ways of being different were a problem, but I would often credit this feeling to not going through puberty as quickly as other people my age. They were simply better at it than I was. As I would get older, I would figure it out like they had and get over whatever things I was feeling.

It is around the end of middle school that I was realizing that feeling more explicit sexual desire (often, but not only for girls), was no cure to my discomfort around most boys and girls, sexually and socially.

I did a little self-examination and tried to be open with myself at this early date. I looked at the few options I had been aware of for things that would make me different. Was I gay? This definitely didn't seem entirely correct and men did occasionally enter into my fantasies, but there simply was always women there too. In these situations, I would be a woman in the scenario. Was I bisexual? This I decided was possible. It seemed to make sense that since I was clearly in my head attracted to women, I couldn't be gay, so I must have been bisexual! My homophobic young mind determined that while it was ok to be gay, I would pretend that I was straight (which is something that I think a lot of bi kids go through).

I had very little concept of what it meant to be transgender. The only thing that I was aware of in relation to transgender identities was these joke tv shows Maury Povitch or Jerry Springer where transexual women would come onto the show and be this scandalous crazy person character. These people thought they were something they weren't and that was that and women were attracted to men, so transexual women had to be attracted to men.

One night after watching one of these shows I had a dream that I was a woman (and this wasn't uncommon usually accompanied by euphoria) and I woke up with what must have been the most clarity about the issue of my youth. I had a fantasy or follow-up dream (I can't remember which) that I told this to the therapist I was seeing and their response to me was, "Did you ever consider for a second that you are one? You are a woman?" I freaked out and thought about that show with fear, disgust and (I guess self-hatred) that I--this wasn't real. I couldn't be a woman because of my body parts and life as a trans woman seemed to be fucking awful on those shows, and being sexually attracted to women the trans women were usually "ugly" in my minds eye.

I never told my therapist and this thought was basically pushed down into my mind until I considered it yet again in Wyoming.

The thing that remained constant as I grew and developed into a young "man" was how envious I was of girls and women. What they had, I could never have! I looked in the mirror with a sort of disgust at what I looked like, simply feeling unattractive and embarrassed by any body part or hair that made me look like a man. I regularly wished I could have been a girl in an abstract way (not a concrete one), but mostly tried to focus on other stuff, dreams for the future. I felt that when I finally had sex with a woman, I would get it what sexuality was supposed to be about as a "boy" who WAS attracted to girls.

I didn't masturbate or have any sexual encounters with people until my sophomore year of college and part of the reason for this was my overall discomfort. I had a gigantic crush on the girl that I went to prom with and late that night had the chance to push things further and the more intimate things got, the more my sexual feelings were turned off. Basically my relationship to my own sexuality was in itself a turnoff. My relationship with the sexual body part that I have been bestowed was itself a complicated and confused one. Anytime sexuality became concrete, there was a seemingly unbridgeable gap between what I had and what I needed to make things feel right and stay aroused or feel pleasure.

In my bedroom in the town of 10,000 people in the middle of a sage brush steppe up to the Rocky Mountains, I considered the way that girls had ALWAYS made me feel by including me in a category of men. I felt literally miserable. When feminists used to use gender exclusionary language before a wider feminist movement became inclusive of transgender identities, I was restricted and not allowed, alloft without a place to fit in--only a category assigned to me MEN by these trans exclusionary feminists. But then, I remembered the feeling of a visit I had to Los Angeles where I met my feminist friends possibly for the first time since they had been awakened to their "radical" feminist ideology and I learned about the space for trans identities (fairly recently added to their playbook This was 2012). I remembered how free I felt among these folks to not be a guy and just to be me.

In the context of all of this, I searched the internet and found out what people said about my fantasies. I found some very transphobic literature as it was designated as a disorder by the diagnostic and statistic manual created by the American Psychiatric Association and I found some less transphobic content as well.

I learned that transgender identities actually cross a wide range of possibilities and I learned the difference between sexuality and gender essentially for the first time. I learned transgender folks sometimes identified in between what was called society's gender binary between men and women. In addition, they had all different types of sexual attractions separate from and within these identities.

I immediately realized that cis gender (what is used to refer to people whose genders assigned at birth agree with the way that they feel), definitely didn’t apply to me.

I took immediately to an identity that I found mentioned called genderqueer. People choose this word for all types of personal identification reasons. The attractive part was that it felt like it was between masculine and feminine. Ever since that morning in Wyoming, I have been exploring and developing these thoughts. It has been a roller coaster of emotions.

I really moved out to Los Angeles because I wanted to be near those feminist friends that I had. I needed some space from my parents and my family and my long and storied history painfully thinking of myself as a guy, which had become more than simply a habit. It was like a habit, but a hurtful one, one that always cut me on some level, but to which I had developed a huge amount of useful, distracting and necessary coping mechanisms so that I could lead a full life.

All of those mechanisms did and continue to attempt to derail my progress. When I had a first real sexual encounter with another person, I discovered how incredibly difficult it was to feel pleasure and satisfaction with my appearance in the context of sexual activity and in the context of my body's shape and form. This along with other realizations helped push me into what was one of the worst depressions of my life. I mourned for my loss of being a "normal guy." This was a fiction that I had created and still continues to influence the way that I interact with the world. I also had moments of celebrating the same loss. GOOD RIDDANCE.

I denied my own identity, the possibility of it even making any sense, the possibility of living a "full life" in my mind leaping out the window all at the same time that I accepted my truth. These sort of things apparently happen concurrently and sporadically moving forward and backward between different stages of grief.

I legitimately felt like my life wasn't worth living, albeit never explicitly considered suicide.

I loved the way that my feminist friends treated me now that they didn't think I was a cis dude. I continued to feel incredibly rewarded for my openness in my feelings and the ways that I felt comfortable interacting with the world with this new conception of self. It was the greatest relief in my life at the same time that I struggled.

The new burden of what living my truth actually meant in the world replaced the previous self-hatred. This was a duller type of pain, generally more outwardly focused. And the other pain that grew and developed was the people around me not knowing or acknowledging my truth. This all happened without any steps I took in order to change the ways I felt about my gender presentation. My concept of my gender identity also developed beyond genderqueer. I will still use this as an identity label because on a certain level it still feels like it fits, but I can give you a more clear expression of the relationship that I feel I have with gender.

If you were to think of gender as a spectrum and not as a binary and you imagine that that spectrum has masculine on one side and feminine on the other, I would place myself a clear distinct amount of space feminine of center.

I am not a guy, or a man.

I don't generally care about my personal presentation from an internal perspective when we are just referring to me. In the context of social spaces however, I care a great deal! And I have come to realize like a Tomboy who decides she wants to do stuff that is feminine--that same stuff I don't care about--MATTERS TO ME. In the context of social situations, I really don't want to be read as cis male, even by a coworker or a stranger. This is something that my mom finds very confusing. Why would I have a desire to move my gender presentation almost completely into the feminine (at least of center) if I don't care? This is who I am and they are basically rendering me invisible by dismissing who I am. Gender really does MAINLY exist for me in the context of social situations, but it also exists in the concept of my physical body as well.

As I mentioned earlier, I suffered from what is called gender dysphoria all throughout my teenage years up until the present. This was a feeling of disconnect between what my body looks like and what my mind feels like it should look like. This was often quite triggering to my depression as was the things that I believe testosterone was doing to my mind and feelings.

These things plus my desire to present as female and my panic and depression of that year a year ago pushed me to visit a hormone doctor and begin taking hormone pills...an estrogen supplement and a testosterone blocker.

So hormonally at this moment, I am female.

My friends and family now refer to me as Jamie and it is the name I would like for you to try and call me as well. Everything in the past and that you have known of me before, and this letter has added up to equal who I am today.

I do still mostly dress the way you'll have remembered seeing me, but I am working on it and increased feminine presentation might make me feel more comfortable with the narrative that is still 2.5 years new to my life as compared to the previous 25.5 years. It is an adjustment for me as well as other people in my family, but it is just the way that things are. Whether or not it is a positive change or not, it is constantly developing (my gender identity) and also unavoidable. As soon as I would give up on this new narrative, I would have given up on the possibility of a happy life.

At the moment I use and tell other people to use gender neutral pronouns to refer to me. These pronouns are a creation of an alternative culture to mainstream English language so people claim that they are unnatural, but what is really unnatural is the concept of the gender binary that has been so enforced by European and christian society partially as a way to economically and physically oppress women and maintain past and contemporary power structures.

The pronouns I use are: they, them, their

And I would appreciate if you attempted to add them to your lexicon to refer to me. I am very understanding of folks who mess it up. Because of my 25.5 year narrative for myself, I occasionally mess up my own pronouns. It doesn't mean that my new narrative isn't true, but simply that old habits are hard to break.

I may in the future begin using feminine pronouns: she, her, hers, but that isn't right now. I just definitely don't want to be he, him, his

I am very glad to be able to share this with you and I'd look forward to discussing it further, whether on the phone or by pen pal.

Love always, Jamie

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years

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Book Excerpt: It's Okay With Me: Hollywood, The 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye by Jason Bailey

We're proud to present an excerpt from a new book by Jason Bailey, "It's Okay With Me: Hollywood, The 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye."

Synopsis (from Amazon.com): One of the cornerstones of the 1970s New Hollywood movement was the reinvention of genres from the studio era, with Westerns, musicals, and gangster movies getting the “revisionist” treatment by the so-called Film Brats who were raised on them. But few genres were revisited with as much vigor as the private eye movie – which found New Hollywood icons like Robert Altman, Roman Polanski, and Arthur Penn putting their distinctive spin on the timeworn conventions of the gumshoe film. So what was it about the private eye movie that was so compelling at that particular juncture, in both film history and American life? In It’s Okay With Me, author Jason Bailey dives deep into the essential detective pictures of the era, breaking down how they bridged past and present, while examining how each film was not only representative of New Hollywood, but of the wider cultural moment.

“At first I said, I don’t want to do Raymond Chandler,” Robert Altman recalled, of the initial offer to direct the 1973 film version of The Long Goodbye. “If you say ‘Philip Marlowe,’ people just think of Humphrey Bogart.” But when Gould’s name was floated, “then I was interested. So I read Leigh Brackett’s script, and in her version, in the last scene, Marlowe pulled out his gun and killed his best friend, Terry Lennox. It was so out of character for Marlowe, I said, ‘I’ll do the picture, but you cannot change that ending! It must be in the contract.’ They all agreed, which was very surprising. If she hadn’t written that ending, I guarantee I wouldn’t have done it."

Brackett’s participation was a key link to the character’s past – her second screenwriting credit, shared with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, was for Hawks’ Big Sleep. “I met Chandler only once,” Brackett said. “I know he wanted Marlowe to be depicted as an honest man, and somebody who was his own man. I wanted to get that into the screenplay. But I also had to show Marlowe the way he looks to us now in the Seventies… Because Marlowe, as Chandler saw him, would be unthinkable in the Seventies.” Altman agreed: “I think it’s a goodbye to that genre - a genre that I don’t think is going to be acceptable anymore.” To convey that displacement, Altman and Brackett hit upon their guiding principle. “I decided we were going to call him Rip Van Marlowe,” Altman said, “as if he’d been asleep for twenty years, had woken up and was wandering through this landscape of the early 1970s but trying to invoke the morals of a previous era.”

To drive the point home, Altman starts the film with Gould’s Marlowe literally waking up from a deep sleep. These opening shots are the only time he’s not in a full suit, which he even wears to take out his laundry. Throughout the picture, he’s the only one wearing a tie (even the gangsters are in turtlenecks), and he only removes it when he goes into the ocean (though he leaves his coat on). Marlowe’s the only one smoking – and he’s doing it constantly – the “Marlboro Man” sticking out like a sore thumb in the New Age, health-conscious enclave of Malibu. (He doesn’t stop smoking until the very end, when he needs that hand for his gun.)

The world has changed around him: his neighbors are naked yoga flower children, his cellmate is a chatty revolutionary, and he finds his missing person in a smiley/happy rehab facility. But this Marlowe is a walking anachronism – he just keeps smoking his cigarettes, tying his tie, and doing his job. He is surrounded by his time, yet he is not of it.

"He is a knight errant, and like Don Quixote imperfectly understands the world he inhabits,” Roger Ebert wrote of Gould’s Marlowe, noting that, in contrast to the sardonic narrators of the earlier Chandler pictures, his is a “meandering dialogue that plays as a bemused commentary to himself.” And perhaps he is, though “to himself” seems too purposeful a description for this Marlowe’s sideways mumble, which is less Bogart than W.C. Fields – and seems to point the way towards another muttering Altman protagonist, Robin Williams’ Popeye. His frustrated asides (“Boy, that cockamamie cat”) and nonplussed reactions (“Why don’tcha go over there and tell the girls they’ll catch a cold”) seem a coping mechanism, a way of at least amusing himself in a world where nothing else makes sense.

Altman’s refusal to play by the rules is made clear right from the jump, as he spends no less than eleven minutes on an opening sequence in which Marlowe goes on a late-night grocery store run to feed his finicky cat. It could just be one of Altman’s oddball touches, like the unexplained baby shoe in Marlowe’s apartment or the inexplicable carnival photo booth that takes his mug shot; maybe it’s just a character beat, establishing the proper anything-goes mood. But author William Luhr positions it as a miniature version of the complex mystery that follows, in which Marlowe shuttles his pal Terry Lennox off to Mexico, is accused of assisting in Terry’s murder of his wife, is hired to track down drunken, suicidal Hemingway-esque author Roger Wade, and ends up discovering (wouldn’t ya know it) that his two cases are connected. Yet in both the cat food jaunt and the Lennox/Wade mystery, Luhr argues, “empty characters and empty actions begin and end with Marlowe alone, feeling betrayed, and without the resources to understand or to cope with his situation.”

The opening sequence is one of three that comes up most often in discussions, both laudatory and critical, of The Long Goodbye, along with gangster Marty Alexander smashing a Coke bottle on his mistress’s face (a brutal echo of James Cagney and his grapefruit) and the surprise ending. All three scenes, significantly, are nowhere to be found in Chandler’s source novel, and anyone approaching the film looking for straight adaptation will find little to hold on to. Even casual viewers will likely find its borderline perverse visual style – with the camera in constant motion via zooms, dolleys, pans, and shifting focal points – disorienting or even off-putting. (Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond also inserts an extra dose of smoggy California haze by “flashing” the negative.) But these flourishes give the picture the wild, improvisational feel of a free-form jazz number – Altman as Mingus. More importantly, it’s of a piece with the storytelling; Marlowe cannot figure out his place in this world, and Altman never lets him (or, consequently, us) settle comfortably into his surroundings.

And as a result, it’s hard not to notice that Marlowe isn’t much of a detective. The payoff of his unsuccessful 3am cat food run is that he can’t even fool his own pet. When Terry Lennox arrives shortly thereafter, they pay “liar’s poker” – and Marlowe loses, an apt metaphor for the adventure to follow, in which he pledges constant allegiance to his friend, a conniving murderer who has exploited that friendship. The lug who gives Marlowe a lift home from jail puts it bluntly: “Sorry, Marlowe. Sorry you’re so stupid.” Other movies have their detective stumble around a bit, as is necessary to preserve the suspense of their mysteries; this one explicitly calls its hero dumb, and takes its time disproving the thesis.

Yet even this sap eventually wises up. When a drunken Marlowe presses Wade’s wife for the truth about his suicide, the mumble disappears; when he asks her, “Are you gonna tell me what really happened here,” he speaks plainly and clearly. Most people slur their speech when they’re drunk. Marlowe stops slurring. (Is it an affectation? Something to keep people off-guard?) When he chases her car down a busy street and she strangely ignores him, his sense of self is finally reignited – he plays the fool, but he will not be played for a fool. He finds the supposedly dead Terry luxuriating in Mexico and waiting for his newly single mistress Ellen Wade; Terry grins, “I guess if anybody was gonna track me down, it’d be you,” but he certainly doesn’t seem concerned about betraying his friend, or the consequence of that betrayal. Confronted with his crimes, Terry is unmoved. “What the hell, nobody cares,” he shrugs (a key concluding statement of Hickey & Boggs the previous year).

“Yeah, nobody cares but me,” Marlowe replies.

“That’s you, Marlowe,” Terry says. “You’ll never learn. You’re a born loser.”

“Yeah, I even lost my cat.” And with that, Marlowe shoots the fucker dead.

It’s a shocking, repugnant, and glorious moment, all at once – a “fuck you” to not only the customary hero code of the private eye movie, but the easy-come-easy-go spirit of the character until that moment. Throughout the film, he is passive in both action and in attitude; Terry’s “What the hell, nobody cares” isn’t that far removed from Marlowe’s own refrain of “It’s okay with me,” except that he’s finally encountered something that’s not okay. It’s the moment at which his anachronistic hero becomes, at long last, the modern man – evening the score for a personal slight, and thus philosophically equipped for the “Me Generation.” The ending doesn’t make him a better man; many would argue (and did, loudly, following the picture’s release) that it makes him a lesser one. But it certainly makes him a man of his time.

Considering its unconventional approach and unapologetic torching of genre norms, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that critics and audiences greeted The Long Goodbye with such hostility. It premiered at one of critic Judith Crist’s famed Terrytown weekends (fictionalized and immortalized in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories) in perhaps the worst possible circumstances: following screenings of all the previous Marlowe pictures. West Coast critics fumed; Variety dubbed it “an uneven mixture of insider satire on the gumshoe film genre, gratuitous brutality, and sledgehammer whimsy,” while the Los Angeles Times’ Charles Champlin called Gould’s Marlowe “an untidy, unshaven, semi-literate dimwit slob who could not locate a missing skyscraper and would be refused service at a hot dog stand,” and sneered, “He is not Chandler’s Marlowe, or mine, and I can’t find him interesting, sympathetic or amusing, and I can’t be sure who will.” Kenneth Turan (also later of the Times) included it on a late-‘70s list of the worst movies ever made.

Box office was bad in its initial Los Angeles engagements, and runs in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miami were likewise disappointing. Its New York premiere was cancelled at the eleventh hour, even though press screenings had already been held, and it was withdrawn from release nationwide. Rumors circulated that it would be re-edited, shortened, or abandoned altogether; it turned out, United Artists had re-jiggered its marketing campaign, torpedoing the initial posters and ads, which framed it as a straight thriller, for new posters by Mad magazine illustrator Jack Davis, which made it look like a madcap comedy. Opening in New York months later, it was a modest hit, championed by the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael (“Altman, who probably works closer to his unconscious than any other American director, tells a detective story, all right, but he does it through a spree—a high-flying rap on Chandler and the movies and that Los Angeles sickness”) and the New York Times’ Vincent Canby, who put it on the paper’s year-end top 10 list and praised its creators for having “the courage to create an original character and almost an original story that, by being original, does more to honor Chandler's skills than would any attempt to make a forties movie today."

But Farewell, My Lovely, a much more faithful Marlowe picture (with Robert Mitchum taking on the role) released two years later, was a much bigger commercial and critical success. By preferring that traditional appreciation to the tart aftertaste of Long Goodbye, contemporary critics were letting their own notion of nostalgia gloss over the blackness at the heart of true noir. That view, Luhr writes, “belies an understanding of the profoundly anti-nostalgic, anti-sentimental cynicism and despair that pervaded the actual films themselves, as well as The Long Goodbye.”

Films like Farewell, My Lovely regarded private eyes shallowly, refusing to wrestle with what a character like Marlowe truly meant in this era. It was easier to slap a trenchcoat on him, to put him in a window covered in streaming rain to a saxophone theme, and let us stash him in the past. Farewell was safe, a museum piece, a humorless presentation of fixed images, while the variation Altman presented was unbalancing – in his words, in his actions, even in the way his director framed him – and viewers resisted. "I suspect that people are reluctant to say goodbye to the old sweet bull of the Bogart Marlowe because it satisfies a deep need,” Kael wrote. “They’ve been accepting the I-look-out-for-No. 1 tough guys of recent films, but maybe they’re scared to laugh at Gould’s out-of-it Marlowe because that would lose them their Bogart icon. At the moment, the shared pop culture of the audience may be all that people feel they have left.” And that tension – between who was onscreen and what we needed them to be – would only pull tighter as the decade continued.

“It’s Okay With Me: Hollywood, The 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye” is available now in paperback and Kindle editions.

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