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On Jan. 24, 1848, James W. Marshall was working on the construction of a sawmill in what is now northern California, newly conquered by the fledgling American empire. While digging a channel for the mill, a glint caught Marshall’s eye. He dug, pulling out chunk after chunk of the most valuable rock in the world, a fortune visible in front of his eyes. Tests soon confirmed what Marshall already knew: Gold had been found in the West, bringing with it a transformation that would upend this vast expanse of land. The news got out quick and the vultures got out quicker. Hundreds of thousands of people flooded into California looking for an easy path to wealth. Fighting over this scarce amount of riches, California went from a distant thought to the fastest-growing state in the union. As for Marshall? He never got a penny from his discovery. His sawmill collapsed and the laborers were drawn away by a vision of gold. He lost his money, dying bankrupt and forgotten. It is here that we find the founding mythos of the Golden State: Get rich or die trying.
Nothing better encapsulates this vision of California than the genre of film noir. Rising in popularity as California and Hollywood exploded to the size of the state, noir is fundamentally connected to the state in which it was created. Marked by its trademark vast conspiracies and stylistic moodiness, noir primarily centers on criminal elements that draw right from their gold rush heritage. The stars of noir are private detectives: grizzled men who aren’t cops and don’t deal with the petty minutiae of the “law.” Surrounded on every side by corruption, it’s up to our protagonists to fight through these criminal elements by whatever means necessary and expose the conspiracy beneath it all. These films evolved through the 20th century as California did, with each new edition showing how this mythos has altered the state for better or worse.
Howard Hawks’s 1946 classic “The Big Sleep” reflects this early Hollywood vision of California. His 1940s California shows the dream of the Gold Rush destroyed, the riches dried up — all that remains are those who got rich and those who didn’t. Hawks’s version of California may be an exaggerated one, but it stands true anyway, a place ruled by drugs, sex and crime but with a sheen of sophistication over it all. Starring Humphrey Bogart (“Casablanca”) as the famous literary figure Phillip Marlowe, it presents Marlowe as a suave, charming private detective who is tailor-made to talk his way into and out of trouble. Through a scenic Los Angeles landscape, Marlowe is investigating a vast criminal conspiracy that threatens his clients’ daughters, including Vivian (Lauren Bacall, “To Have and Have Not”), the classic ideal of the “femme fatale,” a beautiful but dangerous woman who seduces the male protagonist and draws him into a dangerous situation. This is how the California Dream draws people into the world of “The Big Sleep.” Not through dreams of gold, but dreams of fortune nonetheless.
There is still a respectability to this representation of California because fundamentally it’s just really cool. The criminals, while brutal, are respectable. They dress in nice clothes, drink nice bourbon and present themselves with a level of glamor fitting of Hollywood. When you watch “The Big Sleep” and other Golden Age noirs, you understand why every wannabe actor looked for their dreams in Hollywood.
When you put the haves and the have-nots in one place, eventually the have-nots rebel. The California of the late ’60s, home of counterculture and Richard Nixon, is the setting for “The Long Goodbye.” Its plot is similar to “The Big Sleep,” involving a convoluted conspiracy that is really just about someone trying to make money at the end of the day, but everything else is different. This California is not the slick underworld of “The Big Sleep.” Elliott Gould (“M*A*S*H”) is our new Phillip Marlowe. Where Bogart was cool in an old-fashioned movie star way, Gould’s Marlowe is cool because he clearly doesn’t care about being cool, or really anything at all. His hair is permanently disheveled, he wears scrunched up ill-fitting clothes and there is a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth at any given moment.
There is no respectability to anyone involved in “The Big Sleep.” Gould’s Marlowe is the closest thing to it, only because his vaguely hippie-adjacent persona rejects the corruption outright. The criminals are nothing more than brutal killers. When Bogart’s Marlow enters the crime business in “The Big Sleep,” he finds a beautiful woman and a happy ending. When Gould’s Marlowe enters it, he finds himself betrayed at every step, beaten and battered and generally worse off — much like the millions of Californians who continued to see their state as a land of opportunity and eventually found a place ravaged by riots, oppressed workers and millions of young men sent off to die in a foreign war. From one noir to another, we see California evolve, a veneer slowly broken.
This image would be finally shattered in one last noir, “The Big Lebowski.” First as comedy, then as farce: “The Big Lebowski” is not a Marlowe story in name but echoes it in theme. It’s a movie fit for the California of the late ’90s into the new millennium. The mystique of the state is long gone, shaken further by another decade of race riots and rocketing home prices while population growth was slowly grinding to a halt. “Lebowski” morphs the noir genre into a full-on comedy.
If “The Big Sleep” shows a belief in the dream of California, and “The Long Goodbye” shows that dream slowly dying, “Lebowski” is its mocking eulogy. Our main character here is Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges, “True Grit”), an unemployed slacker who supposedly helped write the Port Huron Statement and now spends his time smoking weed and bowling. The Dude gets himself drawn into a criminal plot much like the protagonists of the past two movies, but instead of some wise conspiracy, this one arises from a man peeing on his beloved rug and a name mixup. The Dude becomes a detective of his own style, determined to get retribution for his now urinated-on rug. The rest of the movie unfolds in an absurdist comedic plot that upends the conventions of noir while still paying homage to many of its key elements.
Absurdity subverts noir throughout “Lebowski” and with it, our image of the Golden State. If someone were to watch these three films in succession, the urge might be to think you see a state in decay, but really all you see is the destruction of an image. The Dude might be a huge loser, but his instincts throughout “Lebowski” are consistently right; his reads on people are constantly spot on, he can call out Walter’s (John Goodman, “Roseanne”) bullshit, and he even detects the true nature of the conspiracy from a mile away. Maybe this is because someone immersed in the counterculture of the late ’60s can recognize the cynicism and violence of the place they grew up in.
These three films, through their use of noir tropes, reflect this state and its changes over the years. Built upon the mythos of seeking fortune, California has always been a place for people to seek fame and fortune, and its culture has evolved to reflect this idea.
Daily Arts Writer Will Cooper can be reached at wcoop@umich.edu.
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