The uncanny in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep

Matt Haffner's cut and pasted paper wall murals and videos present film noir inspired narrative fragments, and mine art history, popular culture and contemporary life, in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia's 2008-2009 Working Artists Project Series.

Anq-a Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews, 2019

On the face of it, the idea that there could be a connection between Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Coleridge's "Christabel" might seem as farfetched as one of Marlowe's more improbable cases. What could a 1930s American noir whodunit and a late eighteenth-century, early nineteenthcentury Gothic poetic fragment have in common? However, even to frame the question in those terms is to begin to point up generic similarities and potential links. Detective fiction (especially the American version) is, after all, descended from the Gothic, inheriting several of its characteristic tropes and procedures. These include apparently unsolvable mysteries and murders, dark secrets, relentless suspense, constant obfuscation, and innocents threatened by powerful, inscrutable villains. Furthermore, both (pleasurably) plunge the reader into a world in which deep-seated human fears turn out to be true: here, the world might at any moment be taken over by irrational violence and death; here, no one is who or what they appear to be; here, everyone could be harboring unknown and/or sinister motives and intentions. Certainly, "Christabel" and The Big Sleep share these general attributes and could be thought of as being atmospherically related, sharing a sense of undisclosed forces at work, concealed motives and details, for which the reader is given only obscure, lacunae-ridden hints. For instance, is Geraldine simply evil or working under divine instruction? The poem, as it stands, is ambiguous, and Coleridge left widely conflicting accounts of how the story might have continued to his son Derwent and his doctor, James Gillman. Who, in the novel, killed the Sternwoods' chauffeur Owen Taylor, and why? When asked, Chandler claimed not to know (Hiney 163). If Coleridge's poem really is a fragment, Chandler's novel might without inaccuracy be retitled The Big Sleep: A Fragment. 1 Both narratives lack closure: the poem selfevidently (indeed, could Coleridge ever have completed it?), and the novel not so much concludes as simply stops. So much admitted, it is possible to trace more specific similarities between the two texts, and even to suggest that The Big Sleep might be a kind of rewriting of "Christabel." The most obvious resemblance is the shared "hissing." In Part II of "Christabel," the eponymous heroine is twice described as making an involuntary "hissing sound" (ll. 459, 591). In no less than three scenes in The Big Sleep, General Sternwood's younger daughter, Carmen, repeatedly makes "hissing" noises, equally involuntarily. In chapter 24, for instance, Marlowe returns to his apartment to find a naked Carmen in his bed. When he refuses her advances, he becomes aware of the hissing noise very sudden and sharp. It startled me into looking at her again. She sat there naked, propped on her hands, her mouth open a little, her face like scraped bone. The hissing noise came tearing out of her mouth as if she had nothing to do with it. There was something behind her eyes, blank as they were, that I had never seen in a woman's eyes. (171) This moment seems close to several in Coleridge's poem that emphasize Geraldine's uncanny eyes. Indeed, it seems possible that Chandler is indirectly evoking here the famous story, recorded by Polidori, of Byron reading reciting lines from "Christabel" about "the witch's breast" to Shelley, Mary Shelley, and himself, at which Shelley "suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle" (Holmes 328-29). Several passages might have prompted Shelley's

2016

Film International 14.2 (2016): 161-68. Print.

Film-Philosophy

Nothing you can't fix. (Last lines of The Big Sleep) Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse. (Adorno, 1978, 25) As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp, A mock show, dew drops, or a bubble, A dream, a lightning flash, or cloud, So should one view what is conditioned.

Origins of World War I; European Diplomacy, 1914-1945; German History in the 20th Century

Journal of Popular Culture, 2019

A preoccupation of the post-Recession horror film has been the uncanny human—proliferating involuntary doubles bereft of reason and choice. Recent horror film has exploited sleep disorders in particular as one strand of an uncanny horror that is defined by “automaticity,” action without volition. Paranormal Activity (2007), The Break-In (2016), Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), and Lights Out (2016) express late capitalist unease about the embattled terrain of sleep in the illuminated “plugged-in” era, disclosing how the notion of a voluntary self is slipping away as, all around us, versions of ourselves act in ways of which we are unaware. Late capitalist society is what Jonathan Crary has called “an illuminated 24/7 world without shadows,” a world in which we are constantly working, consuming, watching, plugged in, a world fundamentally incompatible with sleep and darkness. The amount of time people spend sleeping is plummeting and sleep disorders are escalating. Horror film has taken up the anxiety surrounded an increasingly contested sleep—specifically, the way in which the tension between a plugged-in, illuminated world and the dark realm of sleep, of bodily exigency, is producing uncanny versions of humans who have no control over what they do.

2013

This article engages in the close textual analysis of Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia (2002) within the context of the psychoanalytic translation of trauma, especially in relation to the psychoanalytic notion of nachträglichkeit. I suggest that the film, despite the prevailing climate of academic and critical disregard, can be considered one of the key films in his body of work to engage with the experience of time and the effects of traumatic memories. Using the specific analysis of the opening sequence, I propose a complex interpretation of the film’s narrative logic that is predicated on the structural principles underlying the mechanisms of time and traumatic memory. Specifically, the film draws attention to the process of constructing the past out of the present demonstrating a reversal of the cause and effect relation inherent in time’s arrow. I suggest that the key to understanding the film's structural relationship to trauma and memory resides in comprehending a cinematic deception that Nolan induces in the spectator from the outset of the film.

NEO: Journal for Higher Degree Research Students in the Social Sciences and Humanities, 2009

This paper explores the construction of an imagined urban landscape through the employment of subjective point of view in Henry Roth's modernist novel Call It Sleep (1934). This involves an engagement with Robert Alter's recent critical writings on 19th and 20th century European novels in terms of their 'experiential realism'. Alter's flexible approach to reading fiction goes beyond a consideration of mere urban representation and towards an understanding of the complex relationship between setting, subjectivity and language in the novel. Call It Sleep maps an early 20 th century version of Brownsville in Brooklyn, New York City, through the subjective language of a Jewish immigrant child named David Schearl. Brownsville is always a subjective entity, and always in flux, dependent on David’s emotional state. This paper examines a key sequence of the novel – David’s ordeal as he loses his bearings in the streets – in light of Brownsville’s documented history.

«The Polish Journal of Aesthetics», 60 (1/2021), 2021

In the present study, I will consider Leo Steinberg's interpretation of Picasso's work in its theoretical framework, and I will focus on a particular topic: Steinberg's account of "Picasso's Sleepwatchers." I will suggest that the Steinbergian argument on Picasso's depictorial modalities of sleep and the state of being awake advances the hypothesis of a new way of representing affectivity in images, by subsuming emotions into a "peinture conceptuelle." This operation corresponds to a shift from modernism to further characterizing the post-modernist image as a "flatbed picture plane." For such a passage, I will also provide an overall view of Cubism's main phenomenological lectures.

2010

Bamberger Studien zu Literatur, Kultur und Medien, 2024

Female characters demonstrate new forms of agency in domestic noir as it is exhibited in S.J. Watson's novel as well as in its film adaptation: in middle-class homes of the twenty-first century, housewives are active participants of their own lives and ably interpret their victimisation against which they fight with alternative strategies in the hope of making a change. This chapter relies on Carisa R. Showden's hypothesis which holds that female agency can develop in situations where it is the least accounted for, such as in abusive relationships. Both texts give special attention to the relationship between female agency and victimisation, although the two texts apply different strategies to illustrate how the amnesiac protagonist, Christine Lucas, fights for the (re-)construction of a conscious and independent self. While the book is rather backward-looking in the treatment of the female experience, the movie takes a much broader view in opening up a dialogue with the technological challenges of everyday life. In domestic noir, instead of a reassuring ending where the victim becomes a hero, the aim is more to demonstrate the recognition of victimhood and the emergence of agency in tension.

Comparative Literature, 2013

Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. (Adorno, Prisms 34 ; Prismen 26) With a precision suggesting a sleepwalker his clumsiness invariably guided him to the very centre of a misfortune... (Arendt 13) Uncertain Steps When we first encounter the narrator of Austerlitz, he is wandering round the unfamiliar town of Antwerp with, he tells us, ‗unsicheren Schritten' (1; 9). As well as reflecting the unfamiliarity of the locale, these ‗uncertain steps' evince a proud modesty characteristic of the classic Sebaldian narrator, a wanderer who discreetly relays the stories of the people and places he is privileged to encounter. In this instance, the willingness to get lost pays off almost instantly, leading to his first meetinng with Austerlitz in the railwaystation waiting room, or ‗salle des pas perdus'. Uncertain or lost steps, it seems, are the way to go. Later, when Austerlitz finds himself counting in Czech, a language he was previously unaware he could speak, he too feels as if he is walking with ‗unsicheren Schritten' (226; 234). But the uncertainty here belongs only to Austerlitz's waking consciousness, as he witnesses with astonishment the spontaneous reemergence of a capacity he had forgotten he ever had. Although Sebald does not use the phrase, steps of this sort, unpurposed yet unerring, are made with what is commonly known in German as somnambule Sicherheit: the legendary surefootedness of the sleepwalker. The convergence in a single phrase of sleepwalking and certainty poses an

1998

International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 2019

The governance of sleep sex (or sexsomnia) in the criminal law is a nightmare. Press reports of sleeping, often drunk, men acquitted as automatons of raping adults and children suggest cases are rising. The use of automatism, rather than insanity, in these cases is strong evidence of the immemorial struggle faced by legal psychiatry in appropriately construing unconscious defendants. This paper responds by drawing on well-established psychoanalytic conceptions of unconsciousness to present sexsomnia as dispositional to the defendant. Taking the Freudian concepts of eros and death instinct, it asserts that sexsomniacs are acting on repressed sadistic desires. Accordingly, those on notice of their sexsomnia, who fail to mitigate the risk of further attacks, should be guilty of rape. Reliance on (a reformed) insanity defencebeing a denial of responsibility at the time of the offenceundermines the scope of the criminal law to self-responsibilise sexsomniacs against perpetrating unwanted sex. Preface "[T]he point which I desire to note is that in all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep. Pray consider whether I am right, and you agree with me." Plato (1941). The Republic. New York: The Modern Library, pp 330-331.