The long goodbye

Yi Yang: The Long Goodbye is extremely fragmented; its events are connected only by the main character Marlowe. And due to the fragmentation, the film cannot be seen as a conventional detective story, which follows strictly a plot development. The entire film is driven by Marlowe’s desire to discover the mystery behind his friend’s death. However, the film never directly tells the audience that the main plot is about Marlowe collecting evidence and solving the crime. Instead, what we see is a series of seemingly irrelevant encounters Marlowe has with various people. But as the story unfolds, we see that pieces of Marlowe’s experience eventually come together and leads us the final ending. Not only the detecting process was fragmented, the ending is also anti-climatic. I did not realize it would be the ending when Marlowe tells the neighboring girls that he will leave for a few days. I did not think that the film would portray him to suddenly solve his friend’s crime at the very end. And as the voiceover comes into play, we are finally gaining back our conventional omniscient view point. We then knew where his friend is now, and that Marlowe eventually finds out the truth. However, the confrontation between Marlowe and his friend is so short and Marlowe shoots him unexpectedly. And then that is it, the sinner is punished, and the justice is restored. But as the ending is so sudden and casual, I feel that it is too “easy” for the sinner to die, questioning if the justice is really restored. The treatment of women in the film is from the surface traditional, but provides us the complexity of the female characters. We have Lynn as the archetype of the Femme Fatale, that she deludes Marlowe to believe that her husband kills the victim, just to get away with her lover. But the film also reveals her back story about her marriage. As she is frequently abused by the volatile husband, we can understand her actions in the film to a certain degree.

The setting and the atmosphere in the film. The film is a commentary of the original detective story Bogart The absence of the exposition: The fragmentation of the plot; anthropological A suspicion of the plot going: The hostility of the conventional plot: the false causality The detective is the only one smokes

The ending: SOME form of justice is restored; but it is weird BUT here, the murderer is Meta-detective story Marlowe character:

1. Cocky
2. Indifferent
3. Physical: always in motion
4. compassionate

He has “voice-over”, having conversations with himself — intelligent Hesitant, self-conscious, and the heroic character is then flatten Flatten into satire Hooray for hollywood: juxtaposition with the cold murder