Doc, the Dude, and Marlowe: Changing Masculinities from The Long Goodbye to Inherent Vice

Several reviewers and scholars of Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice have noted the similarities between the novel and both Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels and the Coen brothers' film The Big Lebowski. Many of the reviewers, in particular, unreflectively comment on Doc Sportello's masculinity, criticizing Doc for not performing the hegemonic masculinity typical of detective novels and films. What has been missing is a deeper examination of hegemonic masculinity in both the novel and its likely source materials. This essay employs Judith Butler's notions of gender performativity as well as Christian Moraru's examination of postmodern rewriting to explore the fluid constructions and performances of masculinity in The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski, and Inherent Vice. Ultimately, this essay argues that Pynchon's characterization of Doc Sportello projects possibilities into alternatives to hegemonic masculinity.

Inherent Vice is rich with intertextual allusions to both Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels and the Coen brothers' film The Big Lebowski. All three works follow a private eye into the hidden worlds of wealth and corruption in Los Angeles. All three utilize similar character archetypes and detective story tropes. All three employ comparable plot structures. Inherent Vice uses these previous texts so flagrantly that the novel goes beyond simple intertextual allusions and employs a form of intertextuality that Christian Moraru terms "rewriting." Inherent Vice polemically rewrites its source material, specifically renegotiating Chandler's and the Coens' constructions of masculinity. Utilizing both Moraru's theory of postmodern rewriting and Judith Butler's notions of gender performativity, this essay explores Doc Sportello as a new construction of masculinity, one who exists in opposition to Chandler's Philip Marlowe and The Big Lebowski's Dude.
the practice of utilizing so many key elements of a previously-written, canonical text that similarities between the rewritten text and the original appear both deliberate and polemical. In Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning, Moraru clarifies, "Rewriting does not equal intertextuality" (19). To be clear, all rewriting is intertextual, but all intertextuality is not rewriting. While a comprehensive history of intertextuality is beyond the scope of this essay, a brief foray into the theory would help situate Moraru's concept of rewriting into the field.
The notion that a new text relates to previously created texts in a variety of ways and that this relationship shapes the meaning of the new text dates back to at least the Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century. Julia Kristeva's work with Mikhail Bakhtin's central ideas in her essay "Word, Dialogue and Novel" gives rise to the term intertextuality. Kristeva summarizes one of Bakhtin's core tenets by stating, "[L]iterary structure does not simply exist but is generated in relation to another structure" . For Kristeva, this relationship challenges the notion that a word has a fixed or static meaning. Meaning is instead formed through a discourse among "the writer, the addressee (or the character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context" (36). A writer, then becomes situated in a society and a cultural history. Much as Roland Barthes argues in "The Death of the Author," authorship, or the total authority of the author, is surrendered in some respect to language, to the flexibility of the concepts that create the signified in relation to every signifier. For Kristeva, the concepts creating the signified are dynamic depending on not only society and history, but on the "vertical" dimension of language, the ways in which the word relates to a cultural or literary body. Kristeva argues, "The only way a writer can participate in history is by transgressing this abstraction through a process of reading-writing; that is, through the practice of a signifying structure in relation or opposition to another structure" (36). Moraru is similarly concerned with a writer engaging in a literary corpus, specifically when that writer does so self-consciously and polemically.
However, Moraru's focus is very different from Kristeva's. While both develop from intertextual theory, Moraru performs postmodern literary analysis on complete texts and Kristeva is a linguist examining meaning in specific words from a traditional structuralist model. Carswell: Doc,the Dude,and Marlowe 4 Moraru owes a further debt to Stephen Greenblatt's "The Circulation of Social Energy." Greenblatt is also performing literary analyses on complete texts and is similarly concerned with how these texts develop from the literary corpus. For Greenblatt, "literature professors are salaried, middle-class shamans" (1) speaking to the dead through textual traces. He begins by "taking seriously the collective production" of language, literary pleasures, and texts (4). To do so, he must shrink the notion of total authority from the author. Like Kristeva, he must recognize that all literature works in relation to not only history and society, but to a body of literature. For Greenblatt, literature produces a "social energy," which, at the minimum, is able to transcend certain material conditions of gender, class, and time periods to move people to laughter, to tears, to pain, to pleasure, etc. Greenblatt investigates how this social energy develops in texts and ties various texts together. "The textual traces," according to Greenblatt, "were made by moving certain things-principally ordinary language but also metaphors, ceremonies, dances, emblems, items of clothing, well-worn stories, and so forth-from one culturally demarcated zone to another" (7). Following these textual traces leads Greenblatt to surmise that "there is very little pure invention in culture" (13). 2 2 There are numerous and varied approaches to intertextuality. A full exploration of them all is beyond the scope of this essay, but, were it feasible, a more complete exploration would show Moraru's approaches to rewriting as one among many voices theorizing intertextuality. Readers may wish to consult: Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 37;Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1992), 229-235;Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or Similarly, Moraru defines rewriting as "an intertextual form that entails a strong tie to ' chronologically prior works,' the 'trace' of which is discernable in the text" (19). However, for Moraru, rewriting goes beyond cultural traces that expand the signified of a given signifier or create a social energy that helps explain a literary work's broad appeal. Rewriting instead "is marked by the author as an 'intentional' presence rather than as an elusive, faint ' echo'" (19). Moraru theorizes rewriting "as a 'flagrant' retelling of identifiable literary tales" (17). Thus, for a work to be a rewriting and not merely intertextual, the work must contain traces that are obvious, that link in recognizable ways to specific texts, and that are hinted at in some way by the author as deliberate. Moraru's concept of rewriting can be a particularly useful tool when studying the work of Thomas Pynchon who, as Linda Hutcheon argues, weaves intertextual traces through his "historiographical metafiction" 3 and who, as Brian McHale demonstrates, "poaches" the popular genres of the historical periods in which his novels are set. Rewriting becomes an even more useful theoretical model when specifically discussing Pynchon's Inherent Vice, which seems to be a flagrant, intentional reconstruction of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye.
This essay will argue, first, that Inherent Vice is one of several rewrites of Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels and second, that in the tradition of these rewrites, Inherent Vice performs an overt reconstruction of Marlowe's representation of hegemonic masculinity. Moraru clearly and repeatedly argues that rewriting must have an ideological component. A "trace" is not enough. A rewrite must examine the ideology of the previous text-or the text's "mythology," in Moraru's terms-and enter into a conversation with it. This conversation explicitly or implicitly stands in opposition to the source text's ideology and makes an argument for a new mythology. According to Moraru, authors "'wage' rewriting to polemically 'update' a 'familiar story.' To do so, they usually take on the representation of race, gender, or class in the 'model' story and alter it" (9). Race, gender, and class are all essentially ideologies and mythologies. They are socially constructed belief systems that have the mythological element of seeking to use fiction to explain a phenomenon that is beyond a society's capability to adequately explain. Chandler's The Long Goodbye overtly engages in this type of mythmaking, self-consciously seeking to define masculinity through Philip Marlowe's performance of it. Several of the rewrites of

Marlowe-from Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase to Robert Altman's The Long
Goodbye to the Coens' The Big Lebowski-seek to update this performance of masculinity. To a greater-and perhaps more subtle-extent, Inherent Vice seeks to write a new myth about masculinity.
Since much of the second half of this essay will examine performances of masculinity, perhaps a few words theorizing masculinity would be helpful here. A comprehensive history of masculinity studies is beyond the scope of this essay, and a short summary should suffice. Most approaches to theorizing masculinity build from feminist studies and grow, specifically, from Simone de Beauvoir's famous statement in The Second Sex, "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman" (283). Fundamental to this expression is the notion that, while sex may be a biological fact, gender is not.
Gender is instead a series of learned behaviors, and culture-through films, novels, religious texts, church sermons, elementary school practices, basic childrearing, and so on-teaches these behaviors to boys and girls. We all learn how to adopt certain behaviors that enable us to perform socially constructed gender norms. In other words, we learn to act like a man or a woman. "Act" is a key term. We do not learn how to be a man or a woman. We learn how to act like one. Gender is a performance. This notion of gender as a performance can be traced back to Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. As Butler explains, "There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ' expressions' that are said to be its results" (33). For Butler, there is no core, inherent, or true gender identity. It is all a series of learned and reinforced behaviors. Butler's primary concern in Gender Trouble is the performance of femininity. She expands this focus into queer and trans performances, but spends very little time exploring masculinity itself. There would be no sense of a "Bulterian masculinity." There is only the notion that all gender-masculine, feminine, or otherwise-is a performance.

Rewriting Marlowe
In Rewriting, Moraru observes, "There are highly canonical, widely popular fictions that capture, even give birth to key myths of certain communities. At the same time, they acquire in the long run a communally 'mythic' weight through successive editing, teaching, reading, and related institutionalizing acts" (3). While Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye may not be the most canonical text, the text is instrumental in constructing the myth of the rugged, individualistic American man who is guided One of the fundamental criteria for rewriting, as Moraru describes it, is an engagement with cultural mythology. Moraru asserts the texts that are rewritten "are our mythic stories since they ' explain' to us-they represent our legends, literally, the founding texts that, etymologically, we are to read. They literally tell us. They tell (us) who we are and how we have come to be what we are" (8). The Long Goodbye and Chandler's other Philip Marlowe novels have become mythological. Philip Marlowe is a legend. He tells men what it means to be a man. We read masculinity in Marlowe.
He tells us who men are and how men have come to be that way. Moraru goes on to state, "Thus, re-telling (re-writing) them is serious business" (8). The serious business solution is highlighted. Likewise, a reader of Inherent Vice can very easily forget that Doc is investigating the murder of Glen Charlock. She can forget who killed Charlock.
She can even feel satisfied in her continued reading when Mickey Wolfmann, the character whose disappearance catalyzes the events of the novel, is found more than a hundred pages prior to the end. In all three cases, Chandler, the Coens, and Comparing the novel and the movie side by side, it becomes clear that The Big Lebowski shares too many key plot elements of The Long Goodbye to be merely "informed by Chandler around the edges." The film, instead, can be viewed as a rewriting of the novel. In both cases, the writers confront images of masculinity. Through Marlowe, Chandler constructs a mythological American male, one who is able to journey into the darkest recesses of society, confront crime, corruption, violence, and temptation, and emerge from it all unscathed. Marlowe represents the man that so many soldiers returning from World War II hoped to become: a man able to shake off the horrors of the world and end up clean (and perhaps sleep with a gorgeous woman, while he's at it). The Coens' reworking of the novel allows them to rewrite this image of masculinity for the 1990s.
The Dude sallies forth into a world of corruption and violence with a sense of humor. He is able to recognize that the world he lives in is at times absurd and vacuous, beset on all sides by pop culture, pornography, and a cruel scramble for diminishing resources. This recognition leads him to search for a way to simply abide. Rather than solving the mystery presented at the beginning of the novel (who really killed Sylvia Lennox) and the film (who kidnapped Bunny Lebowski), the overriding point of both works is to illustrate a man who, in the words of Raymond Chandler in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder," is "the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world" (18). Consistently for Chandler and typically for the Coens, artistic explorations focus primarily on character development.
Inherent Vice mirrors many of these conventions. Doc is swept up in the currents of the wealthy and corrupt. Events are catalyzed by a disappearing spouse. Doc stands rigorously by his self-created morality. He has no visible means of support.
Los Angeles figures so prominently in the novel that it becomes almost a character. Doc confronts a puppet master (from Palos Verdes, not Pasadena, though the move seems to be one more of geographical convenience than salient difference). Pynchon's use of these conventions, coupled with his longhaired, perpetually

The Best Man of His Time
The construction of masculinity raises compelling issues. Clearly, this construction is a key element of Raymond Chandler's work. In "The Simple Art of Murder," Chandler claims, "the gradual elucidation of character… is all the detective story has any right to be about" (17). Chandler expands upon this notion by focusing on one overriding characteristic that he seeks to elucidate: masculinity. For Chandler, the detective novel is about investigating what it means to be a man. When he uses the term "man" in "The Simple Art of Murder," he is clearly discussing men, not using an awkward metonym for humans. After stating that the hero of detective fiction "must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world," (18) Chandler defines this best man in typically masculine terms. The best man is the type to "seduce a duchess" but not "spoil a virgin." He is neither "eunuch" nor "satyr." He is a "man of honor… in all things." He "talks as a man of his age talks-that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness." In other words, he is "a man fit for adventure" (18). Philip Marlowe is just this sort of man. These characteristics make him a masculine icon in America. In his rewriting of The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman has one character repeatedly and intentionally conflate "Marlowe" and "Marlboro" as a way of highlighting Philip Marlowe and the Marlboro Man's shared role as an icon for a ruggedly individual, hyper-masculine man Chandler describes as "the best man in his world" (18).
The Big Lebowski is equally concerned with the construction of masculinity. In one pivotal scene, the two characters named Jeffrey Lebowski (the Big Lebowski and the Dude) meet to discuss Bunny Lebowski's kidnapping. The Big Lebowski asks the Dude, "What makes a man?" The Dude does not answer, and the Big Lebowski describes the characteristics of a man, much as Chandler does. According to the Big Lebowski, a man is constructed out of a series of "challenges met" and "competitors bested." He is a veteran of active combat, perhaps wounded (or, in the Big Lebowski's case, partially paralyzed) in warfare but nonetheless able to "achieve." A man is, above all, able "to do the right thing, whatever the cost." A strong man may cry, as the Big If the narrator does not kill the puppet master at the end of A Wild Sheep Chase, the supernatural evil that the puppet master seeks will be perpetuated. The puppet master, to maintain his power, will have to kill the narrator. The murder is the only way for the narrator to escape the corruption he has been drawn into. The murder Marlowe commits at the end of The Long Goodbye is frivolous. He could have let Terry Lennox live (as he does in the novel). The murder does provide a Hollywood ending.
It ties together the story lines in the film that Chandler leaves dangling in the novel.
Neither act, however, delves deeply into negotiations with masculinity.
As I mention above, Doc's murders are similarly necessitated by the plot. More to the point, the murders speak deeply about masculinity. Adrian, for one, demonstrates Carswell: Doc, the Dude, and Marlowe 16 many of the typical characteristics of hegemonic masculinity. He is aggressive, inherently violent, and seeks to dominate the men around him. His portrayal harks back to two texts on masculinity from the time of when the novel is set, George Gilder's Sexual Suicide Naked Nomads (1974). Sociologist Michael Kimmel summarizes these texts in Manhood in America, stating, "Men, Gilder argued, were biologically driven toward aggression, competition, and violence, naturally ' disposed' to crime, drugs, and violence" (181). Kimmel utilizes Gilder's arguments as a demonstration of the backlash against feminism. He goes on to summarize Gilder's assertions, [I]f women followed feminist ideals, they would abandon their traditional role as moralistic constraints on men's antisocial natures, and all hell would break loose. Since men were untamable, except in their traditionally responsible roles as father, husband, and breadwinner … women's liberation would result in an anarchistic uprising among men, who would run rampant in an orgy of violence and aggression. (181) Adrian is this unhinged man, running rampant in an orgy of violence and aggression.
Though Doc kills Adrian, Doc does so regrettably, offering Adrian every chance to live, even calling an ambulance for him. Adrian, it seems, would rather die violently than live through an act of kindness. This scene raises questions about masculinity.
It casts doubt on the assertions that Adrian is this way "naturally" and that it is his "biological drive" as a man. Adrian's behavior is an outlier for the men in the book.

Doc's Performance
Nonetheless, Louis Menand's summarization of Doc as a fairly goofy, frequentlystoned deviation from the tough-guy private eye is mostly accurate. While Doc demonstrates only a healthy amount of fear for his personal safety, he also has the courage to confront difficult and dangerous situations. But, for Doc, the question seems to be less one of how masculinity should be (or is) constructed and more about how to become a human in the twenty-first century. His rejection of hegemonic masculinity echoes Judith Butler's investigations in Gender Trouble. In response to feminist calls for a new and uniform construction of femininity, Butler argues, "[T] he premature insistence on a stable subject of feminism, understood as a seamless category of women, inevitably generates multiple refusals to accept the category" (7).
The problem with a stable subject, for Butler, lies in the exclusions it creates, and the power that lies behind such exclusions. Butler explains that juridical subjects are invariably produced through certain exclusionary practices that do not "show" once the juridical structures of politics has been established. In other words, the political construction of the subject proceeds with certain legitimating and exclusionary aims, and these political operations are effectively concealed and naturalized by a political analysis that takes juridical structures as their foundation. (5) Thus, when members of a gender fail to satisfy the criteria of the stable subject, they are marginalized from mainstream society, disempowered through this marginalization, and this exclusion is justified as the natural or legitimate process. 6 For Butler, "the task is to formulate within this constituted frame a critique of the categories of identity that contemporary juridical structures engender, naturalize, and immobilize" (8). Butler, of course, was discussing the characteristics of what it means to be a woman. Critiquing any criteria creating a stable subject affords feminism a more inclusive means of reconstructing the power structure, in Butler's view. In many ways, Butler's project has been a fairly successful one. In the twenty-first century, the answer to "What does it mean to be a woman?" has come to be, "Whatever a woman wants it to mean." Yet twenty-first century men have yet to make such gender trouble. Masculinity continues to be defined by fairly narrow criteria.
Hegemonic masculinity seeks to create a stable subject of masculinity characterized by a dominance, aggression, independence, emotional invulnerability, physical strength and toughness, heterosexuality, wealth, and a propensity for violence. A text like The Long Goodbye perpetuates this hegemonic masculinity. Marlowe more or less demonstrates all of the above-mentioned characteristics. The characteristic he may be excluded from is wealth. However, if one reads Chandler's entire Marlowe oeuvre, one finds that Marlowe has had several cases that resulted in real and significant money. This affords Marlowe a certain amount of independence. It enables him to have no boss and ostensibly no one to whom he must answer for his actions. In this way, he has enough wealth to satisfy the criteria of masculinity, i.e., he has money to buy autonomy. 6 In a sense, this is what reviewers and readers like Menand are doing when they classify Doc as a wimp.
They are marginalizing him for not being more stoic, more violent, more angry, more hegemonically masculine. In other words, these classifications reify toxic masculinity. He shapes his life in a way that moves away from the accumulation of wealth. He envisions his detective agency as trafficking in exchanges outside the traditional marketplace, working "for folks who if they paid him anything it'd be half a lid or a small favor down the line or maybe only just a quick smile, long as it was real" (314). 7 He similarly rejects relationships of dominance and submission, preferring instead relationships to be as equitable as possible. Most importantly, he is open emotionally. Unlike Marlowe or Bigfoot, who are only allowed to feel anger, Doc experiences a range of emotions. He allows himself to be sad, to be happy, and to feel love in various ways-familial love, love for friends, love for lovers past and present, and love for his enemies. His rejection of hegemonic masculinity reaches its peak when Doc returns the twenty kilos of heroin to the Golden Fang.
Doc does not meet the Golden Fang alone. We learn, "Doc brought Denis along for, well maybe not muscle, but something like that, some kind of protection he hadn't realized till lately he needed" (348). In other words, Doc brings Denis to the exchange because he wants a friend with him, someone who can offer emotional support. Additionally, when Doc negotiates the exchange of heroin, he turns down money, negotiating instead for immunity from the Golden Fang for himself and his family and friends. These negotiations include the release of Coy Harlingen from the network of the Golden Fang. Coy is allowed to return to his family. To say he is forgiven for his time as a police informant is too simple. Coy neither asks for forgiveness nor performs any type of penance. Payback is not part of the equation. He instead offers his word that he will be an honest family man henceforth, and he is afforded the opportunity to be one. The key to the entire exchange is a trust between Doc and the Golden Fang. Doc explains his reasons to Denis, saying, "What? I should only trust good people? man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense. I mean I wouldn't give odds either way" (349). Of course, the reader must not forget that Doc's greatest talent throughout the novel is his ability to win while betting on the long shot.
This exchange takes on a revolutionary perspective when one considers that Pynchon's crime novel depicts a neoliberal society in which the concerns of the marketplace supersede all other concerns. In this society, one of the most important appendages for maintaining power is a massive carceral state legitimated by a desire for payback. And, in the climax of the novel, Doc forces an exchange that rejects both the neoliberal marketplace and the ideology of payback in the carceral state. This rejection is first predicated on Doc's rejection of hegemonic masculinity.
However, Doc's rejection is complicated. It is neither ideal nor complete. It can be revolutionary, but the revolutionary potential is unstable.
Judith Butler argues, "[G]ender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free-floating attributes, for we have seen that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence" (33). Doc is aware of the "regulatory practices of gender coherence" and he abides by some of them. Like a hegemonic male, Doc is heterosexual. He is a sports fan. He breaks from his investigation to pursue his heterosexual desires and to watch the NBA playoffs.
He complicates this by demonstrating an openness to other sexualities and by breaking the guy code when he skips the playoffs to have a post-coital conversation with Penny. Still, his rejection of hegemonic masculinity is an incomplete negotiation. He abides by certain characteristics and rejects others. Fundamentally, his masculinity is a performance. Doc is not alone in this regard. As mentioned above, Judith Butler questions the notion that a person has a true gender, one that exists independent of juridical processes, regulatory practices, and cultural pressures. Instead, we perform our genders. We do not necessarily have a choice in these performances, nor do we necessarily have an epistemological core below these performances.
Doc is nothing if not performative. He inhabits several disguises and personas throughout the novel. He utilizes aliases. He hands out false business cards. He wears various hairstyles and wigs and outfits that signify distinct roles and socioeconomic standings. He even goes by "Doc," though his name is Lawrence and he holds no doctoral degree. He is able to transform himself according to the spaces he inhabits.
He can trade his huaraches and Hawaiian shirt for a John Garfield suit that allows him to pass at an exclusive club where only the wealthy, the powerful, the "in place" dine. Yet his chameleon-like tendencies are outed early in the novel. When Tariq Khalil visits Doc's office, Doc greets the member of the Black Guerilla Family, saying, "Say… what it is, my brother" (14). Tariq responds, "Never mind that shit," then stares "under different circumstances offensively, at Doc's Afro" (14). Immediately, Tariq recognizes a performance and makes Doc aware of the recognition. Doc responds by performing instead as an investigator, asking only the questions he needs answers to, giving only the responses his client needs. Tariq continues his performance of masculinity by seeking to establish dominance by criticizing Doc's financial state, saying, "Secretary's off today" when Doc starts typing out his own ticket. Tariq continues to try to get the upper hand through a series of smart aleck remarks. Doc does not take the bait. His performance of that particular type of masculinity ended when Tariq asked him to "Never mind that shit." From that point forward, Doc performs an alternate masculinity, one that renegotiates hegemonic masculinity while resisting the impulse to create a new, stable model of masculinity.

Judith Butler observes
Gender is a complexity whose totality is permanently deferred, never fully what it is at any given juncture in time. An open coalition, then, will affirm identities that are alternately instituted and relinquished according to the purposes at hand; it will be an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure. (22) Doc's performances permanently defer a single or unified masculinity. In response to the power of the Golden Fang specifically and contemporary neoliberal society in general, Doc alternately institutes and relinquishes performances of masculinity as a move toward a more autonomous and egalitarian society. He opens the door for alternate masculinities, multiple convergences and divergences that likewise seek a revolutionary potential. Perhaps this is Pynchon's most significant break in his rewriting of The Long Goodbye and The Big Lebowski: his rejection of their narrow constructions of masculinity. Doc shrugs off the gendered tropes of detective fiction and dismisses the questions of what it means to be a man.
Instead, he searches for ways to be a more fully realized human: how to live with integrity, how to love his enemy as well as his neighbor, how to construct and maintain a community, and how to face the corruption of his world with humor and generosity.