The Long Goodbye

The capitalist society Marlowe inhabits alienates and makes miserable all its inhabitants. Marlowe’s work on the Lennox and Wade cases takes him into a world populated by the very wealthy. The wealthy people have all the money they will ever need, allowing them to live in isolated communities, surrounded by other similarly wealthy people. Despite this access to vast sums of money, none of the people Marlowe meets are happy. Instead, they feel separated from reality. They do not know how to make their lives better, finding little pleasure in their careers, cars, hobbies, or romantic partners. As such, these wealthy communities are rife with discord and immorality. Marlowe realizes that the spate of extramarital affairs, alcoholism, and violence indicates that no amount of money can repair the glaring holes in these peoples’ lives. While men like Marlowe struggle to get by, the rich and powerfully are stricken by moral rot and social alienation. They are isolated from the aches and pains of the real world, so they torture one another to feel anything other than the numb, cloying pain of their unhappy lives. They shut themselves away from the poor by building neighborhoods which, though they are intended to be happy, wealthy communities, become like prisons of alienation. These wealthy people are the true beneficiaries of capitalism, but they have gained nothing from their unearned success.

Marlowe meets the incredibly wealthy Harlon Potter and the disreputable gangster Mendy Menendez. While Potter is considered to be one of the smartest and most upstanding men in the country, Menendez is dismissed as a violent crook. Despite their vastly different reputations, both men deal with Marlowe in the same way: They like Marlowe and appreciate his honesty, but they threaten him with violence if he dares to intrude into their private lives. From Marlowe’s perspective, the successful capitalist and the petty crook are the same. They share the same outlook on life, the same moral code, and the same way of interacting with the world. The only difference is that Harlon Potter is deemed permissible by society while Menendez is deemed a criminal. The similarity between them is a damning indictment of capitalism. The rich are all criminal, whether they made their money legally or not. As Marlowe and Ohls suggest, there is no way to become as rich as Harlon Potter without exploiting someone. The only real difference is that Potter owns a newspaper, so he can shape the truth of the world to his will. Menendez, on the other hand, must rely on a knife.

Marlowe and Ohls recognize the capitalist alienation that shapes their world. They see the encroaching modernity, separating the rich into their own unhappy neighborhoods and forcing the poor into a life of constant struggle to get by. There are those who can straddle both worlds. Lennox marries into money and for a brief time divorces out of it. Nevertheless, he is constantly unhappy, whether rich or poor. He demonstrates how material wealth fails to repair the lingering trauma in a person. The money from his wife only allows him to fund new ways to alleviate his pain, either by drinking heavily or becoming increasingly numb and distant. When Eileen sees Lennox, she understands that he is not the man he once was. He is now completely alienated and traumatized. Unfortunately for the characters, they can envision no other solution. As Ohls implies to Marlowe, they must deal with capitalist alienation because this is the only system they have.