To be honest, after watching the whole movie, I found that kind of boring since I am not born at the period of 1950s to 1970s but I enjoyed how Altman create different atmosphere by using different filming techniques and background music. Although I could not fully comprehend the significance of this movie, I did some secondary research and watched the movie online with English subtitles again and finally I start to understand the hidden metaphors and I especially want to know why he changes the period of time that the story is originally based.
Before I started to analyze some of the metaphors of this movie, I would like to briefly list out areas in the movie that I think interesting to be analyzed later. The first metaphor that I have noticed long before I start my secondary research of this movie is Marlowe is smoking non-stop throughout the whole movie. The second one is the disappearance of Marlowe’s cat.
The non- stop smoking action of Marlowe in the movie makes a big contrast to the girls who lived next to him. To me, those girls actually represent the 1970s, which being healthy is one of the big issues. (Noticed from how they are always exercising in their balcony). In the other hand, Marlowe represents the 1950s where people still don't have the sense of being healthy (his non-stop smoking and his poor lifestyle e.g. waking up at 3am). From this metaphor, I can see how the director carefully designed every single thing for the audience and finally helps to bring out the hidden meaning of the movie.
The scene where the cat leaves the house is actually a big hidden metaphor of the movie. The cat leaves because it is not satisfies with that brand of canned cat food that Marlowe bought from the groceries, I think the leaving of the cat consequently made the disappearance of terry later in the movie, since he is also not satisfies with his rich wife, but he choose to kill her and leave. This metaphor is a hit to show how Marlowe will be betrayed by his friend terry, just like an implication of how the cat betrayed him and leave the house.
I think the purpose of Marlowe discovers only prove that how much the ethical world of the old 1950s Marlowe no longer applies to current 1970s California, and even though his passive helpfulness does not go right with him. Altman's technique of layering characters upon each other while frequently changing the composition, trying to bring out that people are never as they seem and that events are running out of Marlowe's control.
In the movie, Altman has put his own political views into it, he changed the time of the movie from the 40's to the late 60s of United State, it was the period of time where different “weird” sports start to become more popular (such as yoga that those girls are doing in the balcony), youngsters are always anti- war and young people are having somehow called “revolutionary emotional stage” which to be more detail is teenagers always want to change something and causing some rebellion of something. I think Altman seems to have wanted to keep everything about this period of time in his film.
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