Coffee and Noir: THE LONG GOODBYE
every instance of coffee in noir: 051
You can learn a lot about a character by how they take their coffee: sugar? cream? more whiskey than caffeine?
I’m cataloging every noir scene where coffee plays a role — rote and ritual, soul-dark or cream and sugar, served from dingy diners to shiny penthouses.
A beachfront may not the first image ‘noir’ evokes, but the ocean is a key aspect of many films in the genre: Kiss Me Deadly ends in it, Vertigo dips in and out of it, Moontide and Female on the Beach involve boats in their plot (and The Lady From Shanghai serves coffee in theirs).
It’s a a bright, saturated setting instead of dark, shadowy, high-contrast bar where people pour whiskey in their coffee, or the other way around.
Or in this case, simply pour liquor straight into the coffee mugs . . . with not a drop of coffee in them.
One of my favourite adaptations of one of the quintessential noir writers, Altman’s The Long Goodbye is seen as a flop, an underappreciated masterpiece, an optimistic take on cynical pulp fiction, an exercise in place and period, sometimes all of the above.
This scene involves plenty of those aspects. It’s also full of fakery, the coffee proving as false as the facades of glamour, love, and loyalty under the bleaching California sun.
Just before this beachside scene, Roger Wade (Sterling Haden, no stranger to Coffee in Noir) pulls a milk carton from the fridge, then uses it being empty as excuse to go straight to liquor, straight from the bottle.
The whole scene is loaded with subtext, knowing glances, and absolutely insane camera work.
In reply to “what are you drinking” Marlowe says ‘whatever you’re having’ — correctly guessing it’s harder stuff than caffeine.
In fact, every time a coffee cup appears in this movie, it’s to convey liquor under the guise of civility, even when it’s post-ocean dunk with risk of hypothermia; though steam from the mugs suggests the booze is doctored with hot coffee poured by some thoughtful EMT.
Nobody in The Long Goodbye is really trying to hide that they’ve swapped a socially acceptable drug for a barely-less-socially-acceptable drug. The coffee mugs are there as a feint towards plausible deniability, a way to signal ‘we have class’ without having to actually live up to any standards, even arbitrary ones.
‘Appearances and social standing versus actual values and social mores’ is at the root of most noir, and this is a blunt depiction of exactly how that works.
You can get away with anything you want from daydrinking to murder . . . so long as it benefits the powers that be to let you do so.