One Step Forward, Two Step Playback: Retroactive Characterization and Foreward Innovation in Raymond Chandler’s Playback (1958).

Abstract

Approaching from the critical gap as the most derided and the most misunderstood of his novels, this paper argues Raymond Chandler’s Playback as a wealth of innovations to the hardboiled and as an adaptation of a screenplay a successor of the American film noir. Building on the scholarship of Babener, Jaber, and Swirski, this study looks to the novel’s innovations of the femme fatale archetype, a species of the black widow stock character most commonly associated with film noir and hardboiled fiction. Highlighting the author’s use of filmic tropes of the female archetype to mischaracterize three characters by way of Swirskian replays to the clichéd tropes of the 1940s, this paper argues Chandler conceals the real innovation of his representation of femme fatale corresponding to tropes of the late 1950s as well as the neo-noir tropes of 1960s and 1970s.