THE VAGUEST WAY:

Red harvest in Iraq (Spengler, 1/26/04, Asia Times)

Hollywood embraced all of Hammett's heroes except for the Op [Red Harvest], whose casual destructiveness offends American sensibilities. Yet Hammett's grubby detective might be American literature's most original invention, and, more to the point, he is just the man America needs right now in Iraq.

We encounter the Op in a 1920s Western town, where the mine boss imported gangsters to break a strike, and the gangsters stayed to run the rackets. A brittle truce prevails among the various gangs, the corrupt police and the mine owner. The Op willfully incites a gang war, deceiving colleagues and superiors. He dislikes authority, not least the one that pays him. Damsels in distress and downtrodden workers matter to him not at all. He is a loner without friends, short, fat and alcoholic. His transient love interest is a demimondaine whose murder he neglects to prevent. He incites the war simply because he can, at great risk to his own life, which in any case he holds cheap. He manipulates rather than confronts. The story ends when everyone else is dead.

Numerous films borrowed Red Harvest's plot outline, including Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, Sergio Leone's For a Fistful of Dollars, Walter Hill's Last Man Standing, and the Coen brothers' Miller's Crossing, without, however, portraying Hammett's protagonist. That anomaly reveals much about American culture. The detectives and cowboys who infest American cinema descend from the silly chivalric literature that Miguel de Cervantes lampooned in Don Quixote.

Americans want their tough guys to have a heart of gold. In the Kurosawa-Leone-Hill adaptations, the Toshiro Mifune-Clint Eastwood-Bruce Willis characters take great risk to aid a lady in distress. Hammett's Op cares neither about lady nor risk. His object is the mutual destruction of the contending parties, which he arranges with humor and enjoyment.

Spengler is one of those as yet unreconciled to the truth that our interests are best served by destruction of only one of the contending parties.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 26, 2004 09:29 AM