It's a Little 'Too' Quiet in Here: Writing an Atmosphere

photo credit: National Weather Service

I’m going to step away from being OCD about description, and get OCD about something slightly different this week.

Atmosphere changes a story. Unlike plot or thematic content—speaking to the audience’s sense of logic or intellect—atmosphere appeals almost entirely to the emotions. Like “immersion” for video games, atmosphere in narrative does the work of removing readers from their own time and place. And subject matter, characters, and language that look fun and sunny in one piece of writing turn warped and frightening when the narrative’s atmosphere changes.

"Well this place seems relaxed and friendly!"

I wrote in a previous post that the call sign of a noir is the atmosphere of bleakness, of cynicism, of moral exhaustion, and—in extreme cases—hopelessness. It separates noir from the greater superclass of mystery or suspense, more so than the plot indicators with which it is associated: corrupt cops, femme fatales, the amoral hero, the intersection of high and low society, the fluidity of lawful and lawlessness. These touchstone elements won’t collude as a work of noir fiction, either in film or literature, without the proper mood—the straw that stirs the drink. Consider the case of The Big Lebowski; in this film we see the crooked cops, smut peddlers, at least one gumshoe, rich men with marriage troubles, a femme fatale, and an innocent man trapped in the squabbles of the morally bankrupt. The damn thing is even set in LA. Alas, this is no true noir; without the mood I’ve described, it’s just an excessively clever and subversive film (and boy howdy do I love subversive).

Trust me I could talk about this ALL DAY, people

But enough about hilarious awesome movies you should all go watch right now. In a further earlier post, I stated that Raymond Chandler is the gold standard of noir, by which all others are judged, and so I’m turning to him again. I want to observe how Chandler sets, and maintains, the atmosphere he mastered. What did he do to evoke the feelings that ferment in this passage, from 1942’s The High Window?

“Out of the apartments come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men who actually go to work.”
(Chapter 8)

This particular paragraph is so rich in description that I have to skim through it, lest I am here all day droning on about the beauty of the phrase “faces like stale beer” (or write a whole other post on association). What is at work here is one of the principle components of atmosphere: tone, or the authorial voice. This is the only lens through which the reader sees the world of the novel. What the voice feels—in this case, the voice of Philip Marlowe—will inform the reader’s mood. For Marlowe, the tone is blunt, sarcastic, and unembellished.

It isn’t enough, though, that Marlowe describes unpleasantness in this neighborhood. Setting can buttress the narrative’s atmosphere, but the perception defines it; perfectly happy people can waltz right through streets full of the same desperate and hopeless characters, and create a dramatically different sound. What brings out the feeling of despondency in Marlowe’s voice, as opposed to any other voice, is the fact that he does not describe individual people. He describes people in types, like he has seen them all before. The tone carries not just negativity, but exhausted negativity; desperation is not shocking, and is nothing new. Moreover, the candor—bordering on callousness—of “faces like stale beer” (seriously is that an incredible descriptor or what?) and “men who actually go to work” gives you the sense that it’s been quite a long time since Marlowe really cared about them.

Like most of Chandler’s work, The High Window moves between high and low society from scene to scene: his own modest apartment, semi-legitimate nightclubs, the nouveau riche. To maintain the novel’s mood, Chandler has to maintain Marlowe’s voice even in settings that might be halfway pleasant to a different voice:

“A lot of junk that would take a week to dust. A lot of money, and all wasted. Thirty years before, in the wealthy close-minded provincial town Pasadena then was, it must have seemed like quite a room.”
(Chapter 1)

He might just be visiting a grouchy dowager’s ailing house (but who knows what Antiques Roadshow treasures it holds?!) and not a depressing nook of LA, but here he establishes the sense of vague contempt for all the world he sees, regardless of the locale. This flattening, the reduction of the high and the dismissal of the low, does not waver throughout the narrative. To hold the mood, Chandler must always write through this lens.

A point that’s tangential to everything above but that I had to mention because I just noticed it and it bothers me. In the middle of a conversation, Marlowe notes this after he speaks: “The meaningless talk had a sort of cold bracing effect on me, making a mood with a hard gritty edge” (Ch. 9). I can’t figure out what purpose this sentence serves. After about two pages of narration and dialogue in any Philip Marlowe novel, you already understand that edgy and sardonic is Marlowe’s default. Chandler doesn’t need to remind us now. Moreover, I don’t think this is the kind of thing a character should be saying about himself; it’s too self-conscious. Characters convey themselves through speech and action.