'The Big Sleep' would have been a more effective study of nightmarish existence had the detective been more complicated and had more curiosity been shown about his sweetheart's relation to the crime.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I'm not a great student, so I don't know that I would have been a great detective. Part of my brain sort of works that way, like wanting to figure out puzzles and figure out what happened and why people do the things they do and who they are and how it happened.
The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, was always more concerned about the clockwork cleverness of the plot, never the investigator.
People are fascinated by the darker sides of human nature, and I think they're also interested in seeing the ability that a particular detective or group of detectives might have to solve the crime and put the world right again.
There certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks.
If there was one overarching theme to 'True Detective,' I would say it was that, as human beings, we are nothing but the stories we live and die by - so you'd better be careful what stories you tell yourself.
The thing I don't like about detective stories is looking for criminals.
I think it's always interesting to learn what the seemingly spontaneous one-nighter actually reveals about a character.
When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.
I think a lot of us responded intensely to 'True Detective' because it was so incredibly earnest. That's what made it heartbreaking and involving.
'The Big Sleep' is an unsentimental, surrealist excitement in which most of the men in Hollywood's underworld are murdered and most of the women go for an honest but not unwilling private sleuth (Humphrey Bogart).