After The Long Goodbye
Robert Altman’s 1973 film buried a strange scene inside a fairly ordinary detective plot. A gangster, trying to intimidate Philip Marlowe, orders his own henchmen to strip naked — among them a young, uncredited Arnold Schwarzenegger, reigning Mr. Olympia at the time, silently flexing for the camera while the scene’s actual menace quietly evaporates. Marlowe stays unbothered. The muscle, the machismo, the whole staged threat collapses into something closer to spectacle than intimidation — noir posturing that trips over its own hidden wiring.
The ground of this collage is that scene itself — a sequence of stills lifted directly from the strip sequence, dialogue fragments still legible across the surface, Schwarzenegger and the room of half-dressed men laid out almost like a contact sheet. Onto that ground, actual gay figures are added — not commenting on the scene from outside it, but standing inside it, completing a picture Altman filmed but never quite let himself finish.
The original scene worked because everyone in it insisted it was something else. This collage removes the insisting.
— Behan
