The Long Goodbye (1973)
Directed by Robert Altman
No — The Long Goodbye is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Robert Altman's 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler finds Philip Marlowe, played by a rumpled Elliott Gould, wandering a sun-bleached Los Angeles in a 1948 Lincoln while everyone around him has moved on.
Consciousness Markers
Altman's satire carries a melancholy moral about loyalty in a selfish society, but it is conveyed through tone and character rather than preachy sermonizing.
The film satirizes greed, corruption, and a selfish moneyed Los Angeles, but this is a general moral critique rather than an explicit eat-the-rich economic argument.
The cast is almost entirely white and drawn from unconventional but not diverse sources (a baseball pitcher, a talk-show comedian). There is no deliberate inclusive casting impulse.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear in the film's plot or subplots.
Women function largely as femme fatale and damsel figures within a classic noir framework; no feminist critique or agency-driven arc is present.
Race is not a theme; the film's social commentary targets moral decay and self-obsession, not racial dynamics.
No environmental or climate concerns appear anywhere in the story.
No body-positivity themes or messaging are present.
Alcoholism and erratic behavior appear as character flaws, not as neurodivergence framed with advocacy or understanding.
The film updates Chandler's 1950s setting to the 1970s, but this is stylistic adaptation, not the reinterpretation of historical events through a modern ideological lens.
Why it received this score
Robert Altman's 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler finds Philip Marlowe, played by a rumpled Elliott Gould, wandering a sun-bleached Los Angeles in a 1948 Lincoln while everyone around him has moved on. Marlowe chain smokes in a health-conscious city. He wears a tie nobody else would wear. Altman called the whole enterprise a satire in melancholy, and the melancholy is doing the heavy lifting. This is a film about a decent man adrift in a selfish, self-obsessed society, and it treats that theme with a shrug instead of a sermon.
The moral critique here is real but diffuse. Gangster Marty Augustine smashes a Coke bottle across his girlfriend's face to remind us that the world is violent. Roger Wade, the macho alcoholic novelist, pays his debts and then walks into the ocean. There is greed, there is corruption, there is a moneyed Malibu that discards people without a backward glance. None of this arrives as an economic argument. It is a mood, a texture, a pastel postcard of a city that has stopped caring. The film observes, it does not instruct.
As a document of progressive social consciousness, the picture is essentially barren. The casting is unconventional (a former baseball pitcher, a talk-show comedian, a director) but not diverse in any deliberate sense. Women occupy the familiar noir roles of femme fatale and damsel, and the film shows no interest in disturbing that arrangement. Race is not a theme. There is no environmental concern, no body-positivity messaging, no neurodivergent advocacy, no reinterpretation of history through a modern lens. What remains is a weary, beautiful film about loyalty that nobody returns, and it delivers that lesson through tone, silence, and a camera that never stops drifting. The classification is straightforward. There is very little to measure.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
In 1970s Hollywood, Detective Philip Marlowe tries to help a friend who is accused of murdering his wife.
Questions about The Long Goodbye
Is The Long Goodbye woke?
No — The Long Goodbye is not woke, scoring 6 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Long Goodbye have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Lecture Energy at 12.
How does The Long Goodbye compare to other 1973 movies?
It ranks #13 of the 32 films from 1973 we've scored; their average is 11. The wokest is Soylent Green (39).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.