Edward Hopper, Night Hawks, 1943, Art Institute

Hopper’s paintings express an unforgiving loneliness and pessimism, not only in their city scenes, but also in the seashore scenes.  It’s not that the cityscape and the people have no emotion, it’s that the emotion is despair. No one holds anyone’s hands, no one hugs anyone – humans are forever on their own.  The colors are flat and without warmth; the shadows are cold. 

In this picture, stereotyped on the American mind by the identification of the couple as Marilyn and Bogart, four people barely seem to dent the emptiness of an all night diner in an unremarkable, unvisited big city neighborhood.  The streets are empty of everything – people, signs, cars, trashcans, rubbish, rats – totally empty.  If one of the customers were to leave the diner, he would vanish, evaporate, he would not walk the streets.  The painting portrays a large city, but there are only four people in this city.

The counterman goes about his business of being a counterman – washing coffee cups, making a sandwich perhaps.  He is only one who acts, who seems to have purpose.  The woman in the red dress and her companion:  we are forced to this conclusion as otherwise there would be no reason for them to sit next to each other, but we resist it.  They seem to ignore each other and their cups of coffee – neither the coffee nor the partner exist during the moment Hopper captures.  Of the other man, we can say little, except, like the woman’s partner, he has a suit and hat.  The two are professional men of some sort, not laborers.  They are the hollow men of Eliot, the clerks of Kafka, characters in a noir novel; they are not the honest, hard working laborers of, say, Whitman and Sandburg’s poems.   They are neither the brains nor the brawn that made America great. The American dream has brought them to the despair of a late night café in an empty city.

The identification of the couple with Marilyn and Bogart supports my take on Hopper.  Bogart, in real life social enough, in his movies was a loner, an eccentric, a drop out.  Marilyn was the reverse, social enough in movies, but in her private life, lonely and alienated.

One of my favorite books, David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress is the contemporary literary equivalent; both Markson and Hopper are the stuff of nightmares.