Making Space for Dogs Fucking

I.e.: What's the point if we're not taking some risks?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the dogs fucking in The Long Goodbye. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, allow me to refresh your memory:

The scene comes two-thirds of the way through the movie. An increasingly suspicious Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould, duh) has just arrived in Mexico to investigate the purported suicide of his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton). Robert Altman’s camera spends a full minute watching Marlowe walk off the bus and leisurely stroll through town, culminating in the iconic PI walking off screen… and the camera zooming in on the two dogs GOING AT IT.

There’s no reason this scene needs to be more than a few seconds long. You could simply show Marlowe getting off the bus. Or you could find an even more efficient establishing shot (the bad version: the bus passing a sign with the town name on it). The scene isn’t advancing the plot — or even really developing Marlowe as a character — beyond showing that he is now in Mexico.

And yet.