“I know what happens / I read the book / I believe I just got / the goodbye look…”

When we doodle spirals, do we start outwards and work inwards, or vice versa? The centrifugal force acting on the spiral is observable only from the drawer’s point of view. In Night Moves, private-dick Harry Moseby puts it another way, though perpendicularly: “After the first six feet it’s hard to tell if you’re jumping or falling.” Night Moves’ stultifying finale concludes with a shot of a boat in the Gulf of Mexico spiraling around a wreck. Moseby, having solved the mystery of a missing girl, then having thought he solved the mystery of the now-dead girl, has muscled his way into a plot he only fecklessly solves after everybody is already dead. He bangs his fist in frustration and throttles the boat, succeeding only in spinning out at sea. Like the evacuating Londoners of Gravity’s Rainbow, “this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into…”

The positively poisonous Night Moves turned noir upside down and few were around to notice. Released less than two weeks before Jaws, and overshadowed by contemporaneous auteurist entries by Polanski, Altman, and de Palma, Night Moves is ugly, jarring, and introspective. It cribs the ugliest element of Chinatown’s plot and liquidates almost every character. The dialogue is full of punchy, self-aware retorts referencing the Kennedy assassinations, Sam Spade, Alex Karras, and clumsy football cliches. Bruce Jackson points out in his essay that the most famous of P.I. weapons – the detective’s gun – is locked up at the beginning of the movie and removed at the end, only to be then hastily thrown overboard. Night Moves offers a critical revision of the All-American private eye, lending him all the trappings of the central-casting detective but almost none of the trademark guile. The rare flash of useful improvisation that Moseby shows as a P.I. is to use a fishing net to pull the throttle on a boat. It’s still too late. The action sends him and the boat into a literal tailspin.

Moseby is all misapplied force, spinning around and resisting the centrifugal forces that would have extracted him from a dangerous plot. He prefers the lonely stakeouts or the company of B-movie stuntmen to, for example, watching Rohmer movies with his wife. An ex-pro football player, like Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby “[he drifts] on forever seeking […] the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.”  His house is filled with glory-days memorabilia, and when he is not there he spends his time on stakeouts practicing chess moves. Crucially, he fails to ever apply the lessons from losing games. As he recounts a famous chess game to Paula – the platinum-haired deckhand and the closest analog to a femme fatale in the movie – he quips the loser “played something else and lost.” This portends the misdirected, clumsy actions he takes in the film but also recalls the actual knight moves of Moseby’s modeled chess game. He rehearses his own missteps, failing to see that the two men posing the greatest threat to him each possess some kind of disability.

The tension between action and non-action is Night Moves’ cache of potential energy. After nearly 90 minutes of abortive actions, shaky shakedowns, and nocturnal navigations, the explosive finale releases the pent energy but nullifies the plots. After all, Moseby locks his gun up in the opening titles, passively takes a case offered to him by a friend, and follows clues as they fall into his lap. With his marriage on the rocks and 30 minutes left in the runtime, he screens a phone call from the victim in his last case, quits the private eye business to become a stuntman, and confesses to his wife that he found but never confronted his missing father when he had the opportunity. The confession, incidentally, punctures the self-cultivated image of Moseby as ex-football player and man-of-action. Earlier in the movie, when his wife presses him on why he did not confront her after spotting her on her rendezvous, Moseby admits that he would just be left “stand[ing] there with my thumb up my ass”. With this second confession, his wife - and the audience - finally apprehend the detective's impotence. Moseby, of course, is the last to realize that all of his detective work sums to nothing. Moseby ends up furtively spinning in circles, pathetically watching the plot unfold behind several panes of thick glass, just like us.