L.A. as neo-Noir Wasteland

Rating: 10/10 (16 April 2007)

Directed by Polish-born Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974) is often credited with reviving the classic film noir detective/crime genre exemplified by such '40s and '50s American films as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and Touch of Evil. While classic film noir is characterized by low lit, black and white cinematography, Polanski managed to infuse Chinatown with a profound sense of corruption and nihilism while setting his tale amid the relentless blazing sunlight of a Southern California drought and despite employing two photographic elements previously thought antithetical to film noir style: color film stock and anamorphic widescreen composition. Chinatown's great critical and popular success demonstrated once and for all that the essence of film noir lay mainly in its bleak moral vision, not its cinematographic style.
Seizing full advantage of the 1968 demise of the Hollywood Production Code and the subsequent liberalization in American cinema's treatment of sex and violence, Chinatown builds upon the film noir tradition of exploiting and exploding social taboos. Take, for instance, the central plot function of incest or the notoriously brutal scene in which Jake Gittes has a protruding part of his anatomy nearly cut off (no, not literally that part - but the phallic implications are clear and played for sly comedy in subsequent scenes). Yet Polanski also added an entirely new dimension to classic film noir by linking up its darkness with the paranoid/depressive mood of post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, thereby extending the noir sense of corruption beyond the mean urban streets and to high governmental and privileged economic places. Chinatown may be set in 1930s L.A., but its soul is in the 1970s.
Like earlier film noir private detectives, Chinatown's protagonist, Jake Gittes (a role Jack Nicholson was born to play) is derived in large part from the cynical, wisecracking, "hardboiled" detective popularized in 1930s novels by such writers as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Also like many earlier film noir works, Chinatown adopts a storytelling point of view that is analogous to a mix of "first person" and "third person limited" narration in the novel. Such a viewpoint immerses the audience in a subjective search for truth within a maze of deceptive appearances, recognizing or failing to recognize clues (the "bad for glass" seawater in the Mulrays backyard, the obituary column, Noah Cross's bifocals) just as Gittes does and not a second sooner. Indeed, Chinatown is very unusual in the degree to which it sustains a subjective narrative viewpoint, often punctuating it with clever point of view shots using binoculars, camera lenses, car mirrors, and a variety of Peeping Tom setups.
Gittes's perspective proves to be much more unreliable even than that of classic film noir era private eyes. Like Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Hammett's Sam Spade, Gittes is courageous and resourceful; like them and unlike the police, he is governed by a code of honor, however unconventional or self-defined. Nevertheless, the world in which Gittes operates is far less redeemable by the actions of a detective hero than was the mid-twentieth century world of classic noir and eons remote from the optimistic 19th century world of such English detective novel heroes as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Repeatedly in Chinatown the private eye code either fails to function or is subject to mockery - until, in the film's shocking last scene, Gittes fails for a second time to save a damsel in distress and is led away mumbling "do as little as possible" while a bought police force ushers the innocent Catherine Mulray into the grasp of her rapacious grandfather/father.
Chinatown's representation of another archetypal film noir character, the femme fatale, significantly departs from original film noir conventions as well. The casting of vampish looking Faye Dunaway in the role of Evelyn Mulray would seem to fit well enough, but what happens to the character in the plot and what, even more disturbingly, we learn has happened to her in the film's back-story is not at all in keeping with classic noir. Evelyn's alluring deceptions and even her nymphomania are ultimately the effects of her quite literal violation by patriarchal power, not another instance of female sexuality ruthlessly wresting power in a man's world. If in classic film noir the death or exposure of the femme fatale is requisite for whatever moral redemption is extracted from the darkness, Evelyn's brutal death in Chinatown marks a plunge completely into the darkness.
Of course central to the structure of Chinatown is that most noir of all cities, Los Angeles, centered here on its eponymous "Chinatown" district, where the film's plot climaxes. The scarcity of water in Polanski's Los Angeles transforms the city into a symbolic spiritual Wasteland akin to T.S. Eliot's. But here the fisher king won't die because he is an all-powerful capitalist/father figure willing to "do anything" without moral restraint. Played in a great piece of postmodern self-reflection by John Huston, the father of film noir, Noah Cross is also a figure of the Anti-Christ. Note his ironically doubled Biblical name, his favorite lunch (suggestively Christian fish served with the heads on!), and his power over water, which he diverts not to liberate any chosen people but to line his pockets and own everything he possibly can, including "the future, Mr. Gittes, the future."
Few, if any, American mainstream films have bleaker, more nihilistic resolutions than Chinatown. And few are more powerful or memorable.