Chinatown (1974)

I concede that starting this blog off with an essay about what many critics consider to be one of the ten best movies of all time seems a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. One that has no water in it. I say to you haters... well, yes, it is kind of like that. However, it's also the movie I've watched the most recently, so I'm going to do it anyway.

Films noirs are in many ways the hipsters of the movie world. What sets them apart from other genres is a stubborn insistence on violating accepted conventions of popular movies. Think about this: the first great noir film in many peoples' minds, Double Indemnity, broke all sorts of rules (sort of - I'll come back to that): the entire movie is told in a voiced-over narration, stars a genuine anti-hero, takes place almost exclusively at night, and so on. It's classic noir, and it's a great film.

So why do I bring this up? Well, to begin with, I am of the persuasion that noir did not arise organically simply as a reaction to the Yankee Doodle Dandys of the early 1940s. Rather, noir borrowed, rather liberally, from the experiences of the great German Expressionist films of the 1920s and 30s. This influence permeates Double Indemnity, as it does The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, and countless others. We as a culture miss out on this more often than not because... well, to be honest, it can be unpleasant to watch the Expressionist films. Most Americans don't run to the video store (or Netflix) to order a film that is subtitled and black and white, and eighty years old to boot. We are the poorer for it. I recommend that each and every one of you go now and watch Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I'll wait.

(waiting...)

Back? Good. So by now you'll understand what I mean when I claim that the noir traditions of chiaroscuro lighting, canted cinematography, and visual phantasmagory are distinct holdovers from an earlier vision of cinema.

I give all this background in order to say this: Chinatown is most certainly in the noir tradition, but represents such a radically different vision of the genre, and executes it so well, that classical noir comes to an end with this film. In truth, the transition had already begun; Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye had established the viability of "neo-noir" as its own concept. What sets Chinatown apart, however, is its willingness to self-consciously straddle the two worlds of old and new, and create something altogether unique.

The plot is familiar to us. Woman hires detective to follow husband. Detective discovers secrets. Lies are exposed. Detective realizes too late what side he should be on. Many of us could sit down and outline a workable script from this bare-bones outline.

But Chinatown is not content to give us this formula. Here is a movie that expects and demands that its audience pay attention to every detail. Without the traditional voice over narration, we are in the dark (though most of the movie takes place in bright sunlight) along with Jack Nicholson's Detective Gittes; we discover clues as he discovers them, and when his misled, so are we. Comprehension remains tantalizingly out of reach, and as soon as we think we know something, we are faced with the reality that what we do know may mean nothing anyway. We are so wrapped up in the petty details that we forget to realize the existential hole that is being created around us.

Director Roman Polanski gives us a bleak vision of the world, but empowers us to make up our mind about the film's morals. That's a lot of responsibility to give a guy sitting on his couch with a bag of Cheetos and a Coke. It's probably more than we deserve.


Recommendations from this post: Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, Nosferatu
Related Recommendations: The Last Laugh, The Usual Suspects