James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

Retro style in Chinatown (1974).

In Towne's original script for Chinatown, Noah Cross was killed and Gittes carried Evelyn Mulwray's daughter to Mexico, presumably heading off to a Latin shelter that was sometimes suggested in Sam Peckinpah's westerns. Such an escape is myth, of course, a pastoral, but at least it provides relief from Amerika. Polanski's version is just the opposite, offering no possibility for meaningful action, not even flight. Gittes sees Evelyn slumped over the wheel of her Packard, her eye exploded by a bullet; the daughter screams, while Noah Cross embraces her and tries to shield the view. As Gittes stumbles off, the camera rises above a Chinatown street, with Goldsmith's theme music creating a languorous mood in keeping with the art-nouveau posters that advertised the movie. At this point, the only consolation anyone might have would be in opium dreams.

Despite all the terror and despair he creates, however, Polanski seems to relish the sight of a boogeyman swallowing a baby. Furthermore, despite all its social and psychological corruption, the film as a whole inspires a sentimental fondness for old Hollywood, giving the 1930s a fascinating sleekness, intimacy, and plenitude. My own reaction to the ending of Chinatown is therefore a bit like Lionel Trilling's toward Heart of Darkness: I'm not sure whether to recoil, or to take subtle pleasure in the elegance of "the horror." To be sure, no scene in a detective melodrama is more troubling than the one in which Gittes confronts the patriarch Noah Cross, baffled by the man's fathomless lust and greed; and no scene is more emotionally charged than the one in which Gittes slaps Evelyn to make her confess her past: with each swift blow, the effect changes dizzily, moving from shock to repulsion to deep compassion. Nevertheless, if we want to believe that Polanski is serious, then we must suspect that he sometimes identified with Gittesa man engulfed in a corrupt world. The only major director of the period who worked in both the East and the West (for what Godard used to call Mosfilm-Paramount and Nixon-Paramount), he may have felt that life was beyond corruptionthat it was merely absurd, and that a cool and brilliant style was the only recompense. The ending of Chinatown carries the hint of such an attitude. At the same time, it makes the movie hypnotically beautiful, almost a flower of evil.

Writing in 1979, cultural historian John G. Cawelti offered Chinatown and several other Hollywood films of its day (especially those by Robert Altman and Arthur Penn) as evidence that the old generic system was "exhausted" and on the verge of transformation into pictures "more directly related to the second half of the twentieth century." In his view, the "doomed burlesque" and ''tragic parody" in such movies as Bonnie and Clyde and The Long Goodbye suggested that audiences were becoming increasingly sophisticated about film history and that American pop culture was undergoing a renewal, bringing it closer to "the mainstream of postmodernist literature" (19091). Although Chinatown was more nostalgic than truly parodic, Cawelti argued that it was one of the most important works of the perioda new type of movie that "deliberately invokes the basic characteristics of a traditional genre in order to bring its audience to see that genre as the embodiment of an inadequate and destructive myth" (194). Three years later, in the wake of Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Arc (1981), and the election of Ronald Reagan, Fredric Jameson saw postmodern style and the vogue for nostalgia quite differently. Consumer society, Jameson pointed out, was highly conducive of "stylistic diversity and heterogeneity," especially where pastiche or any form of "blank parody" was concerned. In a wide-ranging indictment of late capitalism, he noted a similarity between pop artists like Andy Warhol and retro movies like Body Heatwhich, even when they were set in the present, seemed to occur in ''an eternal '30s." Although he admired Chinatown, Jameson claimed that such films in general were "an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history" ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society," 117). They also suggested that writers and artists of the present day no longer felt capable of creating new styles or traditions; it was as if the whole weight of "sixty or seventy years of classical modernism" were pressing down on the younger generation like what Marx had called an historical "nightmare" ("Postmodernism and Consumer Society," 115).

In greater hindsight, neither of these views is exactly correct. It is particularly difficult to view Chinatown in Cawelti's terms, when most critics argue that historical noir was already a rebuke to classic Hollywood's dominant mythology. (We should recall that Double Indemnity, Detour, and Out of the Past end with the protagonists either dead or about to be executed and that Kiss Me Deadly explodes the entire cast.) For his part, Jameson sounds overly pessimistic. Nostalgia may be pervasive in the new film noir, but it is also a theme in the "original" pictureswhich, as Paul Schrader points out, usually involve the sort of protagonist who "retreats into the past" (58). Furthermore, any discussion of nostalgia needs to ask: nostalgia for what? A good deal of postmodernist noir involves a conservative, ahistorical regression to the pop culture of the 1950s, or to a glamorous world before that, where people dressed well and smoked cigarettes. But this is by no means always the case. Feminist critic Barbara Creed observes that the "missing past" in most films noirs seems to be a past that "once validated the paternal signifier"; even so, she notes that three of the nostalgia films mentioned by JamesonChinatown, Body Heat, and The Conformistinvolve a male protagonist who fails precisely because "the patriarchal symbolic, the Law, has also failed." 9Clearly the past has different constituencies and different uses, and we need to consider the retro films on an individual basis. To cite only one exception to the general rule, the nostalgia in Devil in a Blue Dress (discussed in chapter 6) has slightly different implications than the nostalgia in Chinatown, even though the two films are in many ways quite similar.

Granting these complications, Jameson may be closer to the truth where the general run of movies is concerned. Unquestionably, Chinatown was an innovative film, made possible by an increasing awareness of old movies on TV, a liberalized censorship code, and a disillusionment with certain American myths. Its immediate legacy, however, was purely stylistic, at the level of cameo roles, moody photography, and male fashion; and it may have taught the advertising industry how to sell products by making them look stylishly moderne. It spawned two British remakes of classic noir, both starring the aging Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe: Farewell, My Lovely (1975), photographed by John Alonzo in a cloyingly arty, wide-angle fashion, and The Big Sleep (1978), updated to contemporary London, with James Stewart miscast in the role of General Sternwood. Such films were heavy with nostalgia, and their treatment of history was entirely superficial.

The same kind of shallowness and conservatism can be seen more recently in a retro thriller like MulhollandFalls (1996), whose production design (also by Richard Sylbert) and music score (by Dave Grusin) are lifted more or less directly from Chinatown. Although it supposedly takes place in the 1950s, and although it seems vaguely influenced by James Ellroy's historical novels about Los Angeles, Mulholland Falls is visually indistinguishable from the world imagined by Towne and Polanski. Like Chinatown, it deals with police violence and official corruption (the murder is committed inside the United States Army's nuclear testing program), but it nevertheless remains sympathetic toward the Los Angeles Police Departmentespecially toward the "hat squad," an elite quartet of plainclothesmen who drive around the city in a convertible, beating up gangsters. Aside from administering vigilante justice, the chief function of these four tough guys is to light cigarettes with Zippos and model a peacock collection of suits and accessories.