Roman Polanski (no relation to the author of this text) has perhaps the greatest claim of any filmmaker to being a character in a real-life film noir—first as a victim, when his wife Sharon Tate was murdered by members of the Manson Family in 1969; then as a villain, as he himself descended into corruption with his statutory rape of a minor in 1973.
So it is fitting that Polanski would himself make a film noir—but not just any film noir. This year marks the 50thanniversary of his masterpiece, Chinatown (in a poetic coincidence, it also marks the death of its screenwriter Robert Towne, widely considered one of the greatest in Hollywood history). Chinatown is often called a neo-noir—quite possibly the first neo-noir (arguably, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye beat it by one year, but despite being based on Raymond Chandler’s greatest novel, it isn’t really very noirish at all). As is frequently the case with this prefix, “neo” here really means nothing more than “comparatively recent”—specifically coming after the genre’s classic era of the 1940s and 1950s.
Chinatown is often called a neo-noir—quite possibly the first neo-noir. As is frequently the case with this prefix, “neo” here really means nothing more than “comparatively recent”—specifically coming after the genre’s classic era of the 1940s and 1950s.
The term noir itself was coined by the French critic Nino Frank (the French always took American movies more seriously than Americans themselves) to refer to a kind of unconventional subgenre of detective stories featuring more lurid plotting and morally ambiguous themes. But if much classic noir was a reaction to the Second World War, then Chinatown was, like many films of its decade, both a reaction to and an expression of the curdling of the idealism of the 1960s. Indeed, much of the art of that era—from music like Neil Young’s On the Beach to non-fiction like Joan Didion’s The White Album was concerned with what Hunter S. Thompson called “that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back”.
As such, while it features a number of classic noir tropes—world-weary private detective, beautiful woman with mind-blowing secrets, thuggish creeps who let the protagonist know he’s getting too close to things meant to stay hidden, etc.—Chinatown is thematically distinctive. For its true focus is not crime but politics—not Chandler’s simple art of murder but corruption in high places.
Chinatown’s true focus is not crime but politics—not Chandler’s simple art of murder but corruption in high places.
Indeed, there’s no seedy underbelly of Los Angeles to be discovered here; the conspiracy at the heart of the film involves not drugs or child pornography but water. And John A. Alonzo’s cinematography reflects this prosaic narrative—replacing the dreamlike chiaroscuro of films like Out of the Past with heavy use of natural light, in which phantasmagoric urban nightscapes give way to blinding California sunshine.
In a marvelous essay on the noir genre, the philosopher Robert Pippin refers to its “unusually bleak fascination with a fatalistic picture of human existence”. In Chinatown the fatalism is akin to the (similarly bleak) thrillers of the 1970s, like The French Connection, but the subject of that fatalism is ultimately political: you can’t beat the system. The film’s villain, Noah Cross, played by filmmaker John Huston in one of the most extraordinary performances on film, gives terrifying expression to that fatalism when he justifies the incestuous rape of his daughter by saying: “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of ANYTHING”. But Cross’s personal monstrousness is a reflection of his political power—the absence of any restraint in one domain is linked to that in the other, and it is the latter form of amorality that ensures Cross’s victory in the film’s famous denouement. Nicholson’s protagonist can only watch helplessly.
Thus, the film’s famous final line—“Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”—is an evasion, a cop-out. Cross’s bottomless corruption is now generalized, and the most important crimes are taking place not in dark, rain-washed alleys but in full view of the public.
This shift in emphasis from sin and fate to politics suggested that the genre’s thematic reserves were being exhausted (it is not incidental that two films dealing with political corruption and conspiracies marked the end of the era of classic noirs: Kiss Me Deadly and Touch of Evil). Perhaps for this reason, Chinatown, despite being one of the greatest noirs ever made, did not presage a new era for the genre but rather proved a dead end. There would of course be future noirs—Kasdan’s Body Heat in the 1980s, starring Kathleen Turner, and John Dahl’s self-consciously retro thrillers a decade later, like The Last Seduction—but these remain fundamentally formal exercises. And, of course, the sensibility of noir would continue to permeate the work of Scorsese, Lynch, the Coen Brothers, and Tarantino. (Though for this writer’s money, the greatest of the retro-noirs is probably Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress, and one regrets Franklin never got the opportunity to shoot a full trilogy featuring its protagonist, Eazy Rawlins).
Of course, the sensibility of noir would continue to permeate the work of Scorsese, Lynch, the Coen Brothers, and Tarantino.
Yet it must be admitted that this trajectory is not limited to noirs. There has in fact been a general decline of genre filmmaking that began before my lifetime—not just noirs, but westerns, gangster films, musicals, and so on. It’s not that these have disappeared completely, but they are far less common, and when they do appear, it is almost inevitably first and foremost as a kind of postmodern commentary on their respective genres, rather than first and foremost as films to be enjoyed in their own right. Thus, a movie like Unforgiven functions as a eulogy for westerns, and movies like Moulin Rouge or La La Land call attention to their own unreality—deliberately casting non-singers, as though to remind the audience that most people can’t perform like Gene Kelly or Cyd Charisse.
The powerful stylization we associate with classic genre filmmaking can now, it seems, only refer to itself, and newer genres (comic-book films unfortunately come to mind here) have not proven as artistically fertile. Indeed the decline of genre filmmaking is linked to the decline of American filmmaking itself, both artistically and commercially.
None of this subsequent history nor the passage of time itself, however, has diluted Chinatown’s own power. And whether or not we see its like again, perhaps it is fitting that the film’s shattering climax—one of the most memorable in cinematic history—brings down the curtain on an entire tradition. Forget it, Jake—what more is there to say?
