Film Noir, Two Classics: Chinatown & Out of the Past
From the first reel to the last, Roman Polanski fills Chinatown with classic noir conventions and characters. The first images on the screen are mysterious photos of a couple having sex in the park. The man whose wife is having the affair is crying at the window when Jake Gittes says, “You can’t eat the venetian blinds, I just had them installed yesterday.” Not only does the film pay homage to classic noir by using venetian blind shadows to cover the room, but also it comes right out and says it. Thus from the very beginning Roman Polanski is admitting that this is his modern take on the established noir genre. Naremore explains how the film has the feel of the old studio films, especially in its use of restrictive framing and tight spaces (Naremore 205).
“Forget about it, Jake, its Chinatown,” a friend advises in this symbolic quote. Throughout the film Jake is seeking redemption as he attempts to bring justice to every aspect of the case. Jake is obviously scarred by his past career in Chinatown and desperately wants respect. As he receives a shave at the barber a man accuses him of being a sleazy investigator. Jake feels he has to defend himself and it is this desire for credibility that motivates him throughout the film. This is despite the fact that he has to go through the majority of the film with a ridiculous bandage on his nose, a clever technique that separates Jake even further from the classic noir prototype.
These characteristics give Chinatown more of a dual narrative than the older noir films, in that what drives the film is both the search for the truth about Mulray and Cross, and Jake’s search for his own personal redemption. Throughout the entire film the audience is in Jake’s shoes. Polanski uses hierarchy of knowledge so that we only know as much as the protagonist knows and this is very effective in keeping the story moving. When Jake gets beaten up and knocked out by the farmers, the camera fades out. The next image we see is Evelyn from Jake’s perspective as he wakes up. Polanski uses this completely subjective narrative to assert that this is indeed Jake’s story.
Polanski’s subtle use of foreshadowing compliments Jake’s continued search for the truth. Early in the movie Jake is in the Mulwray’s backyard when he hears the servant say, “bad for glass,”(attempting to say “grass”). Not really understanding this comment Jake focuses on a shiny object in the pool, but Evelyn soon diverts his attention. In the end of the film Jake once again sees the object when he hears the same comment from the servant. This time he retrieves the object to find a pair of glasses, which serves as the pivotal clue. Jake is once again wrong however and he first accuses Evelyn, later learning that they were Cross’s glasses.
The entire story is a parallel to Jake’s quest for the respect that always remains one inch out of his grasp. Another instance when Polanski uses subtle foreshadowing occurs after Jake and Evelyn have slept together and he tells her he saw her father. She is topless and she immediately covers herself, throwing her hands on her shoulders as if the very mention of his name after she has just had sex brings up painful memories of sexual violation.
“You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t,” says Noah Cross in what is now a classic line. Jake responds by laughing, then he explains how that’s what the district attorney used to say to him in Chinatown. Once again Jake’s past has resurfaced, almost as if everything he does is a reinterpretation of his mysterious past in Chinatown. In this respect the film is similar to Out of the Past, in that Jeff too must deal with a past that haunts him. The obvious difference between the two films is that Out of the Past shows us the flashbacks, in fact they are as much a part of the film as the present, whereas Chinatown has no flashbacks and really only hints at Jake’s past.
The flashbacks in Out of the Past show us how Jeff got involved with the femme fatale of the story, Kathy. It depicts a typical narrative of a tough detective sent to find a wealthy man’s woman. Why does the man, Witt, want her back so badly? “You’ll know when you see her,” he tells Jeff. Thus before we even see her on screen the film as constructed an image of an overwhelmingly sexy woman. Jeff quickly finds her, falls in love with her, and she skips out on him, a simple noir plot line. That is only half the story however, as Jeff gets mixed up with her again years later. At this point he has a new woman, Ann, a relationship Krutnik describes as a “idealized/sexless relationship which tends to be offered as a lost possibility by good girl figures,” (Krutnik, 23).
At the end of the film, after she has proved herself devious and untrustworthy several times, she once again declares her love for him and pleads that they run away together. He plays along, they even take turns saying, “we deserve each other,” which would be the predictable response for Jeff. This is soon exposed as a ploy however, as we learn that Jeff is really taking her to the police. For a split second a happy ending seems in sight, with the assumption that she’ll get arrested and he’ll go back to the “good-girl” Ann. This ideal is quickly crushed as she shoots him and is then shot by the police. Thus they are now both dead, and whether they deserved each other or not they both shared the same end.
The ending of Chinatown is similar in its fearlessness towards a hauntingly fatalistic and pessimistic ending. Polanski had to fight the producers for that ending, in fact he only wrote it a few days before he shot it, and without such a conclusion the film would no doubt lose much of its power. The theme and meaning of the film is never better expressed than in that last shot after Evelyn has shot her father and then driven off. The cops shoot at her as Jake makes a desperate attempt to stop them, knocking down the arm of one as the other steps up and shoots. He only fires a couple times and from such a distance in the dark it would seem likely that he didn’t hit anyone.
Yet the car stops, the horn starts blaring, and Polanski lingers on that shot with the white car in the far distance of the dark night. For a few moments we don’t even know what’s happened or who’s been shot, Polanski makes us listen to that horn and Kathryn’s screams as the cops eventually run up to find a dead Evelyn. Noah begins to moan “Oh, Lord,” as he takes Kathryn away, an unflinching and creepy ending where we see the chain of insect continue.
This is a wonderful anti-Hollywood ending that Naremore rightfully describes as “gothic horror,” (Naremore 206). Jake is left helpless, as he mutters “as little as possible,” a reference to Robert Towne’s opinion of the police’s code of conduct. Jake failed at redeeming his own past, just as Jeff failed at redeeming his, maintaining the trend of a fatalistic noir world that brutally nullifies its heroes attempts to restore virtue to a corrupt situation.
