surfaces, especially when Polanski himself appears, playing Elisha Cook Jr. to Nicholson's Bogart. Nicholson calls Polanski a 'midget,' whereupon the little man administers a symbolically appropriate retaliation; inserting a switchblade into the private eye's left nostril, he neatly slices the wing of the nose. Polanski is probably also responsible for making the world of the film resemble the fiction of Nathanael West. The slick-haired men and heavily made-up women are attractive, but the nostalgic effects sometimes have a disquieting effect. Even Faye Dunaway, who remains passionate and sexy, is not quite the glamorous figure we associate with this kind of movie. Her face is powdered, her eyes are red, and her teeth are stained from lipstick. Her hair, which she compulsively brushes back from her forehead, is stiffened with permanent waves. She is frequently dressed to the neck in gray or black, but in one scene she wears riding clothes and her throat is sweaty. Her every gesture suggests frustrated sexuality and incipient madness, and Polanski, who was always more interested in the pathology of sex than in romance, seems to have encouraged her nervousness by keeping the camera close to her face. 37 Again and again, he juxtaposes her suffering with that of a spotlessly innocent-looking girl (Diane Ladd) whom she is trying to hide from Gittes. The image is diabolically clever, because the girl's innocence turns out to have been born out of the corruption that threatens to destroy her.
Much of Chinatown has a quiet, ghostly feel, as when Gittes stands outside the Mulwray estate and hears the faint squeak of chamois against a yellow Packard. The movie is also filled with Asian servants and Latino workers who glide around the edges of the scenery, watching the white world decay. The houses and settings are nicely selected and designed to evoke the period, and yet they seem vaguely embalmed, in part because of John Alonzo's anamorphic, often extremely low-key photography, which hides interiors in gloom and emphasizes dry, yellowish colors. The air of grotesquerie extends even to minute details that register almost subliminally: vaguely funereal flowers in vases or on lawns; a picture of a black sailing ship on a wall behind two doomed women; a pattern on a bedspread that I momentarily took for a bloodstain; and a girl's summer dress and wide straw hat lying incongruously in a dark living room. In one shot late in the movie, Gittes bends over to look at a shiny object at the bottom of a pond. Off in the corner of the screen, something stirsthe reddish fin of a goldfish, looking for an instant like a monster. (Earlier, we recall, Polanski promised to feed the hero's nose to a goldfish.)
This sinister ambiance prepares us for the climactic moments, when Gittes finds himself back in Chinatown. Here again the film invites comparison with The Maltese Falcon and other dark thrillers of the 1940s, many of which came to ironic, somewhat joyless conclusions, based on a deep-seated sexual paranoia. The note of failure in classic noir, however, was frequently softened by a qualified attempt to assert some kind of justice or return to social equilibrium. In contrast, Chinatown is truly pessimistic. Because it is a Vietnam-era film, contemporary with the Watergate scandals, its hero does not walk away from chaos like Welles in The Lady from Shanghai ('Maybe I'll live so long that I'll forget hermaybe I'll die trying'); instead, he is helped offscreen by two of his business partners. The ordinary institutions having failed, he remains locked in a world of irrational greed and sickness, and his consciousness of that world has left him so numb he can barely move.
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.' 9 Clearly the past has different constituencies and different uses, and we need to consider the retro films on an individual basis. To cite only one
