[For this year’s
Valentine’s
series, I wanted to highlight and contextualize some of the movies I most
love. Leading up to a weekend Guest Post from one of our most impressive
scholarly FilmStudiers!]
On a classic
film noir mystery that’s also a pitch-perfect historical fiction.
I don’t think I need to use too much
space here arguing for the greatness of Chinatown (1974). By
any measure, from contemporary awards (ie, nominated for 11 Oscars and 10
BAFTAs and 7 Golden Globes) to historical appreciations (named to the National
Film Registry by the Film Preservation Board in 1991) to ridiculously
obvious criteria (a 2010
poll of British film critics named it “the best film of all time”!), Roman
Polanski’s film noir (although it feels at least as right to write “Robert
Towne’s film noir,” since the screenplay is to my mind the greatest one ever filmed
and of course Polanski is now a rightly disgraced figure) about a world-weary
private detective and pretty much everything else in 1937 Los Angeles is one of
the most acclaimed and honored American films. It stars Jack Nicholson at the
absolute height of his career and powers; features a pitch-perfect supporting cast
including legendary director John Huston as one of the great villains of all
time; centers on a multi-generational Southern California familial and
historical mystery that would make Ross
MacDonald proud; is equal parts suspenseful, funny, sexy, dark, and emotionally
affecting; and has the single greatest final line ever (not gonna spoil it or
any main aspect of the plot here). If you haven’t seen it yet, I can’t
recommend strongly enough that you do so.
On top of all of that, I think Chinatown is one of the very few hugely
successful and popular American films that is deeply invested in complex and
significant American Studies kinds of questions (interestingly, it lost the
Best Picture Oscar to another such film: The
Godfather Part II). By the 1970s it was likely very difficult to
remember—and is of course even more unfamiliar in our own Hollywood-dominated
cultural moment—just how unlikely of a site Los Angeles had once been for one
of the nation’s largest and most important cities; despite its close proximity
to the Pacific Ocean, LA is more or less built in a desert, and by the turn of
the 20th century, when the city’s population had just moved past the
100,000 mark, it seemed impossible for the city to provide enough water to
support that community. It took the efforts of one particularly visionary city
planner, William
Mulholland, to solve that problem; Mulholland and his team designed and
constructed the Los
Angeles Aqueduct, a mammoth project that, once completed in 1913, assured
that the city could continue to support its ever-growing (especially with the
rise of Hollywood in the 1920s) population.
But if that’s the basic
historical narrative of LA’s turning point, an American Studies perspective
would want to push a lot further on a number of different factors and components
within that: where the water was coming from, and what happened in those more
rural and agricultural communities are a result of the aqueduct’s creation; how
much of the money involved was public, how much was private and from whom, and if
the project benefited the whole of the city equally or if its effects were similarly
linked to class and status; what role LA’s significant diversity—even in those
early years it already included sizeable Mexican, African, and Asian American
populations, for example—played in this process; whether the city’s built
environment, its architecture and neighborhoods and streets and etc., shifted
with the new availability of water, or whether there were other factors that
more strongly influenced its planning; and so on. And perhaps the most
impressive thing about Chinatown is
that it manages at least to gesture at almost all of those questions and
issues, without becoming for even a moment the kind of (forgive me) dry
historical drama that they might suggest.
Next movie
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Beloved movies you’d highlight?
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