“You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.” Noah Cross
We all have archetypes that spur us individually. Our backgrounds, our struggles, our loves, loyalties and rivalries combine to create passions, positive and negative, that charge us. These are passions that energize rather than enervate. Because of these personal experiences and passions, each of us have genres that are intensely meaningful, story types to which we return again and again.
I have two. One is “The Joseph Story” which is any story that follows loosely the account of Joseph from the Old Testament. Favorites that fall under this particular archetype are Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Field of Dreams, Heaven Can Wait (1978 version)andDisney’s Beauty and the Beast. Each of these four, while wildly different movies, follows a similar storyline concerning a dreamer with a vision. In the face of events that drag the character further and further from this vision ever being achieved, the vision miraculously comes to fruition in the end, albeit in an often different way than imagined. It’s a wonderful archetype I’ll write about at a later date.
The second story type that drives me revolves around justice.
There are a couple of therapy sessions we need not explore here that would explain why I am obsessed with justice…. not particularly for myself but for the people around me and others I encounter in the world. Consequently, movies that explore justice are some of my favorites of all time, movies I will watch again and again and again. Examples here include Erin Brockovich, In the Name of the Father and Norma Rae. (There are quite a few others I could list.) Each of the movies mentioned are splendid movies even apart from my justice obsession. Erin Brockovich is a wildly entertaining movie, more fun than any such movie has a right to be, a movie that cemented Steven Soderburgh’s status as one of the best directors in Hollywood, and a film that plays out in highly original ways while still being very much a crowd-pleaser. In The Name of the Father is simply one of the best movies of the 90’s and would have swept the Oscars in ’93 had it not been for a juggernaut called Schindler’s List. Norma Rae is a surprisingly gritty, wonderful film that holds up beautifully even today. I love these movies passionately and will show them to anyone, anytime. Yet there is one ‘justice movie’ I return to more than any. It’s a movie that had one of the biggest influences on my life; it is also one of the top 5 movies ever made. That movie is Chinatown.
I was eleven years old the first time I saw Chinatown…
Chinatown, directed by Roman Polanski and written by Robert Towne, debuted to great acclaim in 1974. I was too young to see it in the theatre. But my mom, who saw it in the theatre and loved it, decided we could watch it together when it aired later on television. Though I knew little about the movie, I remember being excited to watch it as we sat in the living room in front of our TV set, which looked exactly like this:
Mom talked to me a little bit about the movie beforehand, explaining that it was thematically a pretty adult movie but she felt I could handle it and we could talk about it afterwards.
The movie opens with one of the most haunting, melancholy themes ever written for a motion picture. The entire score, actually, is my favorite film score of all time. It is perfect. It was written by Jerry Goldsmith who famously had to write the score in a mad dash over 10 days when the original score was thrown out after a disastrous test screening. For those interested in the score, here is a wonderful piece about it well worth reading. If you don’t know the score, here is the main theme:
I was sucked into the world of the movie from the main title onward and though I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to explain why, I could sense I was watching a masterpiece, even edited down, even not in widescreen. The world the movie creates is splendid and no doubt contributed to my love of Los Angeles that seems to grow stronger each day I live in this remarkable city. I was gripped by how brilliantly Polanski and Towne slowly revealed information, creating a beautifully unfolding mystery. Most importantly, I developed a deep love for the very human characters. I cared so much about what was going to happen to these people, I began to experience a growing nausea as the movie progressed and events spiraled out of control. This was suspense, though, not worry. Things in movies always worked out in the end.
Suffice to say I had no idea nor any preparation for the justifiably famous ending, one of the most devastating conclusions to a story imaginable.
While I’d certainly had my fair share of hard knocks to this point in my life, I still had a fairly rosy view towards stories, their purpose, their endings. My own hard knocks are probably a big reason movies and novels were so important to me even then. Tough times are one of the reasons any of us enter narratives, to escape and to affirm our hope that things will work out all right. Chinatown was the first narrative I encountered where not only did things not work out all right, they truly could not end in a more horrible manner, particularly with the bad guy walking away free, clutching his prize. It was decades before I could look at or even listen to John Huston, so powerful and realistic and normal is his depiction of evil in the film. As the movie came to its gut wrenching and perfect end, I remember sitting for a few minutes in stunned silence, then exploding in anger. Anger at the movie, anger that this could happen, anger at my mom for allowing me to watch it. I was so frustrated! How could this be??
Mom and I sat and talked about it for a long time after and she explained to me that as tough as it might be to handle, there are times in the world evil wins out and bad guys get away with their crimes. She explained that was one of the messages of the movie. And that the movie was an alarm bell of sorts, to encourage us to fight against evil people who do bad things. To fight for justice. The ending of the movie was one of those hard, necessary truths we all have to face at some point. This was my time, Chinatown my conduit to a new way of looking at the world. The movie and the ending haunted me for weeks and still in some ways informs how I approach and view the world.
For those who might not know, Polanski and Towne argued bitterly over the ending. The original ending of Towne’s brilliant script concluded with the good guys spiriting away. Polanski, however, fought for the dark finish. Four years previously, his wife Sharon Tate and unborn child were murdered by the Manson Family in one of the most infamous crimes in our country’s history. Polanski at the time was understandably not entertaining visions of happy endings. Polanski won out and the movie is all the better for it.
I’ve wondered since how much the movie has contributed to my own view of humanity. My theology is decidedly Calvinistic, which purports among other things that each individual human is capable of the greatest beauty, kindness and light while also being capable of the darkest thoughts and actions imaginable. I very much believe this and Chinatown imparts this view. The movie might then be the major reason one of my mantras is, ‘There but for the grace of God go I” a phrase many love to throw around but don’t really believe. It’s a rather meaningless phrase unless you believe you are capable of anything. This all leads into a discussion that, as much fun as it can be to debate, is better suited for a blog about philosophy than movies and food. Suffice to say though, that Chinatown is a deep, complex, shockingly honest look at humanity and justice. It was my first experience narratively with justice denied. It fueled my already fierce desire to make sure justice won out. The movie devastates and riles me to this day. With the release Tuesday of the restored Blu-Ray, it’s worth a revisit … or your first visit if you haven’t yet caught the brilliance of Chinatown.
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If you’ve made it this far, I’d love to hear not only your thoughts about the movie and the post, but also what are some of the stories and genres that energize you. Click the link just below under ‘Comments’ to join in.