My graduate course in modernism, postmodernism, and the detective story discussed Chinatown yesterday, and despite my early qualms it turned out to be one of the best classes we've had yet.
I think I let Thom Andersen's extremely critical reading of Chinatown color my opinion of a film I hadn't seen in a few years. Andersen thoroughly demolishes the conventional wisdom that Chinatown accurately exposes some primal Los Angeles myth, but just because it makes a hash of history doesn't mean it doesn't offer other virtues. In fact, John Cawelti's masterpiece of seventies film criticism, "Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films," argues that Polanski's movie is interesting precisely to the degree that it uses nostalgia to comment on its generic forebears in the hard-boiled novel and film noir, not to recreate the past.
Chinatown proved an extremely supple text to play off against Andersen's historicist takedown, Cawelti's archetypal criticism, and the week's final theoretical reading, Fredric Jameson's definition of postmodern pastiche and nostalgia from "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." The movie doesn't fare well under the two historicist/Marxist critics, and for reasons that make complete sense given their priorities; Roman Polanksi and Robert Towne offer a sham version of the thirties and a deeply mythologized, thoroughly inaccurate account of the irrigation of Los Angeles and the San Fernando valley.
Yet Cawelti produces an equally compelling reading that neatly situates Chinatown among both its noir predecessors and its fellow saboteurs of the classical Hollywood genre film. In his hands not just a "nostalgia film" a la American Graffiti or the late sixties neo-noirs, but a critique of the political unconscious of the hard-boiled detective. I had already come to admire Chinatown again after a morning spent watching it, but Cawelti makes it look all the more impressive. The article is a joy to read in itself, a lucid, accessible essay (in that sense, I admit, quite the contrast to Jameson) that defines postmodernist cinema with barely any references to the term "postmodernism" and therefore makes an ideal introduction for students. I don't remember enjoying the piece this much when I first read it (must have been back in 1993 when I first bought the massive Braudy, Cohen, and Mast Film Criticism anthology, surely a rite of passage for many a film geek). I can only hope some of that enthusiastic reception transferred to the students.
As for the movie, it thrives under genre, psychoanalytic, and mythological or archetypal readings even if the history comes apart faster than Jake Gittes's car. My favorite performance - after John Huston's chilling turn - may be Polanski himself as the Man with the Knife. In a movie where everybody else is working so hard to play against hard-boiled type, Polanski gleefully serves us a short little psycho straight up in the best Wilmer (Elisha) Cook manner. He utterly steals his one scene even before he doles out his famous punishment.
A great class all in all. The only downer came when I announced that my grad students do in fact need to read The Waste Land at some point in their studies and that next week is the only good time to do it. The Waste Land and City of Glass in the same class - they'll thank me for it later, I'm sure.
that's an interesting observation Marc, re: Polanski as Elisha Cooke...
the big difference, of course, is that this version of the "little tough guy" actually gets the drop on the protagonist--and humiliates him in the bargain...
what if Wilmer had directed the Maltese Falcon?
that, my friend, is revisionism!
it's a great movie
Posted by: David Fiore | April 05, 2005 at 10:43 PM
what if Wilmer had directed the Maltese Falcon?
And cast its director as a perverse version of his boss, Gutman?!
(Not that I think Huston is just doing a Sidney Greenstreet riff... where Gutman ends up a bit of a joke, bouncing off with Cairo to jaunt around the world in their best Bing n' Bob impression, Noah Cross is all too horrifyingly potent. But aren't they both treatments of the father-of-enjoyment, sick with appetite and desire?)
Posted by: Marc | April 10, 2005 at 11:35 AM
No that I think reading The Waste Land is ever such a bad idea (though personally I'll take The Hollow Men, Prufrock, Ash Wednesday or Geronthion over it any day), but how exactly is it related to detective fiction?
Is the relation through the parataxis and heap of broken images and all that?
Posted by: Peli Grietzer | April 10, 2005 at 01:57 PM
It's related by allusion to just about every work I put on the syllabus, from the common reading of General Sternwood as a Fisher King archetype to my feeling that Noah Cross is a warped version of the same. It became increasingly difficult to get through a class without talking about the poem - it seems even more important to the postmodernists, as a handy target for parody or dissent - especially since the majority of my students haven't read it. And as I'm offering a class on theories of modernism and postmodernism as well as detective fiction I decided that needed correcting.
Those strictly practical considerations aside, there is a serious case for discussing The Waste Land in terms of detective fiction, as it offers the same kind of epistemological quest that structures so many detective stories (and that postmodernist detective stories like City of Glass explode). Martin Rowson showed this in his brilliant decision to parody the poem as a noir starring a very Robert Mitchum-like PI named Marlowe (only the first of many perfect noir-to-Eliot or noir-to-modernism jokes, like casting Mr. Eugenides as Casper Gutman). If that book were still in print, as I've said before, Eliot would have been on the syllabus from the beginning. This only rectifies his omission.
Posted by: Marc | April 10, 2005 at 04:02 PM
And I would add, having now conducted the class, that Peli's instincts are exactly right - The Waste Land pairs up very well with City of Glass because of their common interest in fragmentation as both narrative tactic and cultural syndrome. Auster's much more skeptical of Eliot's project of reassembling the heap of broken images, though; I read Peter Stillman (senior) as a deranged "heroic" modernist, one who longs for a return not simply to the premodern but the prelapsarian.
Only the Coen brothers left at this point, and then we're done...
Posted by: Marc | April 15, 2005 at 11:15 AM
That really sounds like a course i should have taken.. I googled myself into your site, cus i'm having problems with my exam. I'm sposed to discuss the auteur theory in the light of modernism and postmodernism, witch Chinatown as example..
Got any hints for me?
:)
Posted by: Ida | May 29, 2005 at 01:06 PM
Yes - don't ask anybody else to do your work for you. :)
That is a well-designed question, asking students to synthesize their understanding of theories that are slightly orthogonal to one another. I'm assuming your class read the Cahiers du Cinema critics, or Andrew Sarris's "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962," or maybe Peter Wollen if you discussed the auteur theory; they'd be good places to start. Cawelti's article is one of the best (and easily the most accessible) pieces on Chinatown and postmodernism.
And don't forget to cite your sources!
(cue corny public service announcement music)
Posted by: Marc | May 30, 2005 at 12:07 PM
Yeah i've read a lot (read too much, written too little), I just have problems structuring my thoughts and putting it all together.. But thanks anyway! (Horrible spelling mistakes should be blamed on me being norwegian)
Posted by: Ida | May 30, 2005 at 05:08 PM
My comic book version of The Waste Land is still in print in the UK, where Picador re-issued it in 1999. Try Amazon, although this is the UK edition (which the lawyers got hold of) and so is different from the US version (which was saved by the excellent parody defence). Try Amazon.
Posted by: Martin Rowson | June 01, 2005 at 06:38 AM
Ah, there it is.
I'd love to hear more about the legal troubles (from the Eliot estate?). What changes were made in the UK edition?
Posted by: Marc | June 01, 2005 at 01:02 PM
Essentially I wasn't allowed to quote anything from the poem, apart from the title (subtly different) and the chapter titles. This prohibition included quoting the quotations, which are, apparently, covered by compilation copyright. I was hoping, when the book first came out in 1990, that when it came out of copyright in 2015 I could immediately make the porno version of the poem, as revenge served up cold, but then they extended the term of copyright to 70 years, and by 2035 I'll be 76 and probably betond caring.
Anyway, you'll see the changes in the Penguin/Picador edition, and I'm not alone in facing the full legal wrath of the Eliot estate - unlike Andrew Lloyd Webber, of course
Posted by: Martin Rowson | June 06, 2005 at 03:59 AM
I've heard equally infuriating stories about the Eliot estate barring quotations from academic works, or charging fees so exorbitant as to effectively bar them; so much for academic fair use.
At any rate, the gauntlet has been thrown - let some young turk in 2035 produce the all-porno Waste Land. Perhaps we can start grooming our children now.
Posted by: Marc | June 07, 2005 at 11:42 AM