Back in the mid 70s I was a young child, but even then, I was a reader. It seems somewhat awkward to confess this, but besides reading Peanuts anthologies, Beverly Cleary novels (the Henry Huggins series) and many, many science fiction novels, I also used to read Mad magazine. Of course, I never used to let this be known among my classmates. This was a hidden pleasure, for the reason that this item would have sealed my identification with the outcasts group of kids who were never popular and who were instead the butt of many jokes. This was still my fate, but I didn't want to attract any more attention to myself, and found it prudent to buy my issues and keep them at home, where I would reread them over and over, enjoing as I did the sly and subversive and, yes, zany take on popular culture. I suppose it reflected something in my character, and I wonder at the juxtaposition between Charlie Brown and Alfred E. Neumann and why it seemed to sum up my personality.
Mad magazine has many features with recurring characters,such as the "Spy vs. Spy" series, as well as the engaging marginalia (the drawings on the sides) that featured the work of Sergio Aragones. They also always included a spoof of a popular movie or television series or even cultural phenomenon, although by the time the magazine had been published, the trend or item might have been past its' peak of popularity. They were always enjoyable, however, and now I have no regrets about confessing that as a kid in junior high school, I eagerly awaited the new magazine and pestered my parents to buy it when I accompanied them to the supermarket. It was the only incentive I had for doing so, after all. And, after all this time, I remember the adaptions of movies such as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "Star Wars" and, of course, "Chinatown".
I vaguely remember the plotline as gleaned from this satirical take. It seemed to involve a private eye who had several run-ins with thugs, and who had his nose slashed. It involved water and real estate as well, although Mad magazine always introduces exagerrated comic touches. Thus, I watched the movie anticipating finally the opportunity to see the "straight" version of a film that had been critically lauded.
As I watched it, I found myself overcome by nostalgia. Naturally, it wasn't for the period in which the film is set, which is the year 1937, but for the 1970s, and my memories of stars such as Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, who were fixed into my consciousness at that time. It is a film noir which, as applied to the city of Los Angeles, is very much in lines with what we associate with this setting. After all, writers such as Raymond Chandler made their careers exploring what was for them a timeless setting of moral ambiguity, in which eternal human frailties are explored.
I wonder at times about why this genre should have been so suited to Los Angeles, a city that was very much a dynamic creation that was predicated on dreams. Los Angeles is not an ancient city, and it has experienced a period of explosive growth in which many new dreamers have arrived fueled by hopes of a new beginning. Perhaps it feels like a mecca for lost hopes, and that is why this earnest feeling is such an innate feature of film noir. It is a feeling that is present in any instance of film noir that I remember seeing, as was also present in another favorite film, the science fiction classic "Bladerunner".
There is, of course, also a mournful air over what has been lost. Perhaps it is precisely in that intersection between dreams and the corruption that festers within human nature that we find the narrative power of this genre. Corruption is always present, and I feel at times as if we are reenacting ever again the primordial narrative of a utopia that is corrupted by the snake in all its eternal guises, a snake that we carry within us.
It was fascinating to see Jack Nicholson as a young and dashing figure, playing a character who had been scarred by past experiences. When an allusion was made to his past history in the force, and the experience of working specifically in Chinatown and the confession of the character that when working in that area, the best policy was to do "as little as possible", because there was an implicit recognition that we never really understood the true nature of the conflicts that were made manifest. To be an officer in Chinatown and to be asked to intervene was to be unable to distinguish whether one was helping to prevent a crime or unwittingly helping to consumate it, and this was very much the case in this movie as well where the discoveries made by the detective towards the end serve to uncover a sordid history that undercuts the narrative of culpability he had thought to so carefully weave.
If we learn anything about human nature is that is doesn't change, and that while we may find ourselves in a mileau in which people prey on each other constantly, we also find angelic creatures who strike us with the pathos of vulnerability.This was certainly the case with the Faye Dunaway character.
The P.I. ventures from one scene to the next as he slowly pieces together the sordid details of an arrangement whereby a real estate scheme, in conjunction with a personal family tragedy, combined to provide the dynamic impulse for the series of events. Rapacity is echoes in both the public and the private domain, after all, and the dam for which a bond is to be issued would seem to represent paradoxically the unleashing of pent-up energy and appetites that bring out both the best and the worst in us all. As the PI confronts the aged real estate baron and asks why he is motivated to carry out this scheme when he has all the money he will ever need, he exclaims that it is for "the future", laying claiming thereby to a legacy whose true and complete nature won't be evident until the end, when we find out about the hidden daughter.
I was completely engrossed in the film, and it sparked for me another sharp pang of nostalgia for the 70s, that decade that at the time I was so desperate to escape. I can't imagine why I waited so long to view this movie, even after the advent of VCRs and videotapes. Perhaps I have always been too moored in the present, something that is all the more evident when we are young, giving primacy to immediate experiences, but without the time to reflect on the past. Now that I have aged, this has changed, and I seem to yearn to go back, to see and hear and feel what I remember only dimly but with a deep sense of loss.
And that sense of loss what permeates the genre of film noir as well.
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