Sitting in front of the projection of Chinatown, I was captivated by each scene. As the film progressed the secrets began to be exposed, the lies caught up with the characters, and the plot unfolded. This motif of doing what ever it takes to get to the top was again present in another text. There was something about this movie where the audience was enthralled, but also so extremely disturbing.
After class when I would dig into my backpack and pull out our most recent novel, "What makes Sammy run?", I was once again reminded of this "rat race" of a city we live in. These texts often arise questions such as "why do we do what we do?" I try to dissect the character and sympathize with them and attempt to see the situations and conflicts through their lenses, but I haven't quite figured it out. As residence of Los Angeles we should be able to relate and understand the obstacles these characters often face. The reoccurring plot idea of our protagonist being rudely awakened by the cruelties of this city and their world being flipped upside down. I am personally not exposed to all these lies and deception our city is appositely laced with, but maybe others are. Do people identify with characters like Huff, Jake, Al, Lola? Although these fictional tales were set in 80 years ago, are these ever present in this great city? As Angelenos are we quick to adapt these texts as historical data?
Al, in What makes Sammy run? explains his understanding of Hollywood when he states,
"It was no secret to anybody that she was working out on him and he was working out on her, each one wanting something and not quite admitting it. Some people call that the Hollywood tug of war, though that incept is a little narrow. Hollywood may be one of its most blatant battlegrounds, but it is really a world war, undeclared." (Schulberg, 37).
This passage reminded me of Huff's perception Los Angeles and Jake's complex feeling towards Chinatown. All these hostilities toward Los Angels made me think this is what Noir does. It brings a skeptical mind set upon people. An idea that if your in Los Angeles everyone has an agenda. No interaction with another is genuine especially if you are wealthy and/or powerful. Everyone is working on each other and tearing each other down until they are at the top. People are absolutely relentless and unforgiving. One can neither breathe nor let their guard down with out the fear of someone mistaking them as human. I have observed in both are books and the movie that once a character opens up they become human, however, they are immediately yanked down from their societal rank and their weakness is displayed.
Is this a fair representation of our city? Is my assumption of Noir correct?
We have all witnessed corruption, deceit, power of the institution, greed, etc. in these texts, but do these ideas define Noir. I've been struggling for a few weeks to really define this genre. I feel that I may identify Noir when I see it , but at the same time I'm unsure what in these texts triggers this recognition.
I have had a similar issue when trying to define Noir. The thing that has clicked and made sense for me is that "Noir" is more of a mindset than its own entity. What I mean by this is that I believe that many stories can be told in a Noir way. Exaggerating the bad and only showing the viewer what is wanted to be seen can shift perception and thought from the nuances that make human interactions so complicated and hard to understand. I believe Los Angeles can give people the best or worst of times simply based on how their mindset shapes their perception. There are plenty of movies that paint LA as a place for the gods, we have simply just been focusing on a more negative medium that depicts LA in a way that is unfamiliar to most of us. Every city deals with the situations that have been depicted in these texts we have analyzed. It is just hard to see that sometimes when we are always focusing on the birth and story of Los Angeles.
ReplyDeleteSloan is totally spot on with her analysis of people "working on eachother" during this time period. Rarely are there any genuine characters in the texts we've been seeing and I think it's justified to assume that this is part of noir's definition. Reflecting on the theme of people being attacked when their guard is down, I wonder when we are going to find Sammy's Achilles heel. We are only 4 chapters into the book and he has shown little weakness at all! Sammy has proven to be the epitome of "rags to riches" and it makes me wonder if you have to be THAT manipulative and THAT
ReplyDeleteheartless if one is ever going to survive in the big league (Hollywood in this case). Al is more of a sensitive, understanding guy and he has yet to become as financially successful as Sammy. Does the fact that Al's personality is more compassionate than Sammy's have anything to do with their prosperity in Los Angeles?
One of the interesting things about Noir is that it doesn't necessarily try to define L.A.. Most of it is limited to a specific group or subset of the city. Most people can live long lives in LA without being effected by Sammy Glick, or wouldn't even hear about the insurance scandal in Double Indemnity. While boosters and detractors fight to paint the entire city a certain way, noir simply uses the city as a backdrop for the stories that are told. This isn't to say that they are false, or that they don't represent Los Angeles. If we learned anything from our reading about Mickey Cohen and Parker, it's that LA does contain these true noir elements.
ReplyDeleteNoir is simply well-represented in LA. Our history is woven with crime, deceit, and corruption. While many other places have these elements as well, noir will always be rooted in LA in the same way that surfing will always be associated with Hawaii, even if Australia and New Zealand do it just as well.
In response to Conor's comment and the question of Noir's agenda, I think it is important to remember that Noir is a style. A genre. Like fantasy or science fiction. I say this, not to belittle any unifying significance we find in these texts, but to remind us that Noir is separate from the propaganda pieces produced by the debunkers and the boosters.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, when I watch Jake's nose get cut open, spilling blood over his three piece, I cannot help but admire this genre. Maybe Noir's agenda is one of crashing planes. After all (although they weren't necessarily midwesterners...) the Chinatown residences flocking towards the bloody Packard reminded me an awful lot of those folks in Adamic and West. Those folks that came here to die.
I realize this comment was a complete contradiction... but then again so is Noir. So is LA.
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DeleteAlthough I have not completely seen Chinatown, from my observations I see that Chinatown was able to bring to light all of the corruptions and dishonesty that looms over LA. In addition, after reading What Makes Sammy Run we see the corruptions in businesses and what it takes to get ahead. I think an interesting point (that I wanted to mention in class) was how much our world is driven by money. Money is power and people with this power often abuse it to their own advantage. At the very end of the movie Cross (is that the creepy man's name?) is the one that comes out on top and wins. I think that noir does a very good job of being able to examine the good and the bad in situations. I think that some people do associated with Huff, Jake, Lola and Al because all of these characters are all trying to do good yet they get the short end of the stick.
ReplyDeleteI find a lot of truth in Sloan's statement that people in the city are afraid of being human. A common theme we've been encountering in characters is a certain detachedness, a front they put up that they are completely unfazed by anything that comes their way. Take Sammy and Mr. Mulray, for example - they run like machines. It seems that they have complete control of their emotions and even of the actions of the people around them. But this is not human; this is the type of thing Los Angeles attracts, requires, and brings out of people.
ReplyDeleteWe debated about the purpose of "Jake" in "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." If Los Angeles is so against people being true and human, maybe it is meant to be a scolding. After all, that scene was the only time Jake broke from the ice cold demeanor that he had throughout the movie. It was the first time he displayed any sign of disbelief, pain, or even remorse. For that split second, he had no control - and for just being human, he was thought to be weak.
Because of that, I agree with Sloan's assumption of Noir...and although I hate to say that it's a fair representation of the city, truthfully I think it is. I actually think it's a fair representation of most places. Sadly good guys have a very hard time winning anymore.
Since I've watched these two noir films, my impression of noir is about highlighting the good and the bad. And most typically noir films are in black in white showing the "light" and the "dark". Chinatown, although in color, demonstrates this emphasis of the good and the bad by revealing the corruption that comes with money or power. In "What Makes Sammy Run?", Sammy represents the evil and deceit. His mentality, selfishness, and drive bring about his success, and in this case, specifically, success means money which then translates to power. All of these physical embodiments of power are shown negatively. Money equates to power which then creates corruption and lies. In Los Angeles, money produces only selfishness and the downfall of others without money.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with Sloan in that I do not feel that I have been exposed to all the lies and deception Los Angeles is apparently laced with, so far in my years living in Los Angeles. A lot of the root of the conflicts, lies and secrets of characters we have met, such as Huff, Jake or Sammy I think must be recognized as part of being/ attributed to being human. So I think what I have been struggling with is finding what I believe is an authentic difference between the answers to the question: “Why do we do what we do?” because we are humans and “Why do we do what we do?” because we are Angelinos. I feel that we have often been too quick to correlate the corruption in characters we meet with what are possible negative qualities Los Angeles “has to offer”. I hope that just as we dedicated several minutes dissecting single sentences today in class, we can dedicate the time for in depth analysis each time we make a connection between an action or quality of a character in a book we read and the characteristics of Los Angeles we believe have influenced/shaped that action or quality to be develop the way it has. To comment on the functionality of noir, I believe it is fair to say noir brings a skeptical mindset to people. Just as it’s intended purpose is not as clear/ apparent as that of boosters or detractors is, it results in a not as clear effect- and maybe purposefully.
ReplyDeleteI am really engaged by Lucas’s comment on noir as a crashing plane from Day of the Locust. Noir is one of the only (some would posit the only) homegrown LA genre. Maybe that’s because people from LA really want to see planes crash, and noir fits just fine. In one of texts we read earlier (I tried to find the quotation but couldn’t), the author makes the claim that noir is LA’s adopted history. It is a series of stories that we have misconstrued as our factual past. This idea is complicated by the real noir-like elements of our city, like the stories of Mulholland and Cohen, but it is true that Double Indemnity was fictional. Maybe we feel these stories to be fact because they happen in real places that we have visited, but there is something beyond that. Noir depicts a truer history of LA than we have been given previously, so we take it, despite its technically fictional nature, as the lesser of two evils. The LA history we know is largely that of the boosters, but there is an inescapable sense that things are not how they seem and are said to be. So we turn to the noir writers for a description of LA that mirrors the city’s character if not its actual past (although… Mulholland and Cohen). We read stories where planes crash because they allow us to express the feeling that takes hold in almost all of us, that planes are crashing around us all the time. Perhaps LA is one giant plane on its way down, and we read noir to figure out what happens when it hits the ground. Too bad the noir we have analyzed always ends at the climax. We know we hit the ground, but not what happens next.
ReplyDeleteThey say that Buddha himself once said that all striving is meaningless. Noir as a genre illuminates this as truth. Jake fights against absolute evil, he finds himself through this fight, but in the end has no power to overcome the institution and loses everything. Walter himself is evil in a world of evil where the only honesty is a product of greed. Sammy runs to buy himself the next pair of shoes. Tod paints a picture that comes true before it can be given to the public. Midwesterners work their whole lives to be able to get up and move west, and when they arrive they have no power, money, or happiness. Nietzche thinks that all human striving does nothing and does not bring human life any further. In fact, it just makes life a living hell. And Noir agrees with this too. Jake creates death. Walter creates death. Tod creates death. Hell on earth.
ReplyDeleteNoir is dark. It is bleak and desolate and alone. It is apt that it comes from Los Angeles, a town that loves to cry about how bad things are. It is fitting that such a perfect place attracts such sad people.
Or does it? When we were building a list of why people came to Los Angeles, nobody really seemed all that sad to me. Nobody on that list came to die. They were pursuing something, pursuing progress, maybe, or love or productivity or happiness or something. And most of them found it! Where is that dead, hopeless, sad Los Angeles identity? Noir ignores people just as much as debunkers and boosters did. Noir ignores people because noir never stops to think.
A man named Gautama was sad, once. He was sad because he thought that all striving was meaningless, and he was sorry for his fellow man because he did not want to see them strive on for so long meaninglessly. To find understanding, he set out on a great search. He needed answers; how to understand the sorrow of the world, how to fix the world, what the truth of the world is. He searched and searched until all his followers left him. Still, he thought. All striving is meaningless! Angry, he sat at the base of a particularly nice bodhi tree. To himself he thought that he would sit under the same tree, unmoving, until he finally had answers to his questions. Days, months, years passed, until finally he understood. He had gained enlightenment. He stood up, and he was no longer Gautama. He was Buddha. And he understood:
All striving is meaningless: strive endlessly.
I think that you have, mostly, accurately described noir's true intentions and what it intends to make its readers feel and think. I also think that noir has accurately displayed many exaggerated outcomes just as you have pointed out in many of the texts that we have been reading. However, as I do think that this is noir's main objective, I also think that it is not noir's only objective. Besides just these many expected outcomes out of the noir theme, I do also believe that noir takes a toll on Los Angeles itself on a daily basis. I, however, have encountered only some of the deceitfulness and corruption that noir has imposed on Los Angeles, but I do believe I have not experienced the most of it. I have yet to truly experience the truly negative side that noir imposes on our city but I am also curious to see its more positive effects.
ReplyDeleteNoir in both Hollywood and in LA in general is real. There is unmistakably this dark and twisted personality that LA has come to inherit. Just think of the Chinatown scene where Mrs. Mullray gets shot. That scene is quite honestly a pretty accurate representation of the Los Angeles that we live in today. Stuff like that happens all of the time. We here news daily about crimes and shootings and stories that can even be more twisted than the one in "Chinatown". For example, the LAPD depicted in "Chinatown" is almost identical to the LAPD seen in todays society. You have cops stealing money, you have corruption between cops and certain races, you have corruption between cops and higher members of Los Angeles society...I could go on. The point is that this dark and twisted perception of LA that Im sure some of us have seen too many times over the course of this class is the actual truth. Noir is real in LA.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I do believe that noir in LA is present, I also believe that there is a presence of genuinely in LA. Not everything that LA encompasses deserves the label of noir. It's more like the positive aspects of LA have to live within and deal with the noir aspects of LA if that makes sense.
I said it in class but I might as well say it again. I believe noir, just as any other genre (comedy, rom-com, drama), is to entertain their viewer. If the purpose of noir is to expose the truth about the deceit and corruption as well as promote the idea that everyone around you is just out for your cash or playing in the "hollywood tug of war", then isn't is incredibly ironic that the goal of the actual movie itself is to make money. Why tell a story about greed and the entrophy-ing nature of money, when your goal as the movie maker is to make bank.
ReplyDeleteThe genre of merely a stylized version of the truth. The truth can often be surprising but usually very boring. No one wants to hear what you really did when you ditched class, they want to hear what you wish you did when you skipped class. I think a line in What Makes Sammy Run? put it best, "Work hard, and, if you can't work hard, be smart; and, if you can't be smart, be loud" (Schulberg 81). And maybe that's all noir is, being loud. Being loud about the dirt we are given as truth in our society.