Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Chinatown
1974 · Roman Polanski · Chinatown on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how many crimes happen in flat midday sunlight. (light)
Alonzo shoots the reservoir, the channels, the orange groves in amber daylight. There is almost no baroque shadow. The sun exposes everything and hides nothing, and nothing is helped by that.
Payoff: Noir usually hides its crimes in the dark. Here concealment is unnecessary, which tells you how safe the guilty feel.
Watch the bandage on Nicholson's nose after the knife attack. (camera)
Polanski himself wields the blade. For most of the second half the white tape sits in the center of every close-up, anchoring your eye to Gittes's humiliation while he keeps working the case.
Payoff: A detective who cannot follow his own nose. Each new discovery he makes leaves the wound more visible, not less. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action-image: a hero who perceives correctly and acts, and changes nothing.
Listen for the solo trumpet, and for how rarely music plays. (sound)
Goldsmith gives Gittes one mournful brass line and then withdraws. Between entrances you get ceiling fans, traffic, office clatter. The trumpet returns like a thought Gittes will not say aloud.
Payoff: The score carries the sadness the character keeps off his face.
Look at how flat the background sits behind the actors. (camera)
Alonzo favors long lenses in anamorphic widescreen. Distances compress, so hills, fences and buildings press right up against the characters. People look pinned inside their locations rather than moving through them.
Payoff: The lens makes the environment inescapable before the plot does. You feel the trap as geometry.
Watch Dunaway's hesitations, and Huston's easy, unbothered warmth. (performance)
Evelyn stalls, breaks off, starts sentences again. Noah Cross never hurries and never lowers his voice. Their manners are the evidence Gittes has to read.
Payoff: Watch how you read them yourself, and notice what the film lets you decide. In the reading: index of equivocity. Evelyn's hesitations can be read two ways at once, which the reading calls equivocity: one clue fitting two different truths.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the nose. The bandage stays in every close-up while Gittes keeps working the case.