As Andean Glaciers Shrink, Water Worries Grow nytimes.com
URL, just for the record. The NYT may pull its links someday, but odds are NYT URLS are considerably more permanent than SI.
Distantly connected to the water topic, an old film retrospective piece I managed to dig up:
FILM; Jolting Noir With a Shot Of Nihilism query.nytimes.com
Clip:
Protagonists of American action films -- the western, film noir, war -- are all about the individual act as a means of redemption or self-definition. If that's taken away, they have almost nothing left. In ''Chinatown,'' that's taken away. Perhaps no American film ever worked with such cruel ingenuity to show not only the futility but also the catastrophic consequences of good intentions.
The ending has such force because, like Gittes, we never learn; despite all indications, we assume things will not collapse so horribly. Like Gittes, we think we've seen this movie before, and we know how it goes. As we near the climax, he misinterprets a pivotal clue and re-enacts the climax of ''The Maltese Falcon,'' calling the police to turn Evelyn in and then using the pressure of their imminent arrival to demand that she acknowledge his mastery of the puzzle by confessing to his version of events. But he's in over his head. As Noah Cross warned him earlier, ''You may think you know what you're doing, but, believe me, you don't.'' . . .
HOW perverse is the humor? Well, what should we make of the associations that Mr. Polanski had to know we'd bring to the image of him, of all people, slitting people open with a knife?
All those closet romantics who wish to place ''Chinatown'' safely within the noir tradition that preceded it are fond of reciting what they believe to be the film's final line: Gittes's assistant's ministering and pre-emptively elegaic ''Forget it, Jake; it's Chinatown.'' They recognize the familiar appeal of its squint-eyed, tough-guy stoicism. The movie's actual last lines, though, belong to Gittes's friend the good cop. What he shouts, offscreen, as darkness closes in, is a lot less reassuring, and more fitting: ''Get off the street. Get off the street.'' |
