I was looking at a long old essay I did in 2006 about the Polanski/Towne movie Chinatown, an example of neo-Noir. Although I wouldn’t write the same essay today, some portions of the essay may contain some useful thinking about plot. I have put together a bowdlerized version of the essay below. It is going to come to you without much scaffolding, and without much specific discussion of “Chinatown”, because what is below is a three-page excerpt from a 25-page essay.
—
The stories considered archetypal of the classic Noir era span an array of types. Audiences basically only can walk into the theater expecting a plot of intrigue, unlawfulness, and unreliable loyalties; no Noir guarantee exists that a good guy will survive, or that a good guy will even exist. Some formal-structural characteristics do exist, though, and one is the way that the stories tend towards an unusual relationship between content and structure. Plot, typically an obvious element of art that purely serves as content, exists in Noir as both the significant element of content and of form. The most important formal qualities of Noir narrative have to do with the way the filmmakers manage to let story structure, narrative revelation, and perspective interact, placing the audience in the middle of the confusion the characters feel over the plot.
Let’s look at some literary plot structures — not plots, but plot structures — and consider how Noir plots relate.
PLOT TYPE #1: a narrative includes a plot which introduces a problem early in the story. Tension surrounding the resolution of the problem builds until the point of the narrative’s denouement. ( There’s a cat stuck in a tree. Fire Dept comes & has trouble helping the cat. Finally the cat gets down.) Examples: Medea, Hamlet, and Moby Dick. This plot structure/type could be reasonably stretched to include episodic stories ranging from Huck Finn to Candide to the novels of Joyce; and would include most genre works we could name. Most any film, particularly among early movie history, also fits into this very broad plot structure – whether a comedy or a western or a gangster flick, the protagonists near the beginning of the story find themselves in a pinch or on the run or with a heist in mind, and the story takes off from there.
PLOT TYPE #2: One form of exception to the first plot structure occurs when the audience already knows near the beginning of the story both what is at stake and where the story will end. This second plot structure is built on suspense, a tension of how and when an action will take place. This structure, in terms of film, would include much of Hitchcock’s work, as well as a variety of other stories superficially quite different from one another; take, for example, the way Citizen Kane offers a version of this structure, with the upfront presentation that for all Kane’s acquisitions he could not re-acquire the world of “Rosebud,” and contrast Annie Hall and Alvy Singer’s presentation in the first scene that he and Annie have broken up.
PLOT TYPE #3: this structure is another form of twist on the first plot arc, that first arc being the common one in which a problem appears near the beginning of the story, and this same problem occasions the plot until the problem’s resolution near the end of the narrative. The third structure, by contrast, presents a problem near the beginning of the story, and that problem ostensibly occasions the story. This problem is the superficial core problem of the narrative. The narrative, however, has in fact been occasioned by a hidden prior problem.
This third plot structure, then, includes Tom Jones, and, in terms of film, most Noir stories. In most High Noir, the superficial core problem is a murder plot or perhaps a necessary-but-unwanted involvement with criminals (think of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity or Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past) or in some cases, as with Touch of Evil, a murder that occurs right off the bat. The early murder (a device also used in Chinatown) of course occasions an investigation, but is not central to the hidden prior problem that in fact occasions the plot – occasions the plot insofar as this hidden problem will indeed become the focal point of the story. In much of High Noir, the hidden prior problem is simply a predetermined motive, a scheme behind a scheme that one of the characters has conjured. Double Indemnity or The Lady From Shanghai are good examples. In Double Indemnity, the hidden prior problem is Phyllis’ willingness to betray Neff, just like she would betray anyone else. In The Lady From Shanghai, multiple characters have hidden schemes.
Film noir, Chinatown included, tends to quickly present the audience with the superficial core problem, and equally quickly preoccupy the audience with confusing surrounding circumstances, by placing the camera and the narrative perspective (whether third-person or voice-over-based first-person) behind the investigator protagonist. This collusion between perspective and narrative structure tends to be very successful in creating a mysterious tone and an aura of intrigue. When this happens, then plot (which in some stories is straightforwardedly a matter of narrative content, as with the stories of the first narrative structure) becomes a matter of form; plot in this case not only provides the content of the story which the audience witnesses, but also actively shapes the audience’s perception of the story.
The intrigue facing both the protagonist and the audience, while they together wander between the superficial core problem and recognition of the hidden prior problem, is manifold – questions exist of not just whodunit, but also of who can be trusted at all, of who is ultimately loyal to whom. In Chinatown, Jake Gittes wavers on whether Evelyn Mulwray is an honest character, and his uncertainty is aided by her varying explanations of who Katherine is and how she knew Hollis. Evelyn first claims that she has no idea who Hollis was going out with; then she lies to the police that she did initially hire Gittes but still didn’t know who Hollis was with; then she lies to Gittes that Hollis was having an affair but that she was happy about it and allowed it to go on; then she tells Gittes that Katherine is her sister, but she still doesn’t tell him the whole truth, perhaps reasonably believing at the moment that the whole truth would be gratuitous. Meanwhile, of course, the picture is clouded by the fact that other characters have their own secrets to hide. Gittes in part is potentially confused by the way that each new dark revelation about Noah Cross still leaves covered up plenty of other dirty secrets about his power and malfeasance. The confusion and mysteries and intrigue in the plot of Chinatown are cleverly done, but Towne and Polanski do not do too much that veers far from noir convention; most of what distinguishes Chinatown is simply that the noir tone and noir form are done very well. The additional distinction of the movie relates to excellent writerly decisions. One of these is that Towne declines to write a hidden prior problem as a private scheme or premeditated double-crossing, but rather chooses to use a type of hidden prior problem in which this pre-narrative problem is externalized into a human event with multiple witnesses. Furthermore, Towne creates two of these hidden prior problems – one relating to Hollis Mulwray’s ability to read Noah Cross, and one relating to incest. The problem with the witnesses, of course, is that they are either dead, or stuck in a position from which they too have to keep silent.