17 years ago and a fourth-year graduate student, I lived with my wife on the
12th floor of a high-rise on a river bank and close to the University. Our snug
one-bedroom apartment oversaw a cluster of small businesses among which
was a video rental place (it was gone when I visited the place in Aug 2019).
Most of the films were on VHS and I would often borrow a couple on the
weekends. Although I swam with a Masters club regularly, I hadn't fully appreciated
sports in those days. Watching movies was one of the main activities to pass
the long Canadian winter for an indoor slob like me. Early evening I would pop
in a cassette in the player and let it run while I lounged around, drinking,
cooking or doing small chores.
Beautiful Girls(1996) spoke to us partly because the story happened in the dead
of a snowy winter and it was about people our age. After all the laughs,
Punchline(1988) impressed me with "They have an opinion on world hunger. Who
cares? They are debutantes! They are coming out of a Rolls Royce. What does
that have to do with LIFE as we know it!?" My blood boiled and then chilled
watching Malcolm X(1992). I huddled in front of Psycho(1960) and Aliens(1986)
in the early morning hours and thrilled at Andy's escape from Shawshank(1994)
prison. Etc. Etc.
Many dialogs left lasting impressions. What did the words and phrases refer to?
What emotions did they intend to invoke? Etc. I didn't read the scripts but
could recite a few effortlessly after watching a movie a number of times. If I
didn't get it the first time, I was in no hurry to find out. It often came back
down the road, this time most likely easier to interpret simply because of my
acculturation. The knowledge would self-validate and self-enhance through
further feedbacks. The Western culture itself as a learning environment was not
exactly kind but not hopelessly wicked either. It felt like piecing together a
giant puzzle. It is doable, mostly enjoyable and tremendously rewarding.
I discovered the 1974 classic, Chinatown, by accident but it grabbed me like no
other movies. I could vividly recall the bonus behind-the-scene footage. The
screenwriter, Robert Towne, told how the story came from a conversation with a
Hungarian policeman who worked in the LA Chinatown.
"So what do you do?"
"As little as possible." said the cop.
"What kind of law enforcement is that?"
"Hey man. You don't know. When you are among the tongs with their dialects,
you don't know who's doing what to whom and whether you are helping the victim
or inadvertently lending the law to commit a crime. So we decided the best we
could do in Chinatown was to do as little as possible."
That sounded like an uncanny prescience of the US-China relationship today.
But the film was about water, greed, and evil through the eyes of a hard-boiled
dick and former policeman, played by Jack Nicolson, in the early days of LA.
The scenes exuded reality that it felt like watching a documentary. I watched it
so many times that I could easily recall most scenes and recite quite a few
dialogs, especially those from the villian, e.g.,
"You have a nasty reputation, Mr. Gitts. I like that,"
"Of course, I am respectable. I am OLD. Politicians, ugly buildings and
whores all get respectable if they last long enough." and
"I don't blame myself. You see, Mr. Gitts, most poeple don't have to face the
fact but at the right time and the right place they are capable of anything."
Sunday, I started reading Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye" and felt a déjà
vu after a few pages. The style of the hero, a private detective, felt exactly
like Jake Gittes in the Chinatown movie. I had no problem putting Nicolson's
face on detective Marlowe in the novel. Some research revealed indeed both
Towne and Roman Polanski, the movie director, were influenced by Chandler. It
will be great fun reading this author and LA will be transformed in my mind.
