(no subject)

Funny how many of the very best movies are noir, that astonishingly specific form of crime story. It's one of Kurosawa's best veins, one of Truffaut's, is completely internalized in Lynch and the Coens etc. I still nominate Chinatown as best movie ever. I think its biggest strength is the use of the physical environment: the water, that garden, the pocket watches in the glove box, the fish. Perhaps that's the key, that diving down into objects and object significance. In non-noir, I remember being riveted when initially seeing people poke their fingers into the mud in Andrei Rublev, the girl staring at the peeling wallpaper in Through a Glass Darkly, the microphone business at the end of off-noir Touch of Evil. I think Mamet's film theory is basically that actions, especially with props, are what matter in movies. His own are usually most exciting in their dialogue (The Edge perhaps excepted), but that may help explain noir's immediacy. Matchbooks, loose pipes, exotic statues aren't just crime clues, as in mere detection stories, they're things that can still get people killed, even the blessed protagonist (Nicholson's slit nose). Get the audience into that mindset, through sympathy with a character, and our own vulnerability to and reliance on objects opens the film world up, all Heidegger-like. And passing us into that mode somehow makes us much more open to the meaning level, when that finally comes along: our distancing defenses have all been abandoned, I guess. James M. Cain's a pretty small fish in literature, but what's most memorable in film is quite often in his line.

Mulholland Drive, eXistenZ and a few other movies take the Significant Object (also the Mysterious Person and Place Not On Any Map) into the dream borderland--where Shelley and where Spenser's knights still roam--and that's more powerful still, perhaps because more Heideggerian, with fragmented context completed by the mind as the right, true lost one.

You don't need a noir plot to get such impact, but that's the easiest way to dovetail the object world into a unified, traditionally cathartic plot. Chinatown is Racine, with crucial telephones and desk drawers taking the place of self-sacrifice and fatal misunderstandings. Or maybe of rhyme.