Studying

Contemporary
American Film
Thomas Elsaesser
Department of Art and Culture, University of Amsterdam
Warren Buckland
School of Film and Television, Chapman University,
California

4.2. Thematic criticism: method

• The starting point of thematic criticism is to look at a film obliquely, to

determine what human values it is indirectly communicating.
• A useful way to begin identifying themes in a film is to keep in mind at the
outset the common themes found in all forms of human communication,
such as those listed by Bordwell above (suffering, identity, alienation, the
ambiguity of perception, the mystery of behaviour, freedom, religious
doctrines, enlightenment, creativity, the imagination, etc.).
• Then determine which themes are manifest in the film under analysis.
One useful strategy is to analyse the film scene by scene, in order to
determine what each scene contributes to the film's overall meaning. In
particular, ask yourself: What themes are the characters manifesting
through their actions?
• Focus on the themes that cohere across the film. Unity of theme is an
important aspect of thematic criticism.
• A perennial problem with thematic criticism is that it is too reductive, to
the point of reducing the film to a set of meanings that are so abstract that
the criticism becomes banal (a comment such as 'this film is about life'
won't win any prizes). One way to avoid this is to identify the basic themes
in a film or director's work, and then attempt to establish precisely how
they relate to one another, which will reintroduce an element of specificity
to the analysis.
• Some thematic critics also attempt to outline the director's attitude or
stance toward the themes in his or her films, and to assess whether a
director is able to be both 'inside' his characters and 'comment on' them
at the same time. When discussing the relation between thematic
criticism, genre, and auteur studies, film scholars have often invoked such
a double perspective in order to highlight the 'critical' dimension that
auteurs are said to impart to 'conformist' genres such as family
melodrama (Douglas Sirk and the 'unhappy happy ending') or the
women's film (Max Ophuls in films like Caught or Letter from an
Unknown Woman). A similar case can be made with respect to degrees of
'knowingness' (see below) or the double inscription of a 'naive' and a
'sophisticated' spectator when arguing the merits of distinguishing
between 'classical' and 'postclassical' Hollywood.

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4.3. Thematic criticism: analysis (Roman Polanski)

One thematic analysis of Roman Polanski's films claims: 'Polanski's work

might be seen as an attempt to map out the precise relationship between the
From thematic criticism to deconstructive analysis 123
contemporary world's instability and tendency to violence and the
individual's increasing inability to overcome his isolation and locate some
realm of meaning or value beyond himself (Telotte and McCarty 1998: 388).
This analysis, although general, is nonetheless quite precise in its delineation
of Polanski's themes. It does not simply state that Polanski's films contain a
conflict between 'the contemporary world' and 'the individual' (which is not
very informative). Instead, it adds detail to each category of the opposition -
a violent, unstable contemporary world; an isolated individual with no faith or
conviction, who finds it increasingly difficult to overcome his isolation or
adopt beliefs.
Telotte and McCarty's characterization then outlines the themes of
instability and isolation in more detail. First, isolation. Many of Polanski's
films focus on a character or small group of characters isolated from society.
Examples include (we have added to Telotte and McCarty's list): characters
confined to boats in Knife in the Water, Bitter Moon, and Pirates; a small group
of characters occupying an isolated castle in Cul-de-Sac, characters isolated in
their own apartments in Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant-, three characters cut
off from the rest of civilization in an isolated house in Death and the Maiden;
an American doctor lost and isolated in France as he tries to find his
kidnapped wife (Frantic). In addition, Telotte and McCarty argue: 'All
[Polanski's] characters try continually, however clumsily, to connect with
other human beings, to break out of their isolation and to free themselves of
their alienation' (p. 390). As is common in thematic criticism, Telotte and
McCarty focus their analysis on characters, particularly their actions and
psychological states. They even use the 'commentative heuristic' (see Chapter
3 above) to map the desolate landscape characters occupy onto the characters'
psychology: the 'geography of isolation [in Polanski's films] is often
symbolically transformed into a geography of the mind, haunted by doubts,
fears, desires, or even madness' (p. 389).
In terms of Polanski's second main theme, that of a violent contemporary
world, Telotte and McCarty do not only relate it to the theme of isolation, but
also outline Polanski's attitude towards it: '[Polanski] is able to assume an
ironic, even highly comic attitude towards the ultimate and, as he sees it,
inevitable human problem - an abiding violence and evil nurtured even as we
individually struggle against these forces' (p. 390). The isolated individuals
struggle against the violence and evil of the contemporary world, but at the
same time they nurture what they struggle against. This complex theme is
epitomized in one of Polanski's most famous films - Rosemary's Baby. 'The
basic event ofRosemary's Baby - Rosemary's bearing the offspring of the devil,
a baby whom she fears yet, because of the natural love of a mother for her own
child, nurtures - might be seen as a paradigm of Polanski's vision of evil and

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its operation in our world' (pp. 389-90).

Virginia Wright Wexman analyses Polanski's themes from a different

perspective, by identifying the influence of the Theatre of the Absurd and
Surrealism on his films (Wexman 1979). Polanski's focus on man isolated
in a meaningless universe is a theme that derives from the Theatre of the
Absurd. Wexman then argues that Polanski develops this theme by
focusing 'on shifting power relationships, usually precipitated by the
arrival of an outsider into a group, which forces a reshuffling of status and
privilege' (Wexman 1979: 8). Additional consequences of the influence of
the Theatre of the Absurd include these: Polanski's films are full of
pessimism, of callous exploiters and willing victims, and circular plots,
which 'leave the characters no better off at the end than they were at the
beginning' (Wexman 1979: 10). One of the clear influences of Surrealism is
to be found in his films' focus on deviant behaviour, persecution, and
paranoid delusion. Finally, Wexman does not argue that Polanski assumes
an ironic or comic attitude towards his themes, but argues instead that he
refuses 'to permit audiences to feel for his characters what the characters
are unable to feel for one another' (p. 12).

4.3.1. Thematic analysis of Chinatown

In this section we shall focus on how Chinatown establishes the values of its
main character Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), and then explore two of the
film's general themes.
In the opening scene Jake Gittes, a private investigator who specializes in
matrimonial issues, has handed over to Curly, a working-class male client, a
set of photos of his wife having an affair with another man. As Curly gets more
and more upset, trying to express his anger, Jake is shown to be laid back. He
is in control of the situation: he offers Curly a stiff drink, smokes in his
presence, and tells him he need not pay the whole bill.
In scene 2 Jake talks formally and politely to a new client who calls herself
'Mrs Evelyn Mulwray', the wife of Hollis Mulwray, a high-level official in the
Water department. (In fact, it is the character Ida Sessions, pretending to be
Evelyn Mulwray.) 'Evelyn Mulwray' is the opposite of Jake's previous client:
she is a confident, calculating, rich upper-class woman who expresses herself
clearly. But despite her difference from Curly, her needs are the same: she
suspects her spouse of cheating, and wants him investigated. Jake is able to
treat his new client on her own level, and raises the same issues with her,
especially money (except that he emphasizes to her the expense an
investigation may cost). The main difference between scenes 1 and 2 is that,
whereas Jake smokes in scene 1, 'Evelyn Mulwray' smokes in scene 2. Unlike
many private investigators in classical films noirs, in this neo-noir detective
film Jake is a well-off, upwardly mobile private investigator who feels at ease
From thematic criticism to deconstructive analysis 125
with all his clients (as well as most of the other people he comes into contact

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with).
In scene 3 Jake is shown attending a public meeting where Hollis Mulwray
is to speak. Jake is depicted as being uninterested in the political issues
discussed in the meeting (Los Angeles' precarious position between a desert
and the sea, its lack of drinking water, and a proposal to build a dam). During
the debate, he is shown reading a sports paper. He only looks up when Hollis
Mulwray speaks, and only reacts to the events when a farmer unleashes his
sheep into the meeting (and also accuses Mulwray of corruption). This scene
establishes Jake's self-imposed isolation from contemporary political debates.
He simply wants to do his job and solve his clients' matrimonial problems.
Jake continues to follow and photograph Mulwray in scenes 4-7. In scene
8, in a barber-shop, he gets into an argument with a mortgage broker, who
criticizes Jake for the dishonest nature of his job. Jake strenuously defends his
job as an honest business, which seems to be the main purpose of this scene,
beyond the revelation that Hollis Mulwray's affair has made it into the papers.
Jake also describes his job (to the real Mrs Mulwray) as a business in scene 11
when he goes to visit Hollis Mulwray at home. Jake's pride and business have
been tarnished, and he wants to find out who set up both him and the
Mulwrays (that is, he wants to discover why someone would want to set up
Mrs Mulwray by impersonating her, and why this imposter would come to
him). His motivation for investigating further is therefore primarily personal.
From the few scenes mentioned, we can already identify the film's main
themes. The opening two scenes emphasize the theme of illicit relationships,
of spouses having extramarital affairs. By the end of the film we realize that
this is one of the film's dominant themes articulated across the whole film, but
that it ultimately involves incest between Evelyn Mulwray and her father,
Noah Cross, as well as an affair of some kind between Hollis Mulwray and his
stepdaughter Catherine. If we ask what Chinatown is 'about', what its
'substance' or 'principal idea' is, one answer is that it is about breaking a
fundamental law of society, the incest taboo, a law that creates stable identity
boundaries and societies. Familial relationships define identity, and so the
film's emphasis on relationships is also an emphasis on the fundamental
theme of identity, and the suffering caused by illicit relationships.
This first theme is related to the film's second primary theme: political
corruption. This theme is first raised at the end of scene 3, when a farmer
accuses Hollis Mulwray of political corruption. Jake ignores this cue, however,
and, furthermore, it is a false cue, since Hollis tries to expose the corruption.
After Hollis is killed, the corruption theme is put into sharper focus, as Jake
proposes to Evelyn that her husband was murdered because he tried to expose
corruption. Jake continues the investigation to find out who set him up, and
to find out what Evelyn is hiding. At first he suspects her of the murder, but
later finds out that her 'secret' is that her daughter was fathered by her father,
Noah Cross. Furthermore, Evelyn proposes to Jake that her father may be
behind the political corruption (and behind her husband's death). It is only
towards the end of the film that Jake is able to link together the first theme,
illicit relationships and identity, and the second theme, political corruption,

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and realize that Noah Cross is behind both. Perhaps, therefore, we can link
these two themes, and argue that Chinatowns overall theme is 'patriarchal
corruption', of the father's corruption of both family and politics.
Chinatown includes many of the themes common to Polanski's films. The
hero is isolated from society by the nature of his job (a private investigator
who handles matrimonial cases), although he is far from being a completely
alienated investigator as found in classical films noirs. However, Jake is unable
to establish any beliefs or values beyond his own work ethic, since he explains
that his motivation to investigate Mulwray's death is primarily personal, and
he is shown to be uninterested in politics. The contemporary world is shown
to be violent, as Jake's life is threatened on several occasions and his nose is
badly cut. Furthermore, Cross in particular is depicted as a callous exploiter,
indulging in transgressive behaviour; the film's plot does not lead to
resolution or a happy ending (Polanski rewrote Robert Towne's original
happy ending), but is circular, because the characters are no better off at the
end than they were at the beginning - indeed many are worse off, as Evelyn is
killed, Jake is injured, may lose his licence, and has lost a woman he loved, and
Catherine is handed over to Noah Cross, who seems to escape prosecution.
Because of the ending in particular, the film moves from sharp wit to sombre
pessimism, as the central character slides from cocky assurance and
selfconfident
cynicism to moral confusion and professional ineptitude.

4.3.2. Thematic criticism and auteurism

One of the most prototypical instances of thematic criticism is auteurism, the

attribution of a single source of a film's intentionality, value, and meaning to
the director. It was, as the name suggests, initially formulated in Paris, around
the influential journal Cahiers du cinema. Subsequently, auteurism was taken
up by Movie magazine in London (see Chapter 3) and by Andrew Sarris in
New York, who for a brief period edited Cahiers du cinema in English and in
1968 published The American Cinema: Directors and Directions (Sarris 1996),
the auteurists' bible in the English-speaking world.
What made auteurism a radical doctrine (a 'politics') during the 1950s in
France and the early 1960s in Britain and the United States was that it took the
commercial mainstream cinema (and thus a vital aspect of popular culture)
seriously. Auteur critics challenged the traditional division between the arts
into high and low media, but the real provocation lay in actively maintaining
From thematic criticism to deconstructive analysis 127
the criteria and classifications of traditional aesthetics: the belief in the artist as
a controlling creative identity behind a work, the idea of the consistency of
themes, and the notion of the coherence of an entire body of work over a
lifetime of artistic production. Setting themselves off against film appreciation
as much as against film reviewing in the daily press, the auteur critics elevated
the genre films and studio products directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Howard
Hawks, John Ford, Vincente Minnelli, and others to the status of art, and

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claimed for these directors (auteurs) the rank of major artists. Commenting
on Fra^ois Truffaut's influence in developing the polemical understanding
of the film director as auteur, Andrew Sarris notes: 'Truffaut's greatest heresy
[in the eyes of traditional film critics] was not in his ennobling direction as a
form of creation, but in his ascribing authorship to Hollywood directors
hitherto tagged with the deadly epithets of commercialism. This was
Truffaut's major contribution to the anti-Establishment ferment in England
and America' (Sarris 1996: 28).
More specifically, the auteur critics elevated a select group of Hollywood
directors to the status of classical artists - that is, artists who work within
institutions (in this instance, Hollywood studios), but who expressed
themselves through adhering to conventions. This is in contrast to the type of
director Truffaut and other critics at Cahiers du cinema wanted to become -
and, of course, did become in the 1960s: namely, Romantic artists, who work
outside institutions, and whose expressive style requires the breaking of
conventions.
As we saw above, one of the favoured methods of establishing the
credentials of a director to be considered an auteur (and not merely a metteuren-
scene or a studio contract director) is to demonstrate a set of consistent
themes or preoccupations, across a diversity of genres (e.g. similar or
complementary motifs in Hawks's comedies, his Westerns and his
actionadventures;
the underlying unity of Minnelli's musicals and melodramas) or
across films made for different studios (Hitchcock for Selznick and Universal;
Preminger at first for Twentieth Century Fox and then as his own
independent producer). A thematic analysis of a director's work thus always
implies the presence of countervailing forces - most commonly those of
producer and studio, occasionally that of genre - against which an auteurdirector
was deemed to have succeeded in imposing his signature and thereby
remain true to himself and articulate his Vision of the world'.
If we now apply the auteur argument to Polanski's Chinatown, we note that
both the issues of thematic coherence and authorial identity are complicated by
the fact that Polanski - born in Paris in 1933 - began his career in Poland in the
1960s where the (economic, ideological) constraints for a film-maker were quite
different from those obtaining in a commercial, mainstream film industry. He
subsequently made films in Britain before moving to Hollywood, which he left
in 1976 for France, where he has been making most of his films since. In his
career, therefore, the countervailing forces assumed to be operating in the
Hollywood system, as well as the auteur's (stylistic, thematic) means by which
to assert himself against them, are bound to be different from those assumed to
have negatively or dialectically shaped the career of a Sam Fuller or Nicholas
Ray. On'the other hand, by the time he came to make Chinatown, Polanski had
established a reputation as a highly distinctive director, with an offbeat
approach even to conventional subjects as well as a strong existentialist
undertow that closely affiliated him with various 'gothic', 'expressionist', 'film
noir', or 'horror' genres in cinema history, all of which he often subverted by a

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strain of black humour and absurdist comedy. The strongest countervailing
force in his case would be the change of language (from Polish to English to
French) and the different conditions of production in the four countries in
which he has directed. This makes his situation resemble that of 'independent'
auteurs from a slightly older generation, like Orson Welles or Joseph Losey, who
also moved in and out of several film industries.
But Polanski is also comparable to Hollywood directors of an apparently
quite different generation, namely the expatriate or emigre directors of
Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Billy
Wilder, Max Ophuls, or Robert Siodmak. They, too, had either left their
native country and its film industry to rebuild a career in Hollywood or been
forced by political events to seek refuge in the United States. Adjusting more
or less voluntarily and felicitously to the Hollywood production system, they
were indeed contending with interfering producers (from the auteurist point
of view) and a rigid studio system (from the European perspective). They also
had to make certain genre conventions their own, by subverting or
transforming them (Hitchcock transforming the woman's picture and the
thriller; the directors from Germany giving the Weimar 'social picture' of the
1920s a new, more sombre inflection, as in the neo-expressionist 'film noir' of
the 1940s).
The trajectory of Polanski, however, does not finally fit into this mould
either. On the one hand, one could claim that he was a political refugee from
communist Poland, when the post-Stalinist thaw of the 1960s became once
more the socialist permafrost of Poland's General Jaruselsky in the 1970s. On
the other hand, Polanski's career move to Hollywood follows another pattern,
that of the successful European director lured to Hollywood by an offer he
could not refuse: in this he is more like Louis Malle, Jan Troll, Alan Parker,
Philip Noyce, Ridley Scott, Paul Verhoeven, or Wolfgang Petersen - all of
them directors whose talent Hollywood succeeded in 'buying in' from abroad.
Polanski did become a refugee, in reverse direction, from Hollywood to Paris.
He did not flee the US for political reasons, but jumped bail when facing a
criminal conviction for statutory rape.