Criticism (2007) - The "Chinatown" Syndrome
Details
- article: The "Chinatown" Syndrome
- author(s): Phillip Novak
- journal: Criticism (01/Jul/2007)
- issue: volume 49, issue 3, pages 255-283
- DOI: 10.1353/crt.0.0034
- journal ISSN: 0011-1589
- publisher: Wayne State University Press
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Broadcasting, Character relations, Characters and characteristics in motion pictures, Chinatown, Chinatown (Los Angeles), Cinema, Criticism and interpretation, Culture, Cynicism, David Bordwell, Deborah Linderman, Dramatic arts, Film, Film genres, Film noir, Individual Films, Interactive Media, Joan Copjec, John Belton, John Orr, Laura Mulvey, London, England, Martin Scorsese, Michael Eaton, New York City, New York, Other, Perception, R. Barton Palmer, Raymond Chandler, Roman Polanski, Slavoj Žižek, Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (2005) by Tania Modleski, Thomas M. Leitch, Vertigo (1958), William Rothman, William S. Pechter
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Abstract
Chinatown is deeply critical of that mode of perception, which it marks - by focusing on Jake's perceptions of women and minorities, and by situating Jake so thoroughly in the tradition of private-eye fiction and film, a tradition centered thematically around a white male protagonist's conceptions of women and minorities, most frequently Asians - as Western, white, and male.