Dick writes:
<< In Chinatown, Nicholson looks into Dunaway's eyes
and says something
about there being a little black speck in the iris. In
Jakes, he looks
into Meg Tilly's eyes in an almost identical setup,
and, if you remember
the first movie, you wait for him to make the
connection. But he
doesn't. He goes off on some other tack entirely,
leading one to think
that the similarity of scenes is an unplanned
coincidence. Here's my
question. Is it a coincidence? Or did Robert Towne
write the scene with
the idea of using the eye thing as a clue only to have
Nicholson the
director misinterpret its significance and throw it
away? >>
Not a writerly coincidence, I'd say. I don't remember the Two
Jakes scene, but in Chinatown, I took the scene as an
overdetermined one to cue Aristotle and the notion of the
tragic flaw (the word "flaw" is specifically used) -- the
movie has all them Greek tragedy elements.
Doug
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 20 Aug 2001 EDT