The Mythic Elements of Chinatown

Abstract

In Chinatown, Jerry Goldsmith’s score negotiates conflicting senses of mythic atemporality and expressive immediacy. The score draws upon avant-garde sounds, a “presentist” gesture that allegorizes the film’s tale of corruption for the world of the seventies, negating the “period” quality associated with genre pastiche. At the same, a jazz-inflected main theme and director Roman Polanski’s neoclassicist formalism balance seventies allegory with a sense of “pastness.” The tension between these two dimensions of the score suggests a mythic suspension of temporality, whereas the elemental connotations of musical timbre (water, earth) convey the film’s atmosphere of paranoia with discomforting immediacy. Drawing upon philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s work on the phenomenology of elemental images within the poetic imagination, this chapter attempts to understand musical timbre as a form of mythic immanence that allows us imaginative access to modernity’s terrors, whose actuality we must wrestle with in order to claim a position of ethical engagement.