Chinatown- Story Analysis

In the movie Chinatown, there isn't a narrator or a voice-over narration. The story tells itself through the lives of the main characters. None of the characters are directly the narrators because none of the narrate what happens. They all kind of take sides in the story. I think that the implied narrator of the movie would be J.J. Gittes. I think this because he is the mainly the main character and we see him most of the time. The camera kind of follows him around in the movie. There practically isn't one scene that doesn't have him in it. The spectators supply emotion to the story. The spectators supply the mystery feeling to the movie, especially when he was spying on Mr. Mulwray and the scared feeling when Mr. Gittes almost got caught spying on him. The information that we provide to fill the narrative gaps are questions that we ask ourselves about what's going on and any confusions that we have about what's going on. Time is presented in this movie chronologically. The story is told with the present moment and not with flashbacks or anything. This is realistic because this could happen in real life. The genre of this movie is mystery and thrill. It's mystery because of the spying and killings that have happened. Also, its thrill because each time something new happens it keeps you wanting to know more and more about what's going to happen. The movie doesn't really give a lot of information about the period it was made in. From what we can see, we can recall that it was very old fashioned. The social context is told by the way they talk in the movie. They talk with a lot of manners in the movie. The narrative embodies universal human traits. It can't be mythical concepts because the story line of the movie could actually happen in real life. Nothing about this movie can be a mythical conception. It all is based on real life things that could happen.