Character Analysis: Easy

3) Easy is a loner like other white detectives, but he doesn’t experience an existential crisis like them. Easy just wants to live normal life and own a house. In fact, he only becomes a detective in order to pay his mortgage. Easy doesn’t work out of an office like other detectives. Instead, he treats his home as his office space, which highlights the importance he places on his house. Accepting this job of finding a white woman leads Easy into a world of trouble. When Albright tells Easy that Daphne is hiding somewhere in the black community, he explains that he would do the job himself but he is “not of the right persuasion.” Easy is chosen as the man for the job because as a black man he can weave in and out of black communities. White

Even if the white detectives might face a few suspicious glances or reluctant witnesses in black communities, they would never be faced with dangerous situations that Easy finds himself in just because of his race. For instance, Easy is unsafe at the Santa Monica pier. This is a place that is not associated as a criminal hotspot but rather a popular attraction for all types of people. Because Easy is seen talking to a white girl, however, he is suddenly in danger. A group of white male teenagers start to gang up on Easy, who is not being confrontational in any way because he knows that he is in a tight spot. One wrong move could get him beaten up or killed. The Los Angeles Police Department also harasses Easy. When they arrest him they use unnecessary force, and while interrogating him, they say that they will take him out back and shoot him. The police officers have no respect for Easy and their treatment of him shows their confidence in how untouchable they are. They have the power not only because they are “the law”, but also because Easy is a black man-someone society has cast aside for hundreds of

Burlesque or parody is when you take a well-established set of conventions and subject it to irony or parody it. For example, Blazing Saddles parodies the typical campfire scene found in westerns. Instead of showing cowboys playing guitar around a fire, these men eat beans and fart. Nostalgia is when plot, characters, setting, and style are used to recreate a past time. Films that evoke nostalgia bask in the glow of the past and set up the idea that things were better then. An example of that is True Grit. Demystifying the genre is when a film investigates ways the genre is inverted. Chinatown invokes the myth of film noir with its setting-1930s Los Angeles. While the location and time period were common in film noirs, Polanski has trouble trying to keep that film noir feeling completely intact. Chinatown is not in black and white, so the scenes with the striking contrast between shadow and light are missing along with those images of a dark, foggy street. Polanski tries to remedy that by controlling palette into muted colors, but the golden California light adds warmth to scenes in a film that delves into such a dark, corrupt world. In terms of characters and plot, film noirs often center on a private detective who works alone. This man has a sense of justice despite working outside of the law, an inadequate organization. The PI is typically not