Chinatown and Car Horns

I finally got digital cable recently, and so I've been a tad obsessed catching up with movies (which helps explain my indolent blogging-ethic of late) which I've either never seen or haven't seen in ages. In the latter category is Chinatown, the 1974 Polanski film noir set in 1930's L.A. As you'll recall, Faye Dunaway is killed at the end by the police shooting after her as she races away in her car (which we are led to believe from not just this film but from contemporaneous films as well was standard police procedure back in those days). We know she is dead because the car crashes and we hear the horn blaring away. Polanski set this up neatly in an earlier scene.

Dunaway and Nicholson are seated in a parked car. As Nicholson badgers her, Dunaway (sitting in the driver's seat) slumps forward out of weariness and distress, then jumps back as her head hits the horn. So we're set up for the ending as we are now conscious that if Dunaway slumps forward the horn will sound. Now back in the 30's car horns were easily sounded by a concentric chrome ring set inside the steering wheel - one little tap and the horn went off, which made sense back then as warning people that a car was coming was still often necessary. By the 60's horns were basically oversized buttons in the middle of the wheel, but by the 80's we have the more familiar set up where to blow the horn you have to hit a sweet-spot on the wheel's hub to sound it. Tootin' you horn is no longer convenient as horn blowing has become more of a nuisance than a necessity.

But ever since Chinatown, it has become de rigeur in the movies that a dead man in the driver seat is inevitably signalled by a blaring car horn. Which is really annoying because it's tough enough to honk your horn when some cell-phone chatterer comes gliding into your lane on the turnpike, I can't imagine it's very easy to set it off when you're dead. Try it sometime - when parked preferably - try to slump forward in a way that would set off your horn and keep it blaring - not gonna happen. It's also annoying because Polanski jumped thru hoops to prepare his audience for the horn-blaring denouement in a context where it made sense, but now it is a commonplace for even modern settings when it makes no sense at all. Of course, if the driver is killed and then the car crashes, the car must then explode like it's packed with ten sticks of dynamite.