[COLUMN] Who Framed Roger Rabbit Offers an Animated History of Los Angeles | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece is somewhat in response to the video I did on Coyote vs. Acme a couple of weeks back. Some of the comments asked about Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is very much of a piece with Coyote vs. Acme, and which I love, and which I did consider including in the video, but also deadlines exist. So I thought I’d do a longer piece on it. Be aware, this piece contains spoilers for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is great and you should watch if you haven’t yet. It is also worth acknowledging that it does contain a reference to Roman Polanski’s crimes, in case that might be upsetting to readers, but Chinatown is important context. 

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a delightful family-friendly comedy that demonstrates a clear affection for the history of animation in Hollywood, skillfully blending cartoons and live action performances to great success. It is also, underneath this colorful fantasy exterior, a fascinating social history charting the development of Los Angeles.

At its core, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is an homage to classic film noir. It follows veteran private investigator Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), who is hired by studio head R.K. Maroon (Alan Tilvern) to dig up dirt on Jessica Rabbit (Kathleen Turner), the wife of the studio’s troubled animated star Roger (Charles Fleischer). Valiant discovers that Jessica has been “playing patty cake” with local industrialist Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye), which makes Roger the prime suspect when Acme turns up dead.

The film is as much a love letter to film noir as it is to animation, a type of mid-century filmmaking that came to define Los Angeles by contrasting the blue skies and the bright lights of the city with the moral rot underneath. These were films produced during and after the Second World War that turned a cynical lens on the American Dream, tales of disillusionment and conspiracy which interrogated so much of the nation’s mythology at a time of growing prosperity.

One of the defining examples of film noir was actually a film produced in homage to the genre, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. Indeed, the basic premise of Who Framed Roger Rabbit owes a lot to the basic structure of Chinatown, in which cynical private investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is hired on what seems to be a fairly standard infidelity case tracking wealthy wife Evelyn Cross-Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), which inevitably becomes something far more sinister and complex.

Chinatown begins as a standard film noir and develops into a broader history of Los Angeles, as Gittes discovers a conspiracy to control the water and irrigation into the city. The film was inspired by the so-called “water wars” that had raged over the early decades of the 20th century, albeit filtered through the prism of a fictionalized murder mystery. It is so quintessentially tied to the city’s history that The Los Angeles Times recently named Chinatown as “the best L.A. movie of all time.”

Chinatown is a masterpiece. It was one of the biggest hits of the year. The film earned 11 Academy Award nominations, which was no mean feat in what is widely considered one of the best years in the history of American cinema. Chinatown came to define a genre that it has been designed to celebrate. Writer Robert Towne, who won the Best Screenplay Oscar for his work on the film, planned a trilogy of films that would chart the social and historical evolution of Los Angeles.

This trilogy never developed. Polanski had to flee the United States following the statutory rape of 13-year-old Samantha Gailey, and has not returned since. The first of the two planned sequels to Chinatown, this one focused on oil and real estate, became a tug of war between writer Robert Towne, star Jack Nicholson and super-producer Robert Evans. Towne completed his screenplay in 1984, but the film languished in development hell as Towne fought to direct it as well.

It was Nicholson who eventually directed the sequel to Chinatown, which arrived quietly in cinemas in 1990. This was the same year as The Godfather, Part III, another underwhelming follow-up to a beloved classic from 1974. Seemingly a painful experience for all involved, The Two Jakes would be the third and final movie that Nicholson directed. The film didn’t even place in the top 100 grossers at the domestic box office that year and did not pick up a single Academy Award nomination.

In many ways, although it was technically released between Chinatown and The Two Jakes, Who Framed Roger Rabbit feels like the spiritual completion of the film trilogy. This is an argument that has largely been advanced by film critic David Thomson, who opined in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film that Robert Zemeckis’ toon caper was “the true sequel to Chinatown with its portrait of Los Angeles mugged by the automobile.”

Thomson was not necessarily speaking metaphorically. According to Thomson’s accounting of Hollywood history, “Towne had hoped to follow his private eye, Jake Gittes, through the decades-1937, 1947, 1957-tracing the story of water rights, of oil, and of the killing of public transport to let the automobile own Los Angeles.” Those three central ideas map rather neatly to Chinatown, The Two Jakes and Who Framed Roger Rabbit

There is, as with a lot of this sort of stuff, a tendency to overstate the connection here, to imply that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was literally or intentionally a sequel to Chinatown, instead of simply a thematic companion. For example, there is a longstanding theory among fans that the name of the shell company operated by Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), “Cloverleaf”, was Towne’s original intended title for the third Chinatown film, a claim that seems to have no basis in fact.

“I don’t know where the title Cloverleaf came from,” Towne stated when asked directly about the name. “It was actually supposed to be Gittes vs. Gittes, took place in 1968, and was about the era when no-fault divorce became legal in California.” This has been a consistent line from the creative team, with Nicholson stating that “the third film was meant to be about Gittes’ divorce and relate to air.” It doesn’t seem like Towne and Nicholson were especially interested in roads or freeways.

Still, Who Framed Roger Rabbit works as a surprisingly earnest companion piece to Chinatown, another chapter in the social history of Los Angeles. In this case, it is about the destruction of local communities and of public infrastructure to enable the development of roads and to encourage the automobile industry. Just as Chinatown set a fictional murder mystery against a backdrop drawn from real events, the conspiracy in Who Framed Roger Rabbit is more real than it might appear.

The film takes its inspiration from the real-life conspiracy in the middle decades of the 20th century to dismantle Los Angeles’ public transport system. In the film, the conspiracy is masterminded by Doom’s company “Cloverleaf”, named for a style of freeway connection. In reality, these tram lines were consumed by National City Lines, a company with investors including General Motors, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Trucks.

This is not conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy fact. National City Lines was taken to the Supreme Court under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The companies involved were fined the maximum amount possible under the terms of the Act, a paltry $5,000 dollars. The plan was to dismantle public transport systems like Los Angeles’ yellow trams and trains, and replace them with either cars or buses, which would consume more fuel and thus drive more industry.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is quite overtly invoking this chapter of the city’s history. The film places a heavy emphasis on the city’s tram lines – although it is “the red car” rather than the yellow tram. “Who needs a car in LA?” Eddie asks early in the film. “We got the best public transportation system in the world.” It is a line that reads as a joke from the vantage point of the late 1980s, when Los Angeles had a notoriously terrible public transport system, but it evokes a world that was lost.

Doom’s sinister plot is to build an industrialized world designed for cars rather than for people. “You lack vision,” he goads Eddie, “but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it'll be beautiful.”

Doom’s plan gets at another aspect of this development of road infrastructure in the United States in general and Los Angeles in particular. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is not exactly shy in positioning the toons as a racialized metaphor. They are treated in much the same way that African American performers had been in the Hollywood of the era; economically exploited as their skills enrich the studios. “The best part is, they work for peanuts,” quips Maroon of Dumbo (Frank Welker).

Even the use of “toon” as a derisive term for an entire identity and culture feels filtered through this lens, evoking a real-world slur for a particular ethnic minority. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the human (and mostly white) inhabitants of Los Angeles like to partake in toon culture – to drink in toon bars where they listen to music performed by toons and objectify female toon performers on stage. There is a clear sense of segregation and exploitation to this vision of mid-century Los Angeles.

Doom’s plan is to demolish “Toontown”, the seemingly largely segregated animated community in Los Angeles, to build his freeway. It recalls the way that so much urban development in that era seemed deliberately targeted to disrupt and dislocate minority communities, to the point that the slogan of the movement opposing these plans protested the seeming ubiquity of “white men’s roads through Black men’s homes.” Communities like Sugar Hill in Los Angeles were destroyed.

“Much of Sugar Hill vanished when the Santa Monica Freeway came through,” explains Ailsa Chang, “erasing a Black community to connect newly built white suburbs to the city. When freeways carve through communities, property values their decline, which means less money for schools in the area. And for many residents who live along freeways today, toxic pollutants and constant noise are part of everyday life.” It is a heartbreaking legacy of the industrial development of the postwar era.

Part of the thrill of the recent release of Coyote vs. Acme was the way that film connected contemporary America back to the postwar prosperity that had produced the original shorts. In this sense, it was just following in the footsteps of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film which was similarly interwoven into the social and industrial history of postwar America. For all these cartoons might seem two-dimensional, there is a lot of depth there.