Chinatown (1974)

Not since The Great Gatsby have we had such symbolically overloaded spectacles. Indeed, I wonder if the bifocal nature of Noah Cross' glasses is not merely a concise way of identifying him for the purpose of plot but also a crude way of suggesting that he sees women that are 'far' from him differently compared to those that are close—i.e. referencing his incestuous attraction to his daughter.

It's never quite clear whether Noah Cross is deliberately and repeatedly getting Gittes name wrong in an attempt to get under the investigator's skin, or whether Cross—as a "respectable" Angelino—simply doesn't have to care anymore. But we learn something about his character nonetheless, just as we learn something about Gittes in the precise way that he brings it up—only once.

Much has been written on the meaning of the "Chinatown" in the film's title. I would likely concur that, to Chinatown, "Chinatown" is probably a "place as much as it is a mental state where one cannot see beyond their status, [yet] a place where it’s impossible to know who’s who and what’s what; therefore, it’s best just not to get involved" (Brian Eggert). The implied racism of this quasi-ghetto aside, it does not occur to many that the inability of the surrounding areas to understand or "read" the social dynamics of Chinatown might have been a canny (if unconscious) defensive strategy of those residing within it; to dissuade exploitative intrusions by the white majority enveloping it.

Through the sublte and knowing changes Towne and Polanski made in the characterisation of the detective hero and the impossibility of his quest, Chinatown tells a story which was absolutely modern, which was so much a product of its time, even though it is set nearly forty years before and even through it mroe than repays repeated viewings.

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As in the schema perhaps most prominently at work in the novels of Dashiell Hammett, there is only a mystery because other characters will not tell the investigator the truth.

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Though this film can evidently be seen as very definitely a product of its time, its predominant concerns cannot be simply reduced to those of a phoney reflection of the past. Only think of how it avoids all the pitfalls of a retrospective soundtrack. I there is an argument to be had with Chinatown it will not be because of its knowing evocation of the past, but rather with its romantic anxiety about the present. The ultimate problem if this film for me lies not in the complicit wink of the post-modern but the unblinking stare of the classical.

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There are few commentators of this film who have not 'detected' its structural and thematic resemblance to the story of Oedipus. This seems a hardly insightful archeological perception as not only has the Theban ruler been the conscious and presiding genius of the detective story ever since Poe consolidated its terms, but Sophocles' hero is also the explicit model for Towne himself who speaks of his own tragic hero as the one who 'determines to find the killer and has him front of his eyes all along'.

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The residents of Alameda Street, concrete reflection of the audience's own prurient spectatorship, crane their heads forward eager to see more before they are ordered to 'Clear the area!' The story is all but over, the social order which we will be momentarily returned ('On the sidewalk!', we are ordered) is restored — but not to decency, rationality, love, health and meaning, but to a fundamental, chaotic, unconquerable and unembraceable pervsity. For Chinatown is not the distorted reflection of the world seen through a broken glass darkly, itis is the very image of the world.

— Michael Eaton (BFI Film Classics)

What the passage of time has done for this superlative 1974 film is progressively lessen our sense of its being simply a modern pastiche of the classic 30s gumshoe thrillers. The time gap has narrowed, and it now looks like a classic in a direct line of succession to those earlier pictures. […] Polanski brilliantly shows that money and power are not what's motivating everyone after all. There's a lower stratum of sexual dysfunction and fear at work, which is difficult, if not impossible to understand: the ultimate meaning of the chaotic Chinatown of the title. Unmissable.

— Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian)

The [script's] racism was a conscious strategy to leverage not only the plot, but the theme of blindness, folly and hubris among not only Jake Gittes[,] his two detectives, and the police, but the entire population being manipulated by the Manichean evil of Noah Cross[,] who is making a land and water grab while they pursue half-clues and false mythologies about themselves around the LA basin. Racism is an entertainment and a distraction for what was really going on and, Nicholson, the Oedipal detective at the center of the plot, is absolutely blinded by it throughout the film—until a crucial moment when he gets it. […] I think Polanski “weaponized” American racism against the Chinese by deploying it as a tar baby that Jake and others get stuck in, trying to punch it, feeling a kind of antagonism and disdain towards the Chinese and invoking the whole house of anti-Chinese sentiment in American history.

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The true spectre of evil throughout is white, wealthy and ravenous for power and forbidden sexuality.

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I no longer believe that the movie is purely racist, but that it is an uncomfortable critique of the way racism plays out in American culture and society such that it becomes a beguiling, self-flattering pastime, entertainment and theater for those (normatively white) who cannot see through to their own subaltern standing and how they are undervalued, mocked and manipulated by the wealthy and the powerful.

— Poet Garrett Hongo (Interview in Paste Magazine, 2017)

Just like the characters are diverting water, which as an Angeleno you already know is the symbol of power. Water is everything in California politics. Even today I think. A Taiwanese-descended friend also told me a long time ago that in many Asian cultures, water is considered the power element. It can extinguish fire, move earth, suffocate air. So there’s [a] confluence there.

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[After] Evelyn is shot all of these silent Chinese men and women […] flood the street like the water in the river. They say nothing. Their faces are expressionless. What do you make of that? Are they judges? Are they window dressing? Are they symbolic? They seem something a little other than human. And it does feel like an echo of the scene in the beginning of the film when the angry rancher runs his flock of sheep into the courtroom. I don’t know if the echo is deliberate, but I think it must have been: It was such a striking choice, the courtroom full of sheep. For the rest of the movie there’s a lot of fast snappy talking, and then at the end another scene with a bunch of almost interchangeable beings just walking through the streets like they’re being herded.

— Amy Glynn (Paste Magazine)

Polanski believed if they were to truly make a “modern” detective story in a nineteen-thirties setting, they must employ a disastrous conclusion to set it apart from the genre’s conventions.

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How appropriate then that Chinatown’s villain, land magnate Noah Cross (John Huston), seems to embody a timeless, unfathomable evil, his name by design meant to evoke ancient Christian imagery in its allusion to Noah’s flood and the crucifix. [And] when Jake first meets Cross at his estate, they have lunch together—a plate of fish served head-on. Cross’ message is subtle: Jake is a fish-out-of-water and about to be cooked.

— Brian Eggert (Deep Focus Review)

[Gittes] makes a fine Oedipus, doggedly pursuing his investigation to the point where he’s accomplished precisely what he most wants to avoid.

— Budd Wilkins (Slant Magazine)

To the extent that the energy crisis of 1973–74 surrounds the making of Chinatown, we can say, in a literal sense, that Chinatown is about the energy crisis. The film’s first audiences would have had their experiences of a nationwide oil shortage in the present to relate to Chinatown’s depiction of regional water scarcity in the past. To both problems, a pipeline would present itself,in consumerist and capitalistic terms, as the obvious solution. [The] petropolitics of 1974 are thus displaced in Chinatown to the hydropolitics of 1913.

— Michael Rubenstein (Los Angeles Review of Books)