There’s always something more to say about Roman Polanski’s hard-boiled detective film, Chinatown. Most essays focus on its post-Watergate disaffection or its relation to the Owens Valley water scandal of the early 20th century. These seem determined to fix an artistic creation in historical contexts, a highly reductive move. We don’t watch Casablanca (1942) to understand North Africa or Gone With the Wind (1939) to appreciate antebellum life in the American South. Or not solely for that.
Indeed, artworks with real longevity carry themes that reach far beyond their historical setting or point of creation. Its reflection on the limits of our knowledge in 1974’s Chinatown is among the deepest and most enduring perspectives put on film.
Thematically, therefore, Chinatown is one of the most rewarding films of any era. You feel as though you are watching a parable, even while the unfolding plot keeps you on the edge of your seat. Even though we know what ultimately happens to the lead characters Jack Gittes (Jack Nicholson), Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), and Noah Cross (John Huston), the ending hits as deeply tragic every time. Robert Towne’s famous script rewards close attention by foreshadowing actions, continually revealing misperceptions, and leading the viewer from minor infidelity to the largest of perspectives. Chinatown is hence not just a neo-noir or a reflection of 1970s disillusion. It is perhaps the best Hollywood movie ever made.
This is of course a bold claim. To support it, let’s discuss its thematic depth and its unity of expression.
Chinatown uses the structure and tropes of the film noir to meditate on the nature of knowledge. This genre traditionally shows a detective or investigator gradually piecing together a mystery, with knowledge either rewarded or subverted. So with private investigator Jack Gittes, we follow him as he learns that a client was actually an imposter seeking to discredit a public engineer, that his subsequent murder relates to a series of land sales, and that these are all connected to a man who seeks to control the future of Los Angeles. We follow Gittes in every scene, often viewing over his shoulder, usually in medium-length shots that show both him and his interlocutor. As in noir films, we learn as he does. (A narrative track from Gittes was removed to emphasise this point).
What he learns during his sleuthing, however, doesn’t help Gittes. By the end of the story, Gittes understands the depth of Cross’, a powerful industrialist, corruption and depravity, but it does not matter. Even with the police present, Gittes can only further the tragedy. This is foreshadowed in the discussion of his police work in Chinatown, where the opacity of languages and relationships meant he ended up causing the death of a woman whom he was trying to help.
“What did you do there?” he is asked, and he replies, “As little as possible.” In Chinatown, and in the film’s universe, actions often bring about the opposite of their intentions.
This is not merely ironic. In Noah Cross, Gittes faces an adversary who doesn’t outwit him, because his wealth and power mean he doesn’t have to. This is a man hiding in plain sight. If the detective story assumes that exposure brings understanding, and understanding brings justice, this might mirror the liberal belief in open information and discourse. Here, however, the truth is often already visible. You just can’t do anything about it.
Gittes repeatedly digs up information that others already know. The city coroner knows that a man drowned in a dry riverbed. The clerk at the hall of records knows that significant amounts of land are being sold. Police lieutenant Lou Escobar knows that Gittes was set up by an imposter. Even when Gittes pieces these together, we realise that his task is hopeless.
Power in Chinatown is therefore the ability to shape the conditions under which others act. Gittes spends the story believing he is uncovering reality. What he discovers instead is that reality itself has already been organised by Noah Cross. “He made this city”, the water department secretary says. Gittes has done well for himself by operating within the world he knows and understands, but he cannot challenge the basic foundations of that universe.
When Gittes and Cross meet for lunch, it is for once Cross who subtly interrogates the investigator:
Cross: Who’s the investigating officer?
Gittes: Lou Escobar, he’s a Lieutenant.
Cross: Do you know him?
Gittes: Oh yes.
Cross: Where from?
Gittes: We worked in Chinatown together.
Cross: Would you call him a capable man?
Gittes: Very.
Cross: Honest?
Gittes: Far as it goes. Of course he has to swim in the same water we all do.
Cross: Of course, but you’ve got no reason to think he’s bungled the case?
Gittes: None.
Only later do we realise Cross’ interest in the investigation is more than familial concern, and that his ability to size up the police is not just a matter of him still having “a few teeth in my head, a few friends in town”. Gittes shows his professional skill by asking Cross about the last time he saw Hollis Mulwray, the chief engineer at the LA Department of Water and Power. Gittes parries Cross’ attempt to deflect by saying, “It was about five days ago. You were outside the Pig ‘n Whistle and you had one hell of an argument.” While Cross is surprised that Gittes knows this, he isn’t flustered, and offers Gittes money to work for him. Gittes has agency, but he is still an agent for hire.
For example, Gittes is a highly realistic portrayal of a private investigator, a complex human who combines professional expertise, vanity, coarse humour, courage, and the sense of being haunted. He also alludes to the 1930s noir detective in films like John Huston’s 1942 detective film, The Maltese Falcon, whose pursuit of truth usually ends in revelation and mastery. This is part of what makes him archetypal: he is a seeker of knowledge and a protector, but also the Fool who is misled.
Noah Cross’ daughter, Evelyn, is similarly an abused and traumatised woman striving to protect her daughter, Katherine. This character also alludes to two specific types (the film brilliantly misdirects her roles): the femme fatale who lures and damages men, and the woman trapped by patriarchal structures. Underneath it all is her fundamental archetype: the tragic woman bearing a terrible secret. Cross is simultaneously a Californian businessman and land speculator; one of the oligarchs who built and still control Los Angeles; and the tyrant, the corrupt patriarch, and the demiurge who organises “reality”.
Chinatown‘s final scene shows the full extent of Gittes’ subordination. When Evelyn Mulwray is shot in the eye (the film is replete with references to and images of eyes and spectacles), Gittes mutters to himself, “As little as possible.” It calls back to his failure to protect the aforementioned woman in Chinatown, and to the impossibility of doing so. Cross still holds the money, the influence, and the advantage. It is his world. This is the bleakest ending, but it confirms the film’s view of the conditions of knowledge. By then, Gittes understands Cross, but that understanding cannot save Evelyn.
Let’s also consider the unity of expression in Chinatown. The film does much more than aspire to allegory. Almost every plot point and character is simultaneously realistic, allusive, and archetypal. I have encountered this quality only once before, in George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). The farm is grounded in the realities of animal behaviour, allusive in its portrayal of the Russian Revolution and its corruption by Stalin, and archetypal in its commentary on power, corruption, language, groupthink, and manipulation. Chinatown is an achievement on a similar scale, in a way no other film has ever fully achieved.
The same is true of its plot. It realistically portrays corrupt land speculation; it alludes to the Owens Valley land scandal; and it is archetypal in demonstrating power’s ability to organise the world for its own ends. The incest rape theme is likewise realistic, however horrifying; allusive of the nature of oligarchic power (Cross believes that no ordinary moral limits apply to him, and treats his daughter as property, much as he treats water, land, and Los Angeles itself); and symbolic, making Cross a dark demiurge who violates the natural order.
The crime is deeply symbolic, with incest the ultimate collapse of boundaries, where the family ceases to be a moral institution and becomes a possession, the daughter no longer a child but sexual property. Cross is a man for whom every boundary exists only to be reorganised by his will. This is perhaps the most Satanic portrayal of an individual in cinema. Yet he is never monstrous in demeanour. He remains courteous, charming, and intelligent, for Chinatown continuously enacts misdirection and misapprehensions.
The eponymous Chinatown itself embodies this triple structure. Realistically, it refers to the Los Angeles district where Gittes once worked as a police officer. His recollections, seeded throughout the film, convey a place of linguistic barriers and cultural misunderstandings, where ordinary police methods produce the opposite of their intended effects. It is also allusive. In the film’s 1930s setting, Chinatown represented society’s margins. The police do not understand its languages or relationships and are therefore reduced to interventions whose consequences they cannot foresee, as authority confronts its own ignorance.
Gittes’ attempt to speak Cantonese to Khan, Evelyn’s butler, likewise demonstrates the marginal nature of his understanding. He mistakenly thinks a scrap of knowledge can help him get a grip on the situation. (It doesn’t).
Chinatown is ultimately symbolic. It is the zone in which misdirection, fragmentary knowledge, and mistaken identities reign. Throughout the film, everyone mistakes appearances for reality. Noah Cross thinks Gittes is shaking down Evelyn. Escobar thinks Gittes is an accessory to murder. The imposter Evelyn Mulwray thinks sheis just doing an acting job. Evelyn’s secrecy conceals her father’s abuse, rather than an affair. Gittes believes Evelyn to be a femme fatale when she is a victim.
Chinatown therefore becomes a condition of existence: you can discover the truth, but power structures control the present and future. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown” is among American cinema’s bleakest acknowledgments about the human condition.