Chinatown

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

“It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.”

-Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

Chinatown, where secrets go to live. What ring of hell would Dante have use to described this labyrinthine neighborhood of duplicity? The dark underbelly piled up with pasts too numerous to remember, too horrible to forget. A fact all too familiar for private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), a one-time Los Angeles cop and seemingly the only honest man in town who has worked the beat in Chinatown before and has come full circle to see firsthand how quickly blood seeps into these infernal streets.

What makes Chinatown, a gritty film noir portrayal of corrupt L.A. politics in the 30s, Roman Polanski’s (Rosemary’s Baby, The Pianist) masterpiece is not merely Nicholson’s deft acting, nor Robert Towne’s (The Yakuza, Ask The Dust) Chandlerian script, nor even the instantly absorbing mise-en-scene and camerawork by John A. Alonzo. Nothing so tangible can be identified to explain its ability to exceed the clichéd conventions of the detective genre, yet it’s the small attention to details, like Gittes’ off-putting nose bandage, Jerry Goldsmith’s hauntingly sparse score (written in 10 days) and the haunting phrase which the movie ends on, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” which give the film its transcendent power.

“You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.”
-Noah Cross to J.J. Gittes

Robert Towne had originally planned a trilogy with J.J. Gittes serving as the narrator, or conscious, on the murky foundations of Los Angeles (Chinatown – Water, The Two Jakes – Oil, and Cloverleaf – Freeways), but may have abandoned the idea with the relative lack of success of the Nicholson-directed Jakes. An incredibly ambitious idea which peaked with Chinatown’s hyperbolic depiction of the California Water Wars of the 10s and 20s. Instead of co-opting a characterization of the real life William Mulholland, he split the turn of the century head of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power into two characters, the “good” Hollis Mulwray (murdered husband of Faye Dunaway’s Evelyn) and the “bad” Noah Cross. Eventually resulting in the proverbial dam breaking loose, and the waters flowing from the north, destroying all in their path, flooding into the south, the “bad” Mulholland (Cross representing greed) prevailing over the “good” Mulholland (Mulwray representing innocence) with Gittes (possibly a metaphor for the rest of us?) left to look on powerlessly.

What subtly emerges through the film is not so much the constant deceptions Gittes has to muddle through (Evelyn Mulwray’s rather big secret for one) to find the truth, nor the fact that the majority of the movie has little to do with Chinatown as a physical place as opposed to metaphysical construct, and not even the relative little importance Hollis Mulwray’s corpse represents (it is merely a vehicle for the deluge), but rather the softly persistent ideas of memory and loss. When it comes to women the best medicine might be the whiskey J.J. Gittes consistently slugs down, but to help the forgetting process or to aid in it we don’t know. Gittes’ inability to take his own advice given to a client, “Have you ever heard the expression ‘Let sleeping dogs lie?’ Sometimes you’re better off not knowing…” comes back to haunt him, as it had before and, most likely, as it will again.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 17:18. It is filed under Blog and tagged with , , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.