Chinatown (1974) review
Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is always looking. Until he sees too much.
Chinatown (1974) says much with little: its formidable plot builds up slowly, unveiling piece by piece the story of a city. Director Roman Polanski realizes this and his style matches the plot and never outpaces it – it seems always a bit behind. From a fake case of adultery to the widespread moral corruption which made Los Angeles possible we follow private eye J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), as he gazes and thinks, snoops and tricks his way from dried rivers to orange groves. Like Gittes we never know the facts until the final appalling secret is revealed not with a bang, but a whimper. When Gittes sheds light on the whole business it is so dirty he loses his, Jack Nicholson’s, habitual irony and sneer, suddenly assuming a stoically severe pose. That’s how it is when the truth defeats you. In the end, all that’s left is the urge to forget: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”, famously wraps up the film.
Impossible to forget, of course, for the truth of Chinatown does not concern private affairs, lost love, material gains and losses nor any thing of the sort, so typical of film noir. Chinatown, in revisited noir form, is about a certain state of the world we find ourselves in. A state of absolute aporia: a moral dead-end. In a platonic dialogue, the final aporia preventing us from knowing what the thing is rewards us ethically: even though we run short epistemically, we have improved ethically with the search and the knowing that we don’t know. In Chinatown the epistemic end of the investigation is successfully achieved, and yet morally we are shattered: we know the thing, and we’re all the worse for it. What sort of truth is this? It is actually more akin to the one recognized by the likes of Adorno and Horkheimer. The secret of historical progress was not emancipation, but domination.
Thus Chinatown unites the western and film noir into one single catastrophe stretched in time. The frontier spirit which conquered the west and made a country, establishing a law on the land and allowing economic prosperity and bonanza finally reveals itself: it was never the opposite of savagery and barbarism, but a moment of them, the other side of the same coin, call it modernity. The subjugation of nature inevitably leads to the domination of man over man, and the hands which brought water to the desert and built a city are the same which rape, murder and pillage. Blood on the tracks and on the aqueducts––– blood all over town.
With Chinatown, already safely distant in history from the classic era of genres, the western and film noir become but two distinct moments in the dialectical dynamic of an American Enlightenment: law and chaos, justice and vengeance, progress and exploitation are all immanent to one long historical arc.
That the world is rotten from gutter to penthouse: that was clear from many other noirs, for instance, The Big Heat (1953) (see review). But that there was a logic to it, that it could not have been any different given how things started in the first place, with the violent subjugation of nature and labor, subject and object, to the purposes of a monomaniac, voracious project of domination––– that was far from the scope of classic film noir. Only after its demise, alongside the western, the overall movement of destruction and horror could retrospectively be seen, incipient already both in the railroad and in the badge, in wagons and stagecoaches, and in the courts, leading inevitably to the dams and the oil, the cars and the city lights.
Chinese immigrants, in the bloody course of American progress, have a particularly powerful symbolism: the hands that built the railroads, the foremost instrument of modernity in the 19th century. It’s only appropriate that it is in Chinatown that we have the logical consummation of that process.
Noah Cross (John Huston), the villain-in-chief, “owned the Water department” it is lightly said to Gittes by a secretary of the Department of Water and Power. Everything is wrong with such a sentence, not least the way it is so unproblematically stated and accepted. We’ve grown used to accepting these things.
And who is Noah Cross? He is the spirit of the American modernity incarnate: a frontiersman, a business tycoon and a builder, a force of progress, which he happens to own, development and science, which are his instruments; a man of lust and perversion, insatiable and well aware of his utter foulness. His motto: people are “capable of anything” at the right time in the right place. The 20th century testifies to that.
"Why are you doing this?", asks Gittes, "What can you buy that you can't already afford?" Except it's not about buying things and enjoying them: it's all about the process–– the automatic process in which we are all engulfed, not only the capitalists. Gittes, as an old-fashioned hero, vain and fond of his clothes and cars and cigarette cases, still thinks in terms of the use value of things, when, in fact, it's all about their exchange value, and how money is not merely spent on things, but made to generate more money. In a good Marxian word, it's all about capital. Noah Cross knows this and answers properly: "The future, Mr. Gitts, the future!”. That is, what's never here, but always ahead, the constant running-after for more and more. Well, he's got it.
(Link to scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppGd-2nEOVQ)
Given that long arc of horror and the people who own it and run it: “Can we actually do anything to change things? If so, what is to be done?” This is the most decisive political question of the times, raised by every person at one time or another. One might call it the Leninist question par excellence. And Lenin surely gave a detailed, concrete answer to it. But what does revolution mean today? The iPhone, perhaps. Revolution and emancipation have been entirely dissociated. Lenin’s answer is now opaque, but Chinatown’s has a bitter way of reverberating still. And it’s not a jolly answer.
By the end of the film, Gittes will know everything. Epistemically equipped, he tries to do something, he pursues the good–– and gets the opposite. Knowledge, action and consequences are divorced in Chinatown. One may know and not act; one may act and not know; one may both know and act–– and in all of these circumstances one has no control over the real outcome. Classical reason is done for. This is the film’s final, pessimistic political message which reaches across the 20th century straight into our laps.
Chinatown stands for the fatal pessimism of post-revolutionary political expectations: the rich and powerful built this world and own it; it’s their world and we just live in it. It’s utter defeat. And to the Leninist question, “What is to be done?”, we have the answer: "As little as possible", the D.A.'s instructions to Gittes in his Chinatown days.
Why? The Chinese culture and language in Chinatown were so alien to an American that a law officer would never know what was really going on in a situation. And if he thinks he knows and, then, proceeds to act hoping to do some good (say, prevent someone from being hurt)–– he might bring about harm instead, even if he is right. However, this logic does not seem to work the other way around: if one seeks to do evil – one will succeed, as Noah Cross gets his way. In the screenwriter Robert Towne's words, "the futility of good intentions". That is, there is no futility of evil intentions. You want to do X, you end up doing not-X, if and only if X is good.
The most prudential course of action in such a world is, thus, indeed, to do “as little as possible”. The less you do, the less likely you are to cause anything. A minimalistic practical philosophy emerging out of modern catastrophes and the knowledge of their inevitability. The noir equivalent to Adorno’s Minima Moralia? Perhaps – they’re closer, film noir and the Frankfurt School, than one would expect.
