the language of evil
by Douglas Messerli
Robert
Towne (screenplay), Roman Polanski (director) Chinatown / 1974
Admirers
have long sung the praises of Roman Polanski’s excellent film of 1974, Chinatown. Jack Nicholson’s laconic,
somewhat dim-witted, and yet witty Jake Gittes, Fay Dunaway’s fashionable but
suffering beauty, Evelyn Mulwray, and John Huston’s conscience-less Noah Cross
combined with the suave sets and costumes of 1937 Los Angeles, and the blaring
jazz score by Jerry Goldsmith all worked together to make Polanski’s film a
true pleasure—despite the fact that Robert Towne’s script is often
unnecessarily muddy and meandering.
Of course, part of movie’s purpose is to
confound, as in Gittes’ Chinatown experience; the inability at times to
comprehend what’s going on also gives the film a sense of depth—which, when you
truly come down to it, Chinatown does
not actually possess. What seemingly begins as a story about matrimonial deceit
quickly becomes a tale of American excess: the theft of public resources by the
powerful and wealthy, and the same group’s assumption that they have right to
commit incest and rape; the murders in this film, that of the good public
servant, Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) and an unsuspecting pawn, Ida Sessions
(Diane Ladd), merely seem to be a by-product of those other presumptions.
Yet that is precisely the tragedy of his
life and the hundreds of others good citizens who simply cannot imagine that
someone like Noah Cross (the clear representative of evil in this work) might truly
be without any redeeming characteristics. The famous scene where Gittes slaps
Evelyn as she attempts to explain her relationship to the girl she has hidden
away in her butler’s home, gives evidence to the fact that the private
detective of this tale cannot imagine that someone and the incidents
surrounding her could represent more than one thing: in this case, a “sister” and a “daughter.”
Towne’s original script was determined,
like Gittes’ mind-set, to set things straight, providing a happy ending. But
Polanski, always attracted to the darker realities, knew that as a would-be
redeemer, Gittes had to see the woman he had tried to save die, and the girl
Evelyn was trying to save returned into the paws of the monster, Noah Cross.
But the other aspects of this film are
mostly fictional, and it is those elements of the film that are truly at the
heart of this work. In fact, the plot would perhaps have functioned just the
same had Gittes not been required to wander the city’s beaches and canyons in
search of diverted water.
In short, the seemingly historical issues
of Chinatown are more of a veneer
spread over the story to help it seem far more mysterious that it truly is. The
real issues here are as old as humankind: avarice and utter selfishness, which
Polanski suggests will always overwhelm those who may try to prevent it. Like
the Biblical Noah, Noah Cross will survive at the expense of nearly everyone
else, surely without feeling any need to be redeemed since he name alone
suggests he has already been “saved.” And by film’s end we know that Gittes’
problems in Chinatown were not from the complexity of events but his inability
to comprehend the language of evil.
Los Angeles,
April 10, 2016
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