theriverjordan’s review published on Letterboxd:
Possessing one of the most famous final lines in cinema history, Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” ends with the ignoble assertion that to move forward, one must brush off the ills of the present. But to do so, is to enter a blood debt with the future, where deficit will be paid by casualty and consequence.
Only the last moments of Roman Polanski’s film take place in the title’s namesake neighborhood, though the immortal reminder, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown,” has ensured that the location has become cultural shorthand for the anything goes/everything goes (wrong) parts of the seediest cities. But the cultural heritage of the named Asian-American precinct that once occupied Los Angeles must not be understated within the movie itself.
Among his many faults that come to surface during the movie’s runtime, Jack Nicholson’s private eye Jake Gittes is unquestionably a racist; specifically towards Asians. Early in the film, he makes a crude joke about the sexual prowess of a “Chinaman,” blithely unaware that his punchline also hits down at a minority class victim. It’s a precursor to a more consequential ignorance that will seek punition later in the film. When Jake goes to visit the manor of Faye Dunaway’s heiress Evelyn, her household staff is revealed as almost entirely Chinese. Jake ultimately stumbles due to his own myopia towards their intelligence and presence; missing a vital clue in the case at the expense of mocking the gardener’s English - confusing glass and grass in mocking the man’s accented pronunciation.
This ignorance taking a toll of greater consequence is a callback to events set before the film even begins. Prior to the events of the movie’s narrative, Jake was a cop in Chinatown, and removed himself from a case in the district out of concern for a woman involved; a choice which only ended up harming her even further. Chinatown is a general symbol for the perpetuity of corruption, but it is also a returning locale that haunts Jake’s former life with repetition into his present. Just as Jake will never surmount his own prejudices - and is even blind completely to them - he is condemned to repeat the consequences of his choices, and his past, again and again.
It’s perhaps historically poetic, if not tragic, that the Chinatown of the film’s era no longer exists. In fact, Polanski’s work unfolds in a sort of never-period for the original neighborhood; technically set in a moment when it would already have been destroyed for the construction of Union Station. It grants the locale something of a paired destiny with Jake himself; a ruin still standing, despite history, in spite of the inevitable future.
Much has been already written on the Oedipal themes and motifs of “Chinatown,” including its pervasive eye imagery (the fish head on the platter, the missing eye glasses). This pairs to the work’s ongoing portending of blindness, beginning even in the opening scene, when Jake is nonsensically fussy about a client damaging the blinds in his office. That client is Curly, at first a seemingly one-off minor character, but who returns in a vital role at the film’s close. It is Curly who unites the myopia of racism and Jake’s own hubris to fatal consequence.
When Jake goes to claim a favor from Curly late in the plot, the former customer is revealed as the patriarch for a large and chaotic Italian immigrant family. Also revealed, is the consequence for Jake’s offscreen investigations into Curly’s wife’s infidelity (the photos of which open the film); the woman sports a black eye (more optical imagery) - clearly the punishment for her sexual wanderings. It’s a minor foreshadowing that Jake - once again - has not considered the consequences of his actions, and someone else has suffered the repercussions for his ignorance. That it’s an immigrant woman (not Chinese, but notably not as ‘WASP’ white as Jake’s other associates), that Jake turns a ‘blind’ eye to his unacknowledged prejudice out of need of Curly’s services, is a micro drama of the grander imminent tragedy.
In perhaps “Chinatown’s” most crucial scene of dialogue, Jake asks the villainous Noah Cross, “What could you buy that you can’t already afford?” To which Cross responds, “The future, Mr. Gittes! The future.” It is, though, our knowledge as viewers that, for Jake, for Los Angeles, the future is already bought and paid for with the profiteering derived from owning the past. Jake’s prior blindness - culturally, psychologically - will always follow him forwards to his pre-determined destiny, just as inevitable corruption and greed will also always saturate the lifeblood of his city.
Where once a neighborhood infamous for institutional corruption existed in Los Angeles, now stands a train station bulldozed into place by an aggressive train lobby. A station, since antiquated by the consummation of the metropolis by mega highways plotted by domineering automobile tycoons. The fate of a city, echoed through a neighborhood, whose ruination has already inevitably paid off the profiteers of the future.
Only one building from the original Chinatown remains. A two story brick structure, it is easy enough for it to pass unnoticed in the modern clamor of the city. Those walking, un-remarking, past it — are blind to a cultural past; condemned to live out the consequences of this myopia, forgetting that it ever was Chinatown.
