Chinatown

In an essay about the many ways Hollywood cinema has imagined California, Dana Polan tries to remember the cartoon that shaped his childhood vision of the state as “pure sunshine, a land of beautiful and resplendent weather”. He wonders if, in fact, the memory is a composite image: a conflation of rhyming representations imprinted from multiple cartoons.  Reflecting on this process of memory, Polan observes that the cinema remembers place in the same way: “images of California circulate; modified, critiqued, or replaced, they float from film to film, often reinvigorated or reinvested with earlier mythic associations”.¹ I remembered Polan’s essay about the circulation of California images in January 2025, when the Los Angeles wildfires dominated the Australian news. Prolonged drought had created tinderbox conditions, but the fires were also propelled by a perennial weather event known as the Santa Ana winds. Peculiar to Southern California, the Santa Ana looms large in the Los Angeles imaginary: in one of its most enduring characterisations, Raymond Chandler describes it as a desert wind that will “curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch”.² In a 1968 essay, Joan Didion invokes Chandler to explain that an impending Santa Ana is always a harbinger of fire. In fact, wildfires occurred in California so frequently throughout the twentieth century that Didion claims “the city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself”.³ 

The key resource required to mitigate this catastrophe is, of course, water. But just days into battling the rapidly spreading blazes in January 2025, California firefighters began to report that hydrants in affected areas had run dry. Media outlets broadcast aerial footage of the empty Santa Ynez Reservoir, which had been built in the late 1960s to help protect the Pacific Palisades from wildfires. Where was the city’s water? As California governor Gavin Newsom ordered an urgent investigation into the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, tensions between city officials escalated over who was responsible. Another mythic image of the city floated into view: as we watched the last drops of precious water dribbling from useless hydrants on the nightly news, my partner shook his head and said what I was thinking: “It’s just like Chinatown”. 

The impact Roman Polanski’s 1974 film has had on the mythologisation of Los Angeles is hard to understate. Written by L.A. native Robert Towne, Chinatown draws on and refigures the history of the California water wars, instigated in the first decades of the 20th century by the city of Los Angeles’ efforts to secure the water needed to sustain its rapid growth. Key to this enterprise was the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which was built between 1905 and 1915 to divert water from the Owens Valley in Eastern California towards the city. This development caused considerable tension between the city and Californian farmers, which played out over the course of the following decades. In his lauded essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004), which enacts the circulation of images that Polan describes, Thom Anderson points out that this history has always been public. But in transposing it to a 1937 setting and recasting the city’s capitalist expansion as a story of deep-seated corruption, Towne’s screenplay left an indelible mark on the popular conception of how Los Angeles got its water.⁴

In the film Jack Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, an L.A. private investigator whose work leads him to discover a labyrinthine plot orchestrated by the rapacious property magnate Noah Cross (John Huston). By releasing water from the city’s reservoirs at night across different locations, Cross and a vast network of land prospectors are manufacturing a drought to sink land prices in the Northwest Valley; once bought cheap, the farmland will be re-irrigated through a government-backed project to build an enormous dam. Driving through the drought-riddled valley with widow Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), Gittes says “Do you have any idea what this land would be worth with a steady water supply? About 30 million more than they paid for it.” Gittes thinks he knows what’s going on; but he has only scratched the surface. 

Surfaces, both in terms what they project and what they conceal, are key to Chinatown’s interrogation of the city’s mythology, which the film foregrounds as its principal subject. Anderson argues that the city of Los Angeles only truly became a cinematic subject in the 1970s, once events like the Watts uprising in 1965 had shattered the illusion of L.A. as a sunny coastal paradise and the city had “finally become self-conscious”.⁵ In this context, returning to classical film genres like film noir through a revisionist lens became an ideal way for filmmakers to engage with their subjects in a more reflexive mode. While Chinatown was certainly not the only revisionist noir to be made in the 1970s, it has garnered a critical reputation as the film from this period which adheres most closely to the classical mode’s conventions. Unlike Robert Altman’s adaptation of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1973), Polanski’s film does not destabilise the conventions of the detection narrative nor defuse the tough cynicism of the hard-boiled detective. Instead, like the best detection stories, Chinatown treats the conventions themselves as surfaces that distract us from an unresolvable chaos. 

The film’s use of colour is fundamental to producing this effect. Although it references the striking chiaroscuro effects associated with classical noir conventions, Chinatown is, for the most part, lit to evoke the golden haze of a California summer’s day. This gives the film a nostalgic lustre but also, in the scenes set in the Northwest Valley, foregrounds the fact that this is land that has lost its water. When Gittes drives out to the Valley to investigate, he stops his car on a deserted road and gazes out across an arid, sun-drenched landscape. It looks blisteringly hot and there’s nothing to see, except that these infertile farms have all been recently sold. The light does not cue us to intuit the extent of corruption, greed and moral ambiguity that Gittes’ investigation will eventually uncover; instead, its deceptive clarity aligns us with the private investigator who will experience a devastating failure of perception. Halfway through the film, the Janus-faced Cross delivers a blinding truth when he warns Gittes: “you may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.” Gittes has heard this before, a long time ago, when he worked as a police detective in Chinatown.

Towne got the idea for the film’s title from a cop he met who described Chinatown as a place where “you don’t know who’s a crook and who isn’t a crook. So in Chinatown they say: just don’t do a goddamned thing”.⁶ Polanski did not agree with the screenwriter that Chinatown should function only as a metaphor, so the script was revised to use the place as the plot’s final setting.⁷ As Michael Eaton notes, by the time we reach this climactic point in the film, entering Chinatown feels like crossing into “a state of mind which is completely impossible to escape, to which we are condemned always to return”.⁸ In the film’s final moments, Gittes must come to terms with this repetition and accept once more that although he has seen the face of evil, there is nothing he can do to stop it.

It has been suggested that the film’s use of Chinatown as a metaphor for this state of mind, or for the corrupted city of Los Angeles, perpetuates a history of characterising the East in terms of a dangerous and indecipherable otherness. Polan, for instance, writes that “what undoes the quest for white male truth” in Polanski’s film “comes in large degree from impenetrable “Asian” mystery”.⁹ The film’s final, oft-cited line of dialogue seems to reiterate this: when his associate tells him to “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”, Gittes concedes defeat by turning from the scene of Evelyn’s death. What the investigator fails to recognise, however, is that corruption and moral collapse do not breed in the place of Eastern otherness, but within the structures of capitalism and the white American family. As Homay King observes, the film’s title “plays on our expectation that these horrors – incest, murder, robber-baron economics – will be associated with the world of Chinatown… Like Jake, the film’s spectators have been schooled to locate these violations elsewhere, in lawless ethnic ghettos, on faraway continents, or in an ancient past. Chinatown provides a reminder that sometimes they come from within”.¹⁰ The film’s final sequence achieves its climactic affective register by forcing our confrontation with this truth. Huston’s performance articulates Cross’ unrelenting greed to devastating effect, when in one fluid and monstrous gesture, Cross pulls his granddaughter/daughter away from her mother’s bloody body and covers her eyes with his giant hand. The implication is that Cross will assume possession of her, unchallenged, just as he will continue to control the city’s water supply. 

By replacing the city’s “public history with a secret history”, Chinatown invests the image of Los Angeles with its own mythic associations.¹¹ These do not only circulate from film to film, but from film to memory. 

Chinatown (1974 United States 131 mins)

Prod Co: Long Road Productions Dir: Roman Polanski Scr: Robert Towne Ed: Sam O’Steen Phot: John A. Alonzo Mus: Jerry Goldsmith Art Dir: W. Stewart Campbell

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Burt Young, Diane Ladd

Endnotes