William Dean Howells famously said that "what the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." Things haven't changed much in the American psyche since he made that astute observation. Thus it's remarkable that a film like Chinatown ever got made, and it's probably only due to the breakdown of the Hollywood system and the loss of confidence in American society as a whole in the mid-70s that the film was not only made but became a huge success.
I was thinking about Chinatown not because this is a significant anniversary -- the film was released in 1974 -- but because someone on an online forum recently insisted that the film was something of a failure for him because the ending left him feeling "despondent" and "hopeless," as so many films from the 1970s do. Another poster rightly asserted that the best endings are not happy or unhappy but appropriate. In other words -- mine -- they are the inevitable conclusion to a compelling dramatic action. Comedies tend to end in marriages, the birth of a baby, a feast, or a mixture of all three, suggesting that regardless of the problems presented during the play, the life of the community will go on. Tragedies end with the death of the protagonist, generally a figure important enough that his death implies disaster for the entire community.
Tragedy had been very much on Polanski's mind in the years leading up to Chinatown: besides the horrific events experienced in his own life when the Manson family murdered his pregnant wife Sharon Tate, in 1971 Polanski directed a compelling -- and very violent -- film version of Macbeth with Jon Finch as the amoral man who would be king.
Chinatown is unusual in that the figure who immediately brings to mind a tragic character is not Jake Gittes or Noah Cross or even his daughter Evelyn, who winds up shot to death in the car at the end. In a sense, the tragic figure is Catherine, the innocent girl who is the product of Noah Cross (perfectly played with a lizard's charm by John Huston) having sex with Evelyn, just as brilliantly played by Faye Dunaway). Yet this is a tragedy of incest, and so Catherine/Evelyn are to some extent the same character split in two, doubled: mother/daughter and sister/sister. It's important to note that Hollis Mulwray, the man Catherine was raised to think was her father is not only a business partner of Noah Cross but LA's water commissioner, who's killed by Cross when he threatens to expose his former partner's effort to steal the city's water and resell it back to the city in a complex real estate scam. We can imagine a sequel to Chinatown in which Catherine goes on to murder her father/grandfather and avenge the city he has plundered -- a scenario that is the very stuff of Greek tragedy.
Screenwriter Robert Towne's initial goal was to express his vision of Los Angeles, the town in which he had been born, grew up, and dearly loved, being raped by the corrupt city fathers who ultimately destroyed it through their insatiable greed. In a larger sense, Los Angeles itself is the real tragic character of the film, embodied by the two women, one innocent for this world and the other too poisoned for it, each destroyed by the wealthy father who transgresses sexual boundaries as blithely as he does geographic boundaries in his crooked business scheme which steals water, the lifeblood of any city, from its deceived citizens.
Chinatown's connection to Greek tragedy can even be detected when Cross covers Catherine's eyes with his hands when her mother is shot. Oedipus blinds himself in the play that bears his name when he learns that he killed his father and slept with his mother and gave Freud an awful lot to think about centuries later. In Chinatown, the girl's father slept with her mother/sister, who is eventually shot in the head by the police before Catherine's eyes, until they're symbolically "blinded" by Noah Cross -- the name itself is an ironic nod to both the Hebrew and Christian Bibles -- whom fate made both her father and grandfather. It can even be argued that in covering Catherine's eyes, Cross is in fact "blinding" himself as Oedipus did, by displacing both his sexual transgression -- "I don't blame myself," he tells Jake in an earlier scene -- and the desire to shield his eyes from his crimes by covering his daughter/granddaughter's eyes instead.
In this regard we should remember that Jake Gittes realized that Noah Cross murdered Mulwray when Gittes discovers Cross's eyeglasses in the pond where Mulwray was murdered. Confronting the murderer with the eyeglasses, Cross looks at them and says "What are they? What does it mean?" Cross is feigning ignorance, but in a sense his eyes are unwilling to "see" the evidence of his crime, even when that evidence consists of his own eyeglasses.
King Lear is another towering tragedy that insinuates itself into Chinatown. If Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier were their generation's conception of the ideal Lear, certainly the patriarchal John Huston could have been a worthy contender. Lear has three daughters and Cross has only two, yet the doubling (criss-cross?) of Catherine as both his daughter and granddaughter in effect makes them three daughters as well. But unlike Lear, who wishes his kingdom to be inherited by the daughter who loves him most, but is tragically incapable of seeing which daughter that is, Noah Cross has no intention of leaving his kingdom to anyone, and the love he demanded from his daughter was perverse, an assault against human decency, and led to her ruin, not his.
Cross will eventually die -- be crossed-out -- but the evil he did will live on not only in the lives he wrecked but in the very shape and soul of the city he despoiled for profit and pleasure. In the end, the cops and private eye are mere observers and commentators, as helpless to affect the unfolding events as a Greek chorus. And in both the Greek tragedies and this very American film, a city -- the polis -- is corrupted in the process.
Yet because this is an American film, Jake is not quite a mere observer, though his energetic efforts to find truth and restore order ultimately proved futile. Chinatown tips its hat to the notion of the tragic hero's "flaw" by having Jake Gittes wear a bandage over his nose through much of the film, followed by a scar from where one of Noah crosses henchman slit his nose in order to scare him off the case. Critic Edmund Wilson writes about the idea of the artist/hero's wound in his seminal essay "The Wound and the Bow," and Polanski has some fun by playing the thug who cuts Jack Nicholson's nose with his knife -- the "wounded" artist gets to deliver the wound to the hero of his film himself. And given the plot of Chinatown, its especially uncanny that Jack Nicholson's own mother had been an unwed 18-year old when he was born, he and was raised by her parents with his grandmother pretending to be his mother and his actual mother pretending to be his sister. Nicholson didn't learn the truth until 1974 -- the very year Chinatown was released. Ironies leapfrog over ironies.
But Chinatown is a work of art, not a roman à clef, propaganda, or a sedative. It doesn't seek to change us or get us to agitate for political reform or make us leave the theater feeling "happy." Aristotle declared that tragedy creates a catharsis in an audience that "purges them of pity and fear." I think the film does that quite brilliantly. Yet mid-to-late century America was not ancient Greece, and it could be argued that the catharsis of Chinatown is not perfect, not quite complete. The ending does have a sting in its tail and leaves a disquiet that the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies attempted to quell. Perhaps this is the "despondent" feeling that the poster I quoted earlier felt at the end of the film.
It's well-known that Polanski altered the ending of Towne's original screenplay, which did have a "happy" ending. Here is an (admittedly rare) example of a director understanding the nature of a screenwriter's script better than the screenwriter himself did. Ironically, Chinatown won only a single Academy Award -- for Best Original Screenplay.
Robert Towne intended Chinatown to be a trilogy, and true to the city he had come to mistrust, things didn't work out in his favor. He lost control of the second part, which became the dismal Two Jakes, listlessly directed and starring Jack Nicholson, who had been such a revelation in the first film. The third part was never made at all. But Chinatown gloriously exists, moving and enlightening us in its unique way, and reminding us of a time when such films could still be made in America. I suspect even William Dean Howells might have been impressed.
(For more about Chinatown and Robert Towne, I happily urge you to read the first chapter of David Thomson's matchless history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation. In fact, while you're at it, read the entire book.)
