Ronald Brownstein's article, "The 1970s Movie that Explains 2020s America" in The Atlantic looks back at Polankski's Chinatown, which came out fifty years ago this week. It is worth reading.
If you asked me when I was in my twenties or thirties what I thought the best movie ever made was, I’d say Chinatown. There are few movies that had a more powerful effect on me, but I never want to rewatch it. Reading Brownstein's article prompted me to think about why that might be. Brownstein writes--
In Towne’s script, Chinatown was more a state of mind than a place. It symbolized the enigmatic nature of evil and the inability of even well-intentioned people (such as Nicholson’s Gittes) to pierce the hidden layers of power, the wheels within wheels turning far from view and understanding. Like America itself in the age of Vietnam and Watergate, Nicholson’s character knew less than he thought as he excavated the secrets of Dunaway’s Mulwray and her monstrous father, and he understood even less than he knew.
This film rounds out Polanski's trilogy of metaphysical evil, the first being Rosemary's Baby in '68 and his interpretation of Macbeth in '71. But Chinatown is the most powerful of the three because the most realistically relevant for the ethos of the dawning of, not the Age of Aquarius, but of the Age of Whatever. Rosemary's Baby could be dismissed as horror porn, and since Macbeth is Shakespeare's, there's always something deeply good and true at the heart of it. But with Chinatown, it was evil, corruption, and despair all the way down. I suppose there are other movies before it that make the same point about how at bottom, beneath all the social niceties and norms, rages a dark, repressed monster who wins in the end. But not so powerfully, at least for me. Polanski has a real feel for the uncanny reality of evil that makes other realistic treatments of it seem banal.
When I first saw Chinatown it felt like a personal revelation, an awakening through which my young idealistic self was confronted with the reality of the world around me that I kinda sorta knew, but didn't want to believe was so powerful. I remember that the insight watching the movie afforded me was this sense that civilization and its norms, values, taboos were all flimsy, superficial conventions that were but a thin membrane under which lay a roiling chaos of dark, chthonic, monstrous energies looking for ways to erupt. These energies were in me as they were in the world, and everything else was superficial nonsense, a futile attempt to constrain the unconstrainable. It was for me a dizzying gaze into the abyss. It had a very powerful effect on me that lasted for days.
I was a child of the 60s and hadn't given up yet on the possibility of the 'making of a counterculture'. I thought that mostly sane, decent people were running things, and the bad guys were anomalous and could be managed if good people would just step up. It was just common sense, right? Well I don't believe that anymore, and my watching Chinatown was the beginning of my conversion. As I said, It woke me up, or it was an event that triggered a gradual reckoning that I hadn't made until then. But I also understood that the insight it afforded was not the whole truth. I was too solidly grounded in something else.
If you're under fifty and reading this, you must think I was a naive idiot. Maybe, but perhaps that's because the fundamental nihilistic vision of Chinatown has become since then so normalized. And kids growing up since the 70s haven't a moment of real innocence or real idealism anymore. That wasn't true for me growing up, and I'm glad of it. Kids today get instead a bland, conventional, let's-all-get-along goody-goodiness in the schools, but the reality they confront on the streets and online belies that and is very much consonant with Chinatown. That's reality for kids, and any attempt to paper over it in school is usually pointless. It's the "futility of good intentions" that Brownstein quotes Towne as describing the theme of the movie.
I don't believe that good intentions are futile, but I do believe that the guilelessness of one's good intentions must be matched by a shrewdness that understands the limits of what's possible in any given situation. I don't believe in tilting at windmills. (But I'm glad that some people still do it. We need our holy fools.)
What kids need today is the opposite of the conversion I had in my twenties. If I needed then to awaken to the deep reality of evil, kids today need to awaken to the deep reality of goodness. Evil is profoundly true; so is goodness. But evil is the only profundity that our cultural elite seems to believe in. It is, at least, the only profundity that they know how to write well about. Goodness is mostly portrayed as a kind of affable, good-natured niceness, or as loyalty and generosity to friends and family--and that's fine. But that's not the goodness I'm talking about. It has be at least the equal of the evil that's at the heart of Chinatown, and who these days in the mainstream exemplifies that or even attempts to write about it?
So if Chinatown is such a great movie, why don't I ever rewatch it? Because it has served its purpose, and because so many movies, novels, and TV shows say the same thing over and over again. We all live in Chinatown now, so there's no need to watch a movie about it.