CHINATOWN
What are bleak movies for?
Gareth Higgins on CHINATOWN - what are bleak movies for?
When I first saw Chinatown I was about sixteen years old; now I’m fifty, and I still can’t forget it.
I’ve had a relationship with that film for longer than I’ve known most of the people in my life. It can be valuable to reflect on the movies and music and words and images that have been with us over the course of a lifetime - a meaningful way to ask how we got here, how we’ve changed, what we’ve learned.
It’s also sometimes a lovely way of connecting with the past - a welcome nostalgia. I once woke up from a dream with not merely the memory, but the bodily feeling of safety that I knew when I was eleven years old, listening to Huey Lewis and the News sing The Power of Love from Back to the Future. I later learned that, as Bessel van Der Kolk says, the body keeps the score, and initially thought that meant I was stuck with all the pain, grief, shame and - yes - trauma that I had encountered.
I later learned that not only can we find pathways to genuine healing for that suffering, but that the body doesn’t merely retain the memory of sorrow. It holds it all, and sometimes the score is worth cherishing.
Nobody cherishes the past in Chinatown - Jake Gittes’ private detective (Jack Nicholson’s quintessential role) is ready with a joke but there’s a world-weariness under the surface. The last line of the film - not exactly a spoiler - indicates the reasons for the weariness without explaining them. Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown - a reference to places that have their own rules and where outsiders will neither be welcome nor will they understand the parameters. It could easily been taken as a potentially racist or at least exoticist trope: playing on the cliché of Asian inscrutability, but it’s not really about that at all. For one thing, the Asian characters in Chinatown are presented as humane - one willing to go much more than the extra mile to care for someone; for another, the real darkness in Chinatown’s Chinatown is the shadow cast by Noah Cross, a white robber baron, land exploiter, monstrous ego and worse.
John Huston’s portrayal of Cross constitutes one of the great movie villains, though to call him a villain is to risk diminishing the evil he represents. This is nothing less than the rapaciousness of a person who has allowed themselves to be possessed with the spirit of supremacism: the belief that some lives are worth more than others, and that his life is worth most of all. It’s weaponized individualism, and a demonic inversion of the ineffable treasure of a psychologically and spiritually integrated sense of the eternal. Cross cannot live in the present because he has buried the past rather than facing it; his experience of today is entirely obsessed with tomorrow. So the last line of Chinatown is not the most profound - or at least not on its own terms. When Gittes asks Cross what he can buy with more money than the already countless riches he has mostly stolen from people - sometimes by literally taking their water, Cross responds as if the question is one of the stupidest he’s ever heard: The Future, Mr Gittes, with a slight sneer, as if he’s disappointed to realize that Jake isn’t a match for the scope of the Cross dynastic vision. He prefigures Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, who speaks of what he calls the genius of those so committed to victory that they will make themselves do the most inhuman things. Cross believes he is a qualitatively different category of human than the little people whose lives he wishes to command; for Cross, Jake is somewhere in-between the people he considers peers and those he treats like an ant colony. But while Cross is focused on what might be called prospects, and wants to achieve immortality by overriding the world with his essence, Gittes is trapped by the past.
Neither of them is able to transcend - though at least Jake can recognize a mistake when he makes it. The last 20 minutes of Chinatown are some of the most gripping and tragic in movie history. A dawning, horrific revelation of monumental dehumanization in the past meets a moment of misogynistic rage in the present; someone realizes that they have been suspicious all along of someone whom they should have sheltered.
Isn’t that what we all need to remember? That the people around us are worthy of compassion before cynicism, that necessary boundaries should not trump kindness, and that we should become conversant with the contours of our own privileges, and especially their consequences (intended or not)? There are monstrous things in the world, and there are those beloved ones who have faced the monstrous. Some have lived to tell the tale, some have repaired, and many, like Chinatown’s Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway, also her quintessential role) deserve the most tender and audacious care. But there are also angels, like James Hong’s Kahn, Evelyn’s butler; and Darrell Zwerling’s Hollis Mulwray, two men committed to standing between her and the world that has already taken so much.
Maybe we never experienced such care to begin with; but the way it’s supposed to work is that those with more power will commit their lives to benevolently sharing it with those who have less. Our original nature is to be without guile, totally secure, and not to hide our needs. Maybe we experienced mutual recognition from relatively evolved parents or guardians, or maybe we found or helped create chosen families where the circle of life, bringing what we have and asking for what we need, would be inscribed and re-inscribed. Maybe that hasn’t happened yet, but we sense a deep wordless yearning for it, which itself is authentication of the need, and - I like to think - evidence of the fact that it can be met.
Chinatown, of course, is bleaker than that: a lament for when bad things happen to good people, or when terrible things happen to any people, and how sometimes we cannot stop it. It’s not a surprise that its director, Roman Polanski, had suffered the unimaginable terror of the Holocaust, and the diabolical wickedness of the murder of his wife Sharon Tate. And many of us can’t watch his films without considering how he also harmed other people. But films aren’t their directors (or their writers: I know very little about Robert Towne’s life, but I do know that his script for Chinatown is one of the greatest). Films are made by human beings, flawed and worthy of love, with mixed motives, and once they’re projected to an audience, they become part of the collective and individual consciousness. My near thirty-five year history with Chinatown has spiraled outwards, from an initial sense of confusion at the plot, to an appreciation that I was watching something really special, to shock at the ending, and now to this: a lament is supposed to make us take love seriously. The best thing we can do with a story of sorrow is to let it provoke us to devote ourselves to love, whatever the future (or the past) may hold.
Kathleen Norris’ THREE THINGS: BARRACOON
I’ve been thinking about books that shine a light on history that’s often been hidden or misinterpreted. Zora Neale Hurston’s remarkable Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ is an account of her 1927 visits with Cudjo Lewis, the only remaining survivor of the Clotilde, the last slave ship to come to America from Africa. It landed in Mobile, Alabama in 1860, long after the importing of slaves to America was illegal. Lewis describes in vivid detail he brutality of the raid in which he was caught. The Dahomey King’s soldiers, both men and women, arrived at his village at dawn, and immediately began slashing people with machetes, killing many children and the elderly. When the king of Lewis’s village was captured and declared that he would never be a slave he was beheaded. Lewis saw his mother killed and tried to hide in the bush, but he was captured and taken away. He never learned the fate of the rest of his family.
Cudjo offers an unsettling account of the way in which “African chiefs deliberately set out to capture [fellow Africans][ for the slave trade.” And after the Africans arrived, “how black Americans, enslaved themselves, ridiculed the Africans, making their lives so much harder,” while the whites “simply treated their slaves like pieces of machinery."
I can’t read Cudjo’s story without thinking that these brutal raids are not in the past, but happening now in Sudan, Ethiopia, the Congo, Myanmar, and other places in which tyrants seek power at any cost. To hold onto his position as president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, was willing to kill a huge percentage of his own people, and cause millions to flee the country. One man’s greed created a trauma that will haunt Syrians for many generations to come. I’ll have more to say about intergenerational trauma in my next essay.