Chinatown and the Private-Eye Film

In his landmark 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond
Chandler made no secret of his impatience with Golden Age detective
stories. He dismissed as hopelessly farfetched, despite its
similarity to the screenplay he coauthored for that year’s Double Indemnity,
a tale by Freeman Wills Crofts in which “a murderer by the
aid of makeup, split second timing, and some very sweet evasive action,
impersonates the man he has just killed and thereby gets him
alive and distant from the place of the crime.” And the solution to
Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, he concluded, was “the
type guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit
could guess it.”1

Certainly the hard-boiled story Chandler advocated and practiced,
with its rough-and-tumble maze of tough “janes,” tougher private eyes,
wholesale violence, and official corruption, seems poles apart from
the orderly world of Hercule Poirot Chandler satirized in his semiparodistic
story “Pearls Are a Nuisance” (1939) and throughout the series
of novels beginning with The Big Sleep (1939) that upend their conventions
of the suspects’ class-bound isolation from the outside world
and the detective’s interrogations as a civilized game. The hard-boiled
formula, like its near-contemporaries jazz and musical theater, is a peculiarly
American invention, and one linked especially closely to the
California landscapes of its two best-known practitioners, Chandler
and his progenitor, Dashiell Hammett.
California had been a magical site for American dreams ever since
the days of Spanish explorers’ search for the mythical land of El Dorado
– a search that might have seemed, in this land of mild weather
and bountiful natural resources, to come closer to success than anyplace
else on earth. The rush of prospectors sparked by the discovery
of gold in 1848 added a new layer to the California legend. Even
travelers disappointed in their search for gold stayed to enjoy the region’s
agricultural opportunities, and as early as 1850 California was
admitted to statehood, an isolated western outpost of U.S. sovereignty
surrounded for years afterward by nonstate territories. The
construction of the first transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, a project
financed largely with eastern capital but built by immigrant laborers,
established at a stroke the power of the state’s agricultural exports,
its rich and unstable mixture of Latino, Chinese, European, and
Native American inhabitants, and the growing importance of industrial
capital – in this case, the wealth of the Union Pacific – in its politics.
The infant movie studios that settled in Hollywood beginning in
1911, drawn by cheap labor, varied outdoor locations, reliable weather,
and the proximity of nearby Mexico as a refuge from legal actions,
confirmed the status of California as the nation’s dream factory: a
modern utopia of glamour, wealth, ambition, and ease that hid beneath
its surface the cynicism and disillusionment of every disappointed
dreamer and every dream merchant who knew what hard
work it was to manufacture the myth of the California Eden.
The California landscape was a natural setting for a new kind of detective
story, a kind that owed as much to the strenuous dime-novel
action of western heroes like Buffalo Bill as to the more sedate powers
of reasoning displayed by amateur detectives from Sherlock Holmes
to Hercule Poirot. Although the state was proudly conscious of its vanguard
role as the westernmost outpost of American culture, even its
largest cities retained much of the flavor of frontier towns, in which
institutional justice often seemed a long way off, and strong men in the
role of urban cowboys took up arms to right wrongs the justice system
could not, or would not, touch.

For all his proclivity to violence, the California shamus is most at
home in the contemporary frontier of the big-city landscape. Even audiences
who have seen only a handful or private-eye films are familiar
with the iconography of the California city immortalized in the 1940s
mise-en-scène of The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944),
and The Big Sleep (1946): the dark streets slick with rain, the alleys and
doorways hiding small-time hoodlums, the contrastingly overdecorated
homes of the hero’s nouveau-riche clients, the eternal nighttime
skies, and the noirish high-contrast lighting that throws every threat
into sharp relief. The private eye’s office is invariably located on the
second floor of an office building, presumably for the sake of an evocative
view from windows that frame the cityscape as both picturesque
and menacing.

The very existence of the private eye, the urban cowboy who has
pushed as far west as the Pacific will allow, is a double scandal to the
social order California idealized. A true Eden would have no need of
the police, since no one in Paradise would ever commit a crime; but
even in a fallen world, there would be no work for hard-boiled detectives
if the police did their job properly. Sometimes the police are
overwhelmed by a powerful ring of professional criminals, as in Heat
(1995); sometimes their bureaucratic routines are too unimaginative
to allow them to keep up with an unusually resourceful criminal, as
in The Usual Suspects (1995); but more often they are simply incompetent
or hamstrung by political or personal corruption that makes
them unwilling to do their job. It is only the incompetence and corruption
of the police that keep the private eye in business.
The hard-boiled dick’s typical client – often wealthy, and always
wealthier than the proletarian hero who wears his working-class membership
like a badge of honor – hires the hero to recover either an irreplaceable
artifact redolent of magical powers, or a missing person,
or, as in Murder, My Sweet and Out of the Past (1947), both at once. Even
though the police cannot be brought into the case or are uninterested,
the client’s world, which has been thrown into turmoil by the absence
of something uniquely precious, will be restored to equilibrium by its
return. Almost as soon as the hero takes the case, however, he finds
that these assumptions are wrong because the case for which he has
been hired is fictitious, misleading, or only a small part of a much
more labyrinthine case that ineluctably leads to murder. The client,
who originally described the police as too indiscreet or indifferent to
call in, is often correct; but the client’s deceptiveness about his or her
motives, the stakes of the mystery, or the danger involved means that
the client cannot be trusted either. The private eye is therefore left
in the perilous position of an independent contractor whose deepest
loyalty is not to the client but to the case. Hence the obligatory scene
halfway through The Big Sleep in which Vivian Sternwood Rutledge
(Lauren Bacall) tries to buy Philip Marlowe off the case, telling him
that he’s done the job for which he was hired, only to have him respond
that he won’t quit until he’s uncovered every last criminal
secret, including her own. Kiss Me Deadly (1955) pushes this professional
dedication to a frightening extreme, as Mike Hammer (Ralph
Meeker), working without any client and motivated as much by greed
as by vengeance, defies the confiscation of his gun and his license,
repeated attempts on his life, and the scorn of his secretary, Velda
(Maxine Cooper), in an ultimately futile pursuit of what Velda witheringly
calls “the Great Whatsit.”

The deceptive nature of the private eye’s caseload is an apt indication
of the treacherous nature of his world, a world in which criminals
are neither marginal, socially deviant monsters like Frank Booth in
Blue Velvet (1986), nor suavely deceptive private individuals like the
killers in Agatha Christie, but professional criminals or their unwilling
conspirators: criminals who have the force of money and powerful institutions
(criminal gangs, corrupt city governments, even the police
force) behind their transgressions. What seemed at first a conflict between
good guys and bad guys simply conceals a deeper conflict
among the good guys – the private eye, his client, the police force, the
local government, the justice system – who are fighting instead of supporting
each other. Hence private-eye films tend to be sharply critical
of the society they represent, a society whose pretenses to civilization
are unmasked not only by the criminal intrigues that make up the hero’s
daily work, but by the private eye’s running conflicts with his supposed
allies. Even if the case ends with a roundup (or, more often, a
body count) of killers and gangleaders, the original social evils – the
inequalities aggravated by unbridled capitalism, the dependence of
developers on crooked deals, the government’s abuse of power – are
only contained, never resolved. Greed and lust remain, waiting to
erupt again as soon as the final credits have rolled. A private eye’s
work is never done.
If the hard-boiled story’s resulting attitude toward justice, as first
developed in Black Mask and other American pulp magazines of the
1920s and 1930s, is cynical, the glamorous veneer of the California settings
and the heroic figure of the private eye nonetheless lend the formula
strong elements of masculine romance epitomized in Raymond
Chandler’s famous description of the private eye in “The Simple Art
of Murder” as a man
who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. . . . He must
be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must
be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability,
without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must
be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. . . . He
has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right,
because it belongs to the world he lives in.2
Chandler’s idealistic evocation of the private eye makes it clear that
he embodies all the contradictions of California urban culture. Although
his job sets him against the official powers of his world, he represents
all that is best in that world. He is a free-lance warrior, a man
of honor whose sexual morality is flexible and whose mastery of violence
is one of his most formidable weapons. His incessant wisecracking
is both a guarantee of his disempowered status and a means
of asserting what limited individual power he can, a mark of the personal
charisma that is his primary defense against the epidemic institutional
corruption he faces. He is, in short, that paradoxical figure,
the perfect commoner, the man of his culture who becomes a
hero because he so completely expresses the contradictions of that
culture.

Two qualities of the private eye are especially paradoxical: his professionalism
and his masculinity. The private eye is a working stiff
whose attachment to his job is obsessive, even though he is often criticized
for his lack of loyalty to his employers; but private eyes, though
they seem barely to survive from job to unprofitable job, are luckier
in their employment than police officers because they have the luxury
of independence – they answer to no one but a succession of clients
they can tell off and threaten to quit at will, instead of being a cog in
a machine that is itself helpless or corrupt. Their films nearly always
glamorize their cowboy independence, even when they present private
eyes who are estranged from their wives (Harper, 1966; Night
Moves, 1975), aging and ailing (The Late Show, 1977), psychotic (Kiss
Me Deadly), sadly ineffectual (The Conversation, 1974), disconnected
from their surroundings (The Long Goodbye, 1973), or utterly damned
(Angel Heart, 1987). Since private eyes often, in their pursuit of the
truth, break both the law they are trying to uphold and their promises
to the client who is paying them, their success amounts to a critique
of institutional law and the nature of employment under capitalism.
At the same time, the private eye, for all his up-to-the-minute realism
and violence Chandler praises, is a more old-fashioned figure than either
the gifted amateur detective or the bone-weary cop. Often his disinterested
professionalism makes him an anachronistic knight-errant
who slays modern dragons on behalf of damsels seldom worth rescuing.
If Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade seems perfectly attuned to the
world of treacherous criminals in double-crossing pursuit of the Maltese
Falcon, Bogart’s Marlowe, in The Big Sleep, seems far too good
for his world, virtually the only man of integrity in a landscape teem-
ing with gamblers, blackmailers, pornographers, and their equally degenerate
victims whose families have clawed their way up the slopes
of Los Angeles’ social elite. A generation later, The Long Goodbye goes
still further in presenting the unlikely casting choice of Elliot Gould
as Marlowe caught in a time warp, a survivor from the forties whose
hangdog alienation from his 1970s orbit is by turns outrageously unrealistic,
satiric, and oddly touching in its nostalgia. Abandoned by his
persnickety cat and betrayed by both his client and the old friend who
dropped him into the case, Gould’s Marlowe, who spends his days going
through the motions of a job he does not want to do and does not
seem to be very good at, is a man with nothing but his work to keep
him going.

The popular image of the private eye has less to do with his idealized,
often obsessive professionalism, however, than with his masculinity.
Far more than films about police detectives or amateur detectives,
hard-boiled films regard detective work as a test of what Frank
Krutnik calls the private eye’s “self-sufficient phallic potency.”3 This
convention is so deeply ingrained in private-eye films that it is hard to
appreciate how arbitrary and strange it is. Since private eyes are hired
to solve mysteries by gathering information – tasks that are accomplished
by most real-life private detectives primarily over telephones
and computer modems – there is no reason to assume that testosterone
ought to be a prerequisite for the job. The recent proliferation of
novels about female private eyes (Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone,
Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, et al.)
suggests that women can do the job as well as men; but Hollywood
has never accepted this argument because a search by computer or
phone for a missing person or object would be so visually and morally
dull. In hard-boiled movies, the missing objects or people the detective
is asked to recover are never simply missing; they always turn out
to be involved in a criminal plot. Standing up to the criminal conspirators
requires a hero who is undeterred by violence, capable of using
his fists and guns in the requisite action scenes, untrammeled by inconvenient
personal attachments that might slow him down or cloud
his judgment, and obsessively devoted to the job at hand – in short,
a man. In V. I. Warshawski (1991), the only important film to date about
a female private eye, Kathleen Turner, as the heroine, spends most
of her time alternately acting like a stereotypical male – chasing suspects,
shooting at them, mouthing off at them, and getting beaten up
by them – and assuring the audience that she’s really a woman by
showing maternal devotion to her client, a teenaged girl, and flashing
her legs.

The hard-boiled film’s celebration of masculinity achieves an exceptional
concentration in the archetypal The Maltese Falcon (1941), already
the third film version of Dashiell Hammett’s novel (following The
Maltese Falcon [aka Dangerous Female], 1931, and Satan Met a Lady,
1936). Hired to find his client’s missing sister, Sam Spade (Humphrey
Bogart) avenges as well the death of his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome
Cowan), who grabbed the case from him only to be decoyed into a
dark alley and shot. The story’s tangled series of lies and betrayals
revolve around the characters’ highly competitive search for the legendary
Maltese Falcon, a jeweled statue that has so often been stolen
from its rightful owners over the past four centuries that title to the
storied treasure can evidently be established only by possession. In
the end, the statue over whose possession Archer and two others
were murdered turns out to be a fake, its legendary association with
the Holy Grail a bitterly ironic sign of the corruption of the search for
truth and value in contemporary San Francisco. Although the defeated
villains seem philosophically resigned to resuming their yearslong
search for the real falcon, the talisman’s origin as a tribute to
Charles V from the Knights Templars after their sack of Malta suggests
that this magical object was hopelessly corrupted by the brutality of
armed conquest from the moment of its creation.
Lacking any transcendent value to inspire his search, Spade is left
with only his personal code to distinguish himself from the criminals
with whom the search has allied him. Spade’s treacherous client Brigid
O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) is a femme fatale who uses her wiles
to lure men to their destruction, and each of the other men seeking
the falcon – gardenia-scented Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), jovially paternal
Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), and ludicrously incompetent
gunsel Wilmer Cook (Elisha Cook Jr.) – is clearly marked as homosexual.
It is Spade’s status as nonfemale and nongay that rescues him
from full complicity in the film’s villainous conspiracy. Spade is admirably,
heroically masculine because he is not female or homosexual;
and in the zero-sum economy of hard-boiled movies, the vindication
of Spade’s sexual prowess requires that all other sexual possibilities
be impeached. Hence the private eye’s manliness must constantly be
confirmed through conflicts with asexual or bisexual characters – or,
far more often, with female or gay male characters – whom the film
leaves demystified, disempowered, defeated, and dehumanized.4
This defense of masculinity places debates about sex and power at
the heart of all but a handful of hard-boiled films. It is true, of course,
that The Thin Man (1934) combines a hard-boiled mystery with an intermittently
lightsome celebration of the cockeyed domestic life of private
eye Nick Charles (William Powell) and his wife, Nora (Myrna Loy).
More recently, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), shorn of the interracial romance
that had capped Walter Mosley’s 1990 novel [Fig. 43], uses race
to displace sex as the matrix of the film’s conflicts, focusing almost
exclusively on the survival of Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (Denzel Washington),
the unemployed aircraft worker who serves as the film’s reluctant
hero. In the white man’s world he finds himself investigating, cops
and crooks alike can beat him half to death without a reason, and asserting
his identity requires a perilous tightrope dance between the
Uncle Tom subservience white men demand and the reflexive brutality
of his old friend Mouse (Don Cheadle), whose propensity for violence
becomes disturbingly necessary to Easy’s success [Fig. 44]. But
43. Devil in a Blue Dress: This shot is just about all that remains of the novel’s
interracial romance. (Denzel Washington, Jennifer Beals)
most private-eye films, like films noirs and erotic thrillers, are anatomies
of masculinity.

Since the hero’s masculinity is always reaffirmed at the cost of marginalizing
or annulling other sexual possibilities, the private eye’s investigation
typically focuses on discrediting seductive femmes fatales
like Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Velma Valento (in Murder, My Sweet), or the
Sternwood sisters (in The Big Sleep). Sometimes the hero’s love–hate
relationship with women is dramatized by the presence of both good
and bad heroines, like the double heroines of Murder, My Sweet and
Out of the Past; more often, his ambivalence is simply projected onto
a single heroine, whose ambiguity expresses both his desire to possess
her and his fear of the power her sexuality gives her. The price
of resolving the hero’s ambivalence is the heroine’s demystification,
and often her destruction as well. Not even death can protect an enigmatic
female from the private eye’s continued unsparing exposure, as
Philip Marlowe shows in Lady in the Lake (1947) in his continuing inquiries
about the drowned Muriel Chess, and Mike Hammer shows in
Kiss Me Deadly in his determination to follow the murdered Christina
Bailey’s injunction to “remember me,” even to violating her corpse after
death by retrieving a key she had swallowed.

Although the private eye’s aggressive masculinity, shored up by his
discrediting of alternative sexualities, becomes his most distinctive
trait in later hard-boiled films – turning into a running joke as early
as the endless parade of willing women in The Big Sleep – it also becomes,
especially in the wave of revisionist hard-boiled films that follow
the women’s-liberation movement of the early 1970s, the subject
of a searching critique. In these ironic reconsiderations of masculine
heroism, the male habits that allow a private eye to succeed at his
work – professionalism and abstract idealism; the kind of dualistic
moral thinking that categorizes suspects, solves cases, and confirms
the hero’s embattled masculinity through zero-sum contrasts; the violent
skills that allow the hard-boiled hero to hold his own in a hostile
world; and the freedom to follow a case wherever it leads – turn out
to make him unfit for anything else. Kiss Me Deadly, appearing fifteen
years before the flood of revisionist hard-boiled films, begins its prophetic
critique in the opening scene, as Christina (Cloris Leachman),
the fleeing hitchhiker who Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) has picked
up, recovers from her terror long enough to dismiss him as just one
more example of “Man, wonderful Man,” incapable of loving anything
but himself and his sports car. The film goes on to suggest that Ham-
mer’s expertise as “a bedroom dick” and his sadistic propensity for
violence both stem from his neurotic contempt for the feminized culture
represented by the film’s constant references to ballet, opera,
classical music, and modern art.5 Harper makes the inability of Lew
Harper (Paul Newman) to commit himself to his wife (a character absent
from The Moving Target, the 1949 Ross Macdonald novel on which
the film was based) into one of its most important themes. By the time
of Night Moves, it seems inevitable that no film would burden a private
eye like Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) with a wife if it did not plan
to make an issue of his ruined marriage.

It was at the height of this highly critical reconsideration of the private
eye’s authority and potency that Roman Polanski’s Chinatown
was released in 1974. The film’s Oscar-winning screenplay, credited
to legendary script doctor Robert Towne, looks back nostalgically, as
John Cawelti noted not long after it appeared,6 to the glory days of the
private eye in 1937, the year in which its story is set, at the same time
it presents a penetrating critique of the hard-boiled hero and the values
he represents. The vehicle for this ambivalent critique is pastiche:
The film is a catalog of both private-eye and historical-period clichés
44. Devil in a Blue Dress: Easy (Denzel Washington, right) is forced to depend
on his volatile friend Mouse (Don Cheadle).
whose meanings are renewed and often inverted by their ironic handling.
Both Chinatown’s bumptious hero, J. J. (“call me Jake”) Gittes
(Jack Nicholson), and the case he gets swept up in are defined by
their echoes of the past.

As even its title ends up indicating, however, Chinatown, for all its
nostalgic invocation of a double past – the formative years of the City
of Los Angeles and the celluloid heritage of the California shamus – is
an exceptionally bleak film, a record of unrelieved failure. Despite his
pertinacity, his detective skills, and his unexpected idealism, Gittes
does not realize the monstrous nature of the crime he is investigating
until it is too late to stop its corruption from spreading still further.
He can neither persuade the police to arrest the killer he unmasks nor
save the life of the heroine he has come to love. Chinatown is much
more than an ironic valentine to the hard-boiled detective of the thirties;
though it is patterned by a series of reversals, deceptions, and
betrayals, its deeper structure of revelations, the variety of roles in
which it casts the hero and heroine, and its intricate mixture of tones
make it the most complete detective film of all. Yet the most urgent
question the film poses about Gittes is why this hard-boiled dick, who
seems to wear so lightly the mantle of so many Hollywood private
eyes before him, is doomed to failure.

The film’s balance of celebration and critique of the private eye begins
in its opening scene, after its black-and-white art-deco credits,
backed by Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting trumpet melody. The teasing
possibility that the whole film will be shot in black-and-white continues
in its opening shot, a riffle through a series of black-and-white still
photographs of something Bogart never would have been shown looking
at: a man and a woman having sex. Gittes is presenting them to
Curly (Burt Young), his latest client, a weeping skipjack who suspected
all too accurately that his wife had been cheating on him.
Gittes’s next client, identifying herself as Evelyn Mulwray (Diane
Ladd), wants to hire Gittes to follow her husband, who she says is involved
with another woman. After token protest Gittes agrees and follows
Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the Chief Engineer of the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power, through a dazzlingly pictorial
array of locations, from the hot, spacious interior of the county
courthouse, where Mulwray insists that a dam that drought-stricken
local farmers claim is necessary to their livelihood is doomed to collapse;
to a dry riverbed where Mulwray waits for hours until the night
brings a torrent of water through the spillway; to Echo Park, where
Gittes photographs Mulwray rowing with a mysterious young woman;
to the Almacondo Apartments, where he meets the young woman
again. The one place Mulwray never leads Gittes is his home, for reasons
that will soon become obvious.

Throughout these dreamlike opening sequences, the range of locations
could not be further from the mean streets of Chandler’s Los
Angeles. Cinematographer John A. Alonzo’s brilliant outdoor skies and
low horizon lines create dazzlingly picturesque vistas virtually unique
in hard-boiled films. The handsome, airless interiors designed by Richard
Sylbert seem to recede forever into deep space in widescreen
framings that undercut the customary visual dialectic between exterior
and interior space, or more generally between nature and culture,
so vital in different ways to Fury (1936), The Godfather (1972), Double
Indemnity (1944), Basic Instinct (1992), and Blue Velvet (1986). The absence
of the ubiquitous sepia/gold lighting increasingly used to shoot
historical dramas gives the film’s vistas a fresh, contemporary look
despite the careful period costumes Gittes wears and the automobiles
he passes on the street; and the pacing of these early scenes, in which
Gittes intently watches Mulwray sitting oblivious and equally still in
the distance, is so deliberate that they become hypnotic. The picturepostcard
mise-en-scène presents southern California at its most seductive,
with only a few reminders that Chinatown is a private-eye film:
the class struggles portended by the farmers’ outrage at Mulwray’s
refusal to build a dam that would ensure irrigation for their crops, the
hints of a political establishment polluted by big money, Gittes’s crassly
astringent urban sensibility.

At the same time, the slow pace of these scenes and their lack of action
serve as a reminder that what Gittes is doing is nothing but watching,
harking back to the prehistory of the private eye, when detectives
were expected to be skilled observers rather than men of violence
[Fig. 45]. These early sequences, in which Mulwray seems to be doing
nothing but being watched, seem to fit Laura Mulvey’s proposition that
cinema is organized around male voyeurism and fetishism as neatly
as the corresponding sequences in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in which
Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) watches Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak).
7 Both men, bewildered by the apparent lack of purpose behind
their quarry’s activities, become fascinated with the possibility of discovering
or constructing such a purpose, and the obsessive quality of
this fascination is conveyed in both films by the surreal beauty of the
widescreen California landscapes to which the watchers seem indiffer-
ent. If Gittes is following a man rather than a woman, it is a man whose
lack of masculinity, already foreshadowed by his effeminate bowties,
his self-effacing manner, and his mildly ineffectual arguments against
the new dam, will become steadily more apparent as the film proceeds,
apparently confirming Gittes’s own manliness through the private
eye’s formulaic algebra of contrast.

What is most out of place amid the ethereal beauty of the California
locations in these opening sequences is the earthy sensibility of
Gittes, who seems more realistically drawn than Chandler’s twentiethcentury
knights because he cracks dirty jokes, acknowledges without
shame that the mainstay of his business is sordid divorce work, and
seems, despite the oleaginous assurance of his glad-handing professional
manner and the bravado of his flashy dress outfits, a parvenu
little removed from his dim “associates” Duffy (Bruce Glover) and
Lawrence Walsh (Joe Mantell), or even proletarian clients like Curly.
Gittes, the film seems to suggest, is no chivalric anachronism like Philip
Marlowe; he is the real thing, a working stiff whose work happens
to take him to hotel bedrooms.

45. Chinatown: A hero (Jack Nicholson) who does nothing but watch.
No sooner, however, has the film replaced the normal visual duality
between nature and culture with a thematic duality between its dreamlike
landscape and its down-to-earth hero than it begins to complicate
it. Rumors about Mulwray’s scandalous affair, leaked to the newspapers,
bring Gittes an icily menacing visit from the real Evelyn Mulwray
(Faye Dunaway) [Fig. 46], which forces him to acknowledge that he
has not only, in classic private-eye form, been decoyed into taking the
Chinatown and the Private-Eye Film 205
46. Chinatown: The glacial Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) as the hero first
sees her.

wrong case, but has taken it for the wrong client, since the client on
whose behalf he followed Mulwray was obviously not his wife. Gittes’s
mistake not only starts his relationship with Evelyn Mulwray off on the
wrong foot but forecasts his deeper failures to come, after her husband’s
drowned body is pulled from the spillway Gittes had watched
him visit.

Once Gittes and Mrs. Mulwray tacitly agree to support each other’s
stories about her having hired him to follow her husband, the plot
seems settled in a familiar groove: a dead husband, an alluring widow,
a hard-boiled outsider on the make. When Gittes retraces Mulwray’s
steps by returning to the spillway that night, the signature scene that
follows adds the one ingredient that has so far been missing from
the film’s hard-boiled stew: onscreen violence. After Gittes is nearly
drowned in the unexpectedly torrential runoff, his retreat is interrupted
by crooked ex–Ventura County sheriff Claude Mulvihill (Roy Jenson)
and Mulvihill’s little white-suited companion, identified in the
film’s credits only as “Man with Knife.” As Mulvihill beats and then
holds Gittes up, his sidekick takes out a switchblade knife, accuses
Gittes of being nosy, and then unhesitatingly slits his nose.
This scene confirms the film’s hard-boiled credentials, reminding
viewers that despite its leisurely opening it is still a story in which
criminal corruption will be figured as violent action. In addition, it connects
Gittes to a Hollywood tradition of physically suffering private
eyes. Philip Marlowe, who began life in Chandler’s The Big Sleep by
eyeing a stained-glass window over the door of the Sternwood mansion
showing a naked woman tied to a tree and rescued by a knight,
has to be rescued from bondage himself by the hard-bitten dame for
whom he is looking. Other screen Marlowes get shot up with dope
(Murder, My Sweet), slugged and forced off the road (Lady in the Lake),
or run down by cars (The Long Goodbye). Mike Hammer, widely regarded
as the toughest private eye of all, begins Kiss Me Deadly by being
pulled from his car, beaten, and put back in the car to get sent over
a cliff; miraculously surviving the fire that kills his passenger, he is
available to be beaten again, tied to a bed, and drugged in a later scene
before getting shot in the film’s incendiary climax. Jeff Bailey (Robert
Mitchum), one of the few Hollywood private eyes to avoid serious injury
during his film, ends Out of the Past shot dead by the femme fatale
he thought he could outwit. The ritual torturing of the private eye, of
course, has the effect of giving him a personal stake in his case, justifying
in advance any extralegal actions he might take in the name of
personal revenge; but it also confirms his status as a former or potential
victim whose heroic status is hard-won and liable to be revoked,
particularly when he falls into the clutches of a treacherous woman
[Fig. 47].

In addition, the nose slitting in Chinatown is so sudden, disproportionate,
and graphic that it marks a disturbingly absolute contrast
with the serene California landscape through which Gittes has been
moving. The abrupt outburst of violence is Gittes’s first glimpse of the
nightmare world lurking beneath the painterly surface of Chinatown’s
widescreen visuals. In the most shocking touch of all, the character
who slits the hero’s nose is played by the film’s director, Roman Polanski,
who brings to it a dark history of his own. Born in Poland, Polanski
was eight years old when his parents were forced into the concentration
camp where his mother soon died. Escaping from Cracow’s Jewish
ghetto, he wandered the wartime countryside seeking refuge with
a series of Catholic families. Although he survived to be reunited with
his father when his camp was liberated, he never forgot the episode
in which German soldiers pretended to use him for target practice.
47. Chinatown: The disfigured nose of Gittes (Jack Nicholson) marks his vulnerability
and rationalizes his suspicions of treacherous women.

Throughout Polanski’s early films, a deadpan sense of absurdity is
linked to unbridled terror in the manner of Jerzy Kosinski’s Holocaust
novel The Painted Bird. A few years after Polanski’s award-winning surrealistic
short Two Men and a Wardrobe (Dwaj ludzie z szafa, 1958)
brought him to international notice, his first feature, Knife in the Water
(Nóz w wodzie, 1962), established a tone of lowering, often blackly
comic menace he broadened in both Britain (Repulsion, 1965; Cul-de-
Sac, 1966; Macbeth, 1971) and the United States (The Fearless Vampire
Killers, 1967; Rosemary’s Baby, 1968). His acknowledged specialty was
brooding tone poems that seemed to translate Poe’s unity of effect into
cinematic terms. Already his literal transcription of Macbeth, which
treated Shakespeare’s supernatural horrors as metaphors for the normal
transfer of power, had confirmed his reputation for onscreen
violence. Yet Polanski, as later films from The Tenant (1976) to The
Ninth Gate (1999) would confirm, was more often a poet of anomie who
preferred to keep violence, as in Rosemary’s Baby, largely offscreen,
reserving it for moments in which it expressed and released, for example,
the pent-up psychological tension of the fearfully repressed heroine
of Repulsion. It is all the more gruesome and ironic, therefore, that
here, in his first film following the ritual murder of his actress wife,
Sharon Tate (the star of The Fearless Vampire Killers), by Charles Manson’s
deranged crime family, he casts himself not as the victim of
senseless violence but as its perpetrator, marking a confusion between
villains and victims at the heart of his distinctive contribution
to the private-eye genre.

The director’s attack on his star, the first extended nighttime sequence
in the film, marks a pivotal point in the film’s visual design as
well. Although the events thus far have taken place over at least three
days, they have been shot as if over a single extended afternoon interrupted
only by Mulwray and Gittes’s nocturnal vigil at the spillway.
Similarly, the two days that remain in the story’s time scheme will be
compressed, after Gittes’s lunch the following day with Evelyn’s father,
Noah Cross (John Huston), into a single endless night, as exterior
skies will gradually darken, horizon lines will rise, color palettes will
shade to oppressive monochromes (especially during Gittes’s visit to
an orange grove), and the spectacular interior depth characteristic
of the film’s early scenes will shrink as claustrophobic interior spaces
(most memorably in the tightly framed interiors at the house of Evelyn’s
late impersonator, Ida Sessions) close in around the hero.

This sense of creeping enclosure is emphasized in several ways.
When Gittes returns to the Department of Water and Power to accuse
Mulwray’s deputy, Russ Yelburton (John Hillerman), of having set up
his boss for the scandal Gittes’s investigation unleashed in order to
discredit him and take over his job, he discovers that Mulwray had
once owned the city’s water supply in partnership with patriarchal
Noah Cross. Then, smilingly accepting Gittes’s “nasty reputation,”
Cross offers nothing to allay the detective’s suspicion of having been
a cat’s-paw in a conspiracy to destroy Mulwray – only a handsome
amount of cash to “just find the girl” with whom Gittes had photographed
Mulwray, and an ominous view of Evelyn, his daughter:
“You’re dealing with a disturbed woman who’s just lost her husband.
. . . You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me,
you don’t.” Evelyn’s own attempt to hire Gittes to solve her husband’s
murder is undermined by the telltale twitches that more and more often
cross her beautiful but no longer placidly reposeful face.8
Gittes’s attempt to track down the reason for Mulwray’s murder
takes him from the Hall of Records to a sun-parched fruit grove in the
valley – where his car is literally trapped amid rows of orange trees –
and to the Mar Vista Inn and Rest Home, where dozens of fading old
men and women sit and doze, pinch the nurses, or work on a patchwork
quilt, unaware that the county records to which Ida Sessions
alerted Gittes identify them as the proprietors of a fifty-thousand-acre
empire that would be fabulously valuable if current plans to bring water
to the valley were completed. Each stop in this stage of Gittes’s
journey of discovery is organized around images of complicit mortality.
Together they provide an ironic critique of the opening identification
of Los Angeles with the new Eden, replacing the picture-postcard
exteriors and spacious interiors with landscapes ripe with intimations
of death, the corrupting force of money and culture, and the fragile
natural resources – here figured most powerfully by the ubiquitous images
of water – despoiled by human machinations.
Gittes’s far-reaching odyssey over the external landscape, however,
only begins a voyage of self-discovery that intensifies when he takes
Evelyn Mulwray to bed. Everything he has done up to this point in the
film has been eminently consistent with his role as a vintage thirties
private eye. Though he is more brash and coarse, more self-centered
and even stupid than Bogart’s heroes, his feral intelligence, his eye for
the main chance, and his suspicion of women mark him as the legit-
imate descendant of Marlowe and Spade. But just as Marlowe’s refusal
to be bought off by Vivian Rutledge marks a turning point in The Big
Sleep – the moment at which Marlowe stops acting as the Sternwood
family’s hired help and begins to act like an isolated, impersonal instrument
of justice – Gittes’s new status as Evelyn Mulwray’s lover
marks a crucial stage in his relationship with Evelyn and in his status
as a hard-boiled hero. From now on, Gittes will not simply follow the
self-righteous professional code of the incorruptible private eye; beneath
his shop-soiled cynicism, he will disclose surprisingly quixotic
depths of idealism toward the client he loves but cannot trust. The
fragility of their relationship is indicated by how early their lovemaking
comes in the film: far too soon to give it the terminal, perhaps redemptive
force that it would carry at the conclusion.

Instead of being sanctified by the romantic pairing of the scrappy
detective and the safely domesticated heroine, as it is in Philip Marlowe’s
first four screen incarnations (Murder, My Sweet; The Big Sleep;
Lady in the Lake; The Brasher Doubloon, 1947), the ending of Chinatown
is defined by a pair of horrifying revelations: first Evelyn’s sobbing
confession that the mysterious young woman with whom Gittes had
photographed Mulwray was not simply “my sister” or “my daughter”
but “my sister and my daughter,” the product of Evelyn’s incestuous
union with her father; then Cross’s guileless confession that he killed
Mulwray to cover up his involvement in a scheme to inflate the value
of outlying land he has secretly purchased by manipulating the
Los Angeles water supply in order to force the expansion of the city’s
boundaries. Asked by an incredulous Gittes what more he can possibly
hope to buy with whatever additional money he can amass from
this fraudulent scheme, Cross replies, “The future” – revealing for the
first time the link between his two monstrous crimes: incest with his
daughter and land fraud on an epic scale. Cross, whose first name invokes
the patriarch of the Flood (a role already played by Huston in
his own 1966 film version of The Bible), has “water on the brain” – a
phrase Gittes used to describe the son-in-law he’d been tailing. Cross,
however, has his daughter on the brain as well. The link between water
and daughter is a fertility run amok under Cross’s monstrously
paternal determination to control the future of his family and his city,
whose destiny he wishes to guide with a fond solicitude ultimately unmasked
as incestuous. As a monster who gives new resonance to the
term “city father,” Cross reveals the catastrophic sexual and social
power of paternity gone mad in the climactic street scene in the city’s
Chinatown, in which Evelyn, fleeing with her sister-daughter Catherine
from the patriarchal monster she has just failed to kill [Fig. 48], is
killed by a police officer’s warning shot.9

Why does Gittes, with the best will, fail in his attempt to help Evelyn
escape her father and the patriarchal law he has suborned? As he had
earlier told Evelyn, that’s just the way it is sometimes; it’s the jinx of
Chinatown, where he once before lost a woman he was trying to help.
The broad implication of Gittes’s remark is that Chinatown is his
whole world, a place where nothing ever goes right; but the film offers
several more probing explanations for Gittes’s failure. A former owner
of the city’s water supply, a man who has committed incest with his
daughter and presumably has designs on his granddaughter as well,
has killed his daughter’s caretaker husband in order to push a fraudulent
and unsafe dam through the city council. The new Chief of Water
and Power is in Cross’s pocket; the police indicate they are willing
to join him. Everywhere Gittes turns, he is met by more conspirators
and musclemen, from Cross’s hireling Mulvihill and his knife-wielding
48. Chinatown: The desperate Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) as the hero
last sees her, with Katherine Cross (Belinda Palmer, left).
companion to the white-haired director of the Mar Vista Inn and Rest
Home. Even the elderly residents of Mar Vista are unwitting participants
in the scam. Moreover, when Gittes meets the orange growers
Cross’s people are driving from their land, perhaps the only truly innocent
victims in the film, they turn on him in a rage and beat him. It is
no wonder that his credentials as a white knight cannot survive such
an onslaught.

As the film’s seductive visual design makes clear, nature itself is
against Gittes. He is doomed not simply by the conflict between nature
and culture figured by the fight over the dam and the gradual narrowing
of the film’s widescreen vistas till even the final street scene
traps the characters, but by the fact that the natural world, through
which he thinks he is free to move in the film’s spectacular opening
sequences, is already a commodity corrupted by acculturation. Father
figures as different as Cross and Mulwray have engineered the naturalseeming
landscapes as brutally as they have manipulated Evelyn,
whose name marks her as a daughter of Eve in more ways than Gittes
can understand. His only choices are to become a monstrous father
like Cross or to follow in substitute-father Mulwray’s steps as a victim.

Gittes is trapped, finally, by the film’s historical roots. Setting the
film during the period invoked by so many earlier private-eye films, a
move that casts such a nostalgic glow over its opening scenes, ends
up working powerfully against Gittes, for it ensures an outcome he is
powerless to prevent. Just as the recursive flashbacks in films noirs
cast a noose around the heroes caught in plots their voice-over narration
already recognized as traps, California’s history becomes a fatal
flashback for Gittes – an image made even more powerful by its frankly
mythic roots in the hard-boiled hero’s heyday, years after the actual
Los Angeles water scandals of 1923, but long before viewers might
have assumed the modern urban rot that marks the hard-boiled genre
set in. Viewers know from the first that Gittes is trapped in history. No
matter what he does, Los Angeles will end up building the dam, annexing
the valley, and enriching a few visionary conspirators; the battle
between farmers and city dwellers over water rights will continue to
the present day; and the city’s political future will be dominated, like
its past, by greed and the lust for power. In philosophical terms, tracing
the city’s corruption back to its founding years creates a growing
sense of fatalistic doom surrounding the embattled hero; in mythic
terms, California’s history as a second Eden has included monstrous
serpents from the very beginning; in pragmatic terms, Gittes is neither
smart enough nor powerful enough to prevent the rape of the valley
by a power broker whose ultimate aim is to control the future. The
tide of history cannot be stemmed by a single hero, however noble.
Not that Gittes is the noblest hero under the California sun. He is
hotheaded, venal, crude, and, like Mike Hammer, too busy calculating
the angles ever to see the big picture. It never occurs to him to question
the relationship between Mulwray and his mysterious companion.
He pries Evelyn’s darkest secret out of her in a mere defensive gesture,
in order to defend himself from the victimhood of arrest. Even
knowing that Noah Cross has masterminded a gigantic fraud against
the city, he still naïvely thinks he can face him down, first confronting
him without weapons or backup, then shouting Cross’s guilt at police
officers determined to ignore him.

Gittes fails, however, not because he is a poor specimen of the private
eye, but because he is a perfect specimen. His cynicism, his impulsiveness,
even his bullying brashness, makes him good at this job.
He probably would never have looked beyond the story Ida Sessions
told him if he were not so easily inflamed and so heedless of his own
safety. Gittes’s failure therefore amounts to a critique of the whole
tradition he incarnates, because despite his grating lack of polish, he
shares the features that make most private eyes successful.
What he does not have is a way of thinking about other people as
people. He is egregiously blind to the true nature of the gentle dreamer
Hollis Mulwray. More damningly, he never appreciates Evelyn Mulwray’s
complexity. Since he persists in treating her only as a suspect
in a case, he can think of her only as innocent or guilty. When she acts
innocent, he treats her with tender concern; when she acts guilty, he
recoils in baffled fury. Since the many lies Evelyn tells him mark her
as a femme fatale, Gittes generally treats her as one, following the resolutely
present-tense orientation of all private-eye films in not asking
why she is behaving as she does, or what claims she might have on
him despite her complicity. Echoing Spade’s climactic remark to Brigid
when she asks him if he loves her (“I won’t play the sap for you”),
Gittes repeatedly turns against Evelyn because he fears becoming her
victim. Even his tenderness toward her works against their union, for
it reveals a vulnerability he must cover up by outbursts of rage.
Gittes never sees that it is not necessary to whitewash Evelyn to understand
her. Certainly she is deeply complicit in her husband’s murder.
She has known for years what a monster her father is, yet does
everything she can to protect him because of the secret they share.
When she tells Gittes about her relationship with her father, he immediately
switches gears, thinking of her as a victim rather than a femme
fatale, despite the fact that she does nothing but shake her head when
he asks if her father raped her.11 In truth, Evelyn is neither femme fatale
nor victim; she is a woman whose childhood has left her with a
fatal attraction for powerful men – Cross, Mulwray, Gittes himself –
who cannot protect her from themselves, a woman whose deepest secret
is that her entire identity depends on men. For all his righteous
indignation at Noah Cross, Gittes never realizes the extent to which
his relationship with Evelyn, which turns into an equally devouring,
equally disastrous love, echoes her father’s. This pairing of hero and
villain, together with the film’s presentation of the femme fatale as the
ultimate victim, is its most annihilating condemnation of the private
eye’s masculine heroism. In what amounts to a historical summary of
the hard-boiled hero’s progress from Philip Marlowe’s masculine heroism
to Mike Hammer’s hypermasculine hysteria to the paralysis of The
Conversation’s Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), Chinatown suggests that
the irreducible complexity of the people pressed into service as suspects
and criminals and detectives, and the irreversible contamination
of natural resources by cultural imperatives, guarantee the failure
of any possible quest for justice and truth.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org