Trauma and Repetition in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974)

Roman Polanksi’s 1974 film “Chinatown” seems to have little to do with its titular neighborhood, which is the setting for only one horrible and final scene. Chinatown functions instead to represent the traumatic moment that drives this story just because it is hidden from view—a place indecipherable even to the hard-boiled private investigator who has seen it all … the place he doesn’t go … the place that bothers him to talk about … the place where inaction and evasion are the only ways to avoid causing harm. Wes & Erin discuss what Chinatown has to do with “Chinatown,” and how the theme connects the seemingly disparate themes of police work, political corruption, water rights, and incest. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown seems to have little to do with its titular neighborhood, which is the setting for only one horrible and final scene. Chinatown functions instead to represent the traumatic moment that drives the story just because it is hidden from view, a place indecipherable even to the hard boiled private investigators who has seen it all. The place he doesn't go, the place that bothers him to talk about. The place where inaction and evasion are the only ways to avoid causing harm. Today we discuss what Chinatown has to do with Chinatown and how the film connects the seemingly disparate themes of police work, political corruption, water rights and incest. This is Wes Alwan. 0:56 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:03 Wes: So, Erin, it's a movie that nothing really plot wise happens in Chinatown until the very end of the movie. And in the original screenplay, that's not in there. Polanski changed some things and said, well, we got to have a scene in Chinatown. If you're called the movie Chinatown, you gotta have at least one scene in Chinatown. And we learn almost nothing about Chinatown. The one thing we learn is that Jake Gittes, or as John Huston, Mr. Gitts, that he used to work there, something bad happened there, we learned. We just get hints of that. So why is it called Chinatown? 1:44 Erin: I was thinking about that a little bit too. And Jake's casual bigotry, which prevents us from really, or for me anyway, from really developing any firm sort of liking for him. I think we're in sympathy with him for quite a bit of the film. But he's crude and he tells that really nasty joke, which is really stupid. And so I think these things are supposed to trouble our sympathy with him. But anyway, so it seems for him to be a symbol of this kind of corruption, some sort of moral invasion, I suppose, which again, I tie to his sense of bigotry. The fact that he has to return there seems, because it's set up in the dialogue of the film, that he tried to help a woman there and he just ended up hurting her. And this seemed to be the scene of his original sin as a cop as far as the film is concerned. And so because of the circular nature of the film, perhaps it's inevitable that he ends up back there for this final confrontation and that history repeats itself. 2:47 Wes: It's history repeating itself. But if we knew more about that history, it could be a more poignant repetition in the end, right? I mean, It's a horrifying repetition. But if this movie were being made today, you would have seen some flashback at some point to the event to which this is referring. They wouldn't just let that go, and they wouldn't trust the audience to pick up on these little tidbits about what happened in Chinatown. This scene where they're. I forget if they're already in bed. Is this before they sleep together or after they've been chased out of the nursing home? Is that it? And they're having a talk, and Evelyn says, does this usually happen to you, Mr. Gittes? And he says, what's that, Mrs. Mulwray? Well, I'm only judging on the basis of one afternoon and an evening. But if that's how you go about your work, I'd say you're lucky to get through a whole day. By the way, when reading this screenplay, it actually comes across as more funny. It's a great film, but it's an even better screenplay in a way. And it makes me want. We can talk about that later. It makes me wonder about what Polanski was doing with this. But anyway. And he says, it hasn't happened to me in some time. And she's like, when was the last time? He's like, it was in Chinatown. He was working with the district attorney. And she goes, doing what? And he says, as little as possible. She says, the district attorney gives his men advice like that. He says, they do it in Chinatown. And then she says, it bothers you to talk about it. And then they start tending to his nose a bit. And then after that, she asks, so why does it bother you to talk about it? Chinatown, he says, bothers everybody that works there. But to me, it was. You can't always tell what's going on there. 4:30 Erin: Yeah, that's a really significant line, I think. 4:33 Wes: And then he says, I thought I was keeping someone from being hurt, and I actually ended up making sure they were hurt. This is, like, the one place where we get a bit of intimacy, human intimacy, and also transparency, and also some about what's going on underneath everything. Right. 4:50 Erin: Well, it seems that Chinatown is, you know, it's a state of confusion or a place in which things aren't as they seem, both for Jake and for us, because I think we're so often in Jake's position as the viewers. 5:02 Wes: Yeah, he's in every scene, actually. And everything is shot from his point of view. Polanski purposely did that. We see a lot of his back 5:09 Erin: and shoulders when we read the evidence, up to a certain Point exactly the way that he does. Especially because the movie has set both of us up. It set Jake up in his profession, and it sets as people who are watching him in his profession and people who've been to film noir before, to think that this is another straightforward case of adultery. I was really interested this time around in Jake as a character, why he's so rude to the Chinese workers in Mrs. Mulray's house. The gardener and one of the maids, he's nasty to them. And so it seems to me like this idea of Chinatown as a place of moral corruption for him. And, you know, and we never really quite understand why that is or what connection like Chinatown as an idea has with Chinatown as an actual place or Chinatown as a place where Chinese immigrants might live. And that seems to me to be like a really interesting complication in a character who I think we're supposed to like. And I just wonder what to make of that alongside the fact that he's able to weaponize antisemitism against the evil nursing home owner, so that he's sort of able to cleverly use to pull one over on the guy. So he has this awareness of that. But this Chinese bigotry is something that really this time around just troubled my perception of his character. 6:29 Wes: Yeah, I want to come back to that. Let's talk about his characterization and whether we're meant to like him. But just on the topic of Chinatown specifically, you're pointing out something I think is really important, which is that we're not really given any associations for Chinatown other than the fact that he used to work for the District Attorney there and the fact that something bad went down there, and the fact that it's supposed to represent some sort of inscrutability. When he says it bothers everybody who works there, you can't always tell what's going on there. That's one of the very few moments where you see much vulnerability from him. Right. And even the way Nicholson delivers that line, there's something poignant about it, but it doesn't tell us anything else. And of course, I'm sure many critic, many literary critic has talked about, well, the Orientalism of this idea that there's something inscrutable about Chinatown. I went looking for associations like what was Chinatown in LA in 1937? We know the, the film is set in 1937 because of a. You get a glimpse of that in the newspaper. But interestingly, Chinatown didn't exist in 1937. It had just been demolished. There's a two year period where it did not exist because it was demolished for some station or something. Before that, it was almost like a red light district. It was a very seedy, crime ridden type of place, apparently, or at least that was the reputation. And then what it was after that, I think it was really something quite different. I'm not sure. I didn't. I didn't get to that. But in this film, we really just know two things about it. We know Jake's association and then we know that the help live there. Right in the way Jake formulates it. Chinatown is basically where good deeds go to meet unintended consequences, right? He was trying to help someone. In that very attempt to help her or help this person, he got them hurt. Do we know it's a woman in this first case? 8:35 Erin: He says so explicitly at some point. 8:37 Wes: Okay. 8:38 Erin: I don't know if it's just a matter of a pronoun, but he does okay. 8:41 Wes: When it comes to inscrutability, despite the orientalism of that, it is true, right, that what it represents is a kind of unassimilated cultural pocket, or a partially assimilated cultural pocket. So something that is foreign even on home turf, something almost that's undigested, it's got a language that an investigator can't understand. It's hard to tell. Apparently what Jake means is it's hard to tell who's a criminal and who's not. And again, the reputation before the demolition was a kind of seedy red light district. And also it puts a policeman or an investigator in the position of almost being like a colonial occupying policeman, interestingly enough, on foreign ground. So as an investigator, you can't get plugged in to this in the same way. In a way, what an investigator is doing, it's partially social, right? So lieutenant homicide investigator for police department. Ideally, they're plugged into a community in some way so that people will talk to them or at least they have informants, right? They have the necessary relationships and there's even, you know, often some social connection to the. Whatever criminal element is there. So what someone doing that job in Chinatown faces is a culture that he basically can't navigate. So he's essentially flying blind as an investigator. It's hard to tell what's going on, as he puts it. The more interesting significance is the contrast between that and whatever crime is going on in this sort of immigrant neighborhood where there's essentially an underclass, right? You contrast that to the crime of the powers that be and of the founding fathers. This reminded me of the Godfather, where you have immigrants trying to make it in a new place. And in the Godfather, right. The idea is that the justice system as it stands can't do them justice, and so they invent their own. So there's organized crime, and I assume there's supposed to be organized crime in Chinatown that Jake found incomprehensible. The screenwriter Robert Towne actually called Chinatown the American nightmare, as opposed to the American dream. So the American dream. Right. Good intentions are supposed to get you everywhere. You work hard, you play by the rules, and you get ahead. A place like Chinatown, let's say, maybe puts the lie to that. And then there's the larger association to the fact that LA itself was kind of built upon this original sin of stealing water from the Owens Valley from ranchers. Basically, LA agents from LA pretended to be ranchers and farmers and purchased all the land and diverted the water. That really happened. That's not unusual. Right. So there's always this, like, for states, and there's this foundational violence at the origins of things. That's the way societies at some point in history got organized. And maybe it persists in some form. So the inevitable amount of corruption in the government and legal system. So that's what I wanted to put on the table, is just that contrast between crime within an immigrant community being policed by people like Jake, and then the corruptions of the powers that be, which he sort of inadvertently gets involved in investigating in the film. 12:11 Erin: It's occurring to me while you're talking the significance of Curly. I'm wondering about Curly's relationship with his wife and the fact that they seem to live in a nice neighborhood and have been relatively assimilated. It's one of the geniuses of the film that Curly returns to serve a purpose. 12:28 Wes: Mm. 12:29 Erin: You know, like in film noir, it might be typical to see a privatized office in action in the first act of the film, where you'd have, you know, someone coming in, maybe like a sample client before, you know, the main client comes in. And so we think that Curly is just a character set up to show us exactly what it is that Jake does and Jake's sort of manner with him. And so we think that it's pure exposition, I suppose. Though there are some great things in that opening scene that. 12:55 Wes: Yeah, don't eat the blinds. I just had them installed. 13:00 Erin: It's so good. You know, so there's a lot, of course, about sight in that first scene and other things that we can unpack a little bit later. But you don't really know anything about Curly and his background. And then when Jake goes to his house later and Curly serves that practical purpose and we see the wife with the black eye, it becomes obvious that Curly is Italian and that his wife is maybe not Italian. You know, she could be Italian, but she's blonde. And that I wonder now, in light of this conversation, if that interesting cultural difference. He drives up in a neighborhood which could be anywhere, right? It's obviously not in some kind of Little Italy or Chinatown or whatever, you know, it's more suburbanized. But then he walks in and it's like a multi generational household. And there's all this stuff going on in there, which makes it to me obvious that it's an Italian household. And also that his wife is potentially not Italian. And I'm wondering if that transgression, that adultery of the wife is somehow related to that ethnic difference. I feel like now there's something there. And it didn't occur to me until now. And I don't think I even said to myself out loud, oh, Curly must be Italian. I think it was just something that like was flickering in my subconscious as I, you know, as he walks into the house. It didn't, it didn't occur to me. So I really. This is really not even a half baked thought. I wonder about that and the connection with adultery in that relationship. 14:27 Wes: So it sounds like you're relating adultery to cultural difference. 14:31 Erin: I don't know, like no one gets married expecting their wife to commit adultery. It's not as though adultery is an accepted thing in any culture. But it seems as though this wife of Curly's is maybe out of place within this household and maybe even among her own children and her in laws who I think are also sitting around the table. It reminded me of a woman under the influence which came out in the same year. And so the desire for her to have the affair, it seems like a desire to flee the cultural space in hindsight, like a desire to flee this Italian family. A desire not to be assimilated within the pocket, even if that pocket is itself assimilated into the suburban neighborhood. Does that make any sense? 15:14 Wes: Yeah, I mean, and then there's the question of domesticity and domestication and the effect of that on freedom. So one is assimilated into domestic life at a certain point and one is assimilated into relationships through mutual influence. People change each other and so there's a natural impulse to rebel against that. And I think adultery is part of that. This is important, right? Because seemingly he's just investigating these. It's not crimes, right. It's personal indiscretions. It's unethical behavior. So he's gone from the realm of investigating criminal acts to this twilight zone or hybrid realm. He's not a policeman. He can't go out and say, hey, I'm arresting you for adultery. Or, you know, let's take this to the district attorney. It's just giving the information to the aggrieved spouse. 16:07 Erin: That's interesting because one is, as you say, a legal crime. The other is still a crime of some kind of moral nature. So in one instance we have a way with the justice system of dealing with that quote, unquote, immorality. In the other instance we don't. And I'm wondering if the nebulousness of that is reflected in Jake's character where we have this person who on the one hand, I think, conceives of himself as being a good guy, of having a moral code, as these Raymond Chandler noir detectives often do, but who, on the other hand, has these very obvious flaws and who is not extending maybe his moral awareness or his moral capacity equally to everyone. Which you would hope that a cop would do that because he's part of the arm of the law. You would hope in an ideal world that he would not go after one person based on their cultural background over another. Obviously, this is. This is a problem that human beings have. It's as if the nebulousness of Jake's position as a private eye is a literalization, perhaps of the nebulousness of his own blinders or even casual racism or bigotry of some kind, as expressed when he was a cop and which he carries over with him into that realm. 17:30 Wes: He's no longer doing investigations that have to do with the law per se, right? Criminal law and things that can actually be enforced. He's in this nebulous realm of the ethical. And there are no ethical police or investigators. The enforcement can only be within the relationship. And of course, you see, right. Curly is like his wife, I think, is a black eye, right? So Jake at the end sees the consequences of what he's involved in. And this is. There's always the possibility of extra judicial punishment. And there are other noir films, I think, right, in which this becomes a big issue. Like Coppola's The Conversation in which the protagonist. It's a big problem about what's going to happen with his surveillance. Is it going to get people killed? And it has gotten people killed in the past and will get people killed in the future. And one wonders about the relationship between that and Jake's having apparently gotten someone hurt in the past. 18:25 Erin: So The Conversation also came out in the same year. I just want to say, you know, 18:29 Wes: and the other thing, it's a fall from grace, apparently. I think he must have been on the police force or. I don't know if he can be an independent contractor for the DA or how that works, but I assume he had a job with the city that he lost. Maybe their investigators just attached to the da, But I assume that it's the police. He's had some fall from grace, and now he's suffering in that position doing something which is itself a little bit morally suspect and can lead to unforeseen, just as naturally, the kind of thing sharing surveillance with aggrieved spouses that can lead to unforeseen consequences. The very thing that he should be avoiding. Right. He should be avoiding anything that might do that, not worsening his situation by getting into even murkier territory with this stuff. 19:17 Erin: My understanding of his background, and it's entirely speculative, is that he left the police force willingly because he was disillusioned by whatever happened in Chinatown. I don't necessarily have any evidence for that, except for the fact that I think it's within his character to want to become a private eye and to exert the kind of retributive justice that maybe he couldn't exert as a cop. Like, he feels as though he's sort of restoring the moral order now in some sort of meaningful way. Also, the fact that he's interested in publicity and wants to have his picture taken makes me think that he was not dismissed in some way from the police force. He turns towards the camera and gives his information to the camera. When, oh, I forget what scene. I have this image of him turning around. He might be with Mrs. Mulwray and she's walking ahead of him and he turns towards the cameras and is happy to have his picture in the papers. And so I think that if he had been dismissed in any kind of public way or that would have been a matter of public record, if there was some shame associated with his dismissal, then he might not be so eager for publicity. He makes a comment that publicity is good for his work. 20:30 Wes: Yeah, it was probably not he didn't get fired, but that he was disillusioned. It sounds like the trauma of getting someone hurt has something to do with that. This movie, in a way, really is about trauma and about the repetition of that. The tendency of someone to take something traumatic that happened to them and instead of evading it, repeat it, right? This is something. We'll talk about incest later. He's in a very Oedipus like role because he's ensuring that the very thing that he's trying to avoid is actually going to happen again. So what I was thinking of was, if I'm right and you're leaving the police force because you don't ever want to have this traumatic thing happen again, and maybe you say to yourself, all right, I'm never going back to Chinatown. And maybe you blame it on Chinatown, you know, and the inscrutability of things there and the cultural disconnect. And then, of course, you end up right back in Chinatown at the very end of the film. But you say that, and then you say, well, what am I gonna do? And you say, well, obviously, I just have to be a PI it's somewhat safe because it's not about crime per se, and I have some control and I don't have to go to Chinatown and this and that. It's lower stakes. You know, you can see the cynicism, right? The way it's characterized in the beginning. This screenplay is often taught as, like, one of the greatest of all time. So after Curly is trying to eat the blinds in the beginning, Gittes says, all right, enough is enough. You can't eat the Venetian blinds, Curly. I just had him installed on Wednesday. Curly responds slowly, rising to his feet, crying. Gittes reaches into his desk and pulls out a shot glass, quickly selects a cheaper bottle of bourbon from the several fifths of the more expensive whiskeys, which I did not get that from watching the movie until I read that. And I'm like, okay, okay, that's a. There are a lot of great little touches like that characterization, you know. And at the end of this, Curly says, I think I'll kill her. Again, we get pointed to the fact that this low stakes thing into which Jake has cynically retreated is not as low stakes as he thinks. He can get people hurt. He can get people killed by doing what he's doing, and he has to block that out to some extent. In the next scene, he purported. Mrs. Mulwray, just forget about it. Leave it alone. It's not worth it. So he's even trying to dissuade people from using his services, but if they persist just a little bit. Okay, all right, let's do it. Here's my. Here's my fee. Before we move on to the next thing, I want to just bookmark one thing that I know that we will definitely have to talk about. I wanted to connect this to what you were saying about adultery and you were getting at a cultural element of that. But seemingly he's investigating adultery ultimately, and then it becomes official corruption and then it becomes incest. So there's a kind of circle that it goes through. And then there's some relation here to cultural difference in Chinatown, as we've been talking about. But I think we can hit those connections a little bit more towards the end of how it is that incest and water and official corruption and all that stuff actually relate. Because on the face of it, it looks just like a kind of random thing, you know, for him to think that he's investigating official corruption and end up. Which he is. But the more significant thing ends up being the incest of the father. Right. So the father has committed Noah Cross. Right. Speaking of water and the Bible and two crimes, and one of them turns out to be the more important one. But yeah. Did you want to say some more about that first scene in the characterization of Jake? 24:01 Erin: There are a few things that I'm interested in that opening scene. First, that Jake is full of cliches. He says a lot of meaningless stuff. You know, he says to Curly, when you're right, you're right. He says, let sleeping dogs lie to the fake Mrs. Mulwray. Which is, I think, unintentionally, he's being funny there. I don't think it's his intention to be funny, you know, because it's idea that her husband's having an affair. So he says, let sleeping dogs lie. 24:28 Wes: Let me just say one thing about that. So he's telling her to let sleeping dogs lie. You're better off not knowing. That's what he's really trying to tell himself. 24:37 Erin: Right. 24:38 Wes: At least that's the message for him that he's not heeding. So in a way, he's his own soothsayer doing this Oedipus thing whereby he's achieving his fate by trying to avoid it. And I think, you know, the fact that these are cliches is important in that respect because cliche reveals that he's not thinking. It can reveal repression. 24:58 Erin: And I'm even thinking of the idea of the cliche as a form of idiom within the language. So he's reading, and we're reading this opening scene as a typical noir scene. We're reading him as a typical private eye. We have this, of course, the motif of sight throughout the film. So we have these images that are presented to us in the first scene, which are very obviously of Curly's wife having an affair, they're not graphic, but they're rather affronting. I like that. 25:27 Wes: I was going to make a dumb joke. 25:28 Erin: Go for it. 25:29 Wes: A backing. Okay. All right. So that is funny. 25:34 Erin: No, because I had to guess what the joke was, and it was. Oh, my God. Anyway, the idioms that he uses, I'm connecting to the language and the visual language of the film is what we come to expect in film noir. You know, even the Venetian blinds themselves, that Curly. That Curly eats them is funny, but it's this desire to be blinkered or blinded in some way with these blinds, of course. Like, it's in the word, but it's this desire to not know the terrible thing, to keep oneself sequestered or in the dark. 26:04 Wes: He's installed the blinds, and someone is trying to chew them up. 26:07 Erin: He's installed them. Right. And of course, there's irony in this, because it's his job, it's his way of making money, is to let them know the terrible thing. And so we see that there's a kind of generosity in that or a kind of desire to keep people from truths that will harm them. But I think it's related to this idea of idioms which protect us from difficult emotions, perhaps, and which also keep us in expected modes and patterns of behavior and speech. And so when the Chinese gardener, when he goes to Mrs. Mulray's house, says that the water is bad for the quote, unquote, grass. I'm trying to tie this idiom idea to the fact that Jake is then presented with an unusual use of language, which is a result of the language barrier between them, or this reinvigoration with the language, with someone who's not a native speaker using it in interesting ways very often. Like, the last thing you learn when you're learning a foreign language is the idioms in that language. So you're constantly potentially surprising the people around you with the things that you might say in their language. You can't get into those grooves with any kind of ease that other people. It's invisible to them. And so the moment of recognition when Jake realizes what the gardener is trying to say and the fact that it's actually revealing something that was hidden to him in plain sight. 27:32 Wes: Right. And it turns out to be glasses. Right? 27:35 Erin: So it's glasses, but also the fact that the water is salt water, so it's bad for the grass. So he's making fun of him because he's not using the right word. Or because his accent is preventing him from saying his R properly. So he's being really a jackass, you know? 27:51 Wes: So it's a case in which the cultural difference draws his attention to a clue that he wouldn't have seen it without having noticed that difference. 28:00 Erin: And then there's the triple meaning of, well, why is the water bad for the grass? He doesn't realize it until he returns to the house in the third act of the film, when the gardener gives a little bit more information that salt water is bad for the grass. 28:14 Wes: Ultimately, he puts all those clues together to accuse Mrs. Mulwray of killing her husband, when it turns out it's actually the glasses belong to her father. 28:24 Erin: But that's another cliche. He and we as filmgoers expect her to be the villain because she's in the role of the femme fatale. So again, we're reading a kind of idiom into the genre, into the clues that we've been presented with. The only time that this really, I think, just doesn't quite work where we might. And you can argue if you had a different perception. But the only time where I obviously think like, okay, Jake is reading this situation wrong is very early in the film when he first sees Mr. Mulwray at the. What is that? The public hearing? I don't remember exactly what the nature of that event is supposed to be. I think it's a public hearing where Mr. Mulwray comes up to the stage and starts talking about the water and the dam and all that stuff and how the dam is not gonna hold. Looking at him, I'm like, this guy is not having an affair. I can just immediate tell. I don't know if that was the case for you. 29:14 Wes: Yeah, yeah. 29:15 Erin: Of course we've seen the movie before, but Jake has been primed to see him as an adulterer, obviously, because his wife is saying that he potentially is an adulterer. And maybe we're, like, curious. We're trying to figure this out, but to me, it's obvious that he's not. And it's obvious when he's with the young daughter that that is not a girlfriend, but I don't know. 29:36 Wes: Yeah, I don't know. It's been so long since I first saw it. I don't know if I got that or not. I think it's just confusing when on your first scene of the film, you're like, what is going on? Like, he's arguing with this woman. My impression when I first saw it was it just wasn't clear. But One is inclined to believe. Yeah. That he's not really having. I mean, the movie sets you up to be inclined not to think that adultery is actually what the real substance of all this is. 29:59 Erin: Well, actually, it's occurring to me right now, the fact that Mr. Mulwray is accused of adultery with this girl would actually implicate him in incest. It's a misunderstanding. Of course. They think that she's another woman. Really? She's his stepdaughter. I never thought of that before. 30:17 Wes: Right. It's unclear what he knows. Right. We never learn. Who does he think she is, does he think? 30:24 Erin: I think he knows because Mrs. Mulwray said that he took care of her after it happened and I think raised the daughter. Right. Oh, maybe he doesn't know that it's Noah's. Is that what you mean? 30:35 Wes: Yeah. Does he know it's a daughter of incest? I'm not sure, but I think if 30:39 Erin: he did, then things would be different. 30:41 Wes: So he breaks off the relationship with Noah, and so I assume. Yeah. Thinking about that, I think he's friends and partners with Noah, and then they stop talking. So I think maybe the implication is that he does know. But I wanted to go back to something you were saying about language and the blinds, because eating the blinds, right. That's not a real thing people do. It's just a saying, isn't it? So that's not a cliche, but it's a figure. Figure of speech is kind of brought to life by Curly, who's literally eating the blinds and being told not to. Does he actually bite the blinds at one point? I think he does. 31:17 Erin: I think he does. 31:18 Wes: Yeah. 31:19 Erin: So that's when I should have known he's an Italian. 31:22 Wes: And one more thing, you know, that you were making the association between blindness and blinds, you know, and Jake is supposed to be an investigator and trying to see things, but he's significantly turns out to be blind. And his investigation makes him blind. Right. Accusing Mrs. Mulwray, that the clues come together in a way that keep him blind. But I wanted to point to, you know, one more connection to Oedipus, which is that Oedipus, right. Starts out in the position of investigator as well. The city is sick. Do something, Oedipus. You're the leader. Figure it out. So he becomes a private investigator, and really, of course, he's looking for himself. And then in the end, he blinds himself because the thing that he finds is too difficult to bear and to see. And you get the same association with the kind of City wide sickness here with the whole water thing and the official corruption. 32:12 Erin: That's good. I was wondering about. And maybe this is where we can kind of make our transition into this idea of incest. Because I was associating Jake, of course, with this damaged sight, his inability to see clearly. The most obvious Oedipal at the end of the film is of course, when Mrs. Mulwray has one eye shot out. And this is prefigured with a ton 32:37 Wes: of things, you know, the speck in her eye. 32:38 Erin: Yeah, the speck in her eye. Curly's wife's black eye. Even Jake gets when his nose is cut, which is funny, you know, because he's nosy. He gets a black eye on that side, which makes sense. 32:48 Wes: Polanski. Polanski does it to him. Yeah, right. Polanski is the very diminutive thug. 32:56 Erin: Oh, I guess like the fish on the plate, you know, because it still has its head on and, you know, it has the eye on one side of its head. We can only see the one eye. 33:05 Wes: Yeah. Noah says, I'm sorry. Is that okay? I believe they should be served with their head on. 33:10 Erin: And this has nothing to do with anything, but I just. It has to do with bad sight, but it doesn't have to do with the one eye thing. I was thinking about that Mar Vista Rest Home. It means sea view. But it's also potentially, if we take Mar, its English language, meaning it's bad damaged view, bad view home. So anyway, you know, we get all these images of broken glasses and, you know, whatever. At the end when Evelyn's eye is shot out, that sort of identifies her as the Oedipus. And of course, she's the one who's been involved in this incestuous relationship and she's the victim of the film. But how does she then relate to Jake? You know, are all of these symbols merely just externalizations of Jake's psyche in his sort of Oedipus role? Or can we save them from just being victims of Jake's imagination? Here is Evelyn her own sort of Oedipus figure. 34:00 Wes: Yeah. 34:01 Erin: And does she have her own kind of arc rather than everyone just being part of Jake's continual disillusionment in Chinatown? What is her Oedipus or Oedipal role in this film? 34:14 Wes: I think your point is well taken. She's seen that she herself is the one who's seeing the thing that one ought not to see. And so she loses her eye in the same way that Oedipus loses his eye So I think you're right. It applies more aptly to her. But we can speak more generally about trauma, right? So trauma, what does it mean? What is it above and beyond pain? What makes trauma worse than pain or something different or more significant than pain? And the difference is that pain has a history. Pain slides into the past, and trauma is forever present. And part of the reason it's ever present is because the quote unquote thinking of Freud here, psychical apparatus itself is modified or damaged, right? So the eye is a very good metaphor for that. The ego, for Freud was at its most basic level, it's about movement and seeing and navigating the world, navigating reality. And one's ability to do that is fundamentally damaged by trauma. So Freud was thinking specifically about soldiers who came back from war shell shocked and were just having these horrific dreams. And why would anyone have those dreams? Why wouldn't the psyche just be primed to avoid that? Right? We're primed to avoid what's painful and to do what's pleasurable. Why would we keep inflicting that on ourselves? And why do in our lives we have what he calls a repetition compulsion to repeat these painful and traumatic things. And in Jake's case, it's the compulsion to repeat the circumstance in which he hurts someone, even if the trauma actually hasn't happened, right? So even if one has not been the victim of incest, one literally, one can to some extent be the victim of it psychologically with, like, an overbearing parent, for instance. But even beyond that, there's always the threat of it. There's always the taboo. People's lives and psyches get organized to some extent around that taboo and the prospect of trauma. In Jake's case, right, his eyes are damaged from the beginning of the film. In Oedipus Rex, right, Tiresias says, I'm blind, but I can see. I can see what needs to be seen, right? The truth, what's of significance. And you have eyes, but you can't see. So the damage to seeing is caused by this desire to. You want to evade knowing about it. So instead you act it out, you repeat it. And so, yeah, so symbolically, the physical blinding acts out the metaphor in the way that curly eating the blinds enacts that metaphor, that figure of speech. I don't know if any of this 37:04 Erin: is making sense, but it totally does. It's difficult because the crime in this film is so heinous. It's difficult to think about, like, what the psychic solution is then, you know, like how do you stop the cycle from occurring? Like, what should Jake have done? This dualism where we get good and bad eyesight, we also get the bifocals, Noah Cross's bifocals. This idea of taking both the short and the long view. Like, he's interested in the future. He wants the future so he knows what's going on in the present because he's able to control the police force. He's able to, you know, he's successfully enacting his corruption on the city. But it's toward this larger picture of how he wants the future to be or this grander vision. And I'm thinking about this in relationship to being two things at once, having two things at once. And because of the heinousness of the crime of incest, it's difficult to tie these things together in a way that's satisfactory to me. So Jake, you know, on his face we have like the good side of his face and the bad side, which has been marred by the knife. We have the two types of water, the salt water and the fresh water. Again, we have this bifocal thing, seeing up close and seeing far away at the same time. And then we have this idea of like the sister and the daughter. This is where it becomes difficult for me because I'm like, okay, well, it's not like both good and bad. That's just like, you know, that's terrible to connect those two. But two things occurring at once. That Evelyn could be telling the truth about a relationship which is both her sister and her daughter. And I'm wondering how that maybe connects to the significance of incest in the film and the idea that something can be. Obviously incest is disgusting, the crime is heinous. But I'm saying that it connects to this idea of. And maybe good and bad is the wrong terminology to use here, but good and bad seems to be one element of the system of opposites in which the film is sort of working. The grammar of the film and the images of the film are working in. So I don't know how to connect those things. But I'm. 39:00 Wes: Let me go back to. You started out with progress or the idea of Noah with his bifocals, looking to the future. Noah Cross, very apt biblical name, in part because of the water, the flood, but also because that's paving the way for the future. Right. He's going to take everyone on a little ride into the post diluvian world. But yeah, go ahead. 39:24 Erin: Right. And also just that he stands across or astride generations nasty Sorry, go ahead. 39:30 Wes: Right, yeah, good point. This focus on progress. Right. On future, looking towards the future. This is a variation in a way on investigation. Right. So progress is anti incestuous. Let me start out with that. Because it's the opposite of regression where regression is becoming an infant again and going back into the mother's arms. Right. So to speak. And progress is an attempt to break away from that. And sometimes it's manically such, and sometimes it backfires such that what seems like an attempt to break away from the familial fold actually returns one to it. And in Noah's case, as a perpetrator of incest, you can imagine that he's engaged in his own repetition. And so what does he do? He's paving the way for the future by stealing water, which is highly symbolic of incest on a number of levels. Right. Associate water with birth and with the maternal life force. So he's stealing life force and he's stealing the forces of creativity, including the forces that on some larger level have created him. You try to overpower, right. Incest to ultimately represent, overpowering the forces that have created you. Right. Taking them on for yourself. There's a connection here to hubris and ultimately. Right. This is connected to corruption and to taking advantage of one's own. You're taking advantage of these farmers. Ultimately, it's a system that takes advantage of the people. Right. The government citizen relationship is something like a parent child relationship. And when the government is corrupt, it's like the parent that takes advantage of the child. But what I wanted to get at, and I'm not sure how this connects up, you started the whole idea of good and bad with the idea of the fact that he's, he's looking to progress, I think on the good side of things. And I think if I'm right about that, that's spot on. There's this anti incestuous vector which ironically and inevitably this is the edible thing, gets co opted by incestuous forces. So progress should be non regressive, but instead it becomes stealing water. This is what happens to people with malignant narcissism and ambition. Overweening ambition, ambitions should lead you out of the familial fold. But symbolically, if they become overweening and obsessive, they can really symbolically be a way to return to the. The mother that can have incestuous significance. That's part of how I wanted to connect the concept of incest to water and to the idea of official corruption. 42:10 Erin: I'm thinking too about the idea of a cover up, which I think connects with what you're saying a bit. I haven't fully formulated this, so I 42:20 Wes: was drawing a connection between progress in the sense of expanding LA by making water available to it, growing it, nurturing it, and then what Jake is doing. Right. So Jake is investigating things and nominally that brings things to light and it's progressive. Right. Communication is progressive as well, or can be, because it brings things to light, it opens things up, it can lead to growth. Let's put it very simply. That's what ideally an investigation. But in his case. Right. It turns out to be also to be regressive and it's a more dangerous position to be in because it's looking backward. It's the same thing in therapy. It's like you're supposed to be making progress and you have to think about the past a bit and to do some investigation. But if you get caught there and if it becomes part of the repetition, then it's a problem. 43:13 Erin: Well, I'm thinking about so many images of water bursting out in the film too. Even the fact that the dam that burst prior to the events of the film, which killed a lot of people, is the Van der Lip dam. And that word lip and the fact that so much of what's in the story is the character's attempt to contain it. But, you know, eventually it bursts out, like Evelyn not wanting to tell the truth and finally, you know, admitting it in this burst of again, of language in which she has to explain, or she doesn't really explain, but she has to say, she has to make the connection between. That this girl has both relationships to her. Obviously the water being released in that flood which catches Jake in at one point or even when he's in the barbershop, there's that steam coming from the car outside while Jake is getting a shave. And so it seems like nothing stays covered up in this story about progress. Like everything has to be bursting out all over in the final scene when everything happens, you know, out in the middle of the street, because we know that Cross wins and that he will go on to be successful in his various evil deeds. You know, in the end we know that it doesn't matter. Like he's had the police in his pocket, so his corruption can basically be naked at this point. Like there is nothing to cover up anymore. It doesn't matter. 44:32 Wes: Yeah. 44:33 Erin: And maybe that speaks to his futurity and the fact that the progress that he wants to make doesn't require covering things up. That a cover up implies regression, I think, is what you're saying. And he doesn't need. He doesn't have need of that. He can, like the water, just burst forth and keep doing what he's doing. 44:51 Wes: So he can be relatively brazen about official corruption he's involved in. Right. I think that's your point. But he's also. It's pretty brazen for him to try to be the father of the incest daughter as opposed to leaving that alone. Yeah. 45:06 Erin: In the effort to hide her, to go to Mexico to flee so that he doesn't get access to her. He can then, in the middle of a street and in front of a bunch of cops, just grab the daughter and walk off with her. 45:16 Wes: Right. And have them horrifyingly shoot her when he's the villain. 45:23 Erin: I'm wondering, though, about the connection to Jake getting his proverbial hand slapped when he's trying to uncover secrets, like Noah, as if there's a figure of this forward progress. He does get shot in the arm, but otherwise escapes unscathed when it comes to getting what he wants. Jake fools around and finds out, as they say, you know, like, he's nosy. And as a result, he gets his nose cut. And then he has to wear the thing for the rest of the movie. Wear it openly. Same thing with Curly's wife. Right. Like, she then has to walk around with a black eye because of the knowledge of her adultery being learned by her husband. I'm just wondering about that. Like, if his whole business is to uncover these secrets, crimes and everything, why does he have to walk around with a big gash on his nose? Why isn't Noah's hand slapped at the end? Why doesn't he get arrested? 46:16 Wes: Yeah, Noah suffers the trauma of seeing his daughter killed, but it's unclear. It seems like, yeah, he's not gonna suffer any criminal penalties, so there'll never be any official punishment for what he's done. Having Jake walk around with a bandage on his nose for the whole movie is great. He's snooping around, but the nose and the eye are playing a similar role in this context. His snooping ability, his ability to be nosy, I think, as you've already pointed out, has been compromised. And there's the implicit threat of castration, which is what you get for incest. Castration is just the punishment for incest. So the implication is that he's in search of this incestuous circumstance in doing it. He's compulsively doing it as part of a repetition, and it's going to lead to the same traumatic result as it did last time. Ultimately, that's the real the death of Evelyn is the trauma that's prefigured by the nose cutting or the nose cutting is a warning. Right. So he might have heated it. Shall we go to Postscript and let's say what else we have to discuss. I want to talk a little bit about this idea of doing as little as possible in Chinatown and the significance of that. 47:38 Erin: And also we haven't really talked about Evelyn's character or the other Mrs. Mulwray. 47:44 Wes: And you could say maybe a little bit more about film noir, which you're going to know a lot more about than me. And then. Yeah. All right. So thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.