A Discussion of Roman Polanski's Chinatown - 1974

Conspiracy Theory/Conspiracy Fact III

Remember it Jake, it’s Chinatown

I’m re-watching Roman Polanski’s Chinatown for the nth time right now and for some reason it got me thinking about conspiracies again. If you haven’t seen the film don’t read this until you do since it’s full of spoilers and is an essential masterpiece of American cinema.

I’ve written two very limited posts that attempt to provide some insights into how the Kennedy assassinations were carried out and covered up. In those short posts I linked to two important pieces: one by David Talbot and the other by Ron Unz. I recommend these articles to any who missed them but in this post I want to discuss the question from the perspective of business conspiracy as illustrated in Polanski’s masterpiece. The conspiracy in Chinatown centers on the development of California’s water system and agricultural expansion during the explosive growth of that state in the early 20th century.

The writer of Chinatown, Robert Towne, won the Academy Award for this screenplay. He had written a trilogy actually. The first was Chinatown and focused on the California “water wars”. The second was about oil and the third, which was never made, was about land. California land manipulation and speculation is a fascinating subject and is quite topical given the recent suspicious and massively deadly fires in Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui. It appears, similar to the way New Orleans real estate was plundered after Hurricane Katrina, that the Lahaina fire will follow the same disaster capitalist plan. As Chinatown makes clear, disaster capitalism is not a new phenomenon.

In one of the early scenes in the film we get to hear the story of a real dam, the Saint Francis, that failed and killed over 400 people in 1928. In the film the character of Hollis Mulwray is the engineer who built the failed dam. He is under immense pressure from odd segments of the public and an astroturf campaign carried out by unknown backers to build another dam using a similar design. IRL the dam was built at a location where the geological base was unstable because it was far cheaper than the other proposed location in the San Fernando Valley since “The Valley”, as we know it today, was already partially developed and it would cost the city a fortune to buy up all the property there. Fast, cheap and out of control is as American as Charles Manson and somehow always works out in favor of establishment power.

The second of Towne’s screenplays — this one about the filthy California oil business — is The Two Jakes. Jakes was filmed in 1990 and also starred Nicholson. That’s as far as the similarities go compared to Chinatown. The Two Jakes is a godawful travesty in every conceivable way with Nicholson doing his best impression of a cocaine-filled blimp throughout.

Since Towne’s third script about Cali land pirates was never made I’ll point out that you can get an interesting picture of LA land use and corruption (and a lot of other things) during the mid-late 20th century by watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s sleeper hit Inherent Vice which is closely based on the Thomas Pynchon novel. It is another work of art that I plan to write about soon.

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One of the problems we encounter when talking about conspiracies is that they are, by definition, carried out in secret and in most cases all we can really catch is the shadows they cast or worse, their penumbras. We generally only get a few tantalizing factoids we can attempt to string together to form a loose narrative. One that can easily be brushed off as coincidence or, as the CIA calls them, “conspiracy theories”. As if theory never bears anything more than a tenuous relation to fact.

One of the things that makes Chinatown such a masterpiece is that we get to see Jake Gittes slowly piece together just enough to form a vague picture of what’s actually going on without hammering us with every detail and breaking the spell. A conspiracy telling is very much like a ghost story — and the ghost story is all about the spell it casts on the listener: the haunted feeling that tingles the spine and tickles the amygdala’s deepest reaches. A well-told conspiracy story is a kind of spiritual journey into the heart of human darkness and only works if held lightly.

Interestingly, one of the ways coverups of real world conspiracies succeed is by inundating the investigator with so many details and dead-end narrative paths that it exhausts the searcher and bores the audience. Generally speaking, the average normie only pays attention to narratives they can grasp on first listen and too many details or too much complexity ruins it. The 2008 financial collapse was so unintelligible for most Americans that they just turned away in boredom and disgust.

Chinatown avoids this fate by feeding us tantalizing bits slowly and only after first setting up a mysterious plotline having to do with an alleged mistress and a matrimonial client of PI Jake Gittes who turns out to be an imposter; as well as the plotline about the proposed building of the new dam discussed briefly above. These two storylines intertwine and thread through the characters to form a tale of nightmarish sexual deviance and outrageous greed. Both plots swirl around California oligarch Noah Cross, brilliantly played by that giant of 20th century film, John Huston. Cross is a complete monster in both his private and business lives and yet both monsters are very real and credible. The famous line he delivers to Gittes during their second meeting is haunting because it is both a truism and also the cheap justification immoral actors have used for millennia to justify their horrible acts:

See, Mr. Gitts*, most people never have to face the fact that, at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.

*Cross constantly mispronounces Jake’s surname despite the several attempts Jake makes to correct him. At first we think it’s because he’s trying to dominate Gittes but it slowly dawns on us that other people simply aren’t real to him — very much how Hitler was famous for the vague, blurred faces of the people in his paintings. Cross’s world consists entirely of his desires and ambitions and people are either convenient or inconvenient meatsacks to be used or tossed based solely on which category he places them in at the moment. As his daugher Evelyn Mulwray (née Cross) tells Jake, he is an extremely dangerous man.

We are slowly made aware during the film that he killed his oldest friend and business partner, impregnated his daugher, and in the horrific ending sequence we see he is clearly determined to do the same to his daugher-granddaugher. What’s a little water and land theft after that? Faye Dunaway, always excellent, puts in a truly masterful performance as an extremely damaged child of incest who birthed her own father’s daughter and is desperate to keep the poor girl out of his clutches. This plot is enough to make David Lynch blush.

And this horrible nightmare plotting brings me to a compelling question. Why these two plots? Why do we have the sexual predator and oligarchic murderer all rolled together in the archetypal character of Noah Cross? Isn’t this a bit Grand Guignol?

Well, the short answer is, no. Cross’ horrific appetites and schemes are part and parcel of the same man. As Americans we know this character very well, or should anyway. The Rockefellers, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Hearsts and many other titans of banking, mining, media and industry that “built this nation” had some very dark secrets. The story of Sarah Winchester and the Winchester Mystery House who, so the legend goes, was so unsettled by the way her husband earned the family fortune that she built (and continued to build for many decades) the uncanny mansion in a compulsive bid to ward of bad luck may be a media concocted narrative (and may not be). The reality isn’t what’s important. The fact is that great wealth upends the basic priorities of life for those who hold it. Great wealth is a curse far more than a blessing. It has a tendency to twist and distort the souls of those who hold it.

I purposely left out Andrew Carnegie in the above list because he is perhaps the sole example of an American (actually Scottish) captain of industry who, despite the depredations and misery amongst the workers at his massive steel mills, managed to keep some shreds of his humanity intact and built great philanthropic works and institutions that in one form or another live on to this day. He wrote The Gospel of Wealth that argued the wealthy have a serious duty to society to reduce the hardship and inequality experienced by the teaming masses. Recall that when he built his empire we didn’t live in a fiat currency world where trillions could be conjured in seconds on computer keyboards. If he paid far more to his workers than his competitors they could drive him out of business. This of course is a standard truth about capitalism and is one that I argue has far deeper roots in the reality of the limitations of the physical world itself. These days we tend to think that money can do anything but, as we see in the US’s inability to provide artillery shells to Ukraine in sufficient quantities, it cannot conjure up a new industrial base out of thin air.

Amassing of wealth, and the drug-like compulsion that makes it never enough, becomes the sole imperative. The defining principle and foundation for such a family is the wealth itself such that notions of love, loyalty or any notable human moral or familial bond becomes, at best, of secondary concern. Families disintegrate under the pressure generated by all that money. They are often reduced to squabbling factions and a great victory becomes a great tragedy when the reality that no one at all can be trusted begins to sink in. Doris Duke’s horrible murder and ensuing legal battle is just one infamous example of how it can all go horribly wrong. And that’s just the normal kind of perversion nurtured by great wealth and power.

For some, the perversion burrows its way far deeper into the soul, often annihilating it. Asbolute power corrupts absolutely they say. So how does that absolute corruption frequently manifest? Well, we can see it today in the transgender revolution supported by some exceedingly wealthy families. In the case of Noah Cross and Chinatown, we see it at a smaller scope in the way he acts towards his “nearest and dearest”. His faux concern for his “ill” daughter and his whining that he doesn’t have many years left and it’s his right to know (in the biblical sense?) his daughter-granddaughter are all of a piece with his vicious water and land grabs.

In pursuit of the latter he poisons the wells of farmers and murders those who get in the way: over the course of the film we learn in grim detail of his murder of Hollis Mulwray, the engineer he admits “made him rich” and the husband of his daughter who married this much younger woman to protect her from her monstrous father. He also buys up massive amounts of land for pennies on the dollar using cutouts among the dead and dying at a retirement home. The land he buys is both the “useless” land that, at the time, has no irrigation source and that of desperate farmers who find it more and more difficult to keep their farms viable given the well-poisonings and water shortages he is directly responsible for.

He artificially creates the water shortages by dumping thousands of tons of water into the Pacific Ocean. At the same time, the risky new dam he wants built (it turns out Cross is the shadowy figure behind the astroturf dam-building pressure campaign) will not be used to feed more water to the city but will be redirected to irrigate all the farmland he is buying at firesale prices.

So how does he carry out all these plans? He is, after all, only one old man. Well, obviously, he engages in a series of conspiracies. He hires the kinds of men who are willing to do anything for money. This sort of man is never in short enough supply and is often found creeping around powerful men like Cross. They are the kinds of men who are all too willing to assassinate an Archbishop on behalf of corporate interests and drug cartels or, in the clean and crisp US of A, work for corporate firms like the Pinkertons; or are just mean little hireling gun thugs. This type of man performs outsourced wetwork for the CIA. They are drawn to power like moths to a flame (sometimes dying like those moths) and sneer at those who are not: toady creeps that enjoy cruelty. They never rat because they have no conscience that might motivate such a human urge.

In Chinatown we only really see two of these men. One is played to devasating effect by Polanski himself. He is the wiry weasel with no name that slices into Gittes’ nose at the aqueduct. The other is stupid mob muscle Claude Mulvihill. Vincent Brook, author of Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles suggests that Hollis Mulwray is based on real-life water engineer William Mulholland (who built the Saint Francis Dam and who was ruined when it collapsed) but his character is split into the noble and honorable Hollis Mulwray and the thuggish Claude Mulvihill. Brook also states that:

Land syndicate and Combination members, who "exploited their insider knowledge" on account of "personal greed", are "condensed into the singular, and singularly monstrous, Noah Cross”

So this conspiratorial land and water grab was, in real life, carried out by a cabal of wealthy and well-positioned men. The rot at the heart of Chinatown isn’t really in Chinatown at all.

We see such conspiratorial vigor today, in part, in the unfolding saga of the Biden crime family . But the rot is now so deeply embedded that it has spread out amongst all the denizens of the thousands of garish new McMansions of the DC suburbs built on the blood and treasure of the military industrial congressional complex and its never-ending wars. The conspiracies of today make Noah Cross’ machinations seem almost miniscule and insignificant. And yet Cross’ foray into incestuous relations with his daughter are uncannily mirrored in the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley, wherein she states plainly that as a young girl she took showers with her father and confirms her belief that she was indeed molested by him. Her self-confirmed drug abuse and sexual promiscuity all point to this early trauma.

Life is immitating art immitating life all over our asses these days and it’s really not anything I ever wanted to see. Chinatown is a hard film to watch. The scene toward the end where Gittes slaps Evelyn around believing that she has conspired to kidnap her dead husband’s mistress and is using him to shield her misdeeds is especially heartbreaking. When we learn that the “mistress” is actually Evelyn and Noah’s daughter the world starts to spin out. But of course the horror never ends as, in the last scene, Evelyn is shot through the back of her head and out her eye and the film makes clear Cross has achieved all he desires both in his water and land grab and in getting his arms literally around his daughter-granddaughter. Jake Gittes is led away from this horribulous scene in an almost catatonic state by his loyal employees and the sordid history of our land just keeps rolling along like a great and terrible river of grand ambition, horrifying cruelty and bestial, grasping impulses.

When my father-in-law first moved to this country back in the early 1960’s his family back in Britain were deeply worried for him. They loved much about America but were also terrified of our innate cruelty and violence. His initiation into our culture was a decade of conspiratorial assassinations of our last great moral leaders: first JFK, then MLK and finally RFK. Three men we somewhat curiously refer to in this shorthand perhaps because it’s easier for us to live within our culture and ourselves if we reduce them to a kind of synecdoche. I don’t know. I think I don’t want to know.

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Coming soon: a discussion of the film Inherent Vice where we meet Jake Gittes’ successor in so many ways: Doc Sportello.