Chinatown

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Liza and the group on 26 August 2015.

Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown

Art:

What a great movie. I'd never seen it before and I was interested in it because Baudrillard was interested in it. But I started watching it from the standpoint of some of the things we've discussed in the project.  

What I liked about it was how J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is such the epitome of that cocky, rigidly white male tragic hero/philosophical subject, and how the vaguely exotic "Chinatown"—though never visited until the final scene—plays the stereotypical role of the inarticulate, fathomless backdrop against which he suffers.  

Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) is a modern Ophelia of sorts, one who has fully plumbed the depths of the formless horror, demonstrated by the fact that she has multiple Chinese servants and a daughter through an apparently consensual act of incest with her father. 

Interestingly, she also has a Oedipal hole in her iris (later, through her eye). Gittes' memories of his own time in Chinatown suggest that he witnessed something—both within and without—that he has since tried to forget. Gittes has tried to "uncollapse" that experience; Evelyn lives within that collapse. 

In short, it's another Nietzschean/Baudrillardian tragedy. And J.J. Gittes reminds me a lot of Will Witkowski.

Will:

Crazy! I just started watching it on Netflix for the first time the other day! Unfortunately, I put it on at 3:30 a.m. and fell asleep while watching it. Time to watch it again! 

Come to think of it, from what I saw, there is also a parallel in the backdrop of at least the beginning, which is that a major metropolis will face total collapse (lack of water). You know, it's San Francisco instead of Detroit, so the crisis is more direct and less interesting than Detroit's looming threat (the lodestone), but still. 

You are right that young Will must have been like Gittes. I wonder what failure after failure would turn Gittes into. 

I think about the idea that the Witkowski family is so vastly important, and that all human beings are so vastly important that Jesus dies for all of us. But then we get all this Horatio Algerian rah-rah pablum all the time about following our dreams and being anything we want and determine your own fate and be a self-made man B.S. and we see ourselves as important for all the wrong reasons and abandon our rightful posts as agents of God's light and wander off into Palookaville with our bindles like we're hot stuff and think we're so important when we're just Goofy slipping on a banana peel. 

And meanwhile, God is still working with us where we're at and we're still so important, even though we're Billy Madison coming down late for dinner after getting into a fight with shampoo and conditioner bottles in the bathtub.