My wife and a friend and I watched "Chinatown" the other night, the Polanski classic. The twists and turns of the plot lost my wife; she slept on the couch. I identified completely with the Nicholson character, private eye J.J. Gittes, a would-be tough guy who’s actually an innocent. The entire dramatic tension of the movie is Nicholson losing his innocence and gaining knowledge of how the world works, till he learns the whole truth at the end and walks away despairing: his rich client Evelyn–Faye Dunaway–had a daughter by her father, Noah Cross, played by John Huston, and Cross is the most powerful man in L.A. and is diverting water for developers and murdering his own son-in-law to keep him from blowing the whistle.
The film has obvious Watergate-era resonance (it was made in 1974) but it’s hard to watch it without finding the sexual politics of it uncomfortable. The most grotesque line in the movie is when Nicholson asks Dunaway if she was raped by her father. (The dialogue is not in the original Robert Towne script.) Her non-answer suggests that she was a consensual partner. But the relationship began when the Dunaway character was 15.
How could she have consented? Well it was likely consensual in Polanski’s mind.
Then when Nicholson confronts the John Huston character over his behavior, Huston says in essence, If you have money and power, it’s amazing what you find you can accept in life. Here’s the script, and the line: "I don’t blame myself. You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they’re capable of anything."
That seems to me to be Polanski’s credo. He’s actually on the side of Huston’s character here. And of course the Faye Dunaway character is killed, for trying to escape the morass. Problematic.
