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Jamie DonohueDr. LurieENGL 368: History/Aesthetics of Film25 April 2008

Chinatown and Jake Gittes’ Quest for Traumatic Mastery

This paper will explore the character of Jake Gittes in Roman Polanski’s 1974

film Chinatown. Primarily, this paper is concerned with the role of historicity and trauma

within the male psyche of Jake. American involvement and conflict in Southeast Asia—

Vietnam specifically—weighed heavily upon the American consciousness and the effects

of this war are seen indirectly throughout the film. While classic film noir was concerned

largely with the effects of World War II on America, Polanski’s neo-noir takes many of

these classic aspects and alters them to apply to this situation. Where classic noir was

characterized by what John Cawelti calls the “detective hero,” Polanski’s protagonist

“demythologizes” these tropes in a way that relates directly to what America had

experienced in the Vietnam War. However, while there certainly were differences

between World War II and Vietnam’s effect on the American consciousness, certain

aspects remained unchanged. This paper will examine how the demythologized detective

hero Jake Gittes is affected by the trauma of Vietnam in a way that highlights the

timelessness of historicity while simultaneously embracing the generic transformation

discussed by Cawelti.

First, Cawelti’s theory on Chinatown as an example of generic transformation will

be analyzed and applied to Jake. Then, the general historical foment of the time,

emanating from Vietnam, will be discussed. Next, Kaja Silverman’s arguments on the

effects of trauma on the male psyche, stemming from her analysis of several World War

II-era films, will be explored in anticipation of applying them to Jake—a post-Vietnam

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examination. Finally, the theories and assumptions laid out in these three sections will be

collected and focused on Jake Gittes’ own quest for the “truth” and subsequent

discoveries within the film.

In his essay, “Chinatown and Generic Transformations in Recent American

Films,” John Cawelti analyzes the classic film noir myth of the “hard-boiled detective

story” (243). According to Cawelti, several recent American films exhibit what he calls

“revisionist modes,” which are the burlesque (251), nostalgia (253), demythologization

(254), and reaffirmation (258). Chinatown, according to Cawelti, invokes several

elements of the classic film noir “hard-boiled myth,” but deviates from these modes that

we—as the audience—have come to expect, giving off the “feeling of one myth colliding

with and beginning to give way to others” (244).

Chinatown, through this invocation of the classic myth, shows the audience that

these characteristics—the hard-boiled detective who is able to confront injustice and re-

align society—are “the embodiment of an inadequate and destructive myth” (254).

Classic noir typically fails to confront these realities. For example, Sam Spade in The

Maltese Falcon and Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity both come out as righteous

upholders of moral and social order. Polanski’s film, however, shows us a “universe so

steeped in ambiguity, corruption, and evil that such individualistic moral enterprises are

doomed by their innocent naïveté to end in tragedy and self-destruction” (254). While

the classic noir detective-hero is able to solve the crimes of an individual and bring that

person to “justice,” Polanski’s detective “encounters a linked series of criminal acts and

responsibilities,” a corrupt society in which evil goes unpunished (245). This difference

is what makes Chinatown a neo-noir.

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Jake Gittes embodies both the demythologized detective-hero and the burlesque

revisionist mode discussed by Cawelti. In this burlesque, where “elements of a

conventional formula or style are situated in contexts so incongruous or exaggerated that

the result is laughter” (252), Jake is a man who claims, as the classic detective hero

would, that he lives by a certain moral code. However, money, not justice, is Jake’s

motivation. When Jake’s partner Duffy asks him what he will do if he finds the person

responsible for stealing Los Angeles’ water, Jake responds that he will “sue the shit out

of him.”

While post-World War II American audiences might still have believed in a world

where moral order prevailed over chaos (despite the destruction witnessed during the

war), Vietnam presented the American consciousness with a new Weltanschauung, one in

which the “truth” is not easily ascertained, and when discovered, may be too horrible to

witness. It is because of this new consciousness that Jake cannot be a “classic” film noir

detective, and the “myth” of the detective hero is demythologized.

America did not finally leave Vietnam until April 1975 with the fall of Saigon,

almost a year after Chinatown was released (though most combat units had been

redeployed to the United States prior to this). While the war itself is never explicitly

mentioned in the film, its effects on the American consciousness of the time exist at its

margins as they did in many films that expressed the general foment of the period, such

as The Deer Hunter (dir. Michael Cimino, 1978). While these films dealt explicitly with

Vietnam, Chinatown leaves the source of American societal distress nameless—perhaps

because Polanski’s film did not have the luxury to have been released after the war was

over, and America was allowed more time to come to grips with post-war “fall-out.”

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Chinatown, within Los Angeles, exists in the film as a metaphorical Southeast

Asia in that, as a reflection of American foreign policy decisions during the war, we do

not know or understand what happens there and there is no clear delineation between

good and bad. In Michael Eaton’s book Chinatown, he writes that Robert Towne, the

writer of the film, got the idea for the title from a police officer who said that in

Chinatown, “‘You don’t know who’s a crook and who isn’t a crook…So in Chinatown

they say: just don’t do a goddamned thing’” (13). Jake hints at this sentiment, in a

slightly different context, when he asks Ida Sessions—who is posing as Evelyn Mulwray

and asking for an investigation into her husband’s alleged affair—if she knows the

expression, “let sleeping dogs lie,” and again when he tells Evelyn that, in Chinatown,

policemen did “as little as possible.”

Despite Jake’s claims, he continues to seek the “truth” in solving the film’s

mystery, not unlike American assumptions during Vietnam that America was the

“answer” or “key” for everyone else—that our morals and beliefs were superior and

should be imposed on others. Repeatedly, Jake believes he knows the “truth” and can

solve the mystery, but, much like America’s foreign policy efforts, his claims only result

in his being further ensnared in the vast web of corruption and evil surrounding Los

Angeles. Even in the final shot of Jake, after Evelyn has been killed and Escobar has told

him to go home, he turns as if he wants to say something—he still has not learned that, as

his partner reminds him, “it’s Chinatown.”

The final, and perhaps most important link to Vietnam never directly mentioned

in the film is the role of the returning soldier. Unlike World War II, when veterans were

welcomed home with massive parades and fanfare, soldiers returning to American society

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from Vietnam were many times greeted with an entirely different reality. Often

mistakenly blamed for failures in elected political leadership, many soldiers were

publicly insulted and greeted with a pervasive attitude that their suffering and trauma in

Vietnam had little meaning or import back in the United States. Soldiers often felt that

the American public—and they themselves—did not understand what was happening in

Vietnam, and it became a difficult subject for many to discuss. This is hinted at in

Chinatown, when Evelyn asks Jake about his time in the police department. Repeatedly,

he avoids her questions, indicating that this is not a time in his life that he wishes to

revisit.

It is this idea of the soldier returning from war that brings in the theory of trauma

and its effect on the masculine identity discussed in Kaja Silverman’s book Male

Subjectivity at the Margins. In her opening chapter, “Historical Trauma and Male

Subjectivity,” Silverman discusses the effects of trauma on the male identity and applies

Sigmund Freud’s theory of mastery through repetition, as explained in Freud’s “fort/da”

story, to several films released in the wake of World War II. While her essay explicitly

deals with these films, her theories on trauma and male identity are applicable to Jake

Gittes in Chinatown. Silverman defines “historical trauma” as:

A historically precipitated but psychoanalytically specific disruption, with ramifications extending far beyond the individual psyche…any historical event…which brings a large group of male subjects into such an intimate relation with lack that they are at least for the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant fiction. (55)

This traumatic event is especially applicable to persons involved in combat, and has an

acute ability to “interrupt or deconstitute male identity” (55).

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Silverman goes on to explain Freud’s theory dealing with victims of “war

neurosis” as explained in Freud’s “fort/da” story. In this story, the young boy repeatedly

reenacts his mother’s disappearance in an effort to understand and master the

“unpleasure” they have created. Silverman quotes Freud, writing “‘At the outset he was

in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it,

unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be

put down to an instinct for mastery…’” (Freud, 16 quoted in Silverman, 57). This

repetition and subsequent shift from passive to active participant binds the experiences of

the subject and allows for his “integrating them harmoniously into his psychic

organization” (57).

However, as Silverman notes, the problem with Freud’s theory is that the subject

is involuntarily compelled to repeat these experiences in a manner that is inherently

passive. Silverman links this passive obligation to repeat traumatic experiences with the

death drive, which she defines as seeking “to reduce the organism once again to

nothingness, and so poses a radical challenge to the organization of the psyche…the

compulsion to repeat experiences of an overwhelming and incapacitating sort—

experiences which render the subject hyperbolically passive” (58). This repetition

disguises itself as a means of asserting control and attaining mastery—the armor of the

masculine ego—but instead destroys control in a manner that exposes a void, or “abyss,”

upon which male mastery rests (58, 64).

Silverman goes on to explain that war neurotics suffer “more precisely from

‘reminiscences,’ i.e. from the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences” (60). This

compulsion stems from the masculine desire for control (i.e. mastery) that is especially

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vulnerable to, and is confronted by, the “unbinding” effects of war and subsequent “lack”

that is presented (61). While the soldier is in battle, Silverman claims, “binding” at the

group-level takes place between multiple male soldiers, and protects the individual from

confronting this dismantling and “lack.” However, upon his return to society, the soldier

is no longer protected by his comrades and is exposed to the “abyss” upon which his

masculinity is dependent as a result of the trauma of war (63). This masculine fear of

lack, the disintegration of the ego reliant upon the “illusion of control,” manifests itself in

the “impairment of his anatomical masculinity,” or physical integrity (62).

Silverman then explains the “trauma” of the male’s confrontation with his own

superfluity within society—the society for which he was involved in battle—and how it

is especially traumatic if he finds himself replaced by a woman (53, 63). Here, Silverman

deals specifically with the issue of women in the workplace that arose during the Second

World War (i.e. Rosie the Riveter). This issue was of particular importance to her piece

on World War II-era films and may seem unrelated to a film such as Chinatown, released

nearly thirty years later. However, several issues arise in the relationship between Jake

and Evelyn that indicate a continued struggle stemming from the masculine trauma of

superfluity and replacement by women that will be explored.

After examining these three areas, questions arise surrounding Jake’s place within

the film. Is he the “demythologized” detective-hero, a Vietnam allegory, or the victim of

a masculine identity crisis stemming from some sort of trauma? It seems that

Silverman’s view of Gittes would align him with earlier classic detectives, such as Keyes

and Spade, and form a direct link to Vietnam, not as the neo-noir protagonist seen by

Cawelti. However, Cawelti’s examples of Chinatown as a significant revision of the film

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noir genre cannot be ignored. In attempting to apply aspects of all three of these topics, a

different Jake Gittes comes to light.

First, as Cawelti says, Jake is a burlesque of the classic detective hero. From the

start, Polanski leads the viewer to believe that this will be a classic film noir by using

many of the “classic” tropes. In the opening scene, after Jake has revealed to Curly his

wife’s infidelity, Curly is distraught:

Jake: All right, enough is enough. You can’t eat the Venetian blinds, Curly. I just had them installed on Wednesday.

As Cawelti’s definition of burlesque suggests, Polanski takes the trope of using Venetian

blinds to create unsettling lighting effects and makes a joke of them.

However, Cawelti’s discussion of demythologization and burlesque runs on a

deeper and darker level. As Cawelti notes, Chinatown displays Polanski’s sense of an

evil universe (Cawelti, 254), but Cawelti never explicitly delves into this universe. Why

is it that Jake cannot be a classic hard-boiled detective like the earlier heroes? What is it

that keeps him from attaining this status?

It is in asking these questions that Vietnam and Silverman come into the

discussion of Jake’s status as a “failed hero.” Chinatown is Jake’s Vietnam—it is a place

he served in an authoritative capacity, and to which he does not want to return. This

feeling almost surfaces in the intimate scene between Jake and Evelyn in which Jake’s

vulnerability is almost revealed:

Evelyn: What were you doing there?Jake: Working for the District Attorney.Evelyn: Doing What?Jake: As little as possible.Evelyn: The District Attorney gives his men advice like that?Jake: They do in Chinatown.Evelyn: Bothers you to talk about it, doesn’t it?

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Jake: No—I wonder—could I—do you have any peroxide or something?

And, moments later:

Evelyn: So why does it bother you to talk about it, Chinatown?Jake: Bothers everybody who works there…but to me…it was. (shrugs)Evelyn: Why?Jake: You can’t always tell what’s going on there.Evelyn: No, why was it?Jake: I thought I was keeping someone from being hurt and actually I ended up making sure they were hurt.Evelyn: Could you do anything about it?Jake: Yeah, make sure I don’t find myself in Chinatown anymore.

Although Jake never reveals any of the specifics about his time in Chinatown, other than

the fact that he wore a uniform, certain clues throughout the film lend credence to the

idea that he has suffered from some unhinging trauma of the sort Silverman discusses.

The uniform he wore—ostensibly a policeman’s—calls to mind both military uniforms

and America’s perception of itself and its so called “police role” in Vietnam. The fact

that Jake repeatedly dodges Evelyn’s questions about his time in Chinatown indicates that

this is a site of unresolved conflict for Jake, and that he will be forced to confront it again

before the end of the film.

If Silverman’s theory is applied to Jake, then his quest for the “truth” could be

read as his quest for mastery. That is, the viewer can assume that whatever happened to

Jake in Chinatown as a policeman was somehow linked to the pursuit of “justice” and

“truth” by virtue of the fact that he was a policeman. If that is the case, then the

experience he avoids talking about to Evelyn would be the unhinging trauma Silverman

discusses. Because this trauma is directly linked to Jake’s pursuit of the truth, then his

involvement with Evelyn and the surrounding mysterious plot represent the cycle of

repetition towards some manifestation of the death drive. Despite knowing that he should

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avoid Chinatown and Evelyn, Jake is drawn to them because—as Silverman claims—his

masculine identity is dependent upon mastery (i.e. control). However, this repetition, and

Jake’s quest for mastery, is doomed to expose the “void” in his male ego because of its

compulsive, involuntary nature. What separates Jake’s alleged “death drive,” from those

of Swede (The Killers, dir. Robert Siodmak, 1948) or Walter Neff (Double Indemnity,

dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1946), and sets his character apart as a neo-noir detective, is the

fact that he is not destroyed by the end of the film—he is carried off by his two partners.

This subtle difference questions, in some way, the relevance of historicity. If Silverman’s

discussion of post-World War II films is as applicable to Chinatown as it is to The

Killers, or other classic noir, what does this suggest about the timelessness of war,

trauma, and societal reintegration?

Jake experiences the psychic disintegration of his masculine ego, predicated upon

his illusion of control (i.e. knowing the “truth”), as evidenced by the fact that he is never

truly in control. This idea of Jake’s loss of control is seen when he arrives at the

reservoir and makes a derisive comment to Detective Loach. Escobar chides him saying,

“you’re behind the times, Jake.” In the same scene, a police officer tells Jake that he

cannot smoke near the reservoir, but Escobar tells the policeman, “I’ll see he’s careful

and doesn’t burn himself”—again hinting at the fact that Jake is not in control. Perhaps

even more relevant, especially in light of Silverman’s gender discussion, is the fact that it

is Evelyn who is the possessor of the “truth,” leaving Jake figuratively impotent—and

reminding him of his unpleasurable contact with lack. When Evelyn appears, Jake finds

himself replaced by the female and superfluous to society. Evelyn, strangely, is even

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closer to Chinatown than Jake—surrounded by her Chinese servants—and is the one who

must translate for him when she asks, “cherchez les femmes—was there a woman?”

Just as Silverman argues, Jake’s disintegration of the ego manifests itself in a

physical unhinging of the body’s integrity. The wound he receives from the “Man with

Knife” (Roman Polanski) is borne throughout the film as the physical manifestation of

Jake’s attacked and dismantled masculine ego. When we are shown the injury during the

scene in Evelyn’s bathroom in which they are discussing his time in Chinatown, Evelyn

remarks, “That’s a nasty cut, I had no idea.” The fact that Jake allows Evelyn to see his

“dismantled body” in this scene is significant precisely because it plays into the earlier

mentioned assertion that it is during this sequence that Jake is most vulnerable—and it is

during this sequence that Evelyn’s control, and Jake’s superfluity, is clearly set in stone.

It is in this light, using Silverman and Cawelti to view Chinatown in relation to

Vietnam, that the final scene becomes so horrible. Jake had told Evelyn that, “I thought I

was keeping someone from being hurt and actually I ended up making sure they were

hurt,” and we see this played out again, explicitly, as Evelyn flees from her father under

fire from the police. In trying to keep Escobar from shooting at Evelyn, Jake, handcuffed

to Loach, pulls Loach forward so that he can fire the fatal shot, shooting out Evelyn’s

eye. Jake, in a way similar to certain American foreign policy decisions during the

Vietnam War, finds himself doing more harm than good. From Cawelti’s perspective,

this could be viewed as the darkest of genre transformation. In classic film noir, the

detective-hero is never responsible for someone else’s destruction—while Keyes

“catches” Neff, in the end it is Neff’s “fault” for deviating from societal standards that

destroys him—here Jake is directly at fault for Evelyn’s death, as he might as well have

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pulled the trigger himself. Taking Silverman’s argument, the audience sees Jake’s

passive role in the repetition of a traumatic experience—doing “as little as possible.”

While Jake seeks to take on the active repetition that Freud discusses, he is unable to

transition from being a passive participant.

Using these two critics’ work leads to a better understanding of Polanski’s

Chinatown, in which he shows a society that has lost the possibility for redemption. In

order for Jake to find mastery—the classic detective’s role—he must find the “truth,” and

those responsible for breaking the law. However, Polanski presents a society that is

corrupt beyond punishment or justice, where pursuit of the truth only ends in violence. In

trying to achieve this impossible fiction of mastery, an attempt to restore and reintegrate

his masculine control within the “dominant fiction” of American society (Silverman, 54),

Jake becomes another example of a male subject living out the repetition of

overwhelming traumatic experience that makes him a passive participant. What

complicates this understanding of Jake is the fact that Chinatown is not the classic post-

World War II film, but post-Vietnam. While the possibility for reintegration into society

seems achievable in classic noir—where “evil” is punished, and “good” triumphs—

Polanski’s film rejects this possibility’s existence within the corrupt American society of

1974.

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Works Cited/Consulted

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Cape, 1970.Cawelti, John G. “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films.”

Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 227-245.

Chinatown. Dir. Roman Polanski. Perfs. Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway. Paramount Pictures, 1974.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1994.The Deer Hunter, dir. Michael Cimino. Universal Studios, 1978.Double Indemnity, dir. Billy Wilder. Paramount Pictures, 1944.Eaton, Michael. Chinatown. London: British Film Institute, 1997.Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York:

Norton, 1989.Harris, Oliver. “Film Noir Fascination: Outside History, but Historically So.” Cinema

Journal. 43: 1 (Autumn 2003): 3-24. JSTOR. University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. University of Richmond Libraries, Richmond VA. 18 April 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225928

The Killers, dir. Robert Siodmak. Universal Studios, 1948.Lurie, Peter. “Querying the Modernist Canon: Historical Consciousness and the

Sexuality of Suffering in Faulkner and Hart Crane.” The Faulkner Journal. 20: 1 & 2 (Fall 2004/Spring 2005): 149-176.

The Maltese Falcon, dir. John Huston. Warner Brothers, 1941.Savoy, Eric. “The Rise of American Gothic.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic

Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 167-188.

Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992.

I pledge that I have neither given nor received any unauthorized assistance during the completion of this work.

_________________________Jamie Donohue

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