#21 ‘Chinatown’
Misogyny, Murder, and the Myth of the Male Martyr
Chinatown (1974) is Roman Polanski’s sun-scorched noir nightmare about corruption, incest, and water rights—because nothing says hard-boiled like municipal infrastructure. It’s hailed as a cinematic masterpiece: moody, masterful, and mature. But let’s not confuse complexity with moral clarity. This is a film that cynically lays bare the rotted heart of power—and then carves its initials into the body of a brutalized woman, just to make sure you feel something on the way out.
Jack Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, a private eye with a fedora full of cynicism and a libido he can’t keep holstered. He swaggers through 1930s Los Angeles, a city oozing sun, secrets, and systemic rot. He gets hired under false pretenses, uncovers a conspiracy involving land fraud, drought manipulation, and incest, and slowly realizes—gasp!—he’s in way over his smug, jaded head.
But while the film sells itself as Jake’s moral awakening, the real story, the only story with real stakes, is that of Evelyn Mulwray. Faye Dunaway gives a devastating performance as a woman trapped in a web of male violence, sexual abuse, and generational trauma. She’s fragile and fierce, desperate and dignified, and still the film treats her as a puzzle to be solved, a cipher for Jake to crack.
And crack her, he does—literally and figuratively. Jake slaps her repeatedly in the infamous scene, demanding “She’s my sister! She’s my daughter!” like a twisted refrain. And what’s the emotional payoff? Nothing. No comfort, no reckoning—just more violence, more silence, more trauma draped in moody brass and chiaroscuro shadows.
John Huston plays Noah Cross, Evelyn’s father and the film’s villain—an unrepentant symbol of patriarchal rot who buys land, politicians, and access to his own daughter’s body with the same sick ease. He’s a monster without fangs, smiling through his sins like he’s hosting a dinner party. And the film’s final act? He wins. Evelyn dies. The system closes ranks. And Jake stares blankly while some guy utters the most infuriating line in cinema history: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
What does that mean, exactly? That systemic abuse is inevitable? That the city’s corruption is just part of the landscape, like palm trees and smog? The line has been quoted endlessly as a shrug-shaped monument to nihilism—but it’s not profound. It’s cowardice masquerading as depth. It’s what happens when a story dismembers its women, then asks us to reflect on the male detective’s feelings about it.
Yes, the film is exquisitely crafted. Yes, it’s one of the great American noirs. But underneath the brilliance is a festering rot—of women used as metaphors, of trauma turned into aesthetic, of justice sacrificed at the altar of fatalism.
3 out of 5 oranges
(One for Dunaway. One for the cinematography. One for the unflinching bleakness, even if it hides behind poetry. The rest was washed away with Evelyn’s blood and any hope that noir could be anything more than tragedy dressed up in trench coats and lipstick-stained glasses.)
