Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 25

Orientation via Orientalism: Chinatown in Detective Narratives

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of the three texts I have cited, I will be looking at ways in which the deployment of
“chinatown” functions as a site of blockage, and misreadings. I argue that the
“Chinatowns” that feature in these texts are all mobilized as radically “other” and
unknowable spaces that the detective must decode (or, indeed map) to unravel a
mystery and preserve the classic detective text (which always delivers resolution,
after a span of narrative tension and blockage). However, where the classic detective
narrative is usurped, as in the first example of the film Chinatown, “chinatown” is
left as a site of the unknown, and the impotency of the detective - as a subject of
passivity rather than agency - is revealed. Whether or not the detective text is
preserved however, Orientalism functions as the key preserver of the plot. These
narratives need their “Chinatowns” or something like them, and could not exist
without them. This need approximates, on a smaller scale, Said’s notion that
European identity requires, and is set off against, an idea of the Orient (Said 3).

Chinatown: “You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe
me, you don’t.”
Chinatown (screenplay Robert Towne, director, Roman Polanski, 1974) is
usually written of in terms of its relation with the hard-boiled films of the 1940s.
Variously described as a clever pastiche, a deconstruction, and a bitter revision of
the hard-boiled genre2, many film critics are in general agreement that the most
interesting thing about the film is its play on, or usurpation of, the Private Eye
myth of competency and resolution. It is undoubtedly the case that Chinatown
negotiates its narrative in terms of the once dominant hard-boiled school. The
private eye, Jake (J. J.) Gittes is, as Bingham notes, “a mass of contradictions between
the character and the archetype” (128); unlike Bogart’s Sam Spade of The Maltese
Falcon, or his Phillip Marlowe of The Big Sleep, Gittes is flashy, fashionably
dressed, easily outwitted, usually wrong, and makes his living from lowly
“matrimonial work”. The script does appeal, again and again to its generic origins
- Nicholson occasionally makes Bogartian gestures including laconic one liners
and the heavy lidded squint (Bingham 130) — but most appeals to an audience
wise to the conventions of the hard-boiled are deliberate traps; the film invites and
encourages but rarely fulfills certain generic expectations. Thus for example the
audience is encouraged to participate in Gittes’ expectation that Evelyn Mulwray/
Faye Dunaway will fulfill the generic role of “the treacherous broad.” Gittes’ and
the audience’s misreading - using generic code as guide - effectively breaks the
generic “pact” between text and audience. It is interesting to note that the climatic
scene in which the generic code is broken and Evelyn Mulwray is revealed as
innocent, simultaneously breaks a societal taboo by revealing the presence of fatherdaughter incest. And once the rules - both generic and social - are broken, anything
is possible as we are reminded in the famous last line of the film, “Forget it Jake,