Could anything be more despairing than the pervasive corruption of Chinatown? Hollywood had presented visions of mass iniquity with equal force—there is Kiss Me Deadly, with its nuclear finale—and there were films to come, Nashville and Network, Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter, that would hold up a black mirror to fallen America, but the wreckage of Chinatown, transmitted metaphorically, transcends its story and characters. Chinatown is a condition. The condition is the terrible awareness of one’s helplessness, what Towne had always called “the futility of good intentions.” If its resonance surpasses the literal, it is due not only to Towne’s overall concept, the thematic rigor and omnipresence of power and abuse in the script, but to Polanski’s cinematic rendering of Chinatown itself. He insisted it must be in the film as a literal location, but he filmed it metaphorically, amid the vacant black limbo of nightmare. It’s hard to see and it’s too quiet. It doesn’t seem real. The events themselves land with the perfect timing of melodrama. Everything goes wrong precisely at once, and some of it isn’t entirely logical—Evelyn not killing her father at such close range, the police killing Evelyn in the dark at such long range. It moves too fast for comprehension, evoking, in pace, sound, and color, the figurative, a state of mind, Gittes’s state of mind, his Chinatown past, now his Chinatown present, creating a temporal Sisyphean circle that implies the fruitless persistence of return, emotional incarceration, the failure to mitigate incomprehensible trauma.
What makes Chinatown so uniquely disturbing as an American metaphor is that it is so unlike the whiteness of Ahab’s whale or the greenness of Gatsby’s light. However illusory, these are totems of aspiration, of possibility. Futility and fate, by contrast, are concepts that defy the capitalist’s dream of agency and advancement, the (graying) Protestant work ethic that assured pre-Watergate Americans that life was linear, not cyclical, and the game wasn’t rigged against them. It is no wonder, then, that Towne’s metaphor should borrow its desolation from Polanski, a European. “The American has not yet assimilated psychologically the disappearance of his own geographical frontier,” wrote the philosopher William Barrett in 1962. “His spiritual horizon is still the limitless play of human possibilities, and as yet he has not lived through the crucial experience of human finitude.” A decade after this writing, that spiritual horizon reached its finitude in Vietnam and Watergate, and symbolically in Los Angeles, the geographic end of America.
As Towne foresaw, the only place left to go was up—up to The Sting, to “Happy Days,” Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, to “a mix of nostalgia and parody,” Kael wrote, the mass denial of the terrible truths Gittes was powerless to undo.
As President Ford pardoned Nixon, so would Hollywood pardon the difficulties of the recent past. A tilt, backward and downward, had begun; it was pandering, the need to please. And not filmmakers but audiences. “Perhaps no work of art is possible without belief in the audience,” Kael wrote, “the kind of belief that has nothing to do with facts and figures about what people actually buy or enjoy but comes out of the individual artist’s absolute conviction that only the best he can do is fit to be offered to others.… An artist’s sense of honor is founded on the honor due others. Honor in the arts—and in show business, too—is giving of one’s utmost, even if the audience does not appear to know the difference, even if the audience shows every sign of preferring something easy, cheap, and synthetic. The audience one must believe in is the great audience: the audience one was part of as a child, when one first began to respond to great work—the audience one is still part of.”
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The bittersweet sense of having reached the summit, beginning the decline, was felt powerfully Oscar night, April 8, 1975, by none more than Robert Evans, who could rightfully claim authorship of Paramount’s annus mirabilis just as he bowed from his post as head of production. Evans’s date for the evening was his brother Charles.
It rained that Oscar night.
Polanski stayed away.”I didn’t think we would get any awards,” he explained, and he went to Japan for Chinatown’s opening in Japan.
Towne and Payne took a limo to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with Jack (tuxedo, sunglasses, beret) and Anjelica (Halston gown, transparent sequins over painted silk) and Robert and Charles Evans. Nicholson viewed the whole thing—black tie, red carpet, winning and losing, the after-parties—with hearty amusement. The Oscars was a feat of public relations, and he was more than happy to do his job. “It’s good for who it’s good for and bad for nobody,” he said. “And it’s a great night out, seeing everybody down there. Who doesn’t like seeing movie stars? That’s why I started working in the business.” Since his stardom, he had taken pains never to appear on television; he despised the artlessness of the small screen and felt talk shows and interviews hindered the public’s ability to accept the illusion that he could become, on movie screens, someone else. Knowing that Nicholson made an exception for the Oscars, the Academy made sure to reserve him and Angelica front-row seats. “I’ve only heard two opinions on the subject of Academy Awards that stick in my mind,” Nicholson said. “Lao-tze, the great Chinese philosopher, once said, ‘All tribute is false.’ And then there’s what my old and good friend John Huston used to say about it. He said he supported the Awards out of respect for ‘all others who have gone before us.’” A movie fan above all else, Nicholson had been following the Academy Awards his whole life, handicapping the winners and losers since he was a kid, a practice that continued into adulthood, through his own nominations. Nicholson felt going in, whether he deserved the win or not, this wasn’t going to be his year. This year, in the friendly company of Evans, Towne, and Lou Adler and Adler’s date, model and actress Lauren Hutton, he would simply enjoy; he would applaud his friends, his favorite filmmakers from around the world (Fellini was nominated for Amarcord, Louis Malle for Lacombe, Lucien), and, like a fan, cheer on all that was golden of Hollywood, his favorite team sport. Jack knew that sort of stance wasn’t fashionable, especially now, with a nation in the economic, social, and political dregs, but wasn’t it, in some way, why Americans watched? Didn’t Fred and Ginger dance through the Depression? Silly, unjust, occasionally crass—granted—but what business wasn’t? At least this one also made movies.…
It was still drizzling as they pulled up to the Dorothy Chandler, and stepping from the limousine, all were asked to mind their long gowns and trouser cuffs and step carefully—the drains weren’t working—along the soggy red carpet. Inside, the squeak and squish of watery footfalls were the source of shared amusement, a great leveling of pretensions and worry that culminated, semi-hilariously, in power players in their stocking feet and some slippery bits of slapstick.
“It’s your night,” Coppola said to Evans behind the theater.
“No, Francis. It’s yours.”
Coppola, twice nominated that year for Best Picture, was convinced that the Academy would split its vote, losing him the win for either Godfather II or The Conversation. But Evans knew that the Academy, having previously awarded Cabaret Best Picture over The Godfather, would give Coppola his due this year.