Sathfilms

If you’re willing to respond to this blog-post and are short on time, perhaps reading the last two paragraphs of this post is enough because I’m really interested in what people think.

Chinatown is a really good film. The characters and the strange character relations are somewhat unique. Another particularly interesting element of the film is its structure, and it is discussed in Alternative Scriptwriting at some length. I’m probably inadvertantly spoiling the film for you in the rest of this post, so if you plan to see the movie (which you should) perhaps skip over this of this paragraph. The structure of Chinatown isn’t particularly noticeable,, seemingly framed almost standardly in the three acts, but then the last act of the film illustrates otherwise, revealing to the audience something classically unexpected.

Let me clarify what I’m saying about Chinatown regarding the “expected”: Jake’s actions at the end of the film are relatively congruent with the rest of his actions in the film, and perhaps even expected. I say this since he he is portrayed as flawed character in the first two acts who is often out to save his own neck and “make an honest living”, regardless of his good intentions. However, in films that are of the restorative three act structure, “good” and “bad” morals are somewhat ubiquitous in a generlised kind of way, and “good” ultimately prevails in the third act, and the protagonist restores the mess he or she has managed to create. So although Jake acts as he always has, and says nothing at the end of the film because the people he cares about are already dead, the sense of “good” or “justice” is not embraced by him.

So, the film ends with a kind of hopeless inevitability where everything is against you, even though the structure suggests (because of the norm) that the film is going to end with good prevailing where Evelyn perhaps does not die, and Jake lives or dies fighting for Evelyn and justice. Thus, although it seems unlikely that Jake can turn this situation in his favor, we (as an audience) want him to somehow end up on top. Chinatown achieves this feat by forming a balance between the characters, their implied back stories, and their actions in the film, which essentially foreshadow the end with many glimpses of the “reality” of the situation. So, the end, although unexpected, was well crafted with the rest of the story, and not merely some sort of unexpected twist or sudden event that’s simply there to make the audience say “shit, I didn’t expect that!” Instead there was a suggestion of twisted (or different) morality as a film, a sharp bite of reality. Again, I mean that in relative terms, compared to the more standard restorative three-act structure films, like Wall Street or High Fidelity. The unlikely hero is in a situation where he is unlikely to succeed but this time he actually fails; sometimes, good intentions aren’t enough. Sometimes people with large amounts of power doing “bad” things think they’re right, or that certain things are “just that way”.

On a side note, I was rewatching Chinatown with a person who hadn’t seen the film in a long time and couldn’t remember it. So, the film ended, and this person said that they had wasted her time watching a morally bankrupt film. This person felt that filmmakers have a social responsibility to make films which have a positive impact on audiences, instead of taking the audience for an unnecessary “ride”. This person said that films are entertainment, and thus they should be entertaining without misguiding the audience just to show a morally bankrupt, unexpected ending merely to have a unique film. I don’t agree with this line of thinking because [some] films need to be thought-provoking, perhaps challenging norms and reflecting other realities or potential realities in society. If one thinks that films are just for entertainment so that one feels good at the end, then that’s fine, but can Chinatown and the filmmakers be called “morally bankrupt”? I suppose it depends on your idea of morality. I think the last thing we need are films that all have the same moral standpoint that don’t even question the naive notion of a “universal” or absolute morality. Such widespread, exact, notions of morality don’t really seem to exist in the world today. Furthermore, I don’t think all films need to show “good” always prevailing, nor do they need to show characters that care most about what many (but not all) think is right.

So what does Jake do? What’s right? What is morally acceptable? Does Jake stand up for those who are already dead, for “justice”, merely to get ridiculed and killed? Does Jake stand up for Katherine when he really knows that he can’t achieve anything against the amounts of “power” he would need to oppose. Does Jake trick Evelyn’s father and take him elsewhere in the end so that he gets himself killed or does he rely on his “backup” so that both he and Evelyn can potentially survive the ordeal? Like Jake says earlier in the film regarding his time working in Chinatown: he wanted to do good by someone, but he’s convinced that he was just unlucky.

Not everyone can be Rick from Casablanca.