In the movie Chinatown, one of my favorites, the central character, Jake Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, is a private investigator specializing in marital investigations—that is, his clients are married people who suspect that their spouse has a little something-something going on a back burner. Gittes investigates and collects evidence, often in the form of photographs—the "ocular proof" lacked by Othello—that he then provides to the client in order to confirm their suspicions. He's been hired by someone pretending to be Evelyn Mulwray, wife of Hollis Mulwray, who heads the water department of the City of Los Angeles. Gittes gets the pictures, which are published in the newspaper, thereby discrediting Mulwray, whereupon the real Mrs. Mulwray, played by Faye Dunaway, shows up in his office at about the same time her husband shows up dead, the evident victim of an accidental drowning at a reservoir during a drought. Gittes, pissed about having been played, continues to investigate, which draws him into a vast corruption scheme involving preeminently Mrs. Mulwray's father, played by John Huston. Great, great movie.
In the climactic last scene, where the extent of the corruption is revealed to Gittes and the moviegoer, Evelyn pulls a gun to defend against her monstrous father. Gittes urges her to put the gun down. "Let the police handle it," he advises, but she replies, chillingly, "He owns the police!" There follows a double shooting, the second victim being Evelyn, whose head pitches forward onto the horn of the car she's escaping in. A stunned Gittes is led away from the scene by a cop who, trying to console him, speaks the film's last words of dialog, barely audible on account of the blaring horn: "Forget it, Jake," he says. "It's just Chinatown."
The desolating force of these words derives from the way in which, over the course of the movie, the career path of Jake Gittes is sketched in. He hadn't always been in marital investigations. He had been a cop, a detective, investigating crime. He was assigned to the Chinatown district. Corruption was rampant—to such a degree that a dutiful cop, such as Gittes was, would either have to get on the supplemental payroll or get out of police work. Gittes got out, and into the more lucrative business of marital investigations. He wears nice suits, has a nice car, an assistant, and well-appointed office space. He also has the proud, hard-bitten demeanor of a man who has put away youthful delusions and succeeded. All this background is so skillfully inserted, or suggested, that you hardly notice, often because you are only conscious of being entertained. For example, Gittes's everlasting contempt for all the dumb dirty cops he knows from his former career is conveyed in a scene in which he converses with one such ex-colleague who has had the water to his residence shut off. Gittes asks him how he could know he had no water service, since (I'm going from memory, but try to imagine Jack Nicholson's voice):
You don't drink it [because you're an alcoholic]. You don't bathe in it. Did the water department write you a letter? Oh, but then you'd have to know how to read.
The upshot of this strain in the movie is that Gittes, in his mind, associates his Chinatown experience with the corruption that had stripped him of his idealism and driven him from the police department, which exists to advance the public interest, into the tawdry realm of marital investigations—a more remunerative form of private sector employment that's a different flavor of tawdry than what he knew from police work. He considers himself a man of the world well versed in the ways of Chinatown. But the movie is in some sense "The Further Education of Jake Gittes." The consolatory speech with which the movie ends is overwhelmingly ironic. It's not "just Chinatown." The corruption isn't limited to that part of L.A. It's pervasive, beyond anything that the hard-bitten Jake Gittes could have imagined.
I guess I've seen the movie enough times so that it's become a permanent part of my brain's furniture. I think of it frequently, often as a kind of interpretive tool to explain to myself things that happen in the world, like yesterday's testimony of Gordon Sondland, who bristled when the lawyer questioning him used the term "irregular channel" to describe the drug deal he was pursuing on behalf of Trump in Ukraine:
I'm not sure how someone could characterize something as an irregular channel. When you're talking to the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, the Chief of Staff of the White House, the Secretary of Energy. I don't know how that's irregular. If a bunch of folks who are not in that channel are aggrieved for some reason for not being included, I don't know how they can consider us to be the irregular channel and they to be the regular channel when its the leadership that makes the decisions.
Or, as Fiona Hill explained today, she regarded Sondland with a mixture of annoyance and pity, "[b]ecause he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy, and those two things had just diverged." So some people in the employ of the federal government were still pursuing the national interest. That was the "irregular channel" of dutiful cops. The "regular channel" is for all the high-ranking White House officials trying to swim in the dirty water sluicing out of the Oval Office—Chinatown.
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