There are two lines in the movie that emphasize these themes.  In the first, Noah Cross,** a rich and powerful mover/shaker tells Gittes, “You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.”  This is uttered as a warning to the detective, but it also serves as a hint to viewers that they shouldn’t expect a mere retread of the hard-boiled detective genre/noir film; instead, Chinatown presents us with a plethora of twists and turns. The second key line – “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” -- is the last one of the film.  It’s whispered by one of Gittes’ buddies after the detective has failed in his heroic quest to resolve the case at hand, and an innocent person has been fatally shot.  As one critic claims,


it is a line that takes the whole movie and wraps it in one enveloping the metaphor … If in the sixties ‘we all live(d) in a yellow submarine’ as the Beatles put it, in the seventies we all lived in a Chinatown world where nothing was ever what it seemed, where reality was so layered and complicated that it could never be grasped, where any natural impulses were doomed to failure, where innocence was …  a naïve dream in the face of the sinister and brutal nightmare known as reality (Palmer, 118-119).


         In other words, the line embodies the era’s moral climate and its zeitgeist – the sense of pessimism and hopelessness, seeing the cup half empty instead of half full – that permeated post-Watergate America.  Just as Gittes is frustrated and thwarted in his attempts to figure out all the corporate double dealings going on in Chinatown, so those who listened to the Watergate hearings must have felt powerless in the face of the political dirt being exposed. Gittes silently walks away at the film’s end, “accepting reality without being able to understand it,” just as many Americans, though hungry for answers, were unable had to grasp what we were doing in Vietnam or why corrupt politicians embroiled us in Watergate (Palmer, 119). 

         The line is supposed to console Jake, suggesting that there was nothing he could have done.  This is the same advice that many Vietnam vets contemplated while flying “eastward across the Pacific after thirteen months of chasing the most elusive of realities … Forgetting, especially forgetting a death in which you are intimately involved, is not an easy thing to do.  Whether it occurs … in Chinatown or a war in Vietnam, reality is a difficult thing to avoid, an impossible thing to grasp, and an even harder thing to forget” (Palmer, 119). 

         Towne’s original script had a “feel good” upbeat ending, but Polanski insisted on the downbeat ending the film ended up with (Black). No doubt the still-raging Vietnam War convinced Polanski to give his film the nihilistic finish, but horrific events in the director’s own life were probably a factor, as well.  Polanski is one of the few directors around who have first-hand experience of extreme violence (Weshler).  Born in Paris to Polish parents in 1933, Polanski was four when his family was forced to leave France and return to Poland because of French anti-Semitism.  Polanski then spent years barely existing in the Krakow ghetto, eluding the Nazis.  He survived only because his father pushed him through a hole in the barbed-wire fence and he passed as a gentile.*** His parents, though, were sent to Auschwitz, and while his father survived and was reunited with his son after the war, his mother died in the camp's gas chambers when four months pregnant.  Decades later, in 1969, Polanski’s wife, actress Sharon Tate, pregnant with their child, was murdered, along with three of their friends, by Charles Manson’s gang. Although Polanski himself has repeatedly refused to draw parallels between his own life and his film work (McInis), many critics have noticed similarities between them, particularly his first major piece after Tate’s murder, his realistic and violent version of MacBeth, done in 1971.  When queried about whether personal tragedies have affected his making of Chinatown, Polanksi’s answer was, "I can only tell you that every experience helps you with your work ...  I am unable to tell you how much better the film is because I had certain things happen to me. Whatever you do, you learn. And each next movie has one layer more to make it richer" (Iorio).  

     While Chinatown is about 30 years old, its effects are still reverberating in filmmaking circles.  According to critic Jared Sapolin, Polanski's neo-noir thriller helped "pave the way for later, already destined to be classic, post-1990 noir films such as David Fincher's Se7en (1995) and Christopher Nolan's Memento (2001)" (Sapolin).
 

*It’s been theorized that the casting of Nicholson as Gittes also comments on the Vietnam War.  At one point in Chinatown Gittes says, 'I was trying to keep someone from being hurt, and I ended up making sure that she was hurt.' With 'she' altered to 'he' the sentence might refer to Nicholson’s role in the film The Last Detail, afeature film about American servicemen, which addresses the American people’s frustrations over the war, “as the desire to act is overwhelming, but the conditions in which action is placed are overwhelmingly negative” (Gallafent). 

**There is no doubt some biblical portent to Noah Cross’s name.  In addition, Cross is played by John Huston, known more for his directorial work – including being the progenitor of the noir film with the 1941 classic The Maltese Falcon –  than as an actor.  Nevertheless, a few years prior to the making of Chinatown, Huston supplied the voice of God in the saga The Bible, thus contributing to his powerful persona.

*** One of the most poignant scenes in Polanski's recent film The Pianist, involves the protagonist, Wladyslaw Szpilman, trying to bring a boy through a similar hole in the Warsaw ghetto wall before the Nazis beat him to death, but unfortunately, the child dies.  This echoes Polanski's own wartime experience, albeit with a different ending.  However, this was not an autobiographical element that Polanski added to the scenario; rather, it really did happen to Szpilman.  Surely this similar experience is one reason why Polanski felt the need to film Szpilman's story.

    Black, John F.  Rev. of Chinatown.  http://www.scarletstreet.com/scarlet/articles/filmnoir/filmnoir03.htm

    Gallafent.  “Film Noir in the ‘Seventies.” Echo Park. http://www.newcollege.usf.edu/hassold/Documents/Film_Noir/gallafent.htm

    Iorio, Paul.  “Sleuthing Chinatown.”  The L.A. Times, 1999.  http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/wcmartell/chinatwn.htm

    Martin, Paul.  Rev. of Chinatown in Six Degrees. http://www.6degrees.co.uk/en/2/200007vrchinatown.html

    McInis, Kathleen.  “Roman Tries to Reconquer America.”  Moviemaker Magazine. http://www.moviemaker.com/issues/05/roman/05_roman.html

    Palmer, William H.  The Films of the Seventies: A Social History.  Metuchen, New Jersey and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1987  

    Polanski, Roman. Roman by Polanski, New York: Morrow, 1984. 

     Sapolin, Jared.  Rev. of  Night Moves.. <http://www.jaredsapolin.com/nightmoves.html>