Patron-Exclusive: Chinatown
Added 2024-01-26 08:00:07 +0000 UTCThe team shares their thoughts on Chinatown!
Comments
I've been catching up on these episodes this weekend, and I finished this episode while I was on the metro just as it was pulling into the Chinatown station.
Ben Detrixhe
2024-04-08 02:55:23 +0000 UTCFilm starts with someone getting screwed and ends with someone getting screwed. Perfect symmetry.
Bixby Snyder
2024-02-18 22:28:03 +0000 UTC@Jack Great comment
Rocky
2024-01-27 03:26:12 +0000 UTCHi! I think I might have been the one who requested Chinatown in the comments of your first video. It was definitely worth the wait, and thank you for the many other videos and podcasts in the meantime!
Michael Bouma
2024-01-26 19:17:44 +0000 UTCGreat episode. One piece of thematic writing you guys didn’t touch on (one couldn’t cover them all) is the deliberate, repeated inclusion of Chinese American characters, and the white protagonists’ sentiments towards them, Jake in particular. In both the crass joke he inadvertently tells as Evelyn enters his office for the first time, and in his off-handed mockery of her gardener’s accent when he first visits her home (“bad for the glass”). It seems this behavior speaks to the great flaw of Gittes’ character: his quickest assumptions are recurrently proven to be biased falsehoods. This is true of his sexism as well, shown in his initial refusal of Ida Sessions, and ultimately, in the assumptions he makes about Evelyn. It’s these most convenient assumptions that keep him just one step behind where he needs to be at all times. If he would have listened to the gardener on his first visit, he would’ve found his smoking gun (Noah’s bifocals). At the end of the day, the tragedy secondary to the continued cycle of abuse is that Jake hasn’t learned anything. If anything, he’s further resigned to the notion that nothing can be done in Chinatown. Over the years, some critics have argued that the film’s essential metaphor is a racially biased one; equating the unknowable, foreign nature of the Chinese-American immigrant community to the inscrutable nature of corrupt power. Looking at how the screenplay knowingly stages these biases of Jake’s as essential disadvantages leading to his ultimate downfall, however, gives the film new awareness and thematic weight.
Jack Payne
2024-01-26 17:43:52 +0000 UTC
