Time to Reconsider “Chinatown”?

In a fine essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael Rubenstein, an associate professor of English at Stony Brook University and author of the forthcoming book, “Chinatown” at 50 or, Seeing Oil Through Cinema, chews over that 1974 private-eye film’s legacy, its newly shaky place in cinematic history, and efforts to restore it to public prominence. The article begins:

Released on June 20, 1974, Chinatown has been part of the cultural record for 50 years. In 1991, it was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. In 2010, when Chinatown was 36 years old—the same age as Jack Nicholson when he starred in the movie, when he was, by broad critical consensus, at the peak of his star power—a poll of The Guardian’s top critics proclaimed it “the best film of all time.” So, we might take the occasion of its 50th birthday in 2024 to celebrate a consecrated classic. Or we might notice instead that today, 14 years on from its coronation as best of all time—a ridiculous piece of clickbait anyway—Chinatown seems to have dropped off of a lot of best-of lists altogether. Well into middle age, the film seems now to have passed its prime. Much like a 50-year-old man. Much like me.

If it’s all downhill from here, one can always look back. Even when it was new, Chinatown was a nostalgia machine, generating cinematic pleasure from Hollywood’s 1974 recreation of 1937 Los Angeles. Over the last few years, a couple of fiftysomething Hollywood gentlemen have been conspiring to do the time warp again. David Fincher is rumored to be behind a Netflix series based on Jake Gittes’s backstory as a rookie beat cop in the eponymous district of Chinatown. And Ben Affleck has optioned Sam Wasson’s best-selling 2020 book about the making of Chinatown, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood; if the film gets made, I imagine we’ll see the next generation of Hollywood royalty claim its inheritance by pretending to be the last one. And if I sound like I’m sneering, rest assured that I will be watching all of it, mouth agape in enraptured abandon.

Because I also love Chinatown. I’m fascinated by both the world it depicts and the world that made it. There is no shortage of writing on these subjects; Chinatown needs no recovering from obscurity. So, what else needs to be said? One thing that does need saying before proceeding is this: the reason for Chinatown’s declining critical reputation is probably not its age. At least part of the reason is certainly because the #MeToo movement has since rumbled the film’s reputation by reminding us that its director is a confessed statutory rapist and a fugitive from the law. That might even be the whole reason, and it might even be a just reason.

Click here to enjoy the remainder of Rubenstein’s piece.