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But apparently, he reached it many years before the film depicts him -- at least by Gittes summation. At a pivotal moment in the film, Gittes asks Cross why he did it and says, "How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?" Cross does not hesitate with his answer: "The Future!" (Chinatown, 1974). This exemplifies Gittes misconception regarding the American dream; specifically, that it ends when you have everything you "need." Yet, by this point in the film Gittes has been one of the few people privileged enough to earn a small piece of the truth behind city planning, organization, and corruption. Many of the social realities that we accept as inevitabilities of the modern world actually came into existence for the personal satisfaction of a handful of wealthy people.
Cross is victorious in every way he wanted and Gittes is left only to contemplate the outcome of events. The woman Cross wants to find is his and Evelyn has been stopped from fleeing the city. Nothing stands in his way to divert water, and the population of Los Angeles into the valley. Is he the champion of the American dream, or is he its antithesis? The viewer is provided with everything to believe that the latter is the case. It is never revealed as to...
Either way it can be assumed that Noah Cross' vast wealth and power did not come into existence through hard, diligent pursuit of happiness. Deception and manipulation gave him everything that the American dream tells the public it can attain through work. It is a lie.
Robert Towne's Chinatown is a powerful glimpse into the social production of the modern metropolitan city. The evils of the city are amplified the further in you go; or at least, that is the way it is portrayed. Water, the giver of life, is purposefully withheld from a dying community on the whim of a businessman. The section labeled Chinatown stands as an example of everything that is dreadful about the urban experience, but remains inescapable. Wealth and power held by a single type of human -- white males -- alters the way in which identities are formed. Ultimately, the truth can be substantiated with evidence but still ignored by the victims of disorder.
Bibliography
Chinatown. Feature Film. Paramount Pictures, 1974. 131 min.
Davis, Mike. The Ecology of Fear. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.
Bibliography
Chinatown. Feature Film. Paramount Pictures, 1974. 131 min.
Davis, Mike. The Ecology of Fear. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998.
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