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“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”—the two lines of Roman Polanski’s celebrated Chinatown (1974)—has often been hailed the greatest closing lines in cinematic history. There are two striking observations that can be made from these lines. First, the line’s punch lies in the unstated, implicit shared understanding of what Chinatown symbolized to the American audience in the 1970s: a place of moral depravity, irrationality, indiscernibility, insularity, chaos, and ultimately death. The word “Chinatown” is not merely a geographical marker—it is a loaded sign that is made up of troupes of imaginaries, myths and knowledges of the Chinese in America. Second, part of the “timelessness” of this film can be attributed to the persistence of this sign and the ways it is read by contemporary audiences—four decades after Chinatown’s release, audiences would continue to draw on the very same troupes in decoding the symbolism of the film. I would go so far as to argue that this film would have had the same effect if it was screened for audiences in 1900. The questions that arise here are: How and why have Chinatowns (lived, everyday spaces) been reduced to a sign of Otherness? How has this sign, imbued with very distinctive meanings, persisted throughout time and space (think about its currency in other “western nations”)?
The work of this course is to examine the provenance and function of the representations of Chinatown in film from the early 20th century to the 1980s. Out of what historical, political, geopolitical, economic contexts do they arise? How does “Chinatown” enable and bolster larger constructions and imaginaries of what “America” means? Why is the sign of “Chinatown” so durable in North American and western cinema? And importantly, what forms of resistance toward this sign have been employed? How do they challenge and destabilize the myths of Chinatown and reclaim Chinatown as a vibrant lived space? Films that we will engage with include Terry O. Morse’s Shadows over Chinatown—Charlie Chan (1946), Henry Koster’s The Flower Drum Song (1961), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Michael Cimino’s The Year of the Dragon (1985), John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing (1982) and Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), and Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993). Students are required to attend film screenings every two weeks and read accompanying theoretical and secondary texts that will be assigned for each session. |
