Throwback Thursday: Chinatown and the Twist That Refuses to Fix Anything
Throwback Thursday is a retrospective, not a graded review – one twist per era, spanning the decades this whole idea of a “twist ending” grew out of. Following last week’s stop in 1960 with Psycho, this week jumps forward to Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski, written by Robert Towne), where private eye J.J. “Jake” Gittes takes what looks like a routine infidelity case and instead gets pulled into a conspiracy over Los Angeles’s water supply, a decades-old crime, and a family he should have walked away from the moment he realized he was in over his head.
The Twist
The “sister” Evelyn Mulwray has been hiding, Katherine, is also her daughter – fathered by Evelyn’s own father, Noah Cross, years earlier. The water conspiracy Gittes has spent the entire film chasing turns out to be secondary to this: Cross’s business scheme and his abuse of his own daughter are two expressions of the same unchecked power, and Gittes, convinced he’s finally solved the case, walks Evelyn and Katherine straight into Cross’s reach trying to protect them. Evelyn is shot and killed attempting to flee with Katherine; Cross, the man responsible for both the water conspiracy and the abuse, walks away holding his own granddaughter/daughter, untouched by any consequence the film shows.
Chinatown’s reveal doesn’t function as a twist in the puzzle-box sense Mindblown Monday celebrates – it’s not a rug-pull the plot mechanically sets up and pays off. It’s a genre subversion: Polanski and Towne borrow every convention of 1940s noir (the world-weary detective, the femme fatale with a secret, the promise that solving the mystery restores order) and then refuse the genre’s usual comfort. Gittes solves the case completely and it changes nothing – the powerful man responsible for everything faces no justice, and the film’s famous closing line, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” names the twist’s actual subject: some systems are built so the truth coming out doesn’t matter. That’s a harder, colder twist than a hidden identity or a fabricated timeline, and it’s part of why the film is still taught as the high-water mark of what New Hollywood-era noir could do with the genre’s own rulebook.