the wreckage of Chinatown, transmitted metaphorically, transcends its story and characters. Chinatown is a condition. The condition is the terrible awareness of one’s helplessness, what Towne had always called “the futility of good intentions.” If its resonance surpasses the literal, it is due not only to Towne’s overall concept, the thematic rigor and omnipresence of power and abuse in the script, but to Polanski’s cinematic rendering of Chinatown itself.
