The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

by Sam Wasson

“What we learned in the sixties,” Thom Mount said, “is that trying to build an alternative structure outside the system, given the power of the system, is never going to work.” They were amenable to the corporate superstructure, accessories to Chinatown. They called the Polo Lounge the Polio Lounge. “Bob Evans,” John Landis said, “is the classic example of everything that does not interest me.”

Something—a faith—had been lost. Christopher Lasch, in his 1979 The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, observed: “Since the ‘society’ has no future, it makes sense to live only for the moment … to become connoisseurs of our own decadence, to cultivate ‘transcendental self-attention,’” to become, in short, narcissists, who, bereft of faith, live by a survivalist mentality, “expressed in its crudest form in disaster movies,” seeking escape in fame, sex, power, drugs—any delusion to resist the growing awareness of failure and futility. Drugs, addictions to wealth, celebrity, quick pleasure, and omnipotence—harbingers of Reagan America and eighties Hollywood—were the narcissists’ response to emotional abandonment on the national scale, and, as the ordeal of Evelyn Mulwray attests, took their toll on yet another institutional faith: The family. The children.

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There was still a pull, John Huston’s voice cannoning through his memory: “The one thing you must not do,” it said, “is lose interest.”

To believe in the viability of the dream, a little bit of forgetting was required. Maybe that’s what a dream was.

Our parents, they thought their pasts were behind them; they never were. Our children, we think they’re new, without pasts; they aren’t. They’re old with our memories. Memories we don’t know we have. “I have flashbacks every day,” Payne said.