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A great discussion of a great film.
Chinatown is set in 1937 with historical overtones of decades of Los Angeles water issues continuing to the present.
Chinatown, a complex neo-noir film, is considered one of America's greatest films enhanced by the direction of a relative outsider, Roman Polanski, who endured trauma as a holocaust survivor.
Most psychoanalytic approaches to film discussion use character analysis, interaction between or among characters, the film maker's subjectivity, the illustration of psychoanalytic constructs and consideration of film as a dream. In contrast, Bonnie Kaufman focuses on object relations and various aspects of film craft. She incorporates the theories of Christian Metz and other views of spectatorship, her subjectivity, symbolism, dream processes and other aspects of the primary process, and the film's narration to deepen our understanding and appreciation of this difficult film. She weaves the personal stories and twisted plot into a larger social framework that includes water-and-land-grabbing, money, sexual entitlement and the vortex of greed.
Bruce Sklarew, MD
Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis,
Laurel, MD, USA