forget it, jake—it’s chinatown (13. 536)

As our faithful chronicler informs, the neo-noir classic directed by Roman Polanski and starring Faye Dunaway, Jack Nicohson, John Huston, Diane Ladd and Burt Young was released on this day in 1974 to critical acclaim. Over the milieu of the California water wars, a series of political conflicts over water rights at the turn of the last century with the expansion of Los Angeles and the construction of aqueducts to divert resources from Owens Valley and Mono Lake used by ranchers and farmers, a woman, calling herself Evelyn Mulwray, engages a private detective to keep on whom she says is her husband, a civil engineer with the California public utility department. The investigator photographs the subject with another woman, exposing their apparent affair, but then is confronted by the engineer’s real wife, concluding that the impostor set up her husband in order to discredit him and prevent the discovery of a complex conspiracy to hoard water whilst the city is experiencing a drought. Parallel to Dunaway’s scripted revelation “My sister! My daughter!”—the film could be read as a retelling of Oedipus Rex, a plague exploited to gain power ultimately reflecting the endemic corruption of society, misidentification, and a maimed protagonist who realises the truth too late to affect the outcome—genealogists working for Time magazine informed Nicholson after the making Chinatown that his sister was, in real life, was actually his mother, raised by his grandparents as their own son when the actor was born out of wedlock to showgirl June Frances Nicholson. On learning this fact at age thirty-seven, he acknowledged it was a “pretty dramatic event but it wasn’t what I’d call traumatising…I was pretty well psychologically formed.”