Writing Homework Help

After watching Chinatown, please respond to the following prompts

Identify at least three tropes (character or thematic) that you detected—pun intended—in Chinatown.

For a movie called Chinatown, this film very rarely portrays people of color (except as domestic servants or confidential sources). Analyze the setting and last line of dialog in the film. What is the concept of “Chinatown” meant to evoke for the viewers in the absence of actual Chinese and Chinese American people? How is Nina Revoyr’s Southland a corrective to this dominant narrative and erasure of the “other?”

Chinatown is considered by many critics to be the finest example of film noir ever made. It continues to top lists on the subject. One of the elements that makes the film so powerful is how it turns its entire plot into a red herring. Describe the main plot in the first two-thirds of the film (think water and land) and how it transforms into something else by the end of the movie. How does this plot twist fit in with middle-class white anxiety about the corrosive effect of power, greed, and lust on well-to-do families in the context of Los Angeles?