‘Chinatown’: Bill Cosby’s distant mirror

Yet even as more women stepped forward to corroborate the original accusations, the story of Cosby as sexual predator just kind of died. Journalists who were granted access to the beloved entertainer — an illustrious group that includes his biographer, writers for the Atlantic and the New Yorker, and New York Times media columnist David Carr — mostly looked away from the sex charges or refrained from looking hard enough, rather than disturb what Carr now calls “the Natural Order of Things.” (To read Carr’s admirably candid confessional, click here.) Bob Huber’s exposé in Philadelphia Magazine joined the ranks of trees that fall unheard in the forest.

“It’s not as if I was Woodward and Bernstein meeting Deep Throat in a garage,” Huber recalls. “It was in the civil suit for all to see.”

Above the law

How, you ask, could major-league professional truth-seekers miss such a major story? How could the mainstream mass media so credulously swallow the narrative spun by Cosby, his lawyers, and his PR handlers? You may find the best answer not in journalism but in art — specifically, in Roman Polanski’s classic 1974 film Chinatown.

The Chinatown in Chinatown is not so much a neighborhood as a state of mind, an allegorical ghetto where the world’s born losers — and, not incidentally, the truth — are eternally trampled by the rich and powerful. Polanski’s protagonist, J.J. Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson), is a divorce detective who, in the course of investigating cheating wives and husbands, stumbles across a scheme to swindle Los Angeles of its entire municipal water supply — a scheme so incredible that no one will believe him.

The villain, water baron Noah Cross (John Huston), is a man so wealthy and powerful that he’s above not only the law but also social mores and conventions. It seems far-fetched when we learn that Cross raped and impregnated his own daughter, but that is precisely the point: As Cross himself explains, “I don’t blame myself. You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything.” This is more or less the point I made about Bill Cosby in a 1992 Welcomat column and again last month here in BSR, i.e., that Cosby might have lived up to his avuncular self-image “if he hadn’t accumulated quite so much money, power, and influence.” (Click here.)

Uncovering Watergate

At the conclusion of Chinatown, Gittes babbles desperately to the police about who killed whom and why, but what he tells them sounds so outlandish that they look at him as if he’s crazy. And even if the police believed Gittes, they would ignore what he says, because the arrest of a titan like Cross is simply inconceivable.

When Chinatown was first released in 1974, it struck me as a fitting allegory for the Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from the White House that year. Chinatown’s prevailing rule — that nothing is as it seems — was also the rule in Nixon’s Washington after burglars broke into Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in 1972.

Much like J.J. Gittes, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post were lowly police reporters who stumbled across a story much bigger than a second-rate burglary. Like Gittes, they and their newspaper spent anguished months as lone voices crying in the wilderness. John Dean’s charge — that the president of the United States was involved in an illegal network of political espionage and disruption directed against his enemies — seemed fantastic, and Nixon was able to cover it up as long as he did precisely because no one would believe it. (“If I have to choose between Mr. Dean and the president as to who is telling the truth,” Congressman Joseph Maraziti said at the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment debate in 1974, “I have no difficulty in that regard.”) When a man carries 49 states in a presidential election — or gains control of a city’s water supply, or controls his own awe-inspiring publicity machine — it can fill his head with ideas that don’t occur to most ordinary people.

White House apology

One test of a work of art is its relevance to multiple situations. Chinatown provides a prism through which to understand both Watergate and Bill Cosby, which is a testament to the film’s brilliance. Yet the film differs from these two real-life scandals in one important respect. In Chinatown, Noah Cross gets away with murder, and he also gets his incestuous paws on the pale, nervous girl who, as his daughter/granddaughter, represents his only biological link with the future. As a result, the film leaves us feeling depressed and cynical. In Watergate, by contrast, Woodward and Bernstein were eventually vindicated: They won a Pulitzer Prize, got an apology from Nixon’s press secretary, wrote a best seller and made a fortune on the movie rights; and the man they accused — whom everyone thought was above the law — was forced to resign in disgrace.

Something similar is now happening with Bill Cosby. Eight years after his exposé in Philadelphia Magazine, Bob Huber now finds himself celebrated on national TV shows (albeit only in four-minute sound bite segments). It may have taken decades for the whole truth about the iconic Bill Cosby to emerge, but it is emerging — and once out, there’s nothing any man or woman, no matter how powerful, can do to change it. In Chinatown, truth is the ultimate casualty; in Watergate and the Cosby revelations, truth is an inexorable force that ultimately triumphs. That strikes me as a mighty uplifting story line. Who would have thought that real life could possibly be more inspiring than great art?

For Maria Corley's take on the Cosby case, click here.