Mr. Gittes, the private investigator from Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, was a man who did his job in the most moral fashion. Even when he was accused otherwise, he remained steadfast and continued believing it himself. He was an honest man in his work up until it became personal. When Mr. Gittes was tricked into uncovering the extra-marital affair of the rich water company big shot, Mr. Mulwray, by a woman falsely claiming to be his wife, he began going about his job in an all new fashion. He started breaking the rules. In the scene where Mr. Gittes goes to the dam to investigate the site of Mr. Mulwray’s mysterious death, we see him climbing a fence that has a sign on it that clearly indicates that there are to be no trespassers. Upon being caught, Mr. Gittes gets his nostril split open by a short, angry man with a switch blade. The resulting nose bandage that sticks to Mr. Gittes’s face throughout most of Chinatown is not only there to annoy the viewer, but also to stand for Mr. Gittes’s sacrifice for Mrs. Mulwray, his personal struggle with the case, and lastly, his newly found imperfections.
When it occurs to Mr. Gittes that he has been a part of some sort of scam that required the elimination of Mr. Mulwray, he takes it upon himself to rectify the situation as best he can for the sake of the widow, Mrs. Mulwray. From the time of his first investigation, to the bathroom scene with Mrs. Mulwray, Mr. Gittes wears the bandage. It shows that he is willing to allow himself to suffer personal injury and not be too proud to wear the embarrassingly huge bandage on his face all for the sake of Mrs. Mulwray.
The bandage not only represents his personal sacrifice to Mrs. Mulwray, but it also stands for the personal struggle with this case. Mr. Gittes not only has to talk to the scam artists face to face, dodge the bullets of gangsters, fist fight with those who oppose him, but he also has to do all this with a bandage tapes to his nose. How can he be taken seriously by anyone if they have to sit there and stare at this huge bandage on his face? He also has to fight people with this glaringly obvious weak spot. When the bandage is finally removed, things appear to start going his way. Mr. Gittes removes the bandage in Mrs. Mulwray’s bathroom and the next thing that happens is he is getting action from the lady he has fallen in love with while working on the case. He all but solves the case in the final scene only to have it covered up by his own former police department. Mr. Gittes’s nose bandage represents what was holding him back the entire time.
Finally, Mr. Gittes’s nose bandage represents his own imperfections that he has been so reluctant to reveal to anyone. In the scene where Mrs. Mulwray removes his bandage, his terrible cut is revealed. She is obviously shocked at the severity of the wound and she delicately dabs it with a piece of cotton to try to clean it up for Mr. Gittes. Just as she spots his imperfection, Mr. Gittes notices that she has a spot in her eye. She says that it is a flaw and becomes a little bit embarrassed by it. They realize that neither of them is perfect and they fall for each other.
As soon as he starts wearing the bandage, things start going bad for him. When he finally is able to take the bandage off, his luck begins to turn. The nose bandage represents all that has gone wrong with Mr. Gittes since the beginning of his investigation of the water scandal.
Project Two, Part Two
