SOURCE: Belton, John. “Language, Oedipus, and Chinatown.” Modern Language Notes 106, no. 5 (December 1991): 933-50.

In the following essay, Belton examines Chinatown in terms of the intersection of discourses regarding narrative, psychoanalysis, the Oedipus myth, the detective story, and classic Hollywood cinema.

What the detective story represents, of which social formations and tendencies it is the expression, this we all know. … [It embodies] certain aspects of bourgeois ideology …, serving as one of the most pointed forms of expression of private-property ideology.

(Eisenstein 128)

[Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus] portrays the gradual discovery of the deed of Oedipus, long since accomplished, and brings it slowly to light by skillfully prolonged inquiry, constantly fed by new evidence; it has thus a certain resemblance to a course of psychoanalysis.

(Freud 340)

Laura Mulvey has interpreted the coincidental rise of the detective novel and the development of psychoanalysis (and that of archaeology) in the mid to late nineteenth...