Headscratchers / Chinatown

• When Gittes tells his "screwing like a Chinaman" story, there's a difference between the advice the man gets from his friend and what he does when he follows through with said advice. His friend said the first break in the Chinaman's session was reading Confucius, (a Chinese philosopher) but the man spent his first break reading Life magazine. Is there supposed to be a correlation between the choices of reading material, or...?
  • Well Confucius, a philosopher, was dedicated to exploring and understanding life, and the American man is reading a magazine all about life.
  • The joke is that rather than engaging in solemn contemplation in the manner of a Chinese intellectual he's doing activities that are thoroughly banal and thoroughly American.

• So Cross is just...impervious to bullets or something? How does he just shrug off getting shot?
  • He's not. He's shown gripping his arm and recoiling in pain. But it's a low-calibre gun that only grazes his arm and he quickly vacates the area.