Water

Something Real

Filming began on Chinatown in August of 1973 (just two months before the OPEC embargo that engendered the 1970s oil crisis—but I’m already getting ahead of myself). On one of those early days, the storied Hollywood producer Robert Evans sat watching the daily rushes from the first hours of shooting. The footage he saw moved him to write a giddy memo to his boss Charles Bluhdorn at Gulf and Western, Paramount’s parent company, announcing that they had a “hot one”; that the film was “original” because it “took the clichés of detective movies and applied them to something real.”1 Given the remarkable combination of popular and critical success that Chinatown has enjoyed in the years since its release, it seems safe to say that Evans was right. Chinatown was nominated for eleven Oscars at the 1975 Academy Awards, though it won only one, for Robert Towne’s screenplay. In 1991, it was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. Chinatown’s reputation culminated in 2010 when a poll of The Guardian’s top critics proclaimed it “the best film of all time.”2

Today, fifteen years after its coronation by The Guardian, Chinatown has dropped off a lot of “best of” lists, probably because, at least in part if not in whole, the #MeToo movement has rumbled director Roman Polanski’s reputation for artistic greatness by reminding us all that he is also a rapist. In her book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, Claire Dederer writes that, more than any other contemporary figure, Polanski represents a diabolical balance between “the absoluteness of the monstrosity and the absoluteness of the genius. Polanski made Chinatown, often called one of the greatest films of all time. Polanski drugged and anally raped thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey. There the facts sit, unreconcilable.”3 I’m not writing this book to rehabilitate Polanski’s reputation. But I do believe that Chinatown is a monumental cultural artifact, worthy of its reputation and in fact undervalued in terms of what I see as its central importance as both a document of American civilization and of American barbarism. Many of the interpretations I put forward here are, moreover, only ever minimally auteurist; in some cases they are not even intentionalist. I’m writing this book because, despite its already elevated critical reputation, I don’t think we’ve yet properly appreciated Chinatown: we are not done with it, and it is not done with us. And that’s true not only because Chinatown is a great film—meticulously and ingeniously crafted on nearly every level, from cinematography to acting to writing to scoring to costuming. So meticulously crafted and stylized was it that the eminent critic Pauline Kael announced in her New Yorker review column in 1974 that she hated it in part because it was so “overdeliberate” as to be “suffocating.”4 She was certainly right about the deliberateness—Chinatown reaches Hitchcockian levels of stylization. But Chinatown is more than a great example of the art and craft of filmmaking, and that is what excited its producer, Robert Evans. It is, as he wrote, about “something real.”

That “something real” is undoubtedly and most immediately the water wars that transformed Southern California from a sleepy backwater into a modern megalopolis in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Being about that is what made Chinatown into a mythic fever dream of the founding of the modern city of Los Angeles and, consequently, the celluloid empire of Hollywood that rose in the city’s hydro-engineered bloom. For years after its release, there seemed to be no article or history book or television show about the history of the water wars in Southern California that did not at least mention Chinatown, whether to set the proper generic tone, to corroborate a fact, or testily to refute aspects of the film’s fictionalized account. A widely circulated but apocryphal anecdote tells of an LA Department of Water and Power official who, as they were leaving the premiere screening of Chinatown, protested that everything in the film had been “fabricated with the exception of the incest.”5

It’s not uncommon for fiction to outcompete fact in the public sphere. What is unusual in this case is the near monopolistic imaginative hold that Chinatown maintains on both the fictions and the facts of California’s historic water wars. This seems perfectly fitting in a way, since what’s at stake is the founding history of modern Los Angeles, a city whose global reputation is built on the manufacture of cinematic fictions. Chinatown is, among other things, a stylish nightmare about the American dream factory in the desert. Some historical accounts of California’s water wars embraced Chinatown’s preeminence and built their factual accounts on and around the film’s fabula. In his 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen says that Chinatown “has become a ruling metaphor of the non-fictional critiques of Los Angeles development” and that many viewers have come “to regard Chinatown not only as a docudrama, but as truth—the real secret history of how Los Angeles got its water.”6 In his seminal history of Los Angeles from 1990, City of Quartz, Mike Davis called Chinatown a “history more syncretic than fictional,” a mode of “surrogate public history.”7 So it seems that when Evans said it was about “something real,” he was already seeing the film’s long historical legacy in the earliest days of its making in 1973.

Chinatown served as a kind of syncretic, surrogate public history for more than just the region of Southern California. It also testified to the collapse of public trust in American government in the early 1970s—Vietnam, Watergate, let’s just call it the full Nixon—as well as the beginning of the long slow decline of American economic power, starting with a general energy crisis and reaching a frenzied panic with the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. So perfectly did Chinatown encapsulate the national mood of the early 1970s that film critic Michael Eaton, looking back at Chinatown from 1994, could make a wry, even jokey, association between “Watergate” as a synecdoche for government corruption, and the plot of Chinatown, which is about the use and abuse of actual, infrastructural “water gates.”8 If the ending of Chinatown was, as the New York Times called it in 1999, “one of the more unregenerate moments in American film,” that might be in part because it coincided with one of the most unregenerate moments in American history.9

Not that American history isn’t riddled with unregenerate moments, both recognized and not, that could compete with Watergate and Vietnam; but we are dealing with moments of widely shared public trauma and shame, and in that restricted sense, Chinatown’s “unregenerate moment” has made a spectacular return in the twenty-first century. In 2018 the historian of American conservatism, Corey Robin, held up Chinatown’s villainous antagonist Noah Cross as a fictional precedent for the forty-fifth president. “I’m increasingly of the mind that if you want a real precedent for Trump,” Robin tweeted in 2018, “it’s Noah Cross in Chinatown. Also a man with a distinctive conception of the relationship between state and real estate, oogy family life and politics. The only difference: Cross actually ran things.”10 For Robin, Trump’s closest historical analogue is not Richard Nixon but Noah Cross: history repeating itself, to modify Marx a bit, first as fictional tragedy, and then as historical farce. This was “just” a tweet—not a book or an essay or a lecture, so something more like a paraprofessional speculation than a disciplined argument—but it nevertheless rings entirely true. John Huston’s portrayal of Noah Cross in Chinatown is surely one of the most frighteningly plausible depictions of patriarchal, oligarchic evil in cinematic history. Kael nailed it when she referred, in her review of Chinatown, to Huston’s “rotting charm.”11 What’s so scary about Cross is that he doesn’t look evil at all. He’s positively avuncular, a jovial and vigorous old geezer. It’s only when he appears practically unharmed after being shot at nearly point-blank range by his daughter Evelyn that he reveals his supervillainous powers, lending him a faint family resemblance to unkillable killers like Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers, both of whom hail from a very different generic universe. Cross just keeps on coming, even if only in the rheumatic slow motion of the elderly—or the undead—which just makes him that much creepier, that much more terrifying.

The incest plot is usually the other thing that everybody remembers about Chinatown. “She’s my sister and my daughter!” Evelyn Mulwray confesses and pleads, under extreme duress as Jake Gittes slaps her face back and forth. What might it say about the moviegoer who remembers Chinatown either as a film about water or as a film about incest? Of course the truth is that Chinatown is about both: the twinning of these two plots, their relationship, is no doubt another reason why Chinatown endures. The hyper-regional water wars are woven together in the script with the mythical, quasi-universal oedipal structure. But at the core of Chinatown’s emplotment is less a pairing of these two crimes than a conflict between the film’s writer and its director about which crime it was supposed “really” to be about. For director Roman Polanksi, the priority of plotlines was obvious. Asked during an interview with Der Spiegel which was more important for him in the film, “the water scandal or the incest?” Polanski was unequivocal:

The incest, which is the real cause of the catastrophe in the end. In reality, the capitalist swindle with the water and land of Los Angeles doesn’t bother anyone. But the incest—the private scandal—is really exciting and I’m a bit disappointed it doesn’t come through more persuasively. The film would have been more sensational if I could have emphasized the affair more, and it certainly would have got more publicity. But unfortunately the plot made that impossible.12

The water plot, for Polanski, was just a wonky, overly precious obstacle to the real heart of the matter, the incest plot. But when scriptwriter Robert Towne was asked a similar question, his response was diametrically opposed to the director’s: “Maybe it’s because America’s a puritanical country I felt that the way to drive home the outrage about water and power was to . . . cap it with incest.”13 For him the water thing was the main thing; incest is the vehicle and water the tenor of an extended metaphor for the theft and corruption that founds the city of Los Angeles.

The way in which taboo sex and waterworks signify together is more complicated—and more interesting—than simply the relationship between the tenor and vehicle of a metaphor. Joan Didion, writing in 1969 about a personalized tour inside of Hoover Dam with a Bureau of Reclamations officer who took her “where visitors do not generally go,” literally touches on this very issue:

Once in a while he [the Reclamations officer] would explain something, usually in that recondite language having to do with “peaking power,” with “outages,” and “dewatering,” but on the whole we spent the afternoon in a world so alien, so complete and so beautiful unto itself that it was scarcely necessary to speak at all. We saw almost no one. Cranes moved above us as if under their own volition. Generators roared. Transformers hummed. The gratings on which we stood vibrated. We watched a hundred-ton steel shaft plunging down to that place where the water was. And finally we got down to that place where the water was, where the water sucked out of Lake Mead roared through thirty-foot penstocks and finally into the turbines themselves. “Touch it,” the Reclamation said [sic], and I did, and for a long time I just stood there with my hands on the turbine. It was a peculiar moment, but so explicit as to suggest nothing beyond itself.14

“So explicit as to suggest nothing beyond itself.” This is where sexual taboo and the waterworks meet. Didion supposes that the moment her hand rests on the turbine is suffused with something beyond sex; beyond “the massive involvement” of the dam with “power and pressure”; beyond even “the transparent sexual overtones to that involvement.”15 It is as if she is scolding the reader for their puerility for hearing “penstock” and “turbine” as sexual innuendos. For her, the obsession with waterworks in California is primal in a way that is beyond sex. We might imagine her voice here weighing in on the side of her fellow writer and native-born Californian Robert Towne.

A Shaky Premise

It was also Joan Didion who wrote that “the apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion real live here in only the most temporary way.”16 Carey McWilliams aired a similar sentiment when he opined in his 1946 Southern California: An Island on the Land that most residents of Southern California “do not understand the semi-arid environment in which they live.” Unlike Didion, however, he did not imagine they could be wholly oblivious to the dangers around them. McWilliams’s Southern Californians were instead “haunted by a vague and nameless fear of future disaster” and a dim but persistent awareness that “all the throbbing, bustling life of Southern California is based on a single shaky premise, namely, that the aqueduct life-lines will continue to bring an adequate supply of water to the region.”17

Setting aside his deadpan suggestion of a seismic “shaky premise,” McWilliams’s evocation of a regional population’s fragile dependence on the pipeline infrastructure of its water supply is the “vague and nameless fear” that motivates the action of Chinatown. A library copy of McWilliams’s book was Towne’s first and main source of information about the water wars as he wrote his screenplay. In it Towne would have found a treasure trove of fear and loathing—and fascination and love—for the region. McWilliams quotes the British novelist J. B. Priestly, for example, for whom Los Angeles and its “oddly enervating sunshine” felt “as impermanent and brittle as a reel of film.”18 Priestly reminds us that the Southern California sun can be as draining as it can be beatific, and that, while Los Angeles was first famous for its aqueduct lifelines, it was fast becoming famous for its film industry.

The vast and intricate water infrastructure of greater Los Angeles today sustains a population of about eighteen million people. The population of metropolitan Los Angeles in 1905, when the city relied almost entirely on the Los Angeles River for its water, was only about two hundred thousand. But it was growing fast. That same year William Mulholland, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Water Department – and the historical figure who inspired both the characters of Noah Cross and Hollis Mulwray in Chinatown – publicly argued for “the absolute necessity” of “securing a source of water supply elsewhere. We must have it.”19 Mullholland’s sense of urgency was exaggerated and, by many accounts, disingenuous. But it was certainly true that the city would need more water if it were to grow according to the ambitions of its boosters. As William Kahrl writes, the city did in a sense need the aqueduct, “but it was a need founded in prospect,” not in the immediate needs of the present population.20 Elsewhere Mulholland expressed the idea in a masterfully epigrammatic phrase, characteristically spare but nevertheless brimming with gnomic existential threat for the future inhabitants of the city: “If we don’t get it, we won’t need it.”21

They did get it, and through the 1920s the city of Los Angeles grew by 100,000 residents every year.22 When Mulholland said the city needed a new water supply in 1905, he was stumping for a project he had masterminded: the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which would pump water into the city across 233 miles of desert from the Owens Valley in Inyo County. His sense of urgency coincided and combined with a minor drought and a heatwave in the summer of 1905 that produced, with the help of a coordinated propaganda campaign, a frightened and therefore suggestible public, who voted in 1907 overwhelmingly to fund the project with $25 million in public monies. The Los Angeles Aqueduct was at the time the longest such aqueduct in the United States. It was one of the first and most important steps in constructing modern California. “The history of California in the twentieth century,” Kahrl attests, “is the story of a state inventing itself with water. The modern prosperity of the state has consequently been founded upon a massive rearrangement of the natural environment through public water development.”23

Water development in California was public in large part simply because the scale of the proposed work was so massive that no private corporation was willing, or perhaps even able, to pay for it. Public officials in both Los Angeles and San Francisco “realized that municipalization of the urban water supply, as the means to securing access to the far greater amounts of capital which government can raise though taxation and bond sales, was the essential first step toward securing the water they needed for the future.”24 The nightmare of Chinatown is motivated in part by the question of who should ultimately own the state’s water resources—the public trust or private entrepreneurs—and the life-or-death struggle that ensues from it.

The Los Angeles Aqueduct was approved in 1905 and finished in 1913, when it began pumping water from the Owens River to Los Angeles. By 1926, Owens Lake, which was once continually replenished by the Owens River, had dried up into a salt flat whose desiccated floor periodically rose up into a giant poison dust cloud to choke the valley’s residents. The aqueduct decimated the agricultural sector of the Owens Valley region. But by then Mulholland and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had already turned their attention further north, to other sources from which the city could suck.

The human and ecological consequences of LA’s explosive growth since 1905 are still difficult to assimilate to ecological thought, let alone to judge as a question of moral good and evil. Kahrl attached an epigraph to his seminal book about California’s hydroscape drawn from Max Weber: “He who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers and for his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.” The epigraph serves as a warning at the entrance of Kahrl’s history. We might wonder how a hypothetical reader of Kahrl, sitting in their apartment in Los Angeles, a member of the city’s eighteen million whose very life depends on pumped water, can come to terms with the Los Angeles Aqueduct—and all of the subsequent California water projects—without coming to an existential crisis, realizing that their lives could not and would not, otherwise, be there.

Such wicked existential questions are what make the incest plot device so compelling in Chinatown. Few things come easier than condemning the moral corruption of incest, but the child of such a morally corrupt sexual encounter between a father and a daughter is innocent of the crime of their conception. Most Angelenos bear no responsibility for the water theft—the analogy could easily, perhaps too easily, be made to the rape of the land—that makes their existence possible. Thus does Evelyn Mulwray’s daughter Katherine stand in for them. Contrary, then, to what either Polanski or Towne said about it, the incest plot is essential to the water plot in Chinatown, not just because it “drives home the outrage,” as Towne asserted, but because it figures archetypally the ethical dilemma of existing when that existence is predicated on a prior act of moral evil.

While Kahrl prefaced his history of the California Water Wars with a cautionary epigraph about the futility of moralizing politics, Robert Towne adorned the title page of the second draft of his screenplay for Chinatown with an epigraph taken from William Mulholland’s infamously terse speech at the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913. “There it is. Take it,” Mulholland said before a crowd of 30,000 spectators at Newhall Pass in the San Fernando Valley as he summoned the first waters into the channel. Towne used Mulholland’s words to embody the ethos of his script’s antagonist, Noah Cross, played by John Huston, who murders his son-in-law and business partner in a scheme to monopolize Los Angeles’s water supply. Of course the casual amorality of those words resonates chillingly with Weber’s words of warning in Kahrl’s book. “There it is. Take it,” could be a five-word psychological profile of American manifest destiny. They are the perfect framing words for Chinatown, though ironically the words that appear on the title page of a screenplay bear a somewhat different relationship to what follows than do the words of a preface to a history book like Kahrl’s. Mullholland’s words are never uttered in the film version of Chinatown; the audience would never hear or, assuming most of them would never read the screenplay, read them. They were, it follows, not for the audience. Clearly, though, Towne used Mulholland’s words, as well as the history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, to guide his writing. They worked like an incantation that sets Chinatown in motion before the action of Chinatown begins; a specter that haunts its characters throughout, and that determines their fates.

Capable of Anything

The figure of William Mulholland also looms over Chinatown. In the screenplay Towne splits him in two, inventing the characters of Hollis Mulwray and Noah Cross, not only because the real historical figure was morally ambiguous but also because Mulholland’s real biography was stranger than fiction. The gigantism of his accomplishments and of his failures was simply too implausible. Towne’s character Noah Cross, as magnificently and theatrically terrifying as he is, suffers by comparison to the real historical person upon whom he was based. Almost from the moment of his arrival in Los Angeles, William Mulholland became a mythical figure. He was born in Belfast in 1855 and raised in Dublin. At fifteen he joined the British Merchant Navy. He crisscrossed the Atlantic for four years before deciding with his brother to stow away on a ship to Panama, and from there he made his way to California. When he finally arrived in Los Angeles he immediately identified himself, in the strongest, most literal senses of those words, with the Los Angeles River. In a very short and never-completed autobiographical sketch, he wrote:

Los Angeles was a place after my own heart. It was the most attractive town I had ever seen [. . .] The Los Angeles River was the greatest attraction. It was a beautiful, limpid little stream with willows on its banks . . . It was so attractive to me that it at once became something about which my whole scheme of life was woven. I loved it so much.25

Not long after his arrival he took a job as a zanjero, or ditch-tender, with the Los Angeles City Water Company, during which, “when he was not pulling weeds or working with hoe and shovel [. . .] he spent the long hours of dusk striding the river’s banks, learning its peculiarities, and dreaming of the ways he could fashion its uncertain flows to build a great city.” According to Kahrl, “probably no man has known the Los Angeles River as well as Mulholland.”26 His energy, dedication, and competence were noticed at the Water Company and Mulholland rose quickly through the ranks. In 1880 he was put in charge of enlarging the Buena Vista Reservoir from a holding capacity of three million gallons to thirteen million. When the job was done, Mulholland built himself a shanty on the reservoir’s edge and lived there. He used his income to buy over a thousand young trees and planted them on the grounds.27

In this telling, Mulholland sounds like Johnny Appleseed or Henry David Thoreau. But if this makes him sound like something of a naturalist, living on the land and lovingly tending to it in a bucolic idyll, the next chapter of his career shows that what he was lovingly tending was likely not nature at all but rather the waterworks he engineered. By 1885 Mulholland had risen to the rank of superintendent of the Los Angeles City Water Company, a position he obtained in part because he had “committed to memory not only the company’s entire distribution system of pipes, gate valves, hydrants, pumps, and ditches, but also the details of its complex operation.” The city had little choice but to hire him if they hoped to “understand and maintain the system it had acquired.”28 The man was the map and the map was the man. The LA waterworks, not the LA River, had become the thing “about which” his “whole scheme of life was woven.”

Over time the image of Mulholland as a dedicated nature lover morphed into an image of the Faustian developer. In an interview conducted in 1980 by Marc Reisner, the director of the National Park Service Horace Albright recalled a chilling conversation he had with Mulholland at a dinner in 1925 or 1926 that could just as easily be a scrapped scene from Chinatown’s script. Imagine Mulholland broaching the subject of Yosemite National Park with the tone of a mobster seeking protection money. “That’s a nice park you’ve got there, Horace.” What Albright actually remembers Mulholland saying is certainly in the same generic vein. “I’m going to tell you what I’d do with your park,” he began,

“You know this new photographic process they’ve invented? It’s called Pathé. It makes everything seem lifelike. The hues and coloration are magnificent. Well, then, what I would do, if I were custodian of your park, is I’d hire a dozen of the best photographers in the world. I’d build them cabins in Yosemite Valley and pay them something and give them all the film they wanted. I’d say, ‘This park is yours. It’s yours for one year. I want you to take photographs in every season. I want you to capture all the colors, all the waterfalls, all the snow, and all the majesty. I especially want you to photograph the rivers. In the early summer, when the Merced River roars, I want to see that.’ And then I’d leave them be. And in a year I’d come back, and take their film, and send it out and have it developed and treated by Pathé. And then I would print the pictures in thousands of books and send them to every library. I would urge every magazine in the country to print them and tell every gallery and museum to hang them. I would make certain that every American saw them. And then,” Mulholland said slowly, with what Albright remembered as a vulpine grin, “and then do you know what I would do? I’d go in there and build a dam from one side of that valley to the other and stop the goddamned waste!”29

Even if Albright made this story up it would testify to the ambivalent mystique surrounding the man, a mystique that Mulholland encouraged in many respects and to which he would finally fall victim. Two or three years after Albright’s terrifying meeting with Mulholland, on March 12, 1928, the San Francis Dam—a dam designed and built by Mulholland four years earlier—failed catastrophically. Just twelve hours before it failed, Mulholland had personally performed a site inspection and declared it safe. When the dam broke, a hundred-foot-high wall of water rushed from the Santa Clara Valley into Ventura County and out into the Pacific Ocean, killing an estimated 450 people in its path, many of whom were Latino laborers. In the shooting script for Chinatown, Towne made a point of this by having police lieutenant Lou Escobar show little sympathy for Hollis Mulwray’s fate. Gittes notices this and asks, “What’d he do, Lou, make a pass at your sister?” to which Escobar snaps, “No, he drowned a cousin of mine with about five hundred other people. But they weren’t very important, just a bunch of dumb Mexicans living by a dam. Now beat it, Gittes, you don’t come out of this smelling like a rose, you know.”

Weeks after the Saint Francis Dam catastrophe, Mulholland made a statement at the inquest. Famously (and slightly inaccurately), he expressed his “envy for the dead.”30 “Don’t blame anyone else. You just fasten it on me. If there was an error of human judgement, I was the human.”31 Mulholland was never charged with a crime, but he was forced to resign as chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. He died four years later. The dam failure was one of the worst civil engineering disasters in US history.

Mulholland’s biography is a spectacular story in itself, but it also reveals that there is little resemblance between Towne’s thinly imagined murder victim, the anemic do-gooder Hollis Mulwray, and the historical Mulholland. Usually when critics talk about Chinatown’s connection to the real-life personalities involved in California’s Water Wars, it’s Hollis Mulwray who is anagrammatically associated with William Mulholland. This is only partially true. Mulwray is supposed to correlate with Mulholland, yes, but it’s Noah Cross to whom Towne bequeaths Mulholland’s fantastic vitality. Towne gives his Hyde all the glamor, leaving little for his Jekyll to do but die after a few lines of dialogue that establish his impeccable moral stance. Mulwray and Cross both represent Mulholland, whose ambivalent part in the hydroengineering of Los Angeles is irreducible to a single political or moral judgement. Cross wants to own the water; Mulwray thinks the people should own it. Cross wants to build a massive reservoir; Mulwray refuses because he knows it is structurally unsound. The real Mulholland’s imperious presence, his intimidating physicality and his moral ambiguity, lean much more toward John Huston’s portrayal of Noah Cross. It’s hard to imagine Hollis Mulwray threatening to dam Yosemite. It’s hard to imagine Hollis Mulwray saying, “There it is. Take it.” It’s quite easy to imagine Noah Cross doing either, or both.

A Flaw in the Iris

There is no epigraph on the cover page of the third and final draft copy of Chinatown; Mulholland’s words from the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct are absent. The aqueduct, the motive force for Towne’s screenplay as we know from that now-expunged epigraph, is never mentioned in the dialogue of Chinatown. It does appear once, in Russ Yelburton’s secretary’s office at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), in a photograph on the wall that bears the caption “Noah Cross / Hollis Mulwray / 1925.” In the photo, Cross and Mulwray stand together inside of a cross section of aqueduct pipe, in a desert presumably somewhere between the Owens Valley and Los Angeles. Mulwray’s hand rests amiably on Cross’s shoulder. Such photographs were and are commonplace for big construction projects; real photographs of William Mulholland and his team in precisely such poses with sections of the aqueduct abound in the literature. The idea is always basically the same: to express the scale and scope of such massive infrastructural works by juxtaposing the human form with its vast machinery; to produce a sense of awe for the infrastructural sublime while at the same time aggrandizing the human enterprise and ingenuity that brings such works into existence.

The sequence in which the photo appears is a masterful example of plot exposition within a comic set piece. Jake Gittes suspects that the new chief engineer of the LADWP, Russ Yelburton, is responsible for murdering Mulwray, the previous chief. So he goes to his office to confront him. But Yelburton’s secretary plays interference.

SECRETARY: Mr. Yelburton will be busy for some time.

JAKE: Well, it’s my lunch hour. I can wait.

SECRETARY: He’s liable to be tied up indefinitely.

JAKE: I take a long lunch hour.

Jake takes a seat and lights a cigarette. After a sufficiently awkward silence he stands up and begins to study the photos on the wall in her office. His gaze falls first upon the photo with Mulwray and Cross inside the cross-section of pipe.

JAKE: Noah Cross worked for the Water Department?

SECRETARY: Yes. No.

JAKE: Well, did he or didn’t he?

SECRETARY: He owned it.

JAKE: He owned the Water Department?

SECRETARY: Yes.

JAKE: You mean, he owned the entire water supply for the city?

SECRETARY: Yes.

JAKE: How’d they get it away from him?

SECRETARY: Mr. Mulwray felt the public should own the water.

JAKE: Mr. Mulwray? I thought you said Cross owned it.

SECRETARY: Along with Mr. Mulwray.

JAKE: They were partners?

SECRETARY: Yes! Yes, they were partners.

At this point the secretary, exasperated by Jake’s questions, gives up and lets him in to see Yelburton just to be free of him; the wonderfully haughty and hardened performance by Fritzi Burr makes us suspect that she is quite good at her job, that as such she is wholly unaccustomed to losing this game, and that therefore she must violently hate Jake Gittes in this moment. So exasperated is she that she doesn’t seem to realize how much she’s told him that he needs to know, just as we hardly notice we’re learning what the film is really about. In the writer’s room, this kind of plot exposition, wherein we learn the things that will make the plot come together at a later moment in the film, is called “laying pipe.”32 The figure of speech lends strange weight to this particular instance of laying pipe, since laying pipe is also the manifest content of the scene in question: the explanation of a photo of two people standing together inside of a giant pipe while engaged in the work of laying it: meta-pipelaying, as it were.

I admit I was delighted to learn this meaning of the phrase from the internet, since it resonates so perfectly with what is happening in this scene. But it is also probably the case that “laying pipe” as a widely used industry term postdates Chinatown. There is some precedence, however, for thinking of scriptwriting in terms of plumbing. Billy Wilder once used the metaphor to explain F. Scott Fitzerald’s failures as a screenwriter after he moved to Hollywood to try his hand at it in 1937. In an oft-quoted phrase, he likened Fitzgerald to “a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumber’s job [. . .] He did not know how to connect the pipes so the water could flow.”33 In Chinatown, Wilder’s metaphor for successful emplotment—connecting the pipes so the water can flow—is the plot. In normal usage, “laying pipe” suggests the pedestrian work of getting from A to B, a means to an end, a kind of groundwork necessary for leveling up to something more exalted. But in Chinatown it circles back on itself, pointing both to low-level exposition and narrative climax at the same time. California’s water infrastructure is not the usual kind of laying pipe; it is, as Joan Didion put it in her essay “Holy Water” in 1979, “plumbing on a grand scale.”

We might also note, following Michael Eaton’s suggestion that Chinatown’s plot about a big water pipe can also be read as a pun about Watergate, that in the early 1970s Nixon’s nefarious intelligence leak fixers, officially known as the Special Investigations Unit, were also unofficially known as the White House Plumbers; that moniker would have loomed large in the news of the day. Early in Chinatown, as Jake reviews the surveillance photos of Hollis Mulwray, Walsh quips: “The guy’s got water on the brain!” It’s a funny line, but it’s inaccurate. Mulwray is really preoccupied, like Chinatown itself, less with water than with plumbing and piping. In the shooting script is a more telling line that didn’t make it into the film. As Jake draws up a contract for his services with Evelyn Mulwray, he says “Before this—I turned on the faucet, it came out hot and cold, I didn’t think there was a thing to it.” Jake is wondering about the obscured connection between a forgettable aspect of everyday life and what was, and still is, the grand drama of California’s water politics.

Of course there is another, more vulgar meaning to “laying pipe” that resonates in this context and that absolutely does go back in usage well before Chinatown. “Laying Pipe” in its vernacular vulgarity must recall Didion yet again, this time to the moment she rests her hand on the thrumming turbine in Hoover Dam, an experience that she describes as “so explicit as to suggest nothing beyond itself.” On the one hand, this is meant to mean that the experience bears no relationship to sex; on the other, “so explicit as to suggest nothing beyond itself” is also a nearly perfect definition of pornography. It suggests that the gaze that is enthralled by the spectacle of infrastructure—of the pipeline—is, somehow, a pornographic gaze. It is at least worth noting, as a way of expanding Didion’s point proleptically, that the San Fernando Valley, which in the film is about to be transformed by a new aqueduct into habitable, exploitable land, would become the capital city of the pornography industry over the course of subsequent decades.

Chinatown itself is constantly flirting with near-pornographic vulgarity while fully clothed in the finest artifacts of 1930s nostalgia. There is of course the shocking incest at the heart of the plot. There is the dirty joke about “screwing like a Chinaman” whose bad taste—if not also its racism—is exposed by having the aristocratic Evelyn embarrass Jake by secretly witnessing his enthusiastic telling of it. Structurally the joke is about revealing more about yourself than you meant to. Although it’s Jake’s turn here to be exposed and embarrassed, it is Evelyn who will be subject again and again to such exposure throughout the rest of the film. There is the astonishing non sequitur that occurs when Evelyn informs Jake that she has been out riding her horse all morning. “You must have gone quite a distance,” he says, observing her visibly sweating in her jodhpurs. “I was riding bareback,” is her response, and whether this is nonsensical or sexually suggestive or hysterical or all of the above, it is just left there to simmer ambiguously. It is an incredible moment, fully charged with lust, mystery, terror, malice, and hysterical laughter.

At this point we still imagine Evelyn as the traditional femme fatale of film noir; we are misled into imagining sexual danger coming from her, rather than coming for her. Again and again, the film allows us such moments of snide pleasure in the punchline of dirty or demeaning jokes like these, only to confront us later on with the genuine horrors concealed—and partially revealed—by them. When Jake first surprises Evelyn in her car and accuses her, wrongly, of kidnapping her dead husband’s mistress, she lowers her head in dejection and accidentally honks the car horn. It plays like a false jump scare, momentarily lifting the heaviness of the emotional atmosphere, breaking the tension with relieved laughter. But the callback to this scene, in the film’s final set piece, is mercilessly cruel to characters and viewers alike. Evelyn’s now lifeless head slumps against the car horn, making it wail for several excruciating seconds before Escobar pulls her back and reveals to the camera the gunshot wound through her eye. In Chinatown, no good joke goes unpunished.

The danger to which Evelyn is exposed is still a mystery when, soon after Mulwray’s murder, Jake returns to his office and finds her there waiting for him. She proposes hiring him to find out who murdered her husband. Having just come from his education in Yelburton’s secretary’s office, Jake now knows a lot of things he didn’t know during his last interview with Evelyn. His tragic mistake is that he thinks that means he now knows everything. The conversation that follows plays out on vastly unequal and profoundly unstable grounds of knowledge. Evelyn does not know that Jake knows who her father is; and she does not know that he knows that they were partners in the water department. Jake, on the other hand, does not know anything about Evelyn’s daughter Katherine, or about Evelyn’s blighted relationship with her father. Jake arrogantly proceeds to ambush Evelyn with what he knows; he turns the scene from one between a detective and a client to one between an analyst and an analysand.

JAKE: Tell me something, uh, did you get married before or after Mulwray and your father sold the Water Department? Noah Cross is your father, isn’t he?

EVELYN: [Gasps] Yes, of course. It was sometime after. I was just out of grade school when they did that.

JAKE: Then you married your father’s business partner. [Watches as Evelyn lights a second cigarette.] You’ve already got one going, Mrs. Mulwray. Does my talking about your father upset you?

EVELYN: Why, no. Yes, a little. You see, Hollis and my f [. . .] my father, had a falling-out finally.

JAKE: Over you or over the Water Department?

EVELYN: Not over me. Why should it be over me?

JAKE: Then it was over the Water Department.

EVELYN: Yes. Hollis felt that the water should belong to the public, and I don’t think my father felt that way. Actually, it was over the Van der Lip Dam. You know, the dam that broke?

JAKE: Oh, yeah?

EVELYN: Yes. Hollis never forgave him for it.

JAKE: Never forgave him for what?

EVELYN: For talking him into building it. They never spoke from that time on.

JAKE: You sure about that?

EVELYN: Of course I’m sure.

JAKE: Sign here. The copy’s for you.

Evelyn commits two parapraxes at the top of this dialogue. One of them is physical. At the mention of her father she “forgets” she is smoking a cigarette and busies her hands with lighting another one. The moment reinforces a character trait the viewer has almost certainly already begun to discern; Evelyn is a highly symptomatic neurotic, prone to revealing herself accidentally, or in any case under the guise of accident. The second is verbal: she hesitates over the word “father,” getting out the obstruent fricative “f” sound and then stopping before repeating the whole word from the beginning. She then tellingly overcompensates for her telling hesitation with the words, “falling out finally.” These last words purport to describe the end of Mulwray’s and Cross’ relationship, but they also refer alliteratively to the “f” word—father—that Evelyn is finally able to let fall from her lips. Saying “falling out finally,” can be understood as a neurotic way for Evelyn to prove that she doesn’t have a problem pronouncing words that start with the letter “f,” and by extension, that talking about her “father” is not a problem for her. But of course, proving her facility with other “f” words ironically undercuts her assertion that she has only a little difficulty talking about her father. Evelyn’s neurotic symptom gives itself away in the attempt to cover it up. Such is the anxious reason of neurosis.

The “finally” in the final cut was added in filming; it’s not in the shooting script. I suspect Dunaway added the word because she understood that Evelyn would try to continue talking in order to cover her evasiveness, using “f” words as logorrheic chaff. Evelyn uses “f” words twice more in her exchange with Jake, both times denoting actions involving the finality of the falling-out between Hollis and Noah: Hollis “felt” that the water should belong to the public, Hollis never “forgave” Noah for convincing him to build the Van der Lip Dam. All this falling, feeling, and forgiving rhymes later—verbally and visually—with the “flaw” in Evelyn’s eye, the flaw Jake discovers while she’s cleaning him up, over whose “f” Evelyn falters once again trying to pronounce, that leads them to sex, and that finally turns out to be the fated trajectory of the policeman’s bullet that kills her.

What if we were to add to these spoken “f” words the unspoken ones: the “forgetting” of her first cigarette (and of course, in the final words of the film: “forget it Jake . . .”); and the “failure”—the technical term is catastrophic failure—of the Van der Lip Dam that motivates the falling out between the business partners. Of course, the Van der Lip Dam is a fictionalization of the Saint Francis Dam (another “f” word), which at 11:57 pm on March 12, 1928, failed catastrophically, killing an estimated 450 people. The fictionalization of the dam with a Dutch sounding name containing a homonym of the English word “lip” suggests an analogy between the lips as a barrier for holding back words and, at the same time, as a spillway for words to burst forth against their speaker’s will. And this is precisely Evelyn’s situation in the moment, as the “f” word giving her so much trouble is formed by pushing air through a passage created by the tensed, slightly parted lips, an action that threatens to break down, here, into the release of confession.

The thin fictionalization of the Saint Francis Dam as the Van der Lip Dam is dramatized in Evelyn’s “f” word logorrhea. History floods the fiction of Chinatown through the crack of parapraxis. And then there is the other, eponymous “f” word, referring in this case to the abominable incestuous relationship between Evelyn and her father that produces Katherine, their daughter. This is the “fact” that Evelyn wishes at all costs to hide from the world and from Gittes’s investigation. It is the abhorrent thing that causes her to fire off as many other “f” words as she can think of in order, at all costs, to avoid that one.

All this neurotic avoidance—and thus hysterical insistence—on the sex crime at the core of Chinatown might go some way to help us understand why we don’t see much of the actual pipeline that is also at the core of Chinatown. The aqueduct was never really central to the plot. Instead, what we do see are intimations of the aqueduct as we pass through various settings: its beneficiaries, as in the lush gardens at the Mulwray mansion; its casualties, like the desiccated orange farms in the San Fernando Valley; and its support systems, like the (fictional) Oak Pass Reservoir. If, however, the aqueduct is nowhere to be seen in Chinatown, that is not because it isn’t there—because it is, in fact, everywhere. The aqueduct is too ubiquitous to be visible. We cannot look at it because we are also inside of it, always looking through it. Its cross-sectional aperture is the lens through which we are able to see anything, and everything, in Chinatown. What do appear, again and again, are stylized analogies to the pipeline’s maw: all kinds of circular apertures like eyes, drains, pocket watches, lenses, glasses, mirrors, and, as in the case of Evelyn Mulwray’s left eye, flaws. All these refer back to Mulholland’s pipeline even as the script turns away from it, like so many flashes and floaters, the visual aftereffects of a primal, painful exposure.

Using the one representation of the aqueduct as a starting point—the photo in Yelburton’s secretary’s office—we can begin to see how this image permeates the film. Of course, that photo is staged with the actors; it’s an imitation of other photos just like it in the historical record, in so many historical records of grand modern construction work. And throughout the film, we see other imitations in different registers. We see the same visual trope when Jake is snapping photographs of Mulwray and Katherine together; in a moment that has been much commented on, the image of the pair is projected onto Jake’s camera’s front lens element. At the time this was a tricky special effect to pull off. Polanski initially wanted the figures of Hollis and Katherine to appear upside down in the lens in imitation of how a camera works: by projecting an inverted, upside-down image onto the film plate behind the lens. But he was talked out of that, based on the argument that it might confuse and alienate audiences.

While Polanski was eager to evoke the filmic apparatus, however, what the effect achieves instead is a clear visual analogy to the photo that we are shown later of Mulwray and Cross in the pipeline: two people inside a circular aperture. In the moment we are meant to believe we are seeing Jake snapping pictures of Mulwray with his mistress. Our understanding of the scene changes once we learn that Mulwray is not Katherine’s lover but her stepfather and protector. That is the plot of Chinatown, its narrative. But the visual grammar of the images—the circles with people in them—belies a different plot altogether. Once we thought we were watching two people through a camera lens, then we realize we are watching them through the barrel of a water pipeline. So, two revelations that compete with each other: the verbal explanations that reframe Hollis and Katherine Mulwray’s relationship, and the visual rhymes that relocate them inside of a pipeline, inside the water infrastructure of Los Angeles.

If this fails to convince as only one instance, there are many others in the film, and the evidence quickly becomes overwhelming. When Jake is first hired by the fake Mrs. Mulwray to surveil Hollis Mulwray, he follows the chief engineer around Los Angeles for a full day and ends up near the ocean. Mulwray climbs down an embankment to the beach, and Jake conceals himself above, crouched inside a half-pipe at the end of a drainpipe, in such a way that we might reasonably consider him to be observing Mulwray from inside the pipeline.

Moments before that, Jake watches Mulwray through the rearview mirror of his automobile. The mirror is, in the style of 1930s cars, circular. Mulwray’s whole figure, turned in the opposite direction, appears in it, surrounded by sand, scrub, and sky. Outside of the circle of the mirror, the left and right edges of the frame reveal sidewalks, green lawns, and lush trees. The horizon line is closely matched inside and outside of the mirror. The effect is a mise-en-scène that quite literally tells the story of irrigating Los Angeles. The man who brought the water to LA stands in his pipeline, in what was once a desert, whilst around him, outside of the circle—outside of the pipeline—the desert blooms grass-green and concrete-grey: the banner colors of suburbia, the result of the civil engineer’s work.34

The color schemes here were a deliberate aspect of Richard Sylbert’s production design—what he called at the time a “visual structure”—for Chinatown, a way to “rewrite the script in visual terms.” As Sylbert explained the structure to Sam Wasson, “you say to yourself, Okay, Chinatown is about a drought, so all the colors in this picture are gonna be related to the idea of drought [. . .] And the only time you’re gonna see green is when somebody has water from the grass.” All of these elements of Sylbert’s structure are visible in this shot of Gittes’s rearview mirror. Significantly, Sylbert “kept the secrets of his visual structure” from the director, who would be, in Wasson’s words, “consumed with the manifest content of the story.”35 So Sylbert the production designer was interested in thematizing drought conditions through color; Towne the writer was interested in telling the story of the aqueduct without mentioning the aqueduct; and Polanksi the director was interested in creating self-referential images of cameras—and here we see that the shot is manifestly about visual surveillance. All of it comes together here, in this shot of a mirror that is also an image of a pipeline that is also an intimation of an irrigated desert landscape. This combination of visions—equal parts collaboration and conflict, communication and secrecy—is what delivers the hallucinatory, dreamlike experience of cinema. These images linger and haunt because they are condensed, conflicted, and complementary. They signify deeply and broadly without immediately revealing themselves. And they accrue meaning over time and through repetition. They all reference the pipeline as the organizing principle both of Sylbert’s visual structure and of Towne’s plot.

The overall effect of all of these circular apertures visually evoking the pipeline is vertiginous. It may even verge on surrealism, something out of Magritte or Escher, like a framed picture of a picture frame, or a coffee table book about coffee tables. But this visual structure is not only at work in Chinatown; it is also at work in the real-life architectural monument to Mulholland and his aqueduct. The Mulholland Memorial Fountain in Los Feliz was originally dedicated in 1940. In 2013, at the aqueduct’s centenary celebration, a section of eight-foot diameter steel pipeline was mounted in front of the fountain. Looking in at the fountain from the corner of Los Feliz Boulevard and Riverside Drive, the perspective is a graphic match for Gittes’s view from the rearview mirror of his car, only instead of the engineer himself, we see the fountain remembering him. Both perspectives suggest looking through a pipeline as an epistemology and an ontology. They suggest that to think and to be in modern Los Angeles is to think through and be in the water pipeline, an immersion so necessary, and so total, that it is, paradoxically, easy to forget most of the time, like the air we breathe. At the base of the pipeline fragment, pressed into a steel disk and set in concrete, are Mulholland’s words inaugurating the aqueduct, the same words that were cut out of the framing of Chinatown’s screenplay. “There it is. Take it.”

Generally, when critics discuss things like the image of Hollis and Katherine in Jake’s camera lens, or the rearview mirror image of the chief engineer, or Noah Cross’s glasses, or the flaw in Evelyn Mulwray’s eye, what they tend to remark on is how these apertures are analogies for the camera lens; how seeing and being seen are themselves motifs in the film; and how, therefore, the film is often a self-referential meditation on the medium of cinema itself. But this is to remain in a myopic zone of film theory that leaves the pipeline out of focus, where one cannot see that the pipeline is itself a part of this chain of isomorphisms, and that it is in fact no less central to the way the film sees than is the camera’s eye.

One might begin to wonder, given all these stylized cross-sectional views of the pipeline, whether we might ever get a longitudinal view of it from an objectifying distance, in order to hold its totality in our vision: to look at it as opposed to looking through it, as we have so far been doing. There is a striking instance of exactly this during Jake’s surveillance on Mulwray early in the film. Just after Jake attends a town hall meeting in which Mulwray refuses to build a new dam, the scene cuts to an establishing shot of the dried-up bed of the LA River, viewed from a bridge. The camera is stationary at first and seems to be autonomous or omniscient—untethered from any clearly subjective point of view. We see a black car—Mulwray’s—crawling across the opposite bank. Then the camera slowly pans right, losing sight of the car and revealing Jake’s profile coming into frame from the right. The panning shot reveals that we were in fact only ever allowed to see what Jake sees. Just for a moment Jake’s nose seems to hover over the river. Far in the background of the shot sits a section of pipeline that, thinking two-dimensionally or purely in terms of photographic composition, situates it right between Jake’s eyeline and Mulwray’s car on the opposite bank of the river. Then Jake raises his binoculars to get a closer look, and what we understand in terms of realist narrative action is that Jake is looking through those binoculars at Mulwray’s car. But since Mulwray’s car is no longer in the frame, what we actually see is Jake looking through binoculars at a pipeline fragment. The shot suggests that Jake, mired in diegesis, is looking at the wrong thing; the viewer, switching between narrative and visual logics, learns in this moment what the right thing to be looking at is: the pipeline in the background.

I am not implying that this is all intentional—it seems hard to credit the idea that anyone placed the pipeline section in this shot deliberately—but I am insisting that it is meaningful, in the manner of Roland Barthes’s punctum, or the Lacanian Real, or the Freudian return of the repressed. If this were an instance merely of accident—of the photographic record carelessly admitting a concrete chunk of reality into the otherwise scrupulously careful crafting of the profilmic elements of the scene—then it would still, nevertheless, correct the deletion of the aqueduct from the title page of Towne’s second draft filmscript. It would present the pipeline on the screen—Evans’s “something real,” Lacan’s Real—stubbornly refusing to be omitted from the story. The section of concrete pipe that appears in the background of this scene is almost certainly not an actual piece of Aqueduct pipeline, though sections of the aqueduct were made of concrete piping like this one. It is, rather, a figure—probably an accidental one—for the concept “pipeline.”

At another point in the screenplay, Towne describes a storm drain—another kind of pipeline—as yawning at the camera, and he describes the policemen standing around it “staring at the empty pipe as if they expect it to talk.” In Chinatown, the pipeline carries, among other things, an ambiguous, uncanny agency, expressed by sudden watery ejaculations, like the one that nearly sweeps Jake away at the Oak Pass Reservoir, or by withholding them, like when Jake tries and fails to show the police how the water is being diverted through the storm drains.

Consider, by way of further evidence, the next shot, which switches definitively into Jake’s point of view by masking the camera with a cutout frame in the shape of the binoculars he holds up to his eyes. The device is ludicrous, though common enough in popular cinema; what one sees, when one looks through binoculars, is not two circular apertures but one, and even if one saw two, one would see essentially the same image—minutely, imperceptibly shifted in perspective—in each one. But here we see Mulwray walking right in between the apertures, in effect violating every principle of the optical physics of binoculars, taking us out of the idea of “binoculars” in the same gesture that tries halfheartedly to convince us that we are looking through them. Is this a cinematic gaffe, a failed special effect that rips us out of the suspension of disbelief and reminds us that we are, after all, only watching a movie? Or does it happen here because it is meaningful, because we are being reminded that we are looking through two apertures at once—a stereoscopic image created by the fusion of lens and pipeline—whose point of suture is the man in the middle, the pipeline’s chief engineer?

I say “suture” because ultimately it will be, literally, a matter of stitches: the stitches on Jake’s nose in the last third of the film, which will reveal themselves to be yet another representation of the aqueduct, this one written on his face. They are the painful and humiliating price he will pay for not seeing it all sooner. For the time being, however, we note that Jakes fails to see the pipeline in this scene; binoculars are, comically, the wrong kind of lenses to show him what is right in front of his face, or under his nose. But we see it, and we see him not seeing it while seeming to be looking right at it.

You Know What Happens to Nosy Fellows?

This brings us to what might be the third most memorable thing, after the water theft and the incest, about Chinatown: the cut inflicted on Jake Gittes’s nose by an unnamed minor character known only as “Smaller Man” in the script and played by none other than the director himself, Roman Polanski. The scene is set in the (fictional) Oak Pass Reservoir in Los Angeles, where earlier that day the police discovered Hollis Mulwray’s corpse. Jake returns there that night to snoop around; he’s convinced that Mulwray was murdered, and he’s been tipped off that the Water Authority is secretly dumping water into the LA River overnight—in order to create public panic about perceived drought conditions and so to sway the voting public to endorse the construction of more dams and reservoirs, which, unbeknownst to the public, are not being built to service existing Los Angeles at all, but rather to make billionaires of real estate tycoons speculating in the still mostly arid San Fernando Valley. Jake is having a look around when he hears gunshots close by. Desperate for cover, he ducks into the flood channel. Just then a rush of water engulfs him, nearly washing him away and drowning him, but instead slamming him up against a cyclone fence. Jake claws his way out of the channel, soaked and sore and less one “goddamned Florsheim shoe,” only to be accosted by his rival Claude Mulvahill and his diminutive, beige suited, red-bow-tied sidekick. “Hello Claude, where’d you get the midget?” Jake taunts Smaller Man, metafictionally of course also understood as Nicholson taunting Polanski, emasculating the director, enacting an oedipal competition between leading man and auteur. Smaller Man responds by opening his switchblade, gently inserting in into Jake’s right nostril while Mulvahill holds him, and slicing it open, splattering blood. A lot of blood.

It’s a brilliant enactment of the castration fantasy. The director has come out from behind the camera and revealed himself as the true authority over his star puppet, humiliated and branded him as his own. Although the violence of the cut is initially horrific, the wound itself is almost immediately covered and converted into comedy. Nicholson appears in the very next scene in his office with a big ridiculous-looking white bandage right in the middle of his bankable box office face, while around him his associates try, with little success, to hide their amusement. And so he spends the second third of the film with his nose bandaged, and the last third with the wound exposed, conspicuously stitched back together. In the same stroke by which the film conveys the conflict between director and star, however, it also conveys a sense of realism rare in Hollywood cinema: how often do stars get beaten up in one scene, only to appear unbruised, unmutilated, or unscarred in the next? But not in Chinatown. And this is no badge of combat, like a shot to the shoulder, resulting in an arm in a sling, or something similarly superficial—something that enhances the star’s masculinity rather than threatening it. Nicholson’s trademark face has been compromised in the middle of his star turn. And that marks his character—symmetrically to the way Evelyn is marked by the flaw in her iris—as, in Smaller Man’s words, a “nosy fellow.” Jake’s face is effaced. He has become all nose at the moment he realizes how little he knows—a matter, as Diedre Lynch memorably put it in another context, less of “a nose appended to a face” than “a supernumerary face that has attached itself to a nose.”36 One of the grand pleasures of Nicholson’s performance is watching him—both Jack and Jake—fighting with pure charm and force of will against the mark of that bandage, a fight he does often manage to win despite his ultimate defeat. When Yelburton sees Jake’s bandage and asks “does it hurt?,” Jake responds laconically, “only when I breathe.” When Evelyn dismisses his conspiracy theories, he points out that “I damn near lost my nose. And I like it. I like breathing through it.” He’s still got his sense of humor. But by the end, he’ll have lost that along with everything else.

David Fincher, on the commentary track of the 2014 Bluray release of Chinatown, called Jake’s nose wound, with perhaps only a bit of exaggeration, “the greatest running gag in movie history.”37 It defines the style of Chinatown so distinctively that it continues to inspire imitation and parody. Denis Villeneuve recently paid tribute in his 2017 sequel to Bladerunner, another neo-noir LA story set in a dystopian future symmetrical to Chinatown’s dystopian past, by slapping a matching bandage—albeit very briefly—over Ryan Gosling’s beautiful phiz, undoubtedly one of the most marketable faces in contemporary Hollywood, and in that sense directly comparable to Nicholson’s in the 1970s.

Water on the Brain

All of this cinematic brilliance about a sabotaged nose, however, is also a blinding. It causes us to lose sight of the “something real” to which Towne and Evans were so dedicated in the making of Chinatown. And that real thing was, as we know, the aqueduct that frames the story, disappears from it, and then appears in it again and again as an afterimage. It emerges from the wound on Jake’s nose as a longitudinal view—an aerial map—of the aqueduct. To understand how it got there, we can look to the draft history of Towne’s screenplay. A lot of condensation—as in both Freudian dreamwork and water physics—occurs between the second screenplay draft dated August 3, 1973 and the third draft—which became the shooting script—from October 9. The two versions are radically different, and their differences reveal the intensive revisions that went into the making and perfecting of Chinatown’s narrative.

Robert Towne wrote three drafts of Chinatown. Over about three weeks between August and September of 1973, Towne and Polanski revised the second draft together to produce the third and final draft, which became the shooting script. When Towne first showed Polanski his second draft, Polanski judged it “an hour too long,” “needlessly convoluted,” and “in need of a new moral.”38 He was right on all counts. But the second draft is interesting because it reveals more of the genetic process of how the shooting script became what it did; and it is instructive because it holds clues about how to interpret aspects of the film’s final form. In the first and third drafts of the script, Jake Gittes focalizes the restricted narration of every scene: he is identified throughout with the camera and the audience. But in the second draft, Towne decided to experiment with unrestricted narration, freeing the camera and the plot from the discipline of Jake’s POV. Towne hoped to squeeze a lot more detail into the film about the water politics of early-twentieth-century LA by showing the viewer places Jake couldn’t go and things he couldn’t know. In Towne’s long, complex, difficult, and far-from-perfect second draft, in fact, the Los Angeles hydroscape replaces Jake as the narrative’s focalizing force.

The second draft opens with the scene in which Mulwray explores the riverbed and speaks with a Mexican boy mounted on a swayback horse: the same scene whose opening seconds we examined earlier, but in this version Jake is not there. The script specifies a fade-in shot with “L.A. River, October 1937” superimposed on it. The dusty riverbed, “choked with dry weeds,” is only the first sign of prolonged drought. “A half-starved doe and her fawn nibble at weeds in the center of the riverbed.” “Several cars are stalled. Radiators boil over.” “Sheep and cattle lie and bake in the barren fields.” All the regional flora and fauna—indigenous or, like the automobile, invasive—are seen suffering from want of water. The sequence ends with an extreme wide shot of the city “shimmering in the relentless sun.” Thus Los Angeles and its conspicuous lack of water appear as the central subjects of the film in this draft. Jake’s epistemological centrality is displaced, in this telling, by the setting. Chinatown was conceived as, among other things, an epic of Los Angeles, the founding story of a city that made its future in and through the extraordinary water infrastructures built for it over the course of the twentieth century.

As this unmade version of the film opens on a drought in the blazing sun, so it ends with torrential rains in the dark of night. The entire dramatic climax of the story takes place in a deluge at a landing strip on the beach opposite Catalina Island, a direct contrast to the first establishing shots of widespread drought. This idea likely came from Towne’s reading of McWilliams’s An Island on the Land. The contrast in weather that Towne was going for was not symbolic but realistic; it was a profoundly accurate portrayal, in McWilliams’s words, of the “freakishly paradoxical environment” of Southern California. “The basic character of the region” McWilliams writes, can only be understood though the hydrological paradox of the semi-desert: as much as drought may “spread desolation and ruin in the region,” “flood waters have probably caused more damage and loss of life than droughts.”39 He goes on to describe the great flood of 1938, when over four days in March 5.7 trillion pounds of water dropped onto Los Angeles County and killed more than a hundred people. Following McWilliams, Towne was attempting to capture the slow violence of drought and the fast violence of flood, both of which define the ecology of Southern California. But despite being an accurate reflection of average annual rainfall patterns, the last scenes were nevertheless poorly written—overwrought and “needlessly convoluted,” as Polanski had said. It also ended with Evelyn killing her father and escaping with her daughter, a “happy ending” that Polanski insisted would ring false.

Given the disaster of the second draft, Towne and Polanski decided to go back to the original conceit—a detective story filmed in its entirety from the point of view of its gumshoe protagonist. In the process, they merged the character of Los Angeles with the character of Jake Gittes. That suturing is visible in the early LA River sequence, when the camera, which at first appears independent or omniscient, is slowly revealed as it pans right to be, in fact, linked to Jake’s gaze. The same shot links Jake visually with the LA River and with the pipeline in the background. There are other examples of such condensation. Noah Cross was originally called Julian Cross in the script. The name was changed during shooting, presumably for the very good reason that the name Noah links Cross to water. More specifically, it links him to a flood—to the flood that was revised out of the third draft. When McWilliams described the 1938 flood in his book, he focused at length on what happened to the animals. “Alligators washed out of the Lincoln Park Zoo splashed about in the streets, as elephants trumpeted, apes chattered, dogs went mad and jumped into the rivers, and birds bashed themselves to death against stone walls. The Hollywood Humane Society treated injured animals at the rate of thirty an hour, as hundreds of canaries, cats, goats, chickens, dogs, and even lions, were rushed in for treatment.”40 McWilliams was clearly riffing on Noah’s Ark here. With this context in mind, Towne’s change from “Julian” to “Noah” is easy to understand. So we see a process of revision that is also a process of condensation. Instead of a flood as the setting of the finale, we end up with a name, Noah Cross: a residue or remainder of the original idea for a flood scene. The name now preserves, in the genetic layers of revision, the flood we never get to see in the film. The flood isn’t just gone; it’s condensed. Likewise, Los Angeles doesn’t stop being the subject of Chinatown, but the city is merged in revision—sutured—to Jake’s subjectivity.

We can apply the logic of this process once again to the aqueduct and observe how the linear scar of its jagged path from Owens River to the San Fernando Valley is traced out in the stitches on Jake’s nose. In the scene just before Jake and Evelyn have sex they are first brought together in Evelyn’s harshly lit bathroom as she tends to the wound on Jake’s face—freshly disturbed by his skirmishes with Valley farmers and, later, with Cross’s goons at the Mar Vista Inn and Rest Home. “My god,” she says, “that’s a nasty cut. I had no idea. Is it painful? It must be painful.” Jake doesn’t respond to the question because something else has captured his attention. “Your eye. There’s something black in the green part of your eye.” “Oh that,” she says with a nervous smile, “it’s a f . . . flaw. In the iris.” Mutual curiosity about each other’s wounds and imperfections ignites the sexual spark, and they’re off. Of course the “flaw” in Evelyn’s iris is really a proleptic target, and the symbolic referent is once again the pipeline, as becomes horrifyingly clear in the final moments of the film, in the fleeting shot of the bullet hole bored through Evelyn’s head where her eye used to be. Soon after the last shot of Evelyn’s face, the last shot of Jake’s face shows us his left profile as Walsh pulls him away from the scene—while uttering the iconic line, “forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown”—with his stitches prominently displayed. If the hole in Evelyn’s face is a final repetition of all the cross-sectional pipeline imagery elsewhere in the film, then the stitches on Jake’s nose make a perspectival pair with it, a longitudinal view to match the cross-sectional one. The pipeline has fatally wounded Evelyn and mutilated Jake. It has written itself on their bodies, and into the film, after having been removed from the filmscript’s title page.

Intentional? Again, no. Fincher asked Towne whether the visual tropes in Chinatown—the pocket watches, the glasses, the taillights, the pairing of the flaw in Evelyn’s eye with the cut on Jake’s nose, and so on—were the products of conscious thought. “No,” said Towne, “It was never discussed. And I was as surprised I guess as anybody when it was pointed out to me. But it was [. . .] operating on a level of which I was unaware.” It was operating: Chinatown works, and it works on levels beyond the intentions of its makers. Great films are the products of coincidence and circumstance as much as great talent: the right people and the right ideas at the right times in the right places. Nothing could be easier than making a bad film, even—and sometimes especially—when endowed with all the talent in the world. But Chinatown means beyond itself; it is more than the sum of its parts. It undoes and then exceeds its authors’ intentions, first by insisting on the aqueduct they tried to edit out, and then by writing it—blasting it and carving it, really—onto the sacrosanct celestial bodies of its lead actors. And that is a big part of how Chinatown came to be, as Robert Evans once said, about something real.

Notes

1. 1. Christopher Sandford, Polanski (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 196–97.

2. 2. Andrew Pulver, “Chinatown: The Best Film of All Time,” The Guardian, October 22, 2010. Accessed October 14, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/oct/22/best-film-ever-chinatown-season.

3. 3. Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (Hodder & Stoughton, 2023).

4. 4. Pauline Kael, “On the Future of Movies,” in Reeling (Little Brown & Co., 1976), 309–31.

5. 5. Les Standiford, Water to the Angels: William Mulholland, His Monumental Aqueduct, and the Rise of Los Angeles (Ecco Press, 2015), 432.

6. 6. Thom Andersen, dir., Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004).

7. 7. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990), 44.

8. 8. Michael Eaton, Chinatown: BFI Film Classics (Bloomsbury, 1997), 44.

9. 9. Jim Shepard, “Jolting Noir with a Shot of Cynicism,” The New York Times, February 7, 1999. Accessed 15 September 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/07/movies/film-jolting-noir-with-a-shot-of-nihilism.html.

10. 10. Corey Robin [@CoreyRobin], “I’m increasingly of the mind,” Twitter, January 15, 2018. https://twitter.com/CoreyRobin/status/956567857432875013.

11. 11. Kael, “The Actor and the Star,” in Reeling, 352.

12. 12. “Incest Is Interesting,” trans. Joshua Kronen and Paul Cronin, Der Spiegel, December 16, 1974; qtd. in Paul Cronin, ed., Roman Polanski: Interviews (University of Mississippi Press, 2005), 61–62.

13. 13. Qtd. in Eaton, Chinatown, 64.

14. 14. Joan Didion, “At the Dam,” in The White Album (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), 200.

15. 15. Didion, “At the Dam,” 199.

16. 16. Didion, “Holy Water,” in The White Album, 64.

17. 17. Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Peregrine Smith, Inc., 1973), 199–200.

18. 18. McWilliams, Southern California, 199.

19. 19. Norris Hundley Jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, A History (University of California Berkeley Press, 2001), 153.

20. 20. William Kahrl, Water and Power: The Conflict over Los Angeles’ Water Supply in the Owens Valley (University of California Berkeley Press, 1982), 89.

21. 21. Qtd. in Joseph Giovanni, “Just Subtract Water: The Los Angeles River and a Robert Moses with the Soul of a Jane Jacobs,” The Los Angeles Review of Books, December 18, 2015. Accessed July 25, 2024. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/just-subtract-water-the-los-angeles-river-and-a-robert-moses-with-the-soul-of-a-jane-jacobs/.

22. 22. Hundley, The Great Thirst, 164.

23. 23. Kahrl, Water and Power, 1.

24. 24. Kahrl, Water and Power, 5.

25. 25. Qtd. in Kahrl, Water and Power, 20. Kahrl does not have access to Mullholland’s autobiographical fragment, which is still unpublished. He quotes from the thesis of Elisabeth Mathieu Spriggs to whom Mullholland gave access, “The History of the Domestic Water Supply of Los Angeles,” Master’s thesis, University of Southern California, January 1, 1931, page 67.

26. 26. Kahrl, Water and Power, 20.

27. 27. Kahrl, Water and Power, 20.

28. 28. Hundley, The Great Thirst, 143.

29. 29. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (Viking, 1986).

30. 30. Norris Hundley, Jr. and Donald C. Jackson, Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster (The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, 2015), 249. “Envy for the dead” is Hundley and Jackson’s paraphrase. Mulholland’s exact words are: “The only ones I envy about this thing are the ones who are dead,” quoted on 247.

31. 31. Hundley and Jackson, 268.

32. 32. Julia Franz, “How to Talk Like a TV Writer, as Explained by David Mandel of Veep,” The World, April 18, 2017. https://theworld.org/stories/2017-04-18/how-talk-tv-writer-explained-david-mandel-veep.

33. 33. Charles McGrath, “Fitzgerald as Screenwriter: No Hollywood Ending,” The New York Times April 22, 2004. Accessed July 25, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/22/us/fitzgerald-as-screenwriter-no-hollywood-ending.html.

34. 34. I am indebted to my former student Jessica Vestuto, whose final paper in my English 301 course in Spring 2017, “Looking At, Not Through: Mechanisms of Capture in Polanski’s Chinatown,” first brought this image to my attention.

35. 35. Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: “Chinatown” and the Last Years of Hollywood (Flatiron Books, 2020). EPUB.

36. 36. Diedre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 58.

37. 37. “Audio Commentary: David Fincher and Robert Towne,” Chinatown, Narr. David Fincher and Robert Towne, dir. Roman Polanski, 1974, Special Extended DVD, Paramount 2012.

38. 38. Sandford, Polanski, 193.

39. 39. McWilliams, An Island on the Land, 184.

40. 40. McWilliams, An Island on the Land, 196.