Introduction

Chinatown, one of the popular and critical high-water marks of New Hollywood cinema, premiered on June 20, 1974. It has now been part of the cultural record for more than fifty years. Much of this book is a tribute to the film, equal parts appreciation and analysis, that demonstrates how much more there still is to see in it and to say about it. But the last part of this book reveals an aspect of the film that only fully manifests itself fifty years later, that was only incipiently there in the film when it was made, and that now—and perhaps only now, amid the catastrophic climate crises in which we find ourselves—has become fully, insistently, and urgently legible. Chinatown shows us something we still need to learn to see about the American century. What has become legible in Chinatown is the doubled figure of the pipeline—obviously in the case of the water pipeline, or aqueduct, at the center of Chinatown’s plot, to which much critical attention has already been paid, and less obviously in the case of the oil pipelines at the periphery of Chinatown’s production. Chinatown, I argue in the second part of the book, is a kind of indirect oil epic; it indexes the hegemony of the petroleum-energy regime in the postwar global order. Chinatown makes uniquely visible a petromodernist cinematic style: pipeline noir. Its camera eye is isomorphic with the aperture of the pipeline. Chinatown shows us the world viewed through what I call the petroscope.