Oil

The Petroscope

What if we were to speculate that the aqueduct so central to Chinatown is not just an aqueduct but rather a pipeline with multiple, overlapping significations? There is a difference between thinking about Chinatown as a film about water and thinking about it as a film about a pipeline. Water is a specific natural object, resource, and commodity, subject to a specific conflict in a specific history. The pipeline—while it certainly also has a history—is by contrast the generalizable form taken by the transport infrastructure of a range of commodities, among them water, natural gas, and oil. If we say that Chinatown is a film about the pipeline, then we begin to see more than water; we begin to see resonant meanings across the film’s three main historical coordinates. First there is of course the water pipeline, the LA Aqueduct, whose historical moment is really 1913, when it started pumping water across the desert, not 1937, when the film is set.

In 1937 another, counterintuitive kind of pipeline had just become critically important for Los Angeles: the electrical line. The LA Aqueduct included two hydroelectric power plants along its downhill route, and the administration of both the water and the power it brought to LA was allocated to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, a publicly owned utility. It was in October 1936 that Hoover Dam first began transmitting electrical current from the Black Canyon in Nevada to Los Angeles; the city celebrated the day with a “Lights on Parade” that proceeded along Broadway in Downtown, which thus acquired the nickname “The Canyon of Lights.”1

The ambient setting of Chinatown—1937 Los Angeles—is thoroughly informed by these facts. Jake Gittes has a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt prominently displayed in his office; it was FDR’s New Deal that pushed Hoover Dam through its colossal construction in under five years. Even more telling, however, are the descriptive notes in the shooting script of Chinatown, which often call attention to the hum of power lines in the setup of its outdoor scenes, including the pivotal ones we examined in the previous section: in the LA River scene in which Jake surveils Mulwray, “the power lines overhead HUM”; at the Oak Pass Reservoir where Jake gets his nose slashed, we hear “the eerie SOUND of the tension WIRES HUMMING” (caps in original text). Perhaps the electrical wires make their presence felt in the aural register in Chinatown because they are solid conductors instead of hollow conveyances; they don’t lend themselves to analogy with the camera lens the same way that the water pipeline does. Nevertheless, they are pipelines of a sort. I can’t hear the HUM specified in the script in either scene in the film, but the existence of the script notes suggests that Towne was thinking all the time not of water but rather of “water and power” as a paired concept—what the Berkeley hydroclimatologist and cofounder of the Pacific Institute Peter Gleick in 1994 referred to as the “water–energy nexus”2—and as an administrative and discursive unit: the Department of Water and Power.

So, not water, then, but water and power: the critical link between water and energy is already manifest in the 1937 timeline. The third historical coordinate for thinking about Chinatown, the year of its making, between August of 1973 and June of 1974, reinforces it. That year we encounter another double for the water pipeline. This time, instead of the camera lens, the water pipeline’s doppelganger is an oil pipeline, and a rather specific one at that: the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, or TAPS, whose construction was approved on November 16, 1973, when President Richard Nixon signed the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act. Chinatown was then entering its fourth month of production. The Authorization Act effectively halted all legal challenges to the pipeline mounted by environmental and Indigenous activists, authorizing construction “without further administrative or judicial delay or impediment” in light of “growing domestic shortages and increasing dependence upon insecure foreign sources.” It was a declaration of a state of exception: this is an emergency, there can be no more debate, and no more delay. The OPEC oil embargo, which was announced on October 16, 1973, and which brutally demonstrated American dependence on Middle Eastern oil, had already driven up the price of oil fourfold. Eager developers and scared politicians took the opportunity to ram through a project that was otherwise highly contested. By authorizing the TAPS, the United States effectively recommitted itself to a degree of oil dependency—paradoxically arrived at through fearmongering about “foreign” oil dependency, and insistently referred to in Nixon’s speeches at the time as “energy independence”—that continues to this day.

Chinatown was entirely produced under the sign of the energy crisis that overtook the United States—and large parts of the world—in the first years of the 1970s. The shooting script was finalized on October 9, 1973, just eight days before OPEC announced its oil embargo against Israel’s international allies. The year 1973 was a critical inflexion point for an energy crisis that began a few years earlier, in 1970. The United States sank into an economic recession that lasted until the 1980s. But the crisis was much more than economic. The moment the embargo went into effect marked a widespread “cultural crisis,” according to Gabrielle Esperdy, that “destabilized the foundations upon which modern U.S. society was built.”3 As Andreas Killen writes in his cultural history of 1973—aptly titled 1973 Nervous Breakdown—it caused “panic among the public” and fundamentally “altered the course of modern economic and political history.”4 The cultural effects may have been most pronounced in the United States, but the economic effects were global. For Timothy Mitchell, who is otherwise skeptical about the simplified causality of “the events known as the 1973–74 oil crisis,” October 1973 nevertheless marks the moment when “an era of generally improving conditions of life in many parts of the world” came “to a sudden and prolonged halt.”5

The energy crisis of the early 1970s still bears insistently on our present, as the title of Caleb Wellum’s Energizing Neoliberalism: The 1970s Energy Crisis and the Making of Modern America makes abundantly clear. It was a forcing house for the creation of new matters of concern for governance and, as a result, new institutional and administrative structures. In this time the episteme of modern governmentality underwent profound mutations. The year 1970 saw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. In June 1973 Nixon opened the National Energy Office, which “enabled the emergence of a new field of scholarship concerned with energy and energy policy.” With these new institutional structures in place, “energy” and “environment” became crucial categories of federal administration, complementing, conflicting with, and in some ways reconstituting our understanding of the nation and of the national economy. At the international level, the oil-consuming states responded to the OPEC embargo by establishing the International Energy Agency (IEA), whose stated aim was to counteract the power of what was unofficially called the “OPEC Imperium”—Daniel Yergin describes the IEA as operating as “a kind of ‘energy conscience’ for national governments.”6

The categories “energy” and “environment” both had real referents, but they also operated within the confines of existing governmental structures, and in the service of new fictions. This was particularly true in the case of “energy,” where the National Energy Office effected, according to Mitchell, a consolidation of “different concerns over fuel and power into a single agency” and “a singular topic of concern.”7 That topic was oil, and what was previously perceived as a multivalent energy crisis became primarily understood as an oil crisis. The oil economist Morris Adelman called the “energy crisis” a fiction that made “people accept higher oil prices as imposed by nature, when they are really fixed by collusion.” “But belief in fiction,” Adelman added, “is a fact” too, with powerful effects on reality.8

Is this starting to sound a little bit like the plot of Chinatown, wherein a capitalist developer convinces a city’s population to vote for a new dam and reservoir by terrorizing them with the specter of chronic drought and thirst? Or like the historical efforts of William Mulholland to convince the public of the necessity of his proposed aqueduct? As California invented itself with water in the early twentieth century—as William Kahrl so powerfully put it—so the United States reinvented itself with “energy” in the 1970s. To the extent that the energy crisis of 1973–74 surrounds the making of Chinatown, we can say, in a literal sense, that Chinatown is about—or around—the energy crisis. The pipeline is the sign under which Chinatown links water and power to one another and remediates them through the camera lens. The film’s first audiences would have had their experiences of a nationwide oil shortage in their present moment to relate to Chinatown’s depiction of regional water scarcity in the past. To both problems a pipeline would present itself as—in consumerist and capitalistic terms—the obvious solution. The petropolitics of 1973–74 are thus displaced in Chinatown to the hydropolitics of 1913.

In fact oil was never far from the minds of Chinatown’s creators. Towne and Nicholson had simply held oil in reserve as the subject for a sequel. They had envisioned a trilogy of films based on private detective Jake Gittes. Nicholson produced and directed The Two Jakes, the sequel to Chinatown, in 1991, with money he made from playing the Joker in 1989’s Batman. The film was a critical failure. Its production was famously a bonfire of vanities that destroyed whatever chance at greatness it may have otherwise had, and that dashed any hope of a third film. The Two Jakes, however, is explicitly about an oil theft scheme, and features a climactic scene in which an earthquake rips through a janky housing development in the San Fernando Valley, causing oil to erupt from every water-piped orifice of a show-home bathroom. The connection between water and oil is here literalized; they are both run through the same plumbing, the same pipelines. Perhaps the power of the connection loses something by being made so explicit. Or maybe it was a brilliant idea that was only tepidly realized. There are more successful versions of this story, such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), with its climactic zinger delivered unforgettably by a deranged Daniel Day-Lewis, “I drink your milkshake!” a line that perfectly explains the extractive affordances of a pipeline in a tone of narcissistic rage that quickly—and appropriately—turns murderous.

Thinking of Chinatown allegorically as a way of addressing the energy crisis of the early 1970s is one way to explain some of the film’s popular success in its time. It was a product of the energy crisis that reconstituted American life in the early 1970s. And if Chinatown’s regional story about pipeline resource extraction was read—and asks to be read—as a national allegory about pipeline resource extraction, then Chinatown ought perhaps to be understood as more central to the canon of American culture than it previously has been. One might speculate that Chinatown is to the century of American Empire what Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is to the century of British Empire. This would make sense right down to the problematic Polish authors of both works. For which American director could have envisioned “one of the most unregenerate moments in American cinema” with quite the efficient and brutal cynicism that Polanski did? After fighting for a different, happier ending for weeks, Robert Towne once jokingly referred to the ending Polanski wrote for Chinatown as “the tunnel at the end of the light.”9 But if we think of the tunnel in that phrase as an oil pipeline, then what we are left with is really much more than a joke. Instead we have a brilliant figure for the cruel optimism of petromodernity and petropolitics—for the pipeline that often invisibly underwrites American optimism with the fantasy of unlimited energy.

The tunnel at the end of the light materializes at the end of Chinatown on Evelyn Mulwray’s mutilated face. Our sight of it is fleeting—less than a second—and obscured by darkness in the film. It is possible, however, to get an extended look at the wound, to take in its isomorphism with the pipeline, by looking at a production still of Faye Dunaway applying lip gloss while in full VFX makeup for her final shot. The photograph affords us the luxury of seeing how the illusion was created, and how realistic it was. The juxtaposition of the mortal wound—the defacement of the face—with the living work of self-presentation—the “putting on of one’s face”—is as disturbing as it is transfixing. Dunaway’s face is perfect but for the darkened crater where her left eye once was, now a striking graphic match for Towne’s “tunnel at the end of the light.” Except it’s not exactly a tunnel, as I see it. It’s a pipeline. It’s a camera. It’s a pipeline and a camera. It is the petroscope: the stereoscopic effect that reveals to us, in the cinematic style of Chinatown, the politics and poetics of petromodernity.

So much of what I’ve argued here relies on observations about Chinatown’s cinematic style. And style—a special penchant for style—is for Paul Schrader a hallmark of film noir and, by extension, of neo-noir. Film noir, unlike other genres like the gangster film or the western, Schrader writes, “is more interested in style than in theme.” “Because film noir was first of all a style, because it worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically, because it was aware of its own identity,” Schrader continues, “it was able to create artistic solutions to sociological problems.”10 The visual puns on the figure of the pipeline that permeate Chinatown bear out Schrader’s assertion. Of course Chinatown does thematize the water wars, and of course Chinatown contains elements of westerns and gangster films. But at its core it is a reinterpretation of film noir that incorporates into its style the figure of the pipeline, enabling the allegorical leap from water to oil, and from 1937 to 1974, inscribing it into practically every element of its visual style. Chinatown, that is to say, is better understood, not as a neo-noir, but as a pipeline noir.

I Can Explain Everything If You Just Give Me Five Minutes!

Although many critics have made the argument for Chinatown as an allegory of the corruption of American politics in the early 1970s, as far as I know no one else has made the argument for seeing Chinatown as symptomatic of the early 1970s energy crisis. As in the previous section, I do not for a moment imagine that the oil allegory in Chinatown was intentional. But this does not invalidate the interpretation. The fact that I can make such an argument now, fifty years after Chinatown was made and released, is due largely to the emergence of a school of critical thought called the energy humanities and its associated cultural-critical method, petrocriticism. The energy humanities trace their lineage back to Amitav Ghosh’s 1992 review of Abdelraman Munif’s novel Cities of Salt. Ghosh titled his review “Petrofiction,” both to offer a subgeneric category by which to describe Munif’s novel and to observe the curious dearth of such novels in a world otherwise dominated by the politics of oil. In 2014, Imre Szeman and Domonic Boyer announced the establishment of the energy humanities as a subfield of the environmental humanities, whose object would be to help “find our way toward a sustainable energy future” in part by exposing the central role that fossil fuels have played in our current political and economic systems. “The mansion of modern freedoms,” writes Dipesh Chakrabarty, “stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use.”11 And yet until only very recently, as Helen Thompson observes, “the subject of political economy has been curiously lacking in perspectives that engage seriously with energy as an economic and political predicament.”12 These new perspectives on energy—and particularly the energy of fossil fuels as the energetic core of modern capitalism—have gained traction more or less in step with the increasing severity of various ecosystem crises and weather events wrought by global warming and caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. The more we learn about the consequences of what once seemed to be easy and unlimited energy, the more we realize how much our systems of living depend on that energy, and how vital it is to make changes to the ways we live.

Looking back, then, at the last roughly two hundred and fifty years during which the majority of humanity has come to rely on fossil fuel energy, the energy humanities reevaluates the cultural record under the sign of what Patricia Yaeger has called—following a cue from Fredric Jameson—the energy unconscious.13 Whereas Amitav Ghosh coined the term “petrofiction” to refer to cultural artifacts like Munif’s novel about a Middle Eastern Petrostate, that is to say, to works that thematize fossil fuels, the new petrocritics argued that any and all cultural artifacts produced during the period of fossil fuel hegemony ought to be studied as cultural artifacts of petromodernity, and therefore as petrofictions in a different, totalizing sense. If all cultural artifacts of the last century and more could be considered artifacts of petromodernity, then one aim of cultural criticism could be to figure out what that actually means for any particular cultural artifact; to find traces, clues, or symptoms of the cultural artifact’s belonging to petromodernity; and to situate it in a broader context of petromodern cultural production. Doubtlessly, such an interpretive enterprise might itself be interpreted as an act of gross generalization, reification, even epistemic violence against the autonomy of artistic expression. At its best, however, it offers us new ways to understand the extraordinary and exceptional period that we have been living through: what Paul Valéry once called the “general energizing” of the world, with whose consequences—to politics, to forms of human consciousness, to biological life on planet Earth—we are only now beginning to come to terms.14 To interpret a cultural artifact as an artifact of petroculture is to think about what it’s like to live in the fossil fuel age even, and especially, in all the moments we are least conscious of the fact.

“Petroleum,” according to Szeman, “is the hegemonic form of energy at the present time.” This is true despite “the mixed and uneven use of energy around the world at the present time and throughout modernity.” Because oil is hegemonic, “it is possible to speak meaningfully of a period of petromodernity.” And yet, as Ghosh pointed out in 1992, there is very little art and culture concerned with oil.15 That presents a problem for a theory of culture that would attempt to see how a dominant energy regime shapes culture. One would at least have to entertain the theory that there is no connection—or no meaningful, and certainly no determinate, connection—between an energy regime and its cultural production. Petrocritics often point out that “seeing” oil is next to impossible and requires concerted and extended theoretical effort; that is to say that oil is recalcitrant to the eye, if we are thinking of vision as itself a metaphor for apprehending, understanding, comprehending, fixing an object of knowledge, and so on. The problem, according to petrocritics—among whom I include myself—is that it is hard to impossible to bring oil into focus in most cultural texts. This is why Timothy Morton has theorized oil as a hyperobject: a massive phenomenon that we know is “there,” all around us, but that we can’t exactly see or feel directly.16 It’s why Jennifer Wenzel says that “the great paradox” of oil is that it is “not so much invisible as unseen”;17 and it’s why Jeff Diamanti calls fossil fuels “ubiquitous but avisual.”18

Oil’s optical elusiveness seems all the more paradoxical when we consider that the age of oil and the age of cinema are roughly contemporaneous. “Working in an energetic feedback loop,” writes Brian Jacobson, “film and oil, the last century’s most powerful media, co-constituted the world we have today.”19 Film was the dominant cultural medium of petromodernity in the twentieth century. It was also a material product of petroleum feedstock, which meant that it was entangled with oil at the most fundamental level. In the most literal and most general senses, when people in the twentieth century consumed cinema, they were looking through oil. That is to say, they were looking at projections of light through a plastic polymer film that produced images on a screen. This is what it means to say, with petrocritics like Szeman, Wenzel, and Diamanti, among others, that in some sense every narrative fiction on film is a petrofiction. A growing body of critical work in film studies, influenced by the environmental and ecocritical turns, has taken the chemical composition of film as a starting point for thinking about it as a cultural medium. Nadia Bozak’s The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources, for example, is focused on motion pictures; whereas Siobhan Angus’s Camera Geological: An Elemental History of Photography is, as its title announces, mainly about photography. In both books, looking back on film from the digital age means learning to focus, in a new materialist and ecological way, on the medium itself.

The sheer fact of film’s entanglement with oil may not tell us much about Chinatown’s particular entanglement with oil. But our awareness both of oil’s recalcitrance to visualization, and of oil’s entanglement with film, can reveal to us an absence that might otherwise go unnoticed. The year in which Chinatown is set, 1937, is generally considered to be near the historical high point of the studio system in Hollywood under the Hayes Code. It was also a moment of intensive and widespread oil extraction in the Los Angeles region that began in the 1920s. This history was famously novelized by Upton Sinclair in 1927. Oil! tracked the entangled history of oil, oil men, oil money, and Hollywood film. Oil derricks and pump jacks were almost everywhere visible in astonishing numbers in the Los Angeles of the 1930s, in residential and commercial neighborhoods, from roads and highways, and on beaches. In this photograph from Huntington Beach in 1937, oil intrudes upon scenes of otherwise idyllic beach-going leisure. Hundreds of images like this one from the period confirm the impression that oil’s infrastructure was ubiquitous in Los Angeles at the time. But this reality is entirely erased from the nostalgic recreation of the 1930s in Chinatown, despite all the daylight scenes, and despite all the driving around that goes on in the film. Only a profound act of visual disavowal could produce a vision of 1937 Los Angeles without any sign of oil’s extractive infrastructure. To what might we attribute this absence, this historical misrepresentation?

Chinatown was always a nostalgia machine. It is 1974 Hollywood’s recreation of 1937 Los Angeles. The film is just as invested in an aestheticized, even idealized, vision of the city as it is in exposing its essentially corrupt character. In the service of that aestheticized vision, Chinatown ruthlessly excises oil from its field of vision in much the same way that Hollywood cinema in general ruthlessly excises film equipment from all of its fictional scenarios, in order to create, as Walter Benjamin once put it, “an equipment-free aspect of reality” that is in fact “the height of artifice.” From within a tangle of cords, booms, audio recording gear, camera rigs and tracking rails, lighting, scaffolding, and the hundreds of workers employed to manage and operate it all, Hollywood creates a vision of reality as a “blue flower in the land of technology,” a very narrow zone of make-believe in which all that equipment must stay out of sight and out of mind.20 To the same end, actors in narrative fiction films are traditionally trained not to look into the camera lens, to pretend that there is no camera present.

In 1937, Los Angeles was awash in two kinds of equipment: one for fueling modern life, and the other for representing it. In Chinatown, while the equipment of film production and oil extraction disappear diegetically, they reappear as synecdochic visual motifs in the circular figures that appear seemingly everywhere in the film, condensing aqueduct into camera lens into oil pipeline, at times placing characters inside the figures—as with the photo of Mulwray and Cross inside the aqueduct—at others inscribing the figures into the bodies of the characters—as with Evelyn’s fatal wound. Oil may have been erased from the landscapes of Chinatown’s nostalgic vision of Los Angeles, but it reappears with a vengeance, again and again, in the film’s visual grammar.

Other films that came out of the New Hollywood era, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, did see and feel oil, if not directly then in the shape of its commodified forms. But what distinguished them from the historical drama of Chinatown is that they were set in their present. In a well-known scene from Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967) a middle-aged business man named McGuire tries to interest college grad Benjamin Braddock in a career in petroleum products: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics. There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?” Benjamin appears baffled by, indifferent to, and dissociated from McGuire’s solicitation, which is to say that plastics, at least in the abstract, turn him off.

Later in the film though, Benjamin has exactly the opposite reaction to being pitched a specific plastic: he is turned on by Mrs. Robinson’s seductive reverse-striptease with a nylon stocking, an iconic petroleum-based, cheap, mass-marketed substitute for rare, expensive silk. In another context we might think in Freudian terms of the stocking as a sexual fetish, but here, combined with McGuire’s ejaculation, “Plastics!” it also works as an oil fetish. Petroleum is in a sense the source of Benjamin’s affective disorders, a lure by which he is entranced and a trap from which he yearns to escape. The stocking here functions not only as a stand-in for petromodernity but also as an analog to film itself: a scotomic membrane that can be seen through but that also makes itself seen, one that generates scopophilic sexual desire by simultaneously concealing and exposing. The still image taken from that scene graced the promotional posters for The Graduate, suggesting that what turned Benajmin on might also attract audiences. For critic Mike Tondre, once one notices the plastics motif in The Graduate, it becomes “hard to shake the thought that desire, reproduction, and the future itself might be bound up” with oil.21

In his book Oil, Tondre also notes that another Jack Nicholson vehicle from 1970, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, is perhaps “the quintessential expression of the oil blues.”22 Nicholson plays Bobby Dupea, an upper-middle-class piano prodigy who has turned his back on that life to become an oil-field worker in Kern County, California. In a scene that evokes the “stasis and exhaustion” of the age of petromodernity, Dupea finds himself stuck in an interminable traffic jam in the California desert after work in the fields. He spies a piano on the bed of the truck in front of him, jumps out of his car, sits down at the piano and begins playing Chopin. Dupea roleplays the nihilistic clown in a vision of automobile civilization nearing what felt, even as early as the 1970s, like its end.

In his 1991 book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, Daniel Yergin refers to the postwar era as “the age of hydrocarbon man [sic],” a phrase that presages Szeman’s notion of oil hegemony.23 I would suggest that Chinatown, as a product of the energy crisis of the early 1970s—like The Graduate and Five Easy Pieces—is an allegory of the beginning of the end of the age of hydrocarbon humanity. “How many years have I got?” Noah Cross pleads with his daughter in Chinatown even as he confesses to Jake that precisely what he most wants to lay claim to is “the future, Mr. Gitts, the future!”

Fifty years later, across the threshold of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves at the end of the end of the age of hydrocarbon humanity. “Petropolitics,” Dominic Boyer asserts, has now “entered its senescence.”24 Boyer doesn’t declare petropolitics dead; just because they’re in their senescence doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. On the contrary, Big Oil and its political allies still appear quite willing, and like Noah Cross still able enough, to take us all down with them. Being set in Los Angeles, Chinatown predictably spends a lot of its runtime driving around and sitting around in cars. In that, it is comparable to 2014’s Mad Max: Fury Road. Both films are about driving around in a desert landscape looking for water while struggling against an incestuous father who is responsible for an ongoing environmental catastrophe. The difference between them is that in preapocalyptic Chinatown the time in cars is spent cruising comfortably and reveling in some really snappy Chandleresque dialogue, while in postapocalyptic Mad Max it is spent coal-rolling and careening around at top speed while shouting expletives like “Fang it!” “Schlanger!” and “Mediocre!” I am not saying this is worse dialogue—in fact it is fantastically inventive and entertaining—but it is quite different and reflects a historical progression whereby a new kind of civilization first invents itself and then goes on to destroy itself.

The main difference between the plots of Chinatown and Mad Max is the difference between pre- and postapocalypse. Somewhere between them, let’s say mid-apocalypse, Bobby Dupea plays Chopin while stuck in a sea of idling cars baking in the desert heat of the extractive zone, a precursor figure for Immortan Joe’s pet pyromaniac guitarist in Fury Road. “Oh what a lovely day!” shouts Knux in Mad Max in an unaccountably civilized British accent as he opens up the nitro-boosters on his car to accelerate even faster through a global warming–induced electrical sandstorm in zero visibility hoping to win the approval of his moribund warlord daddy.

That is a powerful image of the end of the end of hydrocarbon man. Chinatown’s pipelines are images of the beginning of the end, exemplars of petromodern style and pipeline noir. Looking at Chinatown and Fury Road together shows us, half a century after Chinatown, that we are still peering through the petroscope—still seeing things through oil.

Notes

1. 1. “Early Power Generation,” Water and Power Associates: Informing the Public About Critical Water and Energy Issues Facing Los Angeles and California. Accessed October 9, 2023. https://waterandpower.org/museum/Early_Power_Generation.html.

2. 2. Peter Gleick, “Water and Energy,” Annual Review of Energy and Environment. 19 (1994): 267–99.

3. 3. Gabrielle Esperdy, “The Twilight of Autopia,” Places Journal, October 2019. Accessed October 13, 2023. https://doi.org/10.22269/191015.

4. 4. Adreas Killen, 1973 Nervous Breakdown (Bloomsbury, 2006).

5. 5. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2011), 173.

6. 6. Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (Penguin, 2011), 273.

7. 7. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 173.

8. 8. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 181.

9. 9. Jim Shepard, “Jolting Noir with a Shot of Nihilism,” New York Times February 7, 1999. Accessed December 29, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/07/movies/film-jolting-noir-with-a-shot-of-nihilism.html.

10. 10. Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” Film Comment 8, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 289–90.

11. 11. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 208.

12. 12. Helen Thompson, Oil and the Western Economic Crisis (Palgrave, 2017), 1.

13. 13. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Literautre in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” PMLA 126, no. 2 (March 2011): 305–26.

14. 14. Paul Valéry, The Outlook for Intelligence (1931), trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Matthews (Harper & Row, 1962), 10.

15. 15. Imre Szeman, On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy (University of West Virginia Press, 2019), 225.

16. 16. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

17. 17. Jennifer Wenzel, “Introduction,” in Fueling Culture, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger (Fordham University Press, 2017), 11.

18. 18. Jeff Diamanti, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum (Bloomsbury, 2021), 28.

19. 19. Brian R. Jacobson, “Prospecting: Cinema and the Exploration of Extraction,” in Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice, ed. James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati (Routledge, 2021), 281.

20. 20. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd edition, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), 989.

21. 21. Mike Tondre, Oil (Bloomsbury, 2024), 57.

22. 22. Tondre, Oil, 139.

23. 23. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (Simon and Schuster, 1991), 541.

24. 24. Dominic Boyer, No More Fossils (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), 48.