READER ON WATER AND POWER IN CALIFORNIA

WATER and POWER, r​ eader on

california’s murky water politics
Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping 1
of California
Chapter 4: The Politics of Water
DAVID WYATT

Cadillac Desert: The American Desert and its 21

Disappearing Water
Chapter 3: The First Causes
Chapter 4: An American Nile
MARC REISNER

'Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring 66

L.A. to the water’ Politics, Perceptions and the
Pursuit of History in Roman Polanski’s
Chinatown
ISA S. SCOTT

H
​ azardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban 77
Ecology in Los Angeles
Prologue: ​Water in Los Angeles - A portrait of an Urban Ecosystem
JARED ORSI

The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and 89

Possible Rebirth
Chapter 1: The River as It Once Was
BLAKE GUMPRECHT

reader edited by kandis williams

HISTORY
m
David Wyatt elegantly entwines the public and personal in this elegiac salute to
California, our strangest, saddest, most enchanting state."
—Carolyn See, author of Dreaming: Hard Luc\ and Good Times in America R AC ECOCATASTROPHE,
hi this wholly original study, David Wyatt uses the metaphor of fire to tell the story of
California. Wyatt focuses this "catastrophic history" of his native state on five events of
AND THE SHAPING OP
ocial combustion and tangible fire that swept through California, altering its physical
ind po litical landscape and the way both were represented in art and literature.
Five Fires begins with the accidental importation and spread of the wild oat in the
770s, a process that had its hifman parallel in the Spanish invaders. Wyatt then
xplores the impact of four other significant events: the Gold Rush, the 1906 earth-
[uake and fire, the post-World War II defense-industry boom, and the "fire of race"
bat erupted in Watts in 1965. This fifth fire, which flared throughout the Chinese and
Mexican immigration experiences and the internment of Japanese Americans in World
^ar II, has been at the core of California's history, Wyatt argues.
From the journals of a Gold Camp "mineress" to Amy Tan's novels, from Ansel
Ldams's photography to Roman Polanski's films, Five Fires brings into dialogue a wide
mge of powerful, moving voices. "

/yatt has looked beyond the plastic Hollywood stereotypes to uncover a rich and
dlVerSC h,stor>'- Fwe Firesis M "'gent retelling of the mythology of the
olden State." TT T . f
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

marvelous short history of our most populous state.'

-Newsday

fclT"1"1"8 beginning for the reader taken by this idea of history swept along
—Christian Science Monitor

is a professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park.

- is the author of The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California and
it of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation.

« design by Kathleen M. Lynch

r photograph: Corbis-Bettmann 90000

ilord Paperbacks
cford University Press 9 780195 1 27416

S. $16.95 ISBN 0-1 9-512741-2

1
134 THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE AND FIRE
Edge) ton Trotting, Stride, 18FT, 3 IN. This series of photographs by Muybridge shows
the carriage wheel and horse as they move across numbered trip wires. From The Horse in
Motion, with text by J.D.B. Stillman and an appendix by Muybridge. Courtesy of the
University of Virginia.
when rotated, projected a series of still images onto a screen in order to
create the illusion of motion. San Francisco after Muybridge remained
the center of still photography, leaving Los Angeles to commercialize the
image in motion with an industry that gave spectacle an unprecedented
luminosity and scale.
The San Francisco earthquake and fire mark the eclipse, in California,
of a world of dimension and depth, a world replaceable by the image of it.
As the century turned, both still and moving photography were begin­
ning to create an alternative universe. Any understanding of how life was
lived either in San Francisco or, especially, in its rival city to the south
would yield increasingly to the amplified and the two-dimensional; Los
Angeles was to become the most "filmed" city on earth. As a result, it was
images of Los Angeles that increasingly showed audiences around the
world how life was lived in cities. Those who would express and analyze
the history of this emerging metropolis learned to articulate themselves
against the gathering pressure of a vast visual mediation. Between hear­
ing and seeing—between the claims of voice and the power of
spectacle—those who lived in Southern California would henceforth be
required to make their unsolitary way.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE POLITICS
OF WATER
The Shift South
T HE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE and fire is an event whose meaning is
largely self-enclosed. It presents something of a dead-end for histori-
cal analysis, a happening unproduced by human agency and therefore one /iffy
in whirh responsibility gfvFs way to response. What figures in the ac-
counts of it is the feel or shape or look of theThing. The fire did break the
city's continuity with its Gold Rush origins and "cleared the way," as
Kevin Starr has it, for the building of the modern city of San Francisco.
But during the rebirth of the city out of the flames, there also occurred a
displacement of energy east and especially south. The Moore Shipbuild­
ing Company movedlroin San Francisco to Oakland in 1906 and inaugu­
rated the first boom in the modern East Bay economy. Los Angeles ^
experienced even more significant growth after the fire. This southward
shift was not a~ case oF'moving directly into some suddenly opened
economic or cultural breach. Rather, all the forces that had been gathering
to shift California's wealth and power southward came together in the
next two decades. At the center of this story was not fire but water.
The water that brought life and expansion to Southern California also
b r o u gLfcIeeiTporuicafhu ft. Yet unlike the visitations of fire, the workings
of water's power were often invisible. They took effect slowly, over
decades, as a kind of occluded spectacle, one whose dimensions are still
tf>C-cA
135 /
2
 138 139
THE POLITfCS OF WATER FIVE FIRES

et these waters were by no means secure. They had been procured in compulsion to repeat. As Gittes tries to find out what happened to
the early years of th e century through a carefully orchestrated city cam­ Mulwray, he falls for Mulwray's wife, Evelyn. He tells Evelyn about a
paign. T he aqueduct delivered considerably m ore water than the plan woman he loved, in Chinatown. "I was trying to keep someone from
origina ly promised; not until the drought of the early 1920s and the being h urt," he says. "I ended up making sure that she was h urt. In
rapidly increasing demands for irrigation in the San Fernando Valley attempting to keep Evelyn from being hurt, andin trying to "know" her,
annexed by Los Angeles in 1915, did water in the Owens Valley begin to Jake ensures that she will be killed, as she is with a bullet through the eye
5 ° r \ T h e h r s t dynamite attack on the aq ueduct occurred ,n May
in the movie's last sce ne. He makes the same mistake twice.
w I f ' j u, S ,OVember- °wens Valley residents, led by banker s Sam and Chinatown focuses on the fate of Mulholland, the one_uniyersaldy
V ilfred Watterson, sei zed control of the Alabama Gates and temporarily acknowledged Founder of Los Angeles, as Kevin Starr calls him. T he
hal ted the How of water to Los Angeles. Hundreds gathered at the scene written histories of water a nd the Southland c enter on three men. Mul­
and began a four-day camp-out, complete with bonfires and a pig roast. holland, Fred Eaton, and J. R. Lippincott. E ach was a man obsessed by
Movie star Tom Mix, filming on location in nearby Bishop, rode over with the d r e a m of bringing "the water, as Noah Cross puts it, to L.A. Eaton,
a manachi band an d joined the party. The Wattersons were eventually a former mayor of Los Angeles, introduced Lippincott and Mulholland to
jailed for embezzlement; the Owens Valley, once a rich farming and the Owens Valley in the early years of the century. His purchase of
ranching region, dwindled into a high desert in which people m ade a options o n the key Long Valley site later thwarted the city s plans for
iving pumping gas. Feelings there ran so high against the city that when building reservoirs upstream and so led to th e construction of the Saint
they drove up Route 395 on fishing trips to the High Sierra, in the 1930s, Francis Dam. Lippincott worked for the U.S. Reclamation Service dur­
my father a nd his bro thers taped over the ident ifying w ords "Los An- ing the period w hen Los Angeles set about ac quiring the Owens Valley
geles on their license plate.
>VI"lc Mull,.,H and pre ferred tojtore water , n_underground a quifers
, _ "T" t R a " '2SU f fa c e reservoirs, the city leaders, in the wake of recurring
^ a ® a m S t t h e H u e d "«, insiste d that he build a surface reservoir as
a yis.ble monu ment to the capacity for supply. Despite his awareness of
geologic weaknesses at the Saint Francis Dam site, Mulholland pro­
ceeded. At t he trial that followed the collapse, a University of Southern
California geologist testified that the dam's underlying conglomerate
ormation had become saturated and had given way. "The failure wasdue
to defective f oundation material," he concluded. The stricken Mulhol­
land responded that there had been "no more reason to believe there
might be a catastrophe than a babe in arms."

Th r o u g h of Hollis Mu lwray, Roman Polanski's Chmatown

the f.gure

deals with the consequences of Mulholland's career. It begins with the end
of the story and proposes to have Mulwray build a second dam. He
The Big Three in 1906: J. R. Lippincott, Reclamation Service engineer for California; Fred
refuses. He will not make "the same mistake twice." He is murdered by
Eaton, ex-mayor of Los Angeles; and William Mulholland, chief engineer of the city's
his ex-partner and c.ty-builder Noah Cross,for his refusal. Detective Jake Department of Water and Power. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Department of Water and
Gittes, tricked by Cross into smearing Mulwray, does not escape the Power.

3
 138 139
THE POLITfCS OF WATER FIVE FIRES

et these waters were by no means secure. They had been procured in compulsion to repeat. As Gittes tries to find out what happened to
the early years of th e century through a carefully orchestrated city cam­ Mulwray, he falls for Mulwray's wife, Evelyn. He tells Evelyn about a
paign. T he aqueduct delivered considerably m ore water than the plan woman he loved, in Chinatown. "I was trying to keep someone from
origina ly promised; not until the drought of the early 1920s and the being h urt," he says. "I ended up making sure that she was h urt. In
rapidly increasing demands for irrigation in the San Fernando Valley attempting to keep Evelyn from being hurt, andin trying to "know" her,
annexed by Los Angeles in 1915, did water in the Owens Valley begin to Jake ensures that she will be killed, as she is with a bullet through the eye
5 ° r \ T h e h r s t dynamite attack on the aq ueduct occurred ,n May
in the movie's last sce ne. He makes the same mistake twice.
w I f ' j u, S ,OVember­ °wens Valley residents, led by banker s Sam and Chinatown focuses on the fate of Mulholland, the one_uniyersaldy
V ilfred Watterson, sei zed control of the Alabama Gates and temporarily acknowledged Founder of Los Angeles, as Kevin Starr calls him. T he
hal ted the How of water to Los Angeles. Hundreds gathered at the scene written histories of water a nd the Southland c enter on three men. Mul­
and began a four­day camp­out, complete with bonfires and a pig roast. holland, Fred Eaton, and J. R. Lippincott. E ach was a man obsessed by
Movie star Tom Mix, filming on location in nearby Bishop, rode over with the d r e a m of bringing "the water, as Noah Cross puts it, to L.A. Eaton,
a manachi band an d joined the party. The Wattersons were eventually a former mayor of Los Angeles, introduced Lippincott and Mulholland to
jailed for embezzlement; the Owens Valley, once a rich farming and the Owens Valley in the early years of the century. His purchase of
ranching region, dwindled into a high desert in which people m ade a options o n the key Long Valley site later thwarted the city s plans for
iving pumping gas. Feelings there ran so high against the city that when building reservoirs upstream and so led to th e construction of the Saint
they drove up Route 395 on fishing trips to the High Sierra, in the 1930s, Francis Dam. Lippincott worked for the U.S. Reclamation Service dur­
my father a nd his bro thers taped over the ident ifying w ords "Los An­ ing the period w hen Los Angeles set about ac quiring the Owens Valley
geles on their license plate.
>VI"lc Mull,.,H and pre ferred tojtore water , n_underground a quifers
, _ "T" t R a " '2SU f fa c e reservoirs, the city leaders, in the wake of recurring
^ a ® a m S t t h e H u e d "«, insiste d that he build a surface reservoir as
a yis.ble monu ment to the capacity for supply. Despite his awareness of
geologic weaknesses at the Saint Francis Dam site, Mulholland pro­
ceeded. At t he trial that followed the collapse, a University of Southern
California geologist testified that the dam's underlying conglomerate
ormation had become saturated and had given way. "The failure wasdue
to defective f oundation material," he concluded. The stricken Mulhol­
land responded that there had been "no more reason to believe there
might be a catastrophe than a babe in arms."

Th r o u g h of Hollis Mu lwray, Roman Polanski's Chmatown

the f.gure

deals with the consequences of Mulholland's career. It begins with the end
of the story and proposes to have Mulwray build a second dam. He
The Big Three in 1906: J. R. Lippincott, Reclamation Service engineer for California; Fred
refuses. He will not make "the same mistake twice." He is murdered by
Eaton, ex­mayor of Los Angeles; and William Mulholland, chief engineer of the city's
his ex­partner and c.ty­builder Noah Cross,for his refusal. Detective Jake Department of Water and Power. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Department of Water and
Gittes, tricked by Cross into smearing Mulwray, does not escape the Power.

4
 140 THE POLITICS OF WATER
lands. He supplied information to both Eaton and Mulholland and paved
the way for the city acquisitions by e ncouraging suspension of federal
claims to the waters of the valley.
One of the valley re sidents whose ire Lippincott managed to arouse
was a man named Stafford Wallace Austin, register of the U.S. General
Land Office in Independence. In 1905, up on learning that the city had
quietly purchased all th e potential land within the federal government's
proposed rese rvoir site and riparian rights along the Owens River, Austin
wrote President Roosevelt, charging fraud and conflict of interest. Two
years earlier Austin's wife published the classic trea tment of life in this
"long brown land " TheLsaij ^JUltle^am. In h er autobiography, Earth
Horizon (1932), Mary Austin provides a lucid ifnot disinterested survey of
how things stood in the valley two years before work began on the
aqueduct:
Strange things had happened in Inyo. In July, 1903, investigation was begun
for the reclamation of and lands there under the National Reclamation
Bureau. All reports and estimates of costs demonstrated that the Owens
Valley project promised greater results than any other for the cost. Individ­
ual owners made transfers of rights and privileges. And all this time the
supervising officer of the Owens Valley project and Mulholland, chief engi­
neer, had been working to secure a new water supply for Los Angeles.
Suddenly it burst upon the people of Inyo that they were trying to secure the
waters of Inyo. Everything had been done. The Reclamation Service had
been won over. The field papers had changed hands. Transfers had been
made. . . . There were lies and misrepresentations. There was nothing any of
us could do about it, except my husband, who made a protest to the
Reclamation Bureau.
Austin here draws Mulholland, Eaton, and Lippincott ("the super­
vising officer') into a web of "lies an d misrepresentations." Subsequent
histories have been more concerned to sort out blame, assigning core
responsibility for t he water project and what followed to one individual,
or constructing a hierarchy of error. In doing so, these histories seek to'
manage, to varying degrees, an anxiety about the indeterminacy of the
city's origins. The Owens Valley story is the origin-tale for modern Los
Angeles Kahr^begins Water and Power bv asserting that "the history of
California m die twentieth century is the history ofoi state inventing itself'
with water"—and the refusal of diarhLnTylo yield up a master narra­
5
FIVE FIRES 141
tive or even verifiable e vidence a bout human acts a nd intentions raises
questions about how much we can come to know about the past.
CHINATOWN B E G I N S w ith a detective telling a spouse concerned about
adultery, "You're better off n ot knowing," and it ends by r epeating this
advice: "Lorget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." What do we know about Eaton,
Lippincott, Mulholland, and the water? The question can be answered by
consulting the many popular and academic histories about the bringing of
water to Los Angeles. The best o f these works use archival records to
create a detailed chronology of the events. Yet this kind of straight
history," as Michael Herr calls it in Dispatches (1977), does not entirely
satisfy. In "straight history," as H err describes conventional attempts to
comprehend the Vietnam War, "something wasn t answered, it wasn t
even asked. We were backgrounded, deep, but when the background
started sliding forward not a single life was saved by the information. The
thing had transmitted too much energy, it heated up too hot, hiding low
under the fact-figure crossfire there was a secret history, and not a lot of
people felt like running in there to bring it out. But in t he film Robert
Towne and Roman Polanski made in a nd about Southern California, a
secret h istory is bro ught out, and something does get answered.
We know that Mulholland arrived in Los Angeles in 1877 and
worked as a zanjero, o r ditch tender, for the city. H e wrote about the
discovery of Los Angeles in an autobiographical fragment: "The Los
Angeles River was the greatest attraction. It was a beautiful, limpid little
stream with willows on its b anks. ... 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. We know that Lred Eaton w orked for n ine
years as the Los Angeles City Water Company's superintending engi­
neer, served as mayor, campaigned for the municipalization of the water
system, and saw the city gain control of its domestic water supply in
1902. W e know that Mulholland, who succeeded Eaton as head of the
privately o wned water company, fought the city's pu rchase of the com­
pany but then agreed to assume directorship of the public system. (The
only map of that system existed in Mulholland s h ead.) We know that
Lippincott took E aton to the Owens Valley in 1904, and that Eaton to ok
Mulholland on a visit there some months later. Lippincott, chief of
operations in California for the Reclamation Service, had visited the
 140 THE POLITICS OF WATER
lands. He supplied information to both Eaton and Mulholland and paved
the way for the city acquisitions by e ncouraging suspension of federal
claims to the waters of the valley.
One of the valley re sidents whose ire Lippincott managed to arouse
was a man named Stafford Wallace Austin, register of the U.S. General
Land Office in Independence. In 1905, up on learning that the city had
quietly purchased all th e potential land within the federal government's
proposed rese rvoir site and riparian rights along the Owens River, Austin
wrote President Roosevelt, charging fraud and conflict of interest. Two
years earlier Austin's wife published the classic trea tment of life in this
"long brown land " TheLsaij ^JUltle^am. In h er autobiography, Earth
Horizon (1932), Mary Austin provides a lucid ifnot disinterested survey of
how things stood in the valley two years before work began on the
aqueduct:
Strange things had happened in Inyo. In July, 1903, investigation was begun
for the reclamation of and lands there under the National Reclamation
Bureau. All reports and estimates of costs demonstrated that the Owens
Valley project promised greater results than any other for the cost. Individ­
ual owners made transfers of rights and privileges. And all this time the
supervising officer of the Owens Valley project and Mulholland, chief engi­
neer, had been working to secure a new water supply for Los Angeles.
Suddenly it burst upon the people of Inyo that they were trying to secure the
waters of Inyo. Everything had been done. The Reclamation Service had
been won over. The field papers had changed hands. Transfers had been
made. . . . There were lies and misrepresentations. There was nothing any of
us could do about it, except my husband, who made a protest to the
Reclamation Bureau.
Austin here draws Mulholland, Eaton, and Lippincott ("the super­
vising officer') into a web of "lies an d misrepresentations." Subsequent
histories have been more concerned to sort out blame, assigning core
responsibility for t he water project and what followed to one individual,
or constructing a hierarchy of error. In doing so, these histories seek to'
manage, to varying degrees, an anxiety about the indeterminacy of the
city's origins. The Owens Valley story is the origin-tale for modern Los
Angeles Kahr^begins Water and Power bv asserting that "the history of
California m die twentieth century is the history ofoi state inventing itself'
with water"—and the refusal of diarhLnTylo yield up a master narra­
FIVE FIRES 141
tive or even verifiable e vidence a bout human acts a nd intentions raises
questions about how much we can come to know about the past.
CHINATOWN B E G I N S w ith a detective telling a spouse concerned about
adultery, "You're better off n ot knowing," and it ends by r epeating this
advice: "Lorget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." What do we know about Eaton,
Lippincott, Mulholland, and the water? The question can be answered by
consulting the many popular and academic histories about the bringing of
water to Los Angeles. The best o f these works use archival records to
create a detailed chronology of the events. Yet this kind of straight
history," as Michael Herr calls it in Dispatches (1977), does not entirely
satisfy. In "straight history," as H err describes conventional attempts to
comprehend the Vietnam War, "something wasn t answered, it wasn t
even asked. We were backgrounded, deep, but when the background
started sliding forward not a single life was saved by the information. The
thing had transmitted too much energy, it heated up too hot, hiding low
under the fact-figure crossfire there was a secret history, and not a lot of
people felt like running in there to bring it out. But in t he film Robert
Towne and Roman Polanski made in a nd about Southern California, a
secret h istory is bro ught out, and something does get answered.
We know that Mulholland arrived in Los Angeles in 1877 and
worked as a zanjero, o r ditch tender, for the city. H e wrote about the
discovery of Los Angeles in an autobiographical fragment: "The Los
Angeles River was the greatest attraction. It was a beautiful, limpid little
stream with willows on its b anks. ... 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. We know that Lred Eaton w orked for n ine
years as the Los Angeles City Water Company's superintending engi­
neer, served as mayor, campaigned for the municipalization of the water
system, and saw the city gain control of its domestic water supply in
1902. W e know that Mulholland, who succeeded Eaton as head of the
privately o wned water company, fought the city's pu rchase of the com­
pany but then agreed to assume directorship of the public system. (The
only map of that system existed in Mulholland s h ead.) We know that
Lippincott took E aton to the Owens Valley in 1904, and that Eaton to ok
Mulholland on a visit there some months later. Lippincott, chief of
operations in California for the Reclamation Service, had visited the
6
 142 THE POLITICS OF WATER FIVE FIRES 143

valley a year earlier and had recommended that more than 500,000 acres fund the Hoover Dam project by
be withdrawn for possible development of a local public water project. joining with Los Angeles in 1928
We know that Lippincott and his superiors from the Reclamation to form the Metropolitan Water
Service met with Eaton, Mulholland, and the city attorney in November District.
1904 and asserted that Reclamation would step aside only if the pro­ Despite the vagaries of de­
posed aqueduct was "public owned from one end to another." We know mand, the building of the aque­
that city officials and even the publishers of Los Angeles's newspapers duct was to prove so heroic an
were sworn to secrecy about the city's plans so as to prevent a speculative enterprise that its success tended
run on Owens Valley land values. We know that in March 1905 Lippin­ to eclipse second thoughts. Work
cott, while still working for the Reclamation Service, signed a private on the project began in the fall of
contract with the Los Angeles Water Commission to prepare a survey of 1907. The planned route was to
"the possible sources the city could tap for additional water." And we carry 260 million gallons of water
know that in the same month Lippincott gave Eaton a letter directing a day over a distance of nearly 250
him to prepare a personal report on rights-of-way in the valley. Eaton miles. Arising near the back en­
used the letter to buy up options on the Long Valley reservoir site, trance to Yosemite National Park,
options over which he also retained some private control and which he the aqueduct was to divert the
Pipe for the Los Angeles Aqueduct as it passes
would eventually offer to the city at a price it refused to pay. water of the Owens River into over one of the mountain ranges on its 250-
Why did L.A. want the water? Even this brief summary of the some sixty miles of open canals mile route from the Owens Valley to
jockeying that occurred before the aqueduct construction began suggests and concrete ditches. Gathered reservoirs above the San Fernando Valley.
a profound mixture of motives. "Los Angeles is a desert community," into the fifteen-square-mile Hai- Courtesy of the Los Angeles Department of
former mayor Sam Bagby argues in the second scene in Chinatown-. wee Reservoir, these waters Water and Power.
^ithout_^ter_the_dust will rise up and cover us as though we never would then flow or be pumped
existed^ The film takes place during a period "of drought—a drought through steel siphons and closed tunnels 125 miles across the Mojave to
engineered, it turns out, by the water department. In reality, Los An­ the Lairmont Reservoir, at the base of the Coast Range. The Elizabeth
geles voters supported a bond issue for Mulholland's aqueduct, in part, Tunnel was to carry the waters five miles through the six-thousand-foot-
out of a chronic fear of water shortages—a fear manipulated by the high Sierra Madre, after which they were to tumble through twenty-
water department. Mulholland campaigned for the bond issue by con­ three miles of turbines and conduits to reservoirs above the San Fernando
cocting drought conditions that did not, in fact, exist; 1905 was an Valley.
especially wet year in Los Angeles. He imagined a system that would By the time Mulholland stood at the Owensmouth Cascades in 1913
serve a population of 390,000 residents, a figure he estimated the city and declared to the gathered populace, "There it is—Take it! he had
might reach in 1925. By 1925 the population of Los Angeles was three built the longest aqueduct in the Western Hemisphere. To support the
times that number. five years of construction, the Bureau of the Los Angeles Aqueduct had
Waterwas and is brought to Los Angeles less to meet a necessary laid 120 miles of railroad tracks, graded five hundred miles of highways
Kahrl establishes that and trailsTand erected its own cement-manufacturing plant to produce a
from that time to thivthe city has been able to secure far more water than snecial mixture made with Owens Valley tufa stone. Excavated (ijH, ,239
its citizens have proven able to consume. In the early 1980s only seven days, th726jOO-foot Elizabeth Tunnel set a record for hard-rock tunnel­
percent of the water provided by the Colorado River was used by the city; ing. A potential labor shortage was averted when, in 1907, a financial
the remainder went to the surrounding municipalities that had helped panic led to the closing of mining operations throughout the West; four

7
 142 THE POLITICS OF WATER FIVE FIRES 143

valley a year earlier and had recommended that more than 500,000 acres fund the Hoover Dam project by
be withdrawn for possible development of a local public water project. joining with Los Angeles in 1928
We know that Lippincott and his superiors from the Reclamation to form the Metropolitan Water
Service met with Eaton, Mulholland, and the city attorney in November District.
1904 and asserted that Reclamation would step aside only if the pro­ Despite the vagaries of de­
posed aqueduct was "public owned from one end to another." We know mand, the building of the aque­
that city officials and even the publishers of Los Angeles's newspapers duct was to prove so heroic an
were sworn to secrecy about the city's plans so as to prevent a speculative enterprise that its success tended
run on Owens Valley land values. We know that in March 1905 Lippin­ to eclipse second thoughts. Work
cott, while still working for the Reclamation Service, signed a private on the project began in the fall of
contract with the Los Angeles Water Commission to prepare a survey of 1907. The planned route was to
"the possible sources the city could tap for additional water." And we carry 260 million gallons of water
know that in the same month Lippincott gave Eaton a letter directing a day over a distance of nearly 250
him to prepare a personal report on rights-of-way in the valley. Eaton miles. Arising near the back en­
used the letter to buy up options on the Long Valley reservoir site, trance to Yosemite National Park,
options over which he also retained some private control and which he the aqueduct was to divert the
Pipe for the Los Angeles Aqueduct as it passes
would eventually offer to the city at a price it refused to pay. water of the Owens River into over one of the mountain ranges on its 250-
Why did L.A. want the water? Even this brief summary of the some sixty miles of open canals mile route from the Owens Valley to
jockeying that occurred before the aqueduct construction began suggests and concrete ditches. Gathered reservoirs above the San Fernando Valley.
a profound mixture of motives. "Los Angeles is a desert community," into the fifteen-square-mile Hai- Courtesy of the Los Angeles Department of
former mayor Sam Bagby argues in the second scene in Chinatown-. wee Reservoir, these waters Water and Power.
^ithout_^ter_the_dust will rise up and cover us as though we never would then flow or be pumped
existed^ The film takes place during a period "of drought—a drought through steel siphons and closed tunnels 125 miles across the Mojave to
engineered, it turns out, by the water department. In reality, Los An­ the Lairmont Reservoir, at the base of the Coast Range. The Elizabeth
geles voters supported a bond issue for Mulholland's aqueduct, in part, Tunnel was to carry the waters five miles through the six-thousand-foot-
out of a chronic fear of water shortages—a fear manipulated by the high Sierra Madre, after which they were to tumble through twenty-
water department. Mulholland campaigned for the bond issue by con­ three miles of turbines and conduits to reservoirs above the San Fernando
cocting drought conditions that did not, in fact, exist; 1905 was an Valley.
especially wet year in Los Angeles. He imagined a system that would By the time Mulholland stood at the Owensmouth Cascades in 1913
serve a population of 390,000 residents, a figure he estimated the city and declared to the gathered populace, "There it is—Take it! he had
might reach in 1925. By 1925 the population of Los Angeles was three built the longest aqueduct in the Western Hemisphere. To support the
times that number. five years of construction, the Bureau of the Los Angeles Aqueduct had
Waterwas and is brought to Los Angeles less to meet a necessary laid 120 miles of railroad tracks, graded five hundred miles of highways
Kahrl establishes that and trailsTand erected its own cement-manufacturing plant to produce a
from that time to thivthe city has been able to secure far more water than snecial mixture made with Owens Valley tufa stone. Excavated (ijH, ,239
its citizens have proven able to consume. In the early 1980s only seven days, th726jOO-foot Elizabeth Tunnel set a record for hard-rock tunnel­
percent of the water provided by the Colorado River was used by the city; ing. A potential labor shortage was averted when, in 1907, a financial
the remainder went to the surrounding municipalities that had helped panic led to the closing of mining operations throughout the West; four

8
 144
THE POLITICS OF WATER FIVE FIRES
145

five hundred socialists to va rious public offices in 1910 and 1911. In the
Los Angeles mayoral campaign of 1911, Socialist candidate Job Harnman
portrayed Mulholland's aqueduct as built for the benefit of the San
Fernando Mission Land Company—a cartel, formed one week alter
Lippincott's secret 1905 meeting with city officials, that ha d managed to
buy u p, before t he arrival of the water needed to develop it, most ot the
available land in the as-yet-unincorporated valley. The land includes t e
present-day towns of V an Nuys, Canoga Park, Reseda, Sherman Oaks
and Woodland Hills. H arriman portrayed the water project as carried
out for the benefit of an owner class; the cartel included Otis, his son-in-
law Harry Chandler, a former Los Angeles water commissioner, the vice
president of the Title Insurance Company, and H. J. Whitney, the land
developer who built Hollywood. "Perhaps more than any other city,
Roger Lotchin writes in Fortress California. 'XoSjMigeks was the product
of a development conspiracy .by itsjeadership." "They've been blowing
theselarmerTouTof here and buying their land for peanuts"—this is Jake
Gittes's assessment of the syndicate's effectiveness after he is knocked out
by the crippled farmer in a San Fernando orange grove.
Having tied himself to the labor cause, the success of Harnman s
mayoral candidacy depended upon the acquittal of the McNamara
brothers. Clarence Darrow agreed to handle the McNamaras defense.
He also concluded that his clients were guilty of bombing the Times
sue of Magic Mountain. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Department of WaTr''Z'PoLer^
offices. Using Lincoln Steffens as a go-between, Darrow brokered a deal
in wh ich the McNamaras agreed to plead guilty in exchange for reduced
thousand experienced tunnelers and diggers descended upon Mulhol- sentences. The result was a lost election for Harriman, the discrediting o

wuhVSSr^5'A stnke over food serv,ce in 1910

with a cash shortage ,n construction funds. Mulholland weathered the
d«J the labor movement in Los Angeles, and th e assurance to Mulholland that
the aqueduct would be completed in relative peace.
"SIS by djMussmg^ghty percent of his workforce and thenJ,,ri„„ The story o f water and Los Angeles divides itself into countless sub­
plots. Historians have sometimes managed the proliferating narrative by
MuIHoITand s labor troubles coincided with thTffitiTof the , reducing it to a melodrama. A signal contribution to this process was
organizing McNamara brothers, arrested in O ctober 1910 on charges of made in 1931 by Andrae Nordskog in a pamphlet printed by the Califor­
&v) dynamiting the offices o f the Lor Angeles Largely through the nia State Printing Office. His Communication advanced a conspiracy
an open' JZt o " ' 1^ " " " H 5 0 " ^0 t ' 5 ' L ° $ h a d rema '« d history and accused "the Mulholland political crowd" of "gross mis­
open-shop town. It was a city as resistant to working-class solidarity as management." Two years later Morrow Mayo relied on Nordskogs
an Francisco was hospitable to it. The trial of the McNamara brothers primary research ,n his chapter "The Rape of the Owens Valley pub­
thus became an allegorv of the han-1^ h - • ,
Southern C ihfnrn lbetween capital and labor in lished in his book Los Angeles. "The Federal Government of the United
Throlhou th "" 3 Tly°ra eleCt'°n hangmg th£ bala"«- States held Owens Valley," he concluded, "while Los Angeles raped it. Here
hroughout the country the progressive spirit had elected more than Morrow paraphrased the earliest contribution to the controversy,

9
 144
THE POLITICS OF WATER FIVE FIRES
145

five hundred socialists to va rious public offices in 1910 and 1911. In the
Los Angeles mayoral campaign of 1911, Socialist candidate Job Harnman
portrayed Mulholland's aqueduct as built for the benefit of the San
Fernando Mission Land Company—a cartel, formed one week alter
Lippincott's secret 1905 meeting with city officials, that ha d managed to
buy u p, before t he arrival of the water needed to develop it, most ot the
available land in the as-yet-unincorporated valley. The land includes t e
present-day towns of V an Nuys, Canoga Park, Reseda, Sherman Oaks
and Woodland Hills. H arriman portrayed the water project as carried
out for the benefit of an owner class; the cartel included Otis, his son-in-
law Harry Chandler, a former Los Angeles water commissioner, the vice
president of the Title Insurance Company, and H. J. Whitney, the land
developer who built Hollywood. "Perhaps more than any other city,
Roger Lotchin writes in Fortress California. 'XoSjMigeks was the product
of a development conspiracy .by itsjeadership." "They've been blowing
theselarmerTouTof here and buying their land for peanuts"—this is Jake
Gittes's assessment of the syndicate's effectiveness after he is knocked out
by the crippled farmer in a San Fernando orange grove.
Having tied himself to the labor cause, the success of Harnman s
mayoral candidacy depended upon the acquittal of the McNamara
brothers. Clarence Darrow agreed to handle the McNamaras defense.
He also concluded that his clients were guilty of bombing the Times
sue of Magic Mountain. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Department of WaTr''Z'PoLer^
offices. Using Lincoln Steffens as a go-between, Darrow brokered a deal
in wh ich the McNamaras agreed to plead guilty in exchange for reduced
thousand experienced tunnelers and diggers descended upon Mulhol- sentences. The result was a lost election for Harriman, the discrediting o

wuhVSSr^5'A stnke over food serv,ce in 1910

with a cash shortage ,n construction funds. Mulholland weathered the
d«J the labor movement in Los Angeles, and th e assurance to Mulholland that
the aqueduct would be completed in relative peace.
"SIS by djMussmg^ghty percent of his workforce and thenJ,,ri„„ The story o f water and Los Angeles divides itself into countless sub­
plots. Historians have sometimes managed the proliferating narrative by
MuIHoITand s labor troubles coincided with thTffitiTof the , reducing it to a melodrama. A signal contribution to this process was
organizing McNamara brothers, arrested in O ctober 1910 on charges of made in 1931 by Andrae Nordskog in a pamphlet printed by the Califor­
&v) dynamiting the offices o f the Lor Angeles Largely through the nia State Printing Office. His Communication advanced a conspiracy
an open' JZt o " ' 1^ " " " H 5 0 " ^0 t ' 5 ' L ° $ h a d rema '« d history and accused "the Mulholland political crowd" of "gross mis­
open-shop town. It was a city as resistant to working-class solidarity as management." Two years later Morrow Mayo relied on Nordskogs
an Francisco was hospitable to it. The trial of the McNamara brothers primary research ,n his chapter "The Rape of the Owens Valley pub­
thus became an allegorv of the han-1^ h - • ,
Southern C ihfnrn lbetween capital and labor in lished in his book Los Angeles. "The Federal Government of the United
Throlhou th "" 3 Tly°ra eleCt'°n hangmg th£ bala"«- States held Owens Valley," he concluded, "while Los Angeles raped it. Here
hroughout the country the progressive spirit had elected more than Morrow paraphrased the earliest contribution to the controversy,

10
 146
1 HE PO LITICS OF WA TER
W A. Chal fmlSroaofLm(1922, 1933). Publisher of the Renter,
alfant had maintained that "the government held Owens Valley while
Los Angeles skinned it." Books like Rem, Nadeau's Water Seekers (1950)
and Vincent Ostroms Water and Politics (1953) took a more positive view
of the actions of the city, championing its developer-engineers and even
^" n o f, ^ ^ " g r e a t C r e a t o r s " Abraham Hoffman's or Vil­
lainy (1981) went so far as to attempt a rehabilitation of Lippincott
arguing that he was a "far more complex person than the caricatures have
shown the "unwitting victim o f later historiography distortions."
While it doe s not take sides, Kahrl's Water and Power does deign to
> S D ,' r "'' ;l l ' I V "° c h a r a c t e r i n t h i s narrative has appeared so villainous
as J. Lippincott," he writes i n his co nclusion. "He alone consistently
broke fa,th with his public trust and then lied to cover his actions." Kahrl
tempers this claim by a llowing that Lippincott was correct about Los
Angeles s water needs and "sincere in his belief that he was serving some
ig er pub he duty by en couraging the Reclamation Service to abandon
the Owens Valley m favor of Los Angeles." His closing dismissal of Eaton
as comically ineffectual" pales next to his prior claim that Eaton "never
conceived of the project as anything other than a private scheme that
would work to his personal profit." The San Fernando land syndicate he
describes as "somewhat less than corrupting." Mulholland's story de­
volves, for Kahrl, into a "tragedy." As Kahrl's subtitle suggests, he views
t e story as a conflict." The drama he restages with thoroughness and
alance serves as a model of the historian's truth.
In Chinatown,Polansk, and Towne conduct an inquest into the power
of cinematic truth. Director and screenwriter invoke many of the inci­
dents and figures from the Owens Valley story. But they are finally
concerned less with what we know than how we know. Film confers a
certain kind of knowledge; watching it, we take ,n the world with our
eyes. This amplified visual evidence has an immense authority—it capi­
talizes on the cliche that seeing is believing. What is seen on the screen fills
the being before the mind can think; the assent we give to a movie ismore
sensual and visceral than critical or analytical. Chinatown chooses to
expose rather than to exploit this process. While ,t holds up enema as a
legitimate vehicle for historical memory and critique, it also cautions the
viewer that truth," as Jake Gittes calls what he wants from Evelyn
Muiwray, is always more than meets the eye.
Chinatown was by n o means the first movie to appropriate the Owens
11
F IV E F I R E S 147
Valley stor y; in the 1935 New Frontier John Wayne and the Mesquiteers
rode to the aid of ra
nchers in the New Hope Valley, beset bya water project
for M etropole City. But Chinatown is the first movie to link the historical
and narrative materials of the story w
ith the formal limits and properties of
him. Water serves as the vehicle for this process because its h istory a nd
movements are transparent yet subterranean, ubiquitous while also hid­
den from view. Los Angeles works as the site for the inquiry not only
because of Polanski's personal experience of the city the 1969 Manson-
Tate murders, in which his pregnant wife was brutally slain but because
of the plot-ridden character of the local politics. The intersections between
him and history are many, despite Towne's claim th at I didn t base a single
character in Chinatown on any person I read about in the Owens \ alley
episode." Script and camera focus o n a heroic Mulholland-hgure; they
collapse into Noah Cross the shadier aspects of Eaton, Lippincott, and even
Mulholland (he, like Cross, fought a custody battle with his daughter over
a granddaughter); they play up the role of the land syndicate; they play
down the city's labor problems; they start with the failed dam rather than
the successful aqueduct; and they shift the entire action into the waning
years of the Depression, ten years after the dam gave way and over thirty
years after the "rape of the Owens Valley first b egan.
T R I C K E D B Y A N I M P O S TER into smearing Muiwray, Jake Gittes sets out to
secure his revenge. While he does develop some feeling for Evelyn
Muiwray as the movie proceeds, his prime motive in solving the pre­
sumed mystery is to get back at the people "who set me up. I w ant the
big boys who are making the payoffs," he says. Chinatown unfolds as a
movie about pride, especially the pride of knowing.
As a private eye, its protagonist makes a living by selling information.
The first shot in the movie is of a photograph, grainy but unmistakably a
man and a woman making love." We hear a voice moaning offscreen.
What sounds like sex noises turns out to be the groans of an anguished
husband, Curly. His lamentations provide the sound track as photographs
are leafed through on the screen, and the viewer is taken in by the
synchronization. The movie immediately establishes and exploits, as it
will throughout, a gap between the heard and the seen. Within the
confines of Curly's story, Jake succeeds in selling him adequate informa­
tion about his wife's adultery. Curly confronts his wife, blackens her eye,
 146
1 HE PO LITICS OF WA TER
W A. Chal fmlSroaofLm(1922, 1933). Publisher of the Renter,
alfant had maintained that "the government held Owens Valley while
Los Angeles skinned it." Books like Rem, Nadeau's Water Seekers (1950)
and Vincent Ostroms Water and Politics (1953) took a more positive view
of the actions of the city, championing its developer-engineers and even
^" n o f, ^ ^ " g r e a t C r e a t o r s " Abraham Hoffman's or Vil­
lainy (1981) went so far as to attempt a rehabilitation of Lippincott
arguing that he was a "far more complex person than the caricatures have
shown the "unwitting victim o f later historiography distortions."
While it doe s not take sides, Kahrl's Water and Power does deign to
> S D ,' r "'' ;l l ' I V "° c h a r a c t e r i n t h i s narrative has appeared so villainous
as J. Lippincott," he writes i n his co nclusion. "He alone consistently
broke fa,th with his public trust and then lied to cover his actions." Kahrl
tempers this claim by a llowing that Lippincott was correct about Los
Angeles s water needs and "sincere in his belief that he was serving some
ig er pub he duty by en couraging the Reclamation Service to abandon
the Owens Valley m favor of Los Angeles." His closing dismissal of Eaton
as comically ineffectual" pales next to his prior claim that Eaton "never
conceived of the project as anything other than a private scheme that
would work to his personal profit." The San Fernando land syndicate he
describes as "somewhat less than corrupting." Mulholland's story de­
volves, for Kahrl, into a "tragedy." As Kahrl's subtitle suggests, he views
t e story as a conflict." The drama he restages with thoroughness and
alance serves as a model of the historian's truth.
In Chinatown,Polansk, and Towne conduct an inquest into the power
of cinematic truth. Director and screenwriter invoke many of the inci­
dents and figures from the Owens Valley story. But they are finally
concerned less with what we know than how we know. Film confers a
certain kind of knowledge; watching it, we take ,n the world with our
eyes. This amplified visual evidence has an immense authority—it capi­
talizes on the cliche that seeing is believing. What is seen on the screen fills
the being before the mind can think; the assent we give to a movie ismore
sensual and visceral than critical or analytical. Chinatown chooses to
expose rather than to exploit this process. While ,t holds up enema as a
legitimate vehicle for historical memory and critique, it also cautions the
viewer that truth," as Jake Gittes calls what he wants from Evelyn
Muiwray, is always more than meets the eye.
Chinatown was by n o means the first movie to appropriate the Owens
F IV E F I R E S 147
Valley stor y; in the 1935 New Frontier John Wayne and the Mesquiteers
rode to the aid of ra
nchers in the New Hope Valley, beset bya water project
for M etropole City. But Chinatown is the first movie to link the historical
and narrative materials of the story w
ith the formal limits and properties of
him. Water serves as the vehicle for this process because its h istory a nd
movements are transparent yet subterranean, ubiquitous while also hid­
den from view. Los Angeles works as the site for the inquiry not only
because of Polanski's personal experience of the city the 1969 Manson-
Tate murders, in which his pregnant wife was brutally slain but because
of the plot-ridden character of the local politics. The intersections between
him and history are many, despite Towne's claim th at I didn t base a single
character in Chinatown on any person I read about in the Owens \ alley
episode." Script and camera focus o n a heroic Mulholland-hgure; they
collapse into Noah Cross the shadier aspects of Eaton, Lippincott, and even
Mulholland (he, like Cross, fought a custody battle with his daughter over
a granddaughter); they play up the role of the land syndicate; they play
down the city's labor problems; they start with the failed dam rather than
the successful aqueduct; and they shift the entire action into the waning
years of the Depression, ten years after the dam gave way and over thirty
years after the "rape of the Owens Valley first b egan.
T R I C K E D B Y A N I M P O S TER into smearing Muiwray, Jake Gittes sets out to
secure his revenge. While he does develop some feeling for Evelyn
Muiwray as the movie proceeds, his prime motive in solving the pre­
sumed mystery is to get back at the people "who set me up. I w ant the
big boys who are making the payoffs," he says. Chinatown unfolds as a
movie about pride, especially the pride of knowing.
As a private eye, its protagonist makes a living by selling information.
The first shot in the movie is of a photograph, grainy but unmistakably a
man and a woman making love." We hear a voice moaning offscreen.
What sounds like sex noises turns out to be the groans of an anguished
husband, Curly. His lamentations provide the sound track as photographs
are leafed through on the screen, and the viewer is taken in by the
synchronization. The movie immediately establishes and exploits, as it
will throughout, a gap between the heard and the seen. Within the
confines of Curly's story, Jake succeeds in selling him adequate informa­
tion about his wife's adultery. Curly confronts his wife, blackens her eye,
12
 148 THE POLITICS OF WATER
and sinks back into his routine. But in the world inhabited by Noah
Cross, truth does not so easily yield to surveillance. Jake's investment in
what things "look like" upholds him in the fatal belief that adequate
knowledge can be gained from the world viewed.
"No script ever drove me nuttier," Towne was to say; he felt over­
whelmed ^ by the abundance of data on the politics of water in Los
Angeles. I tried one way and another casually to reveal mountains of
in or mat ion about dams, orange groves, incest, e levator operators." He
was also influenced by another writer about a gone Los Angeles: "reading
Chandler filled m e with such a sense of loss that it was probably the main
reason why I did the script." Polanski viewed the material as more
personal, more existential. "I was in L.A.," he said, "where every street
corner reminded me of tragedy." He insisted that Towne add a love scene
etween Jake and Evelyn, as well as an unhappy ending. "Evelyn had to
die, he maintained. Towne, for his part, had imagined Evelyn in jail
after shooting Noah Cross, with daughter Katherine escaping to Mexico.
For Towne, the tragedy arose from the corruption of place. H e smelled
sage and eucalyptus and felt prompted to write about the despoliation of
California land. The two visions happily converged; t he incest between
father and daughter became a compelling metaphor for our betrayal by
those t o whom we have given our private or public trust.
Directing their skepticism back at their own medium, Polanski and
Towne also ask whether we can trust the truth delivered by an art so
overwhelmingly visual. For Jake, who routinely misinterprets what he
sees, experience proves an uninstructive spectacle. Polanski surrounds
him with aids and obstacles to sight: the binoculars and camera with
which he spies on Mulwray; the photographs of Curly's wife and of Noah
Cross and Mulwray; the various kinds of clear and broken "glass" or
"grass," as the Japanese gardener calls i t i n another misheard aural cue;
Mulwray s specta cles and Cross's bifocals; the eye of a fish a nd the "flaw"
in Evelyn's iris. Eyes get shot o ut; lenses and taillights broken. So Jake
continues to see but has no perspective on what is seen. As both Cross and
Evelyn say t o him, "You may think you know what you're dealing with,
but believe me, you don't."
Jake begins as superior to the action and to his client. He doles out
sympathy and information to Curly and agrees that Curly is right only in
order to get rid of him. The viewer, coming in at the end of the investiga­
tion, is placed in the role of voyeur. We share with Jake a sense of
13
FIVE FIRES 149
distanced knowing, even delectation. In the following scenes, we watch
Jake watch Mulwray: at City Hall, in the bed of the Los Angeles River,
and at the outfall at Point Fermin Park. The next day, back at the office,
we are treated to a second set of photographs that show Mulwray outside
a restaurant with an older man. Jake tosses them down in disgust,
accusing his assistant Walsh of having wasted his time. These photo­
graphs refuse to yield information. Walsh mentions that the two men
argued. "What about?" Jake asks. Walsh answers: "I only heard one
word—apple core."
Jake cannot hear the clue in apple core ( albacore, the name of
Cross's yacht club), and the viewer has as yet no idea what the words
might mean. But the gap between the seen and the heard has been
introduced a second time, and it suggests that what Jake needs to do is not
to look but to listen. Throughout the film he proves remarkably deaf to
the tones and inflections of speech. He cannot hear the falseness in Ida
Sessions's impersonation of Mrs. Mulwray. Nor can he detect the obvious
and sincere distress in Evelyn's voice as she gamely attempts to divert him
from discovering the identity of her daughter.
Jake's futile attempt to catch up with the past is m easured out by the
movie's persistent ticking sounds, as in the scene just after he and Evelyn
make love. P rovocative little noises, l ike the sexy squeak of a car being
polished or a name being scraped off an office door, frequently distract
him. The telephone interrupts lovemaking and sleep. Jake's refusal to
heed the messages carried by sound culminates in a silent movie of his
own staging—the scene where he watches Evelyn and her daughter
arguing through a bungalow window, and where, for the lack of a sound
track, he draws all the wrong conclusions.
Late in the film, and lhng after we have begun to question Jake's skill as
a detective, Polanski introduces another scene that enacts the persistent
lag in Jake's response to sound versus sight. Jake has been called to Ida
Sessions's apartment and walks through it, finding a wilted head of
lettuce, s pilled groceries, and then Ida dead on the floor. A hand-held
camera shakily follows him. Jake turns toward a dark closet. At this
moment Jerry Goldsmith's score produces a loud screech, one that we
hear but that Jake does not. A light suddenly comes 6n in the closet,
revealing the hidden police officers Loach and Escobar. While the scene is
meant to scare us, it also conta ins a built-in warning device that blunts the
shock. The sound track gives us the aural before the visual cue; it is as if
 148 THE POLITICS OF WATER
and sinks back into his routine. But in the world inhabited by Noah
Cross, truth does not so easily yield to surveillance. Jake's investment in
what things "look like" upholds him in the fatal belief that adequate
knowledge can be gained from the world viewed.
"No script ever drove me nuttier," Towne was to say; he felt over­
whelmed ^ by the abundance of data on the politics of water in Los
Angeles. I tried one way and another casually to reveal mountains of
in or mat ion about dams, orange groves, incest, e levator operators." He
was also influenced by another writer about a gone Los Angeles: "reading
Chandler filled m e with such a sense of loss that it was probably the main
reason why I did the script." Polanski viewed the material as more
personal, more existential. "I was in L.A.," he said, "where every street
corner reminded me of tragedy." He insisted that Towne add a love scene
etween Jake and Evelyn, as well as an unhappy ending. "Evelyn had to
die, he maintained. Towne, for his part, had imagined Evelyn in jail
after shooting Noah Cross, with daughter Katherine escaping to Mexico.
For Towne, the tragedy arose from the corruption of place. H e smelled
sage and eucalyptus and felt prompted to write about the despoliation of
California land. The two visions happily converged; t he incest between
father and daughter became a compelling metaphor for our betrayal by
those t o whom we have given our private or public trust.
Directing their skepticism back at their own medium, Polanski and
Towne also ask whether we can trust the truth delivered by an art so
overwhelmingly visual. For Jake, who routinely misinterprets what he
sees, experience proves an uninstructive spectacle. Polanski surrounds
him with aids and obstacles to sight: the binoculars and camera with
which he spies on Mulwray; the photographs of Curly's wife and of Noah
Cross and Mulwray; the various kinds of clear and broken "glass" or
"grass," as the Japanese gardener calls i t i n another misheard aural cue;
Mulwray s specta cles and Cross's bifocals; the eye of a fish a nd the "flaw"
in Evelyn's iris. Eyes get shot o ut; lenses and taillights broken. So Jake
continues to see but has no perspective on what is seen. As both Cross and
Evelyn say t o him, "You may think you know what you're dealing with,
but believe me, you don't."
Jake begins as superior to the action and to his client. He doles out
sympathy and information to Curly and agrees that Curly is right only in
order to get rid of him. The viewer, coming in at the end of the investiga­
tion, is placed in the role of voyeur. We share with Jake a sense of
FIVE FIRES 149
distanced knowing, even delectation. In the following scenes, we watch
Jake watch Mulwray: at City Hall, in the bed of the Los Angeles River,
and at the outfall at Point Fermin Park. The next day, back at the office,
we are treated to a second set of photographs that show Mulwray outside
a restaurant with an older man. Jake tosses them down in disgust,
accusing his assistant Walsh of having wasted his time. These photo­
graphs refuse to yield information. Walsh mentions that the two men
argued. "What about?" Jake asks. Walsh answers: "I only heard one
word—apple core."
Jake cannot hear the clue in apple core ( albacore, the name of
Cross's yacht club), and the viewer has as yet no idea what the words
might mean. But the gap between the seen and the heard has been
introduced a second time, and it suggests that what Jake needs to do is not
to look but to listen. Throughout the film he proves remarkably deaf to
the tones and inflections of speech. He cannot hear the falseness in Ida
Sessions's impersonation of Mrs. Mulwray. Nor can he detect the obvious
and sincere distress in Evelyn's voice as she gamely attempts to divert him
from discovering the identity of her daughter.
Jake's futile attempt to catch up with the past is m easured out by the
movie's persistent ticking sounds, as in the scene just after he and Evelyn
make love. P rovocative little noises, l ike the sexy squeak of a car being
polished or a name being scraped off an office door, frequently distract
him. The telephone interrupts lovemaking and sleep. Jake's refusal to
heed the messages carried by sound culminates in a silent movie of his
own staging—the scene where he watches Evelyn and her daughter
arguing through a bungalow window, and where, for the lack of a sound
track, he draws all the wrong conclusions.
Late in the film, and lhng after we have begun to question Jake's skill as
a detective, Polanski introduces another scene that enacts the persistent
lag in Jake's response to sound versus sight. Jake has been called to Ida
Sessions's apartment and walks through it, finding a wilted head of
lettuce, s pilled groceries, and then Ida dead on the floor. A hand-held
camera shakily follows him. Jake turns toward a dark closet. At this
moment Jerry Goldsmith's score produces a loud screech, one that we
hear but that Jake does not. A light suddenly comes 6n in the closet,
revealing the hidden police officers Loach and Escobar. While the scene is
meant to scare us, it also conta ins a built-in warning device that blunts the
shock. The sound track gives us the aural before the visual cue; it is as if
14
 1:>U THE POLITICS OF WATER
the thunder arrives before the lightning. By inverting the normal timing
of cues, t he scene not only points to an alternative method of gathering
evidence but to the viewers increasing distance from and even suspicion
of the adequacy of the hero.
Until Faye Dunaway turns up as the real Mrs. Mulwray, t he viewer
accompanies Jake in gathering the data. Her appearance marks the
beginning of our divergence from him. We first see her as she stands
behind Gittes while he tells Walsh and Duffy the joke about the "China­
man. As he finishes the joke, Jake laughs, turns, sees Mrs. Mulwray, and
chokes. After this sequence, our relation to him shifts: We are no longer
willing to look at the world through his eyes, and when we see him in the
frame, he is in creasingly shot from behind. Jake's back becomes part of
the scenery, the camera situates him in the field he means to survey and
master, while we look over his shoulder. Jake may continue to view
himself as uninvolved, but we see h im as part of the action, a man who
continually gets ahead of himself and who gets in the way.
Yet although we learn not to trust Jake or his point of view, we are
not granted any other angle of access. There are no scenes without him,
and he increasingly becomes the moving force in bringing about the
conclusion the very one he means to prevent. His final summons to
Noah Cross is not only gratuitous, based solely on Jake's desire to fyiow,
but will place Cross at the scene of his daughter's attempted escape. By
subjecting Jake to this series of humiliations and uncertainties, Polanski
withholds from his film an authoritative and knowing point of view. The
director s mistrust even renunciation—of authority culminates in the
cutting of Jake's nose: Polanski casts himself as the "Man with Knife." By
making the behavior of t he character he plays so capricious and unattrac­
tive, he positions himself within the ugly confusions of his film rather
than beyond them.
Anyone who drinks a glass from the tap in Los Angeles accepts
Mulholland's gift. Water connects; even the Mexican boy on the horse
who consults with Mulwray knows that, and he knows that to follow the
appearings and disappearings of water is to acquire the deepest and most
complex knowledge of his city. Yet it is no t a knowledge that enables or
empowers. The knowledge delivered by the movement of water impli­
cates and entangles; it reveals experience as interrelation. Such knowledge
does not afford a privileged perspective, and Jake's attempt to enjoy such
a position is w hat kills.
15
FIVE FIRES 151
Given its view of life as mutual entanglement, the movie rejects the
metaphor of rape that governs so much of the discourse about Los
Angeles and the Owens Valley. When Jake asks Evelyn, "Did he rape
you?" she pauses, then quietly shakes her head back and forth. As an
adult, Evelyn fights her father out of a desire to protect her daughter/
sister, not out of a sense of prior victimage. She accepts her own implica­
tion in the events of her past. The original script even allowed for a kind
of sympathy for Cross, in lines that were eventually cut from the movie:
(i continuing): he had a breakdown . . . the dam broke . . . my mother
E V ELY N
died ... he became a littleboy ... I was fifteen . . . he'd ask me what to
eat for breakfast, what clothes to w ear! ... it happen ed . . . then I ran
away.
Towne's language here represents incest between father and daughter as a
response to a need. It also attempts to imagine the misery of Mulholland's
life a fter the collapse of the dam and to meet it with a strange kind of
solace. The filmed version replaces these lines with Jake's question about
rape. Evelyn does not nod yes to his question. The assumption of respon­
sibility by a character who could so easily have been cast as a victim
complicates any response to the film that looks to separate out innocence
and guilt. Given the horrors of his personal losses—born in 1933 and
raised in Poland, he saw his parents taken to a concentration camp in
1940—Polanski persists in viewing the world as a place in which
people—a'nd by t his he means everyone—are "capable of anything."
Polanski's, then, is finally not a political vision. While the actual history
of governments may be complicated, politics depends on people making a
distinction between better and worse, on acting and deciding. Towne had
wanted a movie in which the good guys got away. But by including
everyone in his landscape of despair, Polanski created an image of Los
Angeles as a site of continuing holocaust. He used the unique history of
water in California to make a general case about the ubiquity of collab­
oration and evil. "He has to swim in the same water we all do," Jake feys
about Escobar. Not even the viewer of Chin atown escapes the implications
of this claim.
While much is lost in this cinematic adaptation of California history—
especially the informed anger that could make for political change—
something is also gained. In Chinatown Polanski creates a powerful vision
 1:>U THE POLITICS OF WATER
the thunder arrives before the lightning. By inverting the normal timing
of cues, t he scene not only points to an alternative method of gathering
evidence but to the viewers increasing distance from and even suspicion
of the adequacy of the hero.
Until Faye Dunaway turns up as the real Mrs. Mulwray, t he viewer
accompanies Jake in gathering the data. Her appearance marks the
beginning of our divergence from him. We first see her as she stands
behind Gittes while he tells Walsh and Duffy the joke about the "China­
man. As he finishes the joke, Jake laughs, turns, sees Mrs. Mulwray, and
chokes. After this sequence, our relation to him shifts: We are no longer
willing to look at the world through his eyes, and when we see him in the
frame, he is in creasingly shot from behind. Jake's back becomes part of
the scenery, the camera situates him in the field he means to survey and
master, while we look over his shoulder. Jake may continue to view
himself as uninvolved, but we see h im as part of the action, a man who
continually gets ahead of himself and who gets in the way.
Yet although we learn not to trust Jake or his point of view, we are
not granted any other angle of access. There are no scenes without him,
and he increasingly becomes the moving force in bringing about the
conclusion the very one he means to prevent. His final summons to
Noah Cross is not only gratuitous, based solely on Jake's desire to fyiow,
but will place Cross at the scene of his daughter's attempted escape. By
subjecting Jake to this series of humiliations and uncertainties, Polanski
withholds from his film an authoritative and knowing point of view. The
director s mistrust even renunciation—of authority culminates in the
cutting of Jake's nose: Polanski casts himself as the "Man with Knife." By
making the behavior of t he character he plays so capricious and unattrac­
tive, he positions himself within the ugly confusions of his film rather
than beyond them.
Anyone who drinks a glass from the tap in Los Angeles accepts
Mulholland's gift. Water connects; even the Mexican boy on the horse
who consults with Mulwray knows that, and he knows that to follow the
appearings and disappearings of water is to acquire the deepest and most
complex knowledge of his city. Yet it is no t a knowledge that enables or
empowers. The knowledge delivered by the movement of water impli­
cates and entangles; it reveals experience as interrelation. Such knowledge
does not afford a privileged perspective, and Jake's attempt to enjoy such
a position is w hat kills.
FIVE FIRES 151
Given its view of life as mutual entanglement, the movie rejects the
metaphor of rape that governs so much of the discourse about Los
Angeles and the Owens Valley. When Jake asks Evelyn, "Did he rape
you?" she pauses, then quietly shakes her head back and forth. As an
adult, Evelyn fights her father out of a desire to protect her daughter/
sister, not out of a sense of prior victimage. She accepts her own implica­
tion in the events of her past. The original script even allowed for a kind
of sympathy for Cross, in lines that were eventually cut from the movie:
(i continuing): he had a breakdown . . . the dam broke . . . my mother
E V ELY N
died ... he became a littleboy ... I was fifteen . . . he'd ask me what to
eat for breakfast, what clothes to w ear! ... it happen ed . . . then I ran
away.
Towne's language here represents incest between father and daughter as a
response to a need. It also attempts to imagine the misery of Mulholland's
life a fter the collapse of the dam and to meet it with a strange kind of
solace. The filmed version replaces these lines with Jake's question about
rape. Evelyn does not nod yes to his question. The assumption of respon­
sibility by a character who could so easily have been cast as a victim
complicates any response to the film that looks to separate out innocence
and guilt. Given the horrors of his personal losses—born in 1933 and
raised in Poland, he saw his parents taken to a concentration camp in
1940—Polanski persists in viewing the world as a place in which
people—a'nd by t his he means everyone—are "capable of anything."
Polanski's, then, is finally not a political vision. While the actual history
of governments may be complicated, politics depends on people making a
distinction between better and worse, on acting and deciding. Towne had
wanted a movie in which the good guys got away. But by including
everyone in his landscape of despair, Polanski created an image of Los
Angeles as a site of continuing holocaust. He used the unique history of
water in California to make a general case about the ubiquity of collab­
oration and evil. "He has to swim in the same water we all do," Jake feys
about Escobar. Not even the viewer of Chin atown escapes the implications
of this claim.
While much is lost in this cinematic adaptation of California history—
especially the informed anger that could make for political change—
something is also gained. In Chinatown Polanski creates a powerful vision
16
 152 TH E POLITICS OF WATER FIVE FIRES 153

of life in which relations stop nowhere and in so doing makes a direct ambiguity of experience. This mordant negative capability reminds us
challenge to the historicizing imagination. When we attempt to under­ that works of art that dramatize the past without apportioning blame, or
stand the film as a historical artifact, as pointing toward or influenced by even establishing firm lines of cause and effect, do as much as the histories
some earlier historical occurrence, Chinatown in fact invokes an infinity of to keep stories like the one shared by Los Angeles and the Owens Valley
contexts. The most obvious is the Mulholland story—surely this is a unforgotten and alive.
movie about bringing the water to L.A. But why, then, is it set in the
1930s? Perhaps it is a movie about the promises and failures of public
works in and since the New Deal. The film is, as Polanski writes, "about
the thirties seen through the camera eye of the seventies." Jake's failed
attempt to save the woman he loves—a mistake he makes twice—cannot
be ignored: the futility and impotence and even the guilt Polanski may
have felt after the murder of his pregnant wife provide the context here.
But if any work of art necessarily expresses the received truths of its
moment of production, then the context that comes to mind is the
corruption and betrayal of Watergate. Nixon resigned less than a month
after the film was released. The film's message, h owever, is not that we
must pursue corruption to its lair. Although the catastrophe here is the
coverup, Jake only inflicts more damage by trying to uncover the "truth."
Iff \•. -
But why, then, is it called Chinatown ? Yes, "Chinatown" becomes a
metaphor for the unmanageable, a kind of universal and negative signi-
fier. And if there ever was a situation in which the United States thought
it knew what it was dealing with but didn't, it was Vietnam. The final
image of the Asian faces crowding onto the screen, as well as the salient
yet marginal figures of the Chinese butler and the Japanese gardener
these may provoke some to consider the film's context as not only the long
history of the oppressed "Oriental" in California but the Asian war from
which America had withdrawn in 1973 and which was to end with the
fall o f Saigon in 1975.
By so deftly invoking these and other contexts, Polanski opens up a
free space. Not for action or emotion: these remain for the characters in QP
the film, at least, a dead end. The space Chinatown opens onto is the space
of interpretation itself, a space Polanski creates and protects for the
viewer. Chinatown refuses to allow the onlooker to remain comfortable in
the belief that a city or a life or even a movie can be fully understood by
invoking its generating historical context. Yet the film also understands
and accepts that such narratives and attempts at inter-connection are
necessary fictions by way of which we control our anxiety about the

17
 152 TH E POLITICS OF WATER FIVE FIRES 153

of life in which relations stop nowhere and in so doing makes a direct ambiguity of experience. This mordant negative capability reminds us
challenge to the historicizing imagination. When we attempt to under­ that works of art that dramatize the past without apportioning blame, or
stand the film as a historical artifact, as pointing toward or influenced by even establishing firm lines of cause and effect, do as much as the histories
some earlier historical occurrence, Chinatown in fact invokes an infinity of to keep stories like the one shared by Los Angeles and the Owens Valley
contexts. The most obvious is the Mulholland story—surely this is a unforgotten and alive.
movie about bringing the water to L.A. But why, then, is it set in the
1930s? Perhaps it is a movie about the promises and failures of public
works in and since the New Deal. The film is, as Polanski writes, "about
the thirties seen through the camera eye of the seventies." Jake's failed
attempt to save the woman he loves—a mistake he makes twice—cannot
be ignored: the futility and impotence and even the guilt Polanski may
have felt after the murder of his pregnant wife provide the context here.
But if any work of art necessarily expresses the received truths of its
moment of production, then the context that comes to mind is the
corruption and betrayal of Watergate. Nixon resigned less than a month
after the film was released. The film's message, h owever, is not that we
must pursue corruption to its lair. Although the catastrophe here is the
coverup, Jake only inflicts more damage by trying to uncover the "truth."
Iff \•. -
But why, then, is it called Chinatown ? Yes, "Chinatown" becomes a
metaphor for the unmanageable, a kind of universal and negative signi-
fier. And if there ever was a situation in which the United States thought
it knew what it was dealing with but didn't, it was Vietnam. The final
image of the Asian faces crowding onto the screen, as well as the salient
yet marginal figures of the Chinese butler and the Japanese gardener
these may provoke some to consider the film's context as not only the long
history of the oppressed "Oriental" in California but the Asian war from
which America had withdrawn in 1973 and which was to end with the
fall o f Saigon in 1975.
By so deftly invoking these and other contexts, Polanski opens up a
free space. Not for action or emotion: these remain for the characters in QP
the film, at least, a dead end. The space Chinatown opens onto is the space
of interpretation itself, a space Polanski creates and protects for the
viewer. Chinatown refuses to allow the onlooker to remain comfortable in
the belief that a city or a life or even a movie can be fully understood by
invoking its generating historical context. Yet the film also understands
and accepts that such narratives and attempts at inter-connection are
necessary fictions by way of which we control our anxiety about the

18
19
20
 OZYMANDIAS MARC R E I S N E R
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled Hp, and sneer of cold.command,
CADILLAC
'
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
W.hich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
DESERT
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
The American West
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
and Its Disappearing Water
REVISED AND UPDATED

PENGUIN BOOKS
21
 For Konrad and Else Reisner

PENGUIN BOOKS
Publiuhed by the Penguin Group
, H u d m Street,N m York, N m York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (USA) l n ~ 375
Penguin Bwka Ltd. 80 Srrand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Boob Australia Ltd, 250 C l m k d b d . Omkml!, V i r i a 3124, Awtrdi
Penguin Books Clnada Lrd, 10 Alcorn Armuc, Toronto, Ontario, C.m& M4V 3B2 CONTENTS
-
Penguin Bwka India (PI Ld, 11 Cornmunip Gatre, Paduhcel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India
Penguin Boob (N.Z) Lcd, Cnr Roadale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckhnd,'New f i e l d
Penguin Bwka (South Afrh) (Ppl Id, 24 Stunlee Avenue,
- Roaebank,Johnnubtug 2196, South A f r h
I

Penguin Books h d , Regiaturd Officu: 80 Strand, London WQR ORL, England

First p u b l h c d in the United States of Amvlca by

Viking Penguin Inc. 1986
Published in Penguln Books 1987 INTRODUCTION
This revised and updated edition published in Penguin Books 1993
A Semidesert with a Desert Heart
1
Copyright 0 Marc Reisner, 1986, 1993
CHAPTER ONE
Maps copyright O Vtklng Penguin Inc., 1986
AUljghtsresuv#l A Country of Illusion
15
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt h m
'TalLlng Columbia," words and music by Woody Guthrie. T R O 4 Copyright
1961 and 1963 Ludlow Muslc. Inc., New York N.Y. Used by permlsslon. CHAPTER TWO
The Red Queen
LIBRARY OF CONG- CATALOGWO M PUBLICATION DATA
Reisner, Marc
52
Cadillac desert
Reprint. Originally published, New York, N.Y., U.S.A. CHAPTER THREE
Viking, 1986.
Bibliography.
First Causes
Includes index. , 104
1. Inigatlon-Government policy-West (US.)--History. '
2. Water r u o u m s developmt-Govanment policy-West
CHAPTER FOUR
(U.S.)-History. 3. Corruption (in politics)-West (U.S.)
-History. L Title. An American Nile (I)
[HD1739.A17R45 19871 333.91'00978 87.7602 120
ISBN 0 14 01.7824 4 (mvised edition)

Printed in the United States of America CHAPTER FIVE

Set in Aster The Go-Go Yean
Maps by David Llndroth . 145
Except in the United S t a e of America, this book k wld subject to the condition that
it shall not, by way of trade or othuwlse, be lent, re-sold, h i d out, or otherwise CHAPTER SIX
circulated wlthout the phbhheA prior consent to any form of binding or a v e r other Rivals in Crime
than that in which it is published and without a afmilar condition including this
condition be@ impoad on the aubuquent purchaser. 169
22
1.
J 3 3 ' 3) - .- I -' ' _j
 For Konrad and Else Reisner

PENGUIN BOOKS
Publiuhed by the Penguin Group
, H u d m Street,N m York, N m York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Group (USA) l n ~ 375
Penguin Bwka Ltd. 80 Srrand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Boob Australia Ltd, 250 C l m k d b d . Omkml!, V i r i a 3124, Awtrdi
Penguin Books Clnada Lrd, 10 Alcorn Armuc, Toronto, Ontario, C.m& M4V 3B2 CONTENTS
-
Penguin Bwka India (PI Ld, 11 Cornmunip Gatre, Paduhcel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India
Penguin Boob (N.Z) Lcd, Cnr Roadale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckhnd,'New f i e l d
Penguin Bwka (South Afrh) (Ppl Id, 24 Stunlee Avenue,
- Roaebank,Johnnubtug 2196, South A f r h
I

Penguin Books h d , Regiaturd Officu: 80 Strand, London WQR ORL, England

First p u b l h c d in the United States of Amvlca by

Viking Penguin Inc. 1986
Published in Penguln Books 1987 INTRODUCTION
This revised and updated edition published in Penguin Books 1993
A Semidesert with a Desert Heart
1
Copyright 0 Marc Reisner, 1986, 1993
CHAPTER ONE
Maps copyright O Vtklng Penguin Inc., 1986
AUljghtsresuv#l A Country of Illusion
15
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt h m
'TalLlng Columbia," words and music by Woody Guthrie. T R O 4 Copyright
1961 and 1963 Ludlow Muslc. Inc., New York N.Y. Used by permlsslon. CHAPTER TWO
The Red Queen
LIBRARY OF CONG- CATALOGWO M PUBLICATION DATA
Reisner, Marc
52
Cadillac desert
Reprint. Originally published, New York, N.Y., U.S.A. CHAPTER THREE
Viking, 1986.
Bibliography.
First Causes
Includes index. , 104
1. Inigatlon-Government policy-West (US.)--History. '
2. Water r u o u m s developmt-Govanment policy-West
CHAPTER FOUR
(U.S.)-History. 3. Corruption (in politics)-West (U.S.)
-History. L Title. An American Nile (I)
[HD1739.A17R45 19871 333.91'00978 87.7602 120
ISBN 0 14 01.7824 4 (mvised edition)

Printed in the United States of America CHAPTER FIVE

Set in Aster The Go-Go Yean
Maps by David Llndroth . 145
Except in the United S t a e of America, this book k wld subject to the condition that
it shall not, by way of trade or othuwlse, be lent, re-sold, h i d out, or otherwise CHAPTER SIX
circulated wlthout the phbhheA prior consent to any form of binding or a v e r other Rivals in Crime
than that in which it is published and without a afmilar condition including this
condition be@ impoad on the aubuquent purchaser. 169
23
1.
J 3 3 ' 3) - .- I -' ' _j

CHAPTER THREE
First Causes
w
hen archaeologists from some other planet sift through the
bleached bones of our civilization, they may well conclude
that our temples were dams. Imponderably massive, con-
structed with exquisite care, our dams will outlast anything else we
have built-skyscrapers, cathedrals, bridges, even nuclear power
plants. When forests push through the rotting streets of New York and
the Empire State Building is a crumbling hulk, Hoover Dam will sit
astride the Colorado River much as it does today-intact, formidable,
serene.
The permanence of our dams will merely impress the archaeolo-
gists; their numbers will leave them in awe. In this century, something
like a quarter of a million have been built in the United States alone.
If you ignore the earthen plugs thrown across freshets and small creeks
to water stock or rpise bass, then fihy thousand or so remain. These,
in the lexicon of the civil engineer, are "major works." Even most of
the major works are less than awesome, dammiig rivers like the She-
paug, the Verdigris, Pilarcitos Creek, Mossman's Brook, and the North
Fork of the Jump. Forget about them, and you are left with a couple
of thousand really big dams, the thought of whose construction stag-
gers the imagination. They hold back rivers our ancestors thought
could never be tamed-the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Sacramento,
the Snake, the Savannah, the Red, the Colorado. They are sixty stories
high or four miles long; they contain enough concrete to pave an
interstate highway From end to end.
These are the dams that will make the archaeologists24blink-and
105 First Causes
wonder. Did we overreach ourselves trying to build them? Did our
civilization fall apart when they silted up? Why did we feel compelled
to build so many? Why five dozen on the Missouri and its major tri-
butaries? Why twenty-five on the Tennessee? Why fourteen on the
Stanislaus River's short run from the Sierra Nevada to the sea?
We know surprisingly little about vanished civilizations whose
majesty and whose ultimate demise were closely linked to liberties
they took with water. Unlike ourselves, future archaeologists will have
the benefit of written records, of time capsules and so forth. But such
things are as-apt to confuse as to enlighten. What, for example, will
archaeologists make of Congressional debates over Tellico Dam, where
,
the vast majority ridiculed the dam, excoriated it, flagellated it-and
then allowed it to be built? What will they thinkof Congressmen voting
for water projects like Central Arizona and Tennessee-Tombigbee-
projects costing three or four billion dollars in an age of astronomical
deficits-when Congress's own fact-Knding committees asserted or im-
plied that they made little sense?
Such debates and documents may shed light on reasons-rational
or otherwise-but they will be of little help in explaining the psycho-
logical imperative that drove us to build dam after dam after dam. If
there is a Braudel or a Gibbon in the future, however, he may deduce
that the historical foundations of dams as monumental as Grand Cou-
lee, of projects as nonsensical as Tennessee-Tombigbee, are sunk in
the 1880s, a decade which brought, in quick succession, a terrible
blizzard, a terrible' drought, and a terrible flood.
The great white winter of 1886 came first. The jet stream drove north-
ward, grazed the Arctic Circle, then dipped sharply southward, a par-
abolic curve rushing frigid air into the plains. Through December of
1886, the temperature in South Dakota barely struggled above zero.
A brief thaw intervened in January, followed by a succession of mon-
strous Arctic storms. Week after week, the temperature fell to bottom-
less depths; in the Dakotas, the windchill factor approached a hundred
below. Trapped for weeks, even for months, in a warp of frozen treeless
prairie, thousands of pioneers literally lost their minds. As the iast of
the chairs were being chopped and burned, settlers contemplated a
desperate hike to the nearest town, unable to decide whether it was
crazier to stay or to leave. No one knows how many lost their lives,
but when the spring thaw finally came, whole families were discovered
clutching their last potatoes or each other, ice encrusted on their star-
ing, vacant eyes.
But the settlers' suffering was merciful compared to that of their

CHAPTER THREE
First Causes
w
hen archaeologists from some other planet sift through the
bleached bones of our civilization, they may well conclude
that our temples were dams. Imponderably massive, con-
structed with exquisite care, our dams will outlast anything else we
have built-skyscrapers, cathedrals, bridges, even nuclear power
plants. When forests push through the rotting streets of New York and
the Empire State Building is a crumbling hulk, Hoover Dam will sit
astride the Colorado River much as it does today-intact, formidable,
serene.
The permanence of our dams will merely impress the archaeolo-
gists; their numbers will leave them in awe. In this century, something
like a quarter of a million have been built in the United States alone.
If you ignore the earthen plugs thrown across freshets and small creeks
to water stock or rpise bass, then fihy thousand or so remain. These,
in the lexicon of the civil engineer, are "major works." Even most of
the major works are less than awesome, dammiig rivers like the She-
paug, the Verdigris, Pilarcitos Creek, Mossman's Brook, and the North
Fork of the Jump. Forget about them, and you are left with a couple
of thousand really big dams, the thought of whose construction stag-
gers the imagination. They hold back rivers our ancestors thought
could never be tamed-the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Sacramento,
the Snake, the Savannah, the Red, the Colorado. They are sixty stories
high or four miles long; they contain enough concrete to pave an
interstate highway From end to end.
These are the dams that will make the archaeologists blink-and
105 First Causes
wonder. Did we overreach ourselves trying to build them? Did our
civilization fall apart when they silted up? Why did we feel compelled
to build so many? Why five dozen on the Missouri and its major tri-
butaries? Why twenty-five on the Tennessee? Why fourteen on the
Stanislaus River's short run from the Sierra Nevada to the sea?
We know surprisingly little about vanished civilizations whose
majesty and whose ultimate demise were closely linked to liberties
they took with water. Unlike ourselves, future archaeologists will have
the benefit of written records, of time capsules and so forth. But such
things are as-apt to confuse as to enlighten. What, for example, will
archaeologists make of Congressional debates over Tellico Dam, where
,
the vast majority ridiculed the dam, excoriated it, flagellated it-and
then allowed it to be built? What will they thinkof Congressmen voting
for water projects like Central Arizona and Tennessee-Tombigbee-
projects costing three or four billion dollars in an age of astronomical
deficits-when Congress's own fact-Knding committees asserted or im-
plied that they made little sense?
Such debates and documents may shed light on reasons-rational
or otherwise-but they will be of little help in explaining the psycho-
logical imperative that drove us to build dam after dam after dam. If
there is a Braudel or a Gibbon in the future, however, he may deduce
that the historical foundations of dams as monumental as Grand Cou-
lee, of projects as nonsensical as Tennessee-Tombigbee, are sunk in
the 1880s, a decade which brought, in quick succession, a terrible
blizzard, a terrible' drought, and a terrible flood.
The great white winter of 1886 came first. The jet stream drove north-
ward, grazed the Arctic Circle, then dipped sharply southward, a par-
abolic curve rushing frigid air into the plains. Through December of
1886, the temperature in South Dakota barely struggled above zero.
A brief thaw intervened in January, followed by a succession of mon-
strous Arctic storms. Week after week, the temperature fell to bottom-
less depths; in the Dakotas, the windchill factor approached a hundred
below. Trapped for weeks, even for months, in a warp of frozen treeless
prairie, thousands of pioneers literally lost their minds. As the iast of
the chairs were being chopped and burned, settlers contemplated a
desperate hike to the nearest town, unable to decide whether it was
crazier to stay or to leave. No one knows how many lost their lives,
but when the spring thaw finally came, whole families were discovered
clutching their last potatoes or each other, ice encrusted on their star-
ing, vacant eyes.
But the settlers' suffering was merciful compared to that25of their
CADILLAC DES.ERT
cows. On the woodless plains, barns were rare. Cattle were turned out
into blizzards to survive by their wits, which they don't have, and
which wouldn't have done them much good anyway. They were found
piled by the hundreds at the corners of fenced quarter sections, all
facing southeast; even when a storm abated, the survivors were too
traumatized to turn around, and they died a night or two later under
a listless winter's moon. It was a winter not just of horrendous cold
but of gigantic snows, horizontal broadsides that reduced visibility to
zero and stung thelcattle like showers of needles. Twenty-foot drifts
filled the valleys arid swales, covering whatever frozen grass was left
to eat. At night families would lie awake listening to their cows' dread-
ful bawls, afraid to go out and have the wind steal their last resources
of warmth. Anyway, there was nothing they could do.
The toll was never officially recorded. Most estimates put the loss
of cattle at around 35 percent, but in some regions it may have been
nearer 75 percent. In sheer numbers, enough cows died to feed the
nation for a couple of years. Much of the plains' cattle industry was
in financial ruin. The bankrupt cattle barons dismissed thousands of
hired hands, who were forced to find new careers. When the snows of
1886 melted, Robert Leroy Parker, a young drover, cattle rustler, and
part-time bank robber with a reputation, had more recruits on his
hands than he knew what to do with. He organized them into a gang
known as the Wild Bunch and called himself Butch Cassidy. The Wild
Bunch and the scores of outlaw bands like them worked the banks,
the railroads, and the Pinkerton agents into a murderous froth. To
others, however, they were a moral weight on the mind. Many of the
outlaws had been "good boys," former ranch hands and farmers, oc-
cupations that everyone hoped would domesticate the West and cure
it of its cyclical agonies of boom and bust. But weather was the ulti-
mate arbiter in the American West. Unless there was some way to
control it, or a t least minimize its effects, a good third of'the nation
might remain uninhabitable forever.
As if to confirm such a prophecy, the decade following the great
white winter was a decade when the western half of the continent
decided to dry up. Like most droughts, this one came gradually, build-
ing up force,>nibblingaway at the settlers' fortunes as inexorably as
their cattle nibbled away the dying grass. The sun, to which the settlers
had so recently offered prayerful thanks, turned into a despotic orb;
as Hamlin Garland'wrote, "The sky began to scare us with its light."
In July of 1888;at Bennett, Colorado, the temperature rose to 118, a
record that has never since been equaled in the state. It was the same
throughout the West, as an immense high-pressure zone
j J ~ + , ) , ) I, , d , , ,
- -sat immobile
26
~ , ~ ,
107 First Causes
across the plains. Orographic clouds promising rain formed over the
Rockies, were boiled off in midair, and disappeared. The atmosphere,
it seemed, had been permanently sucked dry.
By 1890, the third year of the drought, it was obvious that the
theory that rain follows the plow was a preposterous fraud. The people
of the plains states, still shell-shockedby the great white winter, began
to turn back east. The populations of Kansas and Nebraska declined
by between one-quarter and one-half. Tens of thousands went to the
wetter Oklahoma territory, which the federal government usurped
from the five Indian tribes to whom it had been promised in perpetuity '
and offered to anyone who got there first. Meanwhile, the windmills
of the farmers who remained north were pumping up sand instead of
*
water, and the huge dark clouds on the horizon were not rain but dust.
The great cattle freeze of the white winter had been, in retrospect, a
blessing in disguise. Had several million more cows been around to
graze the dying prairie grasses to their roots, the Dust Bowl of the
1930s could have arrived half a century early.
When statistics were collected a few years later, only 400,000 home-
steading families had managed to persevere on the plains, of more
than a million who tried. The Homestead Acts had been a relative
success in the East; west of the hundredth meridian, however, they
were for the most part a failure, even a catastrophic failure. Much of
the blame rested on flaws in the acts themselves, and on the imper-
fections of human nature, but a lot of it was the fault of the weather.
How could you settle a region where you nearly froze to death one
year and expired from heat and lack of water during the next eight or
nine?
The drought that struck the West in the late 1880s did not occlude
the entire continent. In the spring of 1889, the jet stream that had
bypassed the West was feeding a thoroughfare of ocean moisture into
the eastern states. In the mountains of Pennsylvania, it rained more
or less continuously for weeks. The Allegheny and Susquehanna rivers
became swollen surges of molten mud. Above Johnstown, Pennsyl-
vania, on the South Fork of the Conemaugh River, a tributary of the
Allegheny, sat a big earthfill dam built thirty-seven years earlier by
the Pennsylvania Canal Company; it was, for a while, the largest dam
in the world. Pounded by the rains, infiltrated by the waters of the
rising reservoir, the dam was quietly turning into Cream of Wheat.
On May 31, with a sudden flatulent shudder, it dissolved. Sixteen
billion gallons of water dropped like a bomb on the town below. Before
anyone had time to flee, Johnstown was swallowed by a thirty-foot
~ , 1 , I ., , , -1 /,
wave. When the reservoir was h a l l y in the Allegheny River, sending
I ) ,; , : . 1 - --) ,
CADILLAC DES.ERT
cows. On the woodless plains, barns were rare. Cattle were turned out
into blizzards to survive by their wits, which they don't have, and
which wouldn't have done them much good anyway. They were found
piled by the hundreds at the corners of fenced quarter sections, all
facing southeast; even when a storm abated, the survivors were too
traumatized to turn around, and they died a night or two later under
a listless winter's moon. It was a winter not just of horrendous cold
but of gigantic snows, horizontal broadsides that reduced visibility to
zero and stung thelcattle like showers of needles. Twenty-foot drifts
filled the valleys arid swales, covering whatever frozen grass was left
to eat. At night families would lie awake listening to their cows' dread-
ful bawls, afraid to go out and have the wind steal their last resources
of warmth. Anyway, there was nothing they could do.
The toll was never officially recorded. Most estimates put the loss
of cattle at around 35 percent, but in some regions it may have been
nearer 75 percent. In sheer numbers, enough cows died to feed the
nation for a couple of years. Much of the plains' cattle industry was
in financial ruin. The bankrupt cattle barons dismissed thousands of
hired hands, who were forced to find new careers. When the snows of
1886 melted, Robert Leroy Parker, a young drover, cattle rustler, and
part-time bank robber with a reputation, had more recruits on his
hands than he knew what to do with. He organized them into a gang
known as the Wild Bunch and called himself Butch Cassidy. The Wild
Bunch and the scores of outlaw bands like them worked the banks,
the railroads, and the Pinkerton agents into a murderous froth. To
others, however, they were a moral weight on the mind. Many of the
outlaws had been "good boys," former ranch hands and farmers, oc-
cupations that everyone hoped would domesticate the West and cure
it of its cyclical agonies of boom and bust. But weather was the ulti-
mate arbiter in the American West. Unless there was some way to
control it, or a t least minimize its effects, a good third of'the nation
might remain uninhabitable forever.
As if to confirm such a prophecy, the decade following the great
white winter was a decade when the western half of the continent
decided to dry up. Like most droughts, this one came gradually, build-
ing up force,>nibblingaway at the settlers' fortunes as inexorably as
their cattle nibbled away the dying grass. The sun, to which the settlers
had so recently offered prayerful thanks, turned into a despotic orb;
as Hamlin Garland'wrote, "The sky began to scare us with its light."
In July of 1888;at Bennett, Colorado, the temperature rose to 118, a
record that has never since been equaled in the state. It was the same
throughout the West, as an immense high-pressure zone
j J ~ + , ) , ) I, , d , , ,
- -sat immobile
~ , ~ ,
107 First Causes
across the plains. Orographic clouds promising rain formed over the
Rockies, were boiled off in midair, and disappeared. The atmosphere,
it seemed, had been permanently sucked dry.
By 1890, the third year of the drought, it was obvious that the
theory that rain follows the plow was a preposterous fraud. The people
of the plains states, still shell-shockedby the great white winter, began
to turn back east. The populations of Kansas and Nebraska declined
by between one-quarter and one-half. Tens of thousands went to the
wetter Oklahoma territory, which the federal government usurped
from the five Indian tribes to whom it had been promised in perpetuity '
and offered to anyone who got there first. Meanwhile, the windmills
of the farmers who remained north were pumping up sand instead of
*
water, and the huge dark clouds on the horizon were not rain but dust.
The great cattle freeze of the white winter had been, in retrospect, a
blessing in disguise. Had several million more cows been around to
graze the dying prairie grasses to their roots, the Dust Bowl of the
1930s could have arrived half a century early.
When statistics were collected a few years later, only 400,000 home-
steading families had managed to persevere on the plains, of more
than a million who tried. The Homestead Acts had been a relative
success in the East; west of the hundredth meridian, however, they
were for the most part a failure, even a catastrophic failure. Much of
the blame rested on flaws in the acts themselves, and on the imper-
fections of human nature, but a lot of it was the fault of the weather.
How could you settle a region where you nearly froze to death one
year and expired from heat and lack of water during the next eight or
nine?
The drought that struck the West in the late 1880s did not occlude
the entire continent. In the spring of 1889, the jet stream that had
bypassed the West was feeding a thoroughfare of ocean moisture into
the eastern states. In the mountains of Pennsylvania, it rained more
or less continuously for weeks. The Allegheny and Susquehanna rivers
became swollen surges of molten mud. Above Johnstown, Pennsyl-
vania, on the South Fork of the Conemaugh River, a tributary of the
Allegheny, sat a big earthfill dam built thirty-seven years earlier by
the Pennsylvania Canal Company; it was, for a while, the largest dam
in the world. Pounded by the rains, infiltrated by the waters of the
rising reservoir, the dam was quietly turning into Cream of Wheat.
On May 31, with a sudden flatulent shudder, it dissolved. Sixteen
billion gallons of water dropped like a bomb on the town below. Before
anyone had time to flee, Johnstown was swallowed by a thirty-foot
~ , 1 , I ., , , -1 /,
wave. When the reservoir was h a l l y in the Allegheny River, sending
I ) ,; , : . 1
27
- --) ,
CADILLAC DESERT 108
it far over its banks, the town had disappeared. Four hundred corpses
were never positively identified. The number of dead was eventually
put at twenty-two hundred-twice as many casualties as in the burn-
ing of the General Slocum on the East River in 1904; many more than
in the San Francisco earthquake and fire; nine times as many as in
the Chicago fire. only single disaster in American history that took
more lives was thek hurricane that struck Galveston,Texas, eleven years
later. The Johnstown flood was significant if only for this sheer loss
of life; but it was also an indictment of privately built dams.
The rapid rise of the federal irrigation movement in the early 1890s
was due in part to this succession of overawing catastrophes. But it
had just as much to do with the fact that by the late 1880s, private
irrigation efforts had come to an inglorious end. The good sites were
simply gone. Most of the pioneers who had settled successfully across
the hundredth meridian had gone to Washinglon and California and
Oregon, where there was rain, or had chosen homesteads along streams
whose water they could easily divert. Such opportunities, however,
were quick to disappear. Groundwater wasn't much help either. A
windmill could lift enough drinking water for a family and few cattle;
but it would require thirty or forty windmills, and reliable wind, to
lift enough water to irrigate a quarter section of land-a disheartening
prospect to a farmer with no money in a region with no wood.
Even if their land abutted a stream with some surplus water rights,
.few farmers had the confidence, cooperative spirit, and money to build
a dam and lead the stored water to their lands through a long canal.
It was one thing to throw a ten-foot-high earthen plug across a freshet
in order to create a two-acre stock pond-though even that taxed the
resources of most farmers in the West, who had invested all their
savings simply to get there from Kentucky or Maine. ,Itlwas quite
another thing to build a dam on a stream large enough to supply a
year-round flow, and to dig a canal-by horse and by hand-that was
long enough, and deep enough, and wide enough, to irrigate hundreds
or thousands of acres of land. The work involved was simply stupe-
fying; clearing a field, by comparison, seemed like the simplest, most
effortless job.
The farmers' predicament, on the other hand, was an opportunity
for the legions of financial swashbucklers who had gone west in pursuit
of quick wealth. In the 1870s and 1 8 8 0 ~hundreds
~ of irrigation com-
panies, formed with eastern capital, set themselves to the task of re-
claiming the arid lands. Almost none survived beyond28ten years. At
the eighth National Irrigation Congress in 1898, a Colorado legislator
109 First Causes
likened the American West to a graveyard, littered with the "crushed
and mangled skeletons of defunct [irrigation] corporations . . . [which]
suddenly disappeared at the end of brief careers, leaving only a-few
defaulted obligations to indicate the route by which they departed."
There was, indeed, a kind of cruel irony in the collapse of the
irrigation companies. Most of them operated in the emphatically arid
regions-the Central Valley of California, Nevada, Arizona, south-
eastern Colorado, New Mexico-where agriculture without irrigation
is daunting or hopeless, but otherwise the climate is well suited for
growing crops. The drought, on the other hand, struck hardest in the
region just east of the hundredth meridian, where, in most years, a
nonirrigating farmer had been able to make a go of it. Kansas was
emptied by the drought and the white winter, Nevada by irrigation
companies gone defunct. In the early 1 8 9 0 ~
the
~ exodus from Nevada,
as a percentage of those who hung on, was unlike anything in the
country's history. Even California, in the midst of a big population
boom, saw the growth of its agriculturalpopulation come to a standstill
in 1895.
! California, the perennial trend-setting state, was the first to .at-
: tempt to rescue its hapless farmers, but the resu1t;the Wright Act, was
another in thelong series of doomed efforts to apply eastern solutions
i to western topography and climate. The act, which took its inspiration
.* ' from the township governments of New England, established self-
: governing mini-states, called irrigation districts, whose sole function
k. was to deliver water onto barren land. Like the western homestead
'
laws, it was a good idea that foundered in practice. The districts soon
$ buckled under their responsibilities-issuing bonds that wouldn't sell,
k building reservoirs that wouldn't fill, allocating water unfairly, dis-
tributing it unevenly, then throwing up their hands when anarchy
prevailed. Elwood C. Mead, then the state engineer of Wyoming and
I.. probably the country's leading authority on irrigation, called the
Wright Act "a disgrace to any self-governingpeople." George Maxwell,
! a Californian and founder of the National Irrigation Association, said
I "the extkvagance or stupidity or incompetence of local [irrigation]
b. directors" had left little beyond a legacy of "waste and disaster."
i Though the Wright Act was in most ways a failure, Colorado, thinking
it had learned something from California's mistakes, adopted its own
c version, which added a modest subsidy for private irrigation devel-
I
j opers in order to improve their odds of success. By 1,894,under Col-
orado's new program, five substantial storage reservoirs had been
:: built. Three were so poorly designed and situated that they stored no
water at all; the fourth.was declared unsafe and was never even filled;
i:
CADILLAC DESERT 108
it far over its banks, the town had disappeared. Four hundred corpses
were never positively identified. The number of dead was eventually
put at twenty-two hundred-twice as many casualties as in the burn-
ing of the General Slocum on the East River in 1904; many more than
in the San Francisco earthquake and fire; nine times as many as in
the Chicago fire. only single disaster in American history that took
more lives was thek hurricane that struck Galveston,Texas, eleven years
later. The Johnstown flood was significant if only for this sheer loss
of life; but it was also an indictment of privately built dams.
The rapid rise of the federal irrigation movement in the early 1890s
was due in part to this succession of overawing catastrophes. But it
had just as much to do with the fact that by the late 1880s, private
irrigation efforts had come to an inglorious end. The good sites were
simply gone. Most of the pioneers who had settled successfully across
the hundredth meridian had gone to Washinglon and California and
Oregon, where there was rain, or had chosen homesteads along streams
whose water they could easily divert. Such opportunities, however,
were quick to disappear. Groundwater wasn't much help either. A
windmill could lift enough drinking water for a family and few cattle;
but it would require thirty or forty windmills, and reliable wind, to
lift enough water to irrigate a quarter section of land-a disheartening
prospect to a farmer with no money in a region with no wood.
Even if their land abutted a stream with some surplus water rights,
.few farmers had the confidence, cooperative spirit, and money to build
a dam and lead the stored water to their lands through a long canal.
It was one thing to throw a ten-foot-high earthen plug across a freshet
in order to create a two-acre stock pond-though even that taxed the
resources of most farmers in the West, who had invested all their
savings simply to get there from Kentucky or Maine. ,Itlwas quite
another thing to build a dam on a stream large enough to supply a
year-round flow, and to dig a canal-by horse and by hand-that was
long enough, and deep enough, and wide enough, to irrigate hundreds
or thousands of acres of land. The work involved was simply stupe-
fying; clearing a field, by comparison, seemed like the simplest, most
effortless job.
The farmers' predicament, on the other hand, was an opportunity
for the legions of financial swashbucklers who had gone west in pursuit
of quick wealth. In the 1870s and 1 8 8 0 ~hundreds
~ of irrigation com-
panies, formed with eastern capital, set themselves to the task of re-
claiming the arid lands. Almost none survived beyond ten years. At
the eighth National Irrigation Congress in 1898, a Colorado legislator
109 First Causes
likened the American West to a graveyard, littered with the "crushed
and mangled skeletons of defunct [irrigation] corporations . . . [which]
suddenly disappeared at the end of brief careers, leaving only a-few
defaulted obligations to indicate the route by which they departed."
There was, indeed, a kind of cruel irony in the collapse of the
irrigation companies. Most of them operated in the emphatically arid
regions-the Central Valley of California, Nevada, Arizona, south-
eastern Colorado, New Mexico-where agriculture without irrigation
is daunting or hopeless, but otherwise the climate is well suited for
growing crops. The drought, on the other hand, struck hardest in the
region just east of the hundredth meridian, where, in most years, a
nonirrigating farmer had been able to make a go of it. Kansas was
emptied by the drought and the white winter, Nevada by irrigation
companies gone defunct. In the early 1 8 9 0 ~
the
~ exodus from Nevada,
as a percentage of those who hung on, was unlike anything in the
country's history. Even California, in the midst of a big population
boom, saw the growth of its agriculturalpopulation come to a standstill
in 1895.
! California, the perennial trend-setting state, was the first to .at-
: tempt to rescue its hapless farmers, but the resu1t;the Wright Act, was
another in thelong series of doomed efforts to apply eastern solutions
i to western topography and climate. The act, which took its inspiration
.* ' from the township governments of New England, established self-
: governing mini-states, called irrigation districts, whose sole function
k. was to deliver water onto barren land. Like the western homestead
'
laws, it was a good idea that foundered in practice. The districts soon
$ buckled under their responsibilities-issuing bonds that wouldn't sell,
k building reservoirs that wouldn't fill, allocating water unfairly, dis-
tributing it unevenly, then throwing up their hands when anarchy
prevailed. Elwood C. Mead, then the state engineer of Wyoming and
I.. probably the country's leading authority on irrigation, called the
Wright Act "a disgrace to any self-governingpeople." George Maxwell,
! a Californian and founder of the National Irrigation Association, said
I "the extkvagance or stupidity or incompetence of local [irrigation]
b. directors" had left little beyond a legacy of "waste and disaster."
i Though the Wright Act was in most ways a failure, Colorado, thinking
it had learned something from California's mistakes, adopted its own
c version, which added a modest subsidy for private irrigation devel-
I
j opers in order to improve their odds of success. By 1,894,under Col-
orado's new program, five substantial storage reservoirs had been
:: built. Three were so poorly designed and situated that they stored no
water at all; the fourth.was declared unsafe and was never even 29filled;
i:
CADILLAC D E S E R T 110
and the fifth was so Ear h m the land it was supposed to irrigate that
most of the meager quantity of water it could deliver disappeared into
the ground before it got there.
In that same year-1894-Senator Joseph Carey of Wyoming,
thinking he had learned something from California's and Colorado's
mistakes, introduced a bill that offered another approach: the federal
government would cede up to a million acks of land to any state that
promised to irrigate it. But, by some elusive reasoning, the states were
forbidden to use land as the collateral they would need to raise the
money to build the irrigation works-and land, at the time, was the
only thing of value most of them had. Sixteen years later, using a
generous estimate, the Carey Act had caused 288,553 acres to come
under irrigation throughout the entire seventeen-state West-about
as much developed farmland as there was in a couple of counties in
Illinois.
As the private and state-fostered experiments with irrigation lay
in shambles, many of the western reclamation advocates heaped blame
on the East and "Washington" for not doing more to help, just as their
descendants, four generations later, would vilify Jimmy Carter, an
easterner and southerner, for not "understanding" their "needs" when
he tried to eliminate some water projects that would have subsidized
a few hundred of them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars
apiece. In each case, the West was displaying its peculiarly stubborn
brand of hypocrisy and blindness. Midwestern members of Congress
were understandably uneager to subsidize competition for their own
farmer constituteats, but they had little to do with making reclamation
fail; the West was up to the task itself. Its faith in private enterprise
was nearly as absolute as its earlier faith that settlement would make
the climate wetter. John Wesley Powell, a midwesterner, knew that
all the private initiative in the world would never mc$e it bloom.
Theodore Roosevelt, an easterner, had returned from the West con-
vinced that there were "vast areas of public land which can be made
available for . . . settlement," but only, he added, "by building reser-
voirs and main-line canals imp~acticalfor private entexprise," But the
West wasn't listening. For the first time in their history, Americans
had come up against a problem they could not begin to master with
traditional American solutions-private capital, individual initiative,
hard work-and yet the region confronting the problem happened to
believe most fervently in such solutions. Through the 1890s, western
Senators and Congressmen resisted all suggestions that reclamation
was a task for government alone-not even for the states, which had
failed a s b d l y as the private comvanies, but for the national
30 govern-
I ) , ) l I l i ; - ) , , ) ; >
First Causes
ment. To believe such a Ling was to imply that their constituents did
not measure up to the myth that enshrouded them-that of the in-
domitable individualist. When they finally saw the light, however,
their attitude miraculausly changed-though the myth didn't-and
the American West quietly became the first and most durable example
of the modern welfare state.
The passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902 was such a sharp left turn
in the course of American politics that historians still gather and argue
over why it was passed. To some, it was America's first flirtation with
socialism, an outgrowth of the Populist and Progressive movements
of the time. To others, it was a disguised reactionary measure, an effort
to relieve the mobbed and riotous conditions of the eastern industrial
cities-an act to save heartless capitalism from itself. To some, its
roots were in Manifest Destiny, whose incantations still held people
in their sway; to others, it was a military ploy to protect and populate
America's western flank against the ascendant Orient.
What seems beyond question is that the Reclamation Act, or some
variation of it, was, by the end of the nineteenth century, inevitable.
. To resist a federal reclamation program was to block all further mi-
gration to the West and to ensure disaster for those who were already
there-or for those who were on their way. Even as the victims of the
great white winter and the drought of the 1880s and 1890s were evac-
uating the arid regions, the trains departing Chicago and St. Louis for
points west were full. The pull of the West reached deep into the
squalid slums of the eastern cities; it reached back to the ravined,
rock-strewn farms of New England and down into the boggy, overwet
farmlands of the Deep South. No matter what the government did,
short of erecting a wall at the hundredth meridian, the settlement of
the West was going to continue. The only way to prevent more cycles
of disaster was to build a civilization based on irrigated farming. Fifty
years of effort by countless numbers of people had resulted in 3,631,000
acres under irrigation by 1889. There were counties in California that
contained more acreage than that, and the figure included much of
the easily irrigable land. Not only that, but at least half the land had
been irrigated by Mormons. Each additional acre, therefore, would be
won at greatei pain. Everything had been tried-cheap land, free land,
private initiative, local initiative, state subsidy-and everything, with
a few notable exceptions, had failed. One alternative'rernained.
There seemed to be only one politician in the arid West who fath-
omed his region's predicament well enough to end it. He had emigrated
to San Francisco froin the East, made a fortune through a busy law
, l , ) ' , . l ; ) ,
CADILLAC D E S E R T 110
and the fifth was so Ear h m the land it was supposed to irrigate that
most of the meager quantity of water it could deliver disappeared into
the ground before it got there.
In that same year-1894-Senator Joseph Carey of Wyoming,
thinking he had learned something from California's and Colorado's
mistakes, introduced a bill that offered another approach: the federal
government would cede up to a million acks of land to any state that
promised to irrigate it. But, by some elusive reasoning, the states were
forbidden to use land as the collateral they would need to raise the
money to build the irrigation works-and land, at the time, was the
only thing of value most of them had. Sixteen years later, using a
generous estimate, the Carey Act had caused 288,553 acres to come
under irrigation throughout the entire seventeen-state West-about
as much developed farmland as there was in a couple of counties in
Illinois.
As the private and state-fostered experiments with irrigation lay
in shambles, many of the western reclamation advocates heaped blame
on the East and "Washington" for not doing more to help, just as their
descendants, four generations later, would vilify Jimmy Carter, an
easterner and southerner, for not "understanding" their "needs" when
he tried to eliminate some water projects that would have subsidized
a few hundred of them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars
apiece. In each case, the West was displaying its peculiarly stubborn
brand of hypocrisy and blindness. Midwestern members of Congress
were understandably uneager to subsidize competition for their own
farmer constituteats, but they had little to do with making reclamation
fail; the West was up to the task itself. Its faith in private enterprise
was nearly as absolute as its earlier faith that settlement would make
the climate wetter. John Wesley Powell, a midwesterner, knew that
all the private initiative in the world would never mc$e it bloom.
Theodore Roosevelt, an easterner, had returned from the West con-
vinced that there were "vast areas of public land which can be made
available for . . . settlement," but only, he added, "by building reser-
voirs and main-line canals imp~acticalfor private entexprise," But the
West wasn't listening. For the first time in their history, Americans
had come up against a problem they could not begin to master with
traditional American solutions-private capital, individual initiative,
hard work-and yet the region confronting the problem happened to
believe most fervently in such solutions. Through the 1890s, western
Senators and Congressmen resisted all suggestions that reclamation
was a task for government alone-not even for the states, which had
failed a s b d l y as the private comvanies, but for the national govern-
I ) , ) l I l i ; - ) , , ) ; >
First Causes
ment. To believe such a Ling was to imply that their constituents did
not measure up to the myth that enshrouded them-that of the in-
domitable individualist. When they finally saw the light, however,
their attitude miraculausly changed-though the myth didn't-and
the American West quietly became the first and most durable example
of the modern welfare state.
The passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902 was such a sharp left turn
in the course of American politics that historians still gather and argue
over why it was passed. To some, it was America's first flirtation with
socialism, an outgrowth of the Populist and Progressive movements
of the time. To others, it was a disguised reactionary measure, an effort
to relieve the mobbed and riotous conditions of the eastern industrial
cities-an act to save heartless capitalism from itself. To some, its
roots were in Manifest Destiny, whose incantations still held people
in their sway; to others, it was a military ploy to protect and populate
America's western flank against the ascendant Orient.
What seems beyond question is that the Reclamation Act, or some
variation of it, was, by the end of the nineteenth century, inevitable.
. To resist a federal reclamation program was to block all further mi-
gration to the West and to ensure disaster for those who were already
there-or for those who were on their way. Even as the victims of the
great white winter and the drought of the 1880s and 1890s were evac-
uating the arid regions, the trains departing Chicago and St. Louis for
points west were full. The pull of the West reached deep into the
squalid slums of the eastern cities; it reached back to the ravined,
rock-strewn farms of New England and down into the boggy, overwet
farmlands of the Deep South. No matter what the government did,
short of erecting a wall at the hundredth meridian, the settlement of
the West was going to continue. The only way to prevent more cycles
of disaster was to build a civilization based on irrigated farming. Fifty
years of effort by countless numbers of people had resulted in 3,631,000
acres under irrigation by 1889. There were counties in California that
contained more acreage than that, and the figure included much of
the easily irrigable land. Not only that, but at least half the land had
been irrigated by Mormons. Each additional acre, therefore, would be
won at greatei pain. Everything had been tried-cheap land, free land,
private initiative, local initiative, state subsidy-and everything, with
a few notable exceptions, had failed. One alternative'rernained.
There seemed to be only one politician in the arid West who fath-
omed his region's predicament well enough to end it. He had emigrated
to San Francisco froin the East, made a fortune through a busy 31 law
, l , ) ' , . l ; ) ,
CADILLAC DESERT 112
practice and the inheritance of his father-in-law's silver mine, moved
to Nevada, and in 1888 launched the Truckee Irrigation Project. It was
one of the most ambitious reclamation efforts of its day, and it failed-
not because it was poorly conceived or executed (hydrologically and
economically, it was a good project) but because squabbles among its
beneficiaries and the pettiness of the Nevada legislature ruined its
hopes. In the process Francis Griffith Newlands lost half a million
dollars and whatever faith he had in the ability of private enterprise
to mount a successful reclamation program. "Nevada," he said bitterly
as his project went bust in 1891, "is a dying state."
Newlands, who succeeded at everything else he tried, gave up on
irrigation, ran for Congress, and won. For the remainder of the decade,
he kept out of the reclamation battles, if only to give everyone else's
solutions an opportunity to fail. All the while, however, he was waiting
for his moment. It came on September 14, 1901, when a bullet fired
by an anarchist ended the life of President William McKinley.
Theodore Roosevelt, the man who succeeded McKinley as Presi-
dent, was, like Francis Newlands, a student and admirer of John Wes-
ley Powell. Infatuated with the West, he had traveled extensively there
and been struck by the prescience and accuracy of Powell's observa-
tions. Roosevelt was first of all a politician, and had no interest in
sharing Powell's ignominious fate; nonetheless, he knew that Powell's
solutions were the only ones that would work, and he wanted a federal
reclamation effo~tbadly. A military thinker, he was concerned about
Japan, bristling with expansionism and dirt-poor in resources, and
knew that America was vulnerable on its underpopulated western
flank. A bug for efficiency, he felt that the waste of money and effort
on doomed irrigation ventures was a scandal. Roosevelt was also a
conservationist, in the utilitarian sense, and the failure to conserve-
that is, use-the water in western rivers irritated him. ','The western
half of the United States would sustain a population greater than that
of our whole country today if the waters that now run to waste were
saved and used for irrigation," he said in a speech in December of
1901. For all his enthusiasm, however, Roosevelt knew that his biggest
problem would be not the eastern states in Congress but the myth-
bound western bloc, whose region he was trying to help. His second-
greatest problem, ironically, would be his chief ally, Francis Newlands.
As soon as Roosevelt was in the White House, Newlands introduced
a bill creating a federal program along the lines suggested by Powell.
But the liitterness he felt over his huge financial loss was so strong
that he described his bill in language almost calculated to infuriate
his western colleagues, who were clinging to the myth 32 that the hostile
113 First Causes
natural forces of the West could be overcome by individual initiative.
In a long speech on the floor of Congress, Newlands said outright that
the legislation he was introducing would "nationalize the works of
irrigationu-which was like saying today that one intended to na-
tionalize the automobile industry. Then he launched into a long ha-
rangue,about the failures of state reclamation programs, blaming them
on "the ignorance, the improvidence, and the dishonesty of local leg-
islatures"-even though many of his listeners had recently graduated
from such legislatures themselves. He even suggested that Congress
should have no oversight powers, implying that he distrusted that body
as much as he did the thieves, opportunists, and incompetents whom
he saw controlling the state legislatures.
Newlands' bill, as expected, ran into immediate opposition. When
it came up for a vote in March, it was soundly defeated. Western
members then began to support a rival bill, proposed by Senator Fran-
cis E. Warren of Wyoming, that contained none of the features New-
lands wanted. By February of 1902, Warren's bill was finally passed
by the Senate and seemed destined to become law. At that point,
however, fate and Theodore Roosevelt intervened. Mrs. Warren be-
came gravely ill, necessitating the Senator's return to Wyoming. In
Warren's absence, Roosevelt leaned on Newlands to tone down his
language, and before long the Congressman was describing his de-
feated measure, which he had already reintroduced, as a "conserva-
tive" and "safe" bill. Roosevelt still wouldn't risk supporting it, but
he came up with a brilliant ploy. Announcing his "sympathy with the
spirit" of Warren's bill, he said he would support it with "a few minor
changes." The person whom he wanted to make the changes and lead
i the bill through Congress. was Wyoming's young Congressman-at-
large, Frank Mondell, the future Republican leader of the House. Mon-
dell had a weakness for flattery and a less than athletic mind, and
f Roosevelt was a master at exploiting both. Before long, he had per-
suaded Mondell to incorporate as "minor changes" in Warren's bill
; almost all of Newlands' language. Roosevelt then softened up his east-
, ern opposition with some implied threats that their river and harbor
5
) projects might be in jeopardy if they did not go along-a strategy that
has seen long useful service. By the time Warren returned from Wy-
oming, Newlands' bill, disguised as his own, had cleared both houses.
! On June 17, 1902, the Reclamation Act became law.
: The newly created Reclamation Service exerted a magnetic pull
on the best engineering graduates in the country. The prospect of
reclaiming a desert seemed infinitely more satisfying than designing
a steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or a power dam in Massachusetts, and
CADILLAC DESERT 112
practice and the inheritance of his father-in-law's silver mine, moved
to Nevada, and in 1888 launched the Truckee Irrigation Project. It was
one of the most ambitious reclamation efforts of its day, and it failed-
not because it was poorly conceived or executed (hydrologically and
economically, it was a good project) but because squabbles among its
beneficiaries and the pettiness of the Nevada legislature ruined its
hopes. In the process Francis Griffith Newlands lost half a million
dollars and whatever faith he had in the ability of private enterprise
to mount a successful reclamation program. "Nevada," he said bitterly
as his project went bust in 1891, "is a dying state."
Newlands, who succeeded at everything else he tried, gave up on
irrigation, ran for Congress, and won. For the remainder of the decade,
he kept out of the reclamation battles, if only to give everyone else's
solutions an opportunity to fail. All the while, however, he was waiting
for his moment. It came on September 14, 1901, when a bullet fired
by an anarchist ended the life of President William McKinley.
Theodore Roosevelt, the man who succeeded McKinley as Presi-
dent, was, like Francis Newlands, a student and admirer of John Wes-
ley Powell. Infatuated with the West, he had traveled extensively there
and been struck by the prescience and accuracy of Powell's observa-
tions. Roosevelt was first of all a politician, and had no interest in
sharing Powell's ignominious fate; nonetheless, he knew that Powell's
solutions were the only ones that would work, and he wanted a federal
reclamation effo~tbadly. A military thinker, he was concerned about
Japan, bristling with expansionism and dirt-poor in resources, and
knew that America was vulnerable on its underpopulated western
flank. A bug for efficiency, he felt that the waste of money and effort
on doomed irrigation ventures was a scandal. Roosevelt was also a
conservationist, in the utilitarian sense, and the failure to conserve-
that is, use-the water in western rivers irritated him. ','The western
half of the United States would sustain a population greater than that
of our whole country today if the waters that now run to waste were
saved and used for irrigation," he said in a speech in December of
1901. For all his enthusiasm, however, Roosevelt knew that his biggest
problem would be not the eastern states in Congress but the myth-
bound western bloc, whose region he was trying to help. His second-
greatest problem, ironically, would be his chief ally, Francis Newlands.
As soon as Roosevelt was in the White House, Newlands introduced
a bill creating a federal program along the lines suggested by Powell.
But the liitterness he felt over his huge financial loss was so strong
that he described his bill in language almost calculated to infuriate
his western colleagues, who were clinging to the myth that the hostile
113 First Causes
natural forces of the West could be overcome by individual initiative.
In a long speech on the floor of Congress, Newlands said outright that
the legislation he was introducing would "nationalize the works of
irrigationu-which was like saying today that one intended to na-
tionalize the automobile industry. Then he launched into a long ha-
rangue,about the failures of state reclamation programs, blaming them
on "the ignorance, the improvidence, and the dishonesty of local leg-
islatures"-even though many of his listeners had recently graduated
from such legislatures themselves. He even suggested that Congress
should have no oversight powers, implying that he distrusted that body
as much as he did the thieves, opportunists, and incompetents whom
he saw controlling the state legislatures.
Newlands' bill, as expected, ran into immediate opposition. When
it came up for a vote in March, it was soundly defeated. Western
members then began to support a rival bill, proposed by Senator Fran-
cis E. Warren of Wyoming, that contained none of the features New-
lands wanted. By February of 1902, Warren's bill was finally passed
by the Senate and seemed destined to become law. At that point,
however, fate and Theodore Roosevelt intervened. Mrs. Warren be-
came gravely ill, necessitating the Senator's return to Wyoming. In
Warren's absence, Roosevelt leaned on Newlands to tone down his
language, and before long the Congressman was describing his de-
feated measure, which he had already reintroduced, as a "conserva-
tive" and "safe" bill. Roosevelt still wouldn't risk supporting it, but
he came up with a brilliant ploy. Announcing his "sympathy with the
spirit" of Warren's bill, he said he would support it with "a few minor
changes." The person whom he wanted to make the changes and lead
i the bill through Congress. was Wyoming's young Congressman-at-
large, Frank Mondell, the future Republican leader of the House. Mon-
dell had a weakness for flattery and a less than athletic mind, and
f Roosevelt was a master at exploiting both. Before long, he had per-
suaded Mondell to incorporate as "minor changes" in Warren's bill
; almost all of Newlands' language. Roosevelt then softened up his east-
, ern opposition with some implied threats that their river and harbor
5
) projects might be in jeopardy if they did not go along-a strategy that
has seen long useful service. By the time Warren returned from Wy-
oming, Newlands' bill, disguised as his own, had cleared both houses.
! On June 17, 1902, the Reclamation Act became law.
: The newly created Reclamation Service exerted a magnetic pull
on the best engineering graduates in the country. The prospect of
reclaiming a desert seemed infinitely more satisfying than designing
a steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or a power dam in Massachusetts,33 and
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
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European journal of
American studies
2 (2007)
Varia

................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Ian S. Scott
‘Either you bring the water to L.A. or
you bring L.A. to the water’
Politics, Perceptions and the Pursuit of History in
Roman Polanski’s Chinatown
................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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66
 ‘Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water’ 2

Ian S. Scott

‘Either you bring the water to L.A. or you

bring L.A. to the water’
Politics, Perceptions and the Pursuit of History in Roman Polanski’s
Chinatown
1 Probably the most famous phrase in Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s 1974 homage to detective
noir, is virtually the last line spoken in the movie. The ensemble of characters is standing by
the car that Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) has attempted to escape in with her daughter,
Katherine (Belinda Palmer). Detectives have fired shots from up the street in their attempt to
prevent Evelyn from fleeing the scene and the result is that the long slow single horn sounding
some yards away signals Evelyn’s death. Her head rests on the steering wheel and blood pours
from a bullet wound that has entered her skull and gone through the defected eye that private
detective J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson) had noticed in a scene earlier in the movie. Lieutenant
Escobar (Perry Lopez) urges Gittes to go home and his associates pull him away from the
vehicle with Walsh (Joe Mantell) famously pleading: “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
2 Of course, “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” is also one of the many lines in the film that pays due
reverence to the screenplay’s inspiration, the work of Raymond Chandler. Screenwriter Robert
Towne had read an article in New West magazine on Chandler’s L.A. and saw an opportunity
to relocate a detective story back to 1930’s California. “Reading Chandler filled me with such
a loss,” he said, “that it was probably the main reason why I did the script” (Wyatt 148).
Stylistically in particular, the film’s visual treatment of L.A. appears to deliver a sumptuous
reconditioning of the depression era. And in the title of the film, notions of dislocation, social
and community tension, as well as urban expansion and ghettoization play to the themes of
the outsider and the ‘other’ embodied in Gittes’ persona. Towne explained that the film’s title
came from a conversation with a Hungarian vice cop who had worked the beat in Chinatown.
The cop told Towne that with so many different tongues and dialects, the police were never
sure if they were intervening in a crime down there or helping to perpetrate one. This dialectical
confusion is metaphorically implanted upon Gittes, his investigation, and Towne’s creation
for him of a past – as an officer in Chinatown – which he thought he had escaped, until the
character of Evelyn Mulwray enters his life.
3 So Chinatown is both an unwelcome psychological fixation for the character of Gittes in
the story and a meditation on an alternative, updated version of the Chandler, Dashiell
Hammett, James M. Cain west coast noir detective story. These two pathways, together with
the Oedipal sub-plot that winds its way through the narrative, have formed the bulk of the
investigation done by film scholars looking at the movie; and the way Chinatown transformed
and reconfigured the classic noirlegacy, in stylistic as well as linguistic terms, has remained the
mainstay of many readings of the film (McGinnis 249-51; Belton 933-50; Shetley 1092-1109).
4 The picture clearly has a number of the key elements in the genre: a workaholic private
investigator, a femme fatale, and a plot with double-dealing sexual intrigue. But while its
story follows what at first appears an obvious path to solution and satisfactory closure – Gittes
uncovers scandal and deception at the heart of elite power and exposes such shenanigans –
slowly but surely bigger, wider and more imponderable issues (state politics, the relevance of
water to L.A., even the weight of history itself upon the state) begin to make his investigation
a fatalistic pursuit. Gittes’ investigation travails the byways of the city’s recent past and the
representation of that history is one of two themes that this article explores further and wishes
to contest and reconsider in the light of other studies.
5 The first connected theme, however, is a re-evaluation of the visualization and stylization of
Chinatown. Contrary to past readings of the movie, it is the contention here that Polanski’s
presentation establishes a far more modern, preemptive setting for Los Angeles, a construction
that, far from looking to the past, actually concerns the future, the future beyond the film’s
1930’s setting as well as its 1970’s production. Through these notions this article asserts that

European journal of American studies, 2 | 2007

67
 ‘Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water’ 3

Chinatown is not only a unique and far more contemporary presentation of L.A. than other
readings have suggested, but it is now also a cinematic composition that has to labor under its
historical pretensions and has itself passed over into the realms of the California mythology it
purports to expose. Linking the visual and the historical together, therefore, this article argues
that Chinatown is today a movie that, more than thirty years after its first theatrical release,
is no longer about Los Angelean or Californian history; it has become a part of the city and
the state’s history.
6 First of all in seeking to assert how and why the film has taken on the mantle of purportedly
real social and historical discourse, it is important to pass comment on Chinatown’s place in
a brand of Hollywood film that arose in the 1970’s, and the link such films hold to similar
contemporary movies. Chinatown heralded the rise of what became known as neo-noir in
the 1970’s, and scholars have pointed to a collection of contemporary and period pieces
which, it is claimed, either owe allegiance to, or share a kindred identity with, Polanski’s film.
Utilizing Marc Vernet's notion that in the 1950’s noir as a genre entered into a conflict and
transformation predicated upon the greater use of color in film, Leonardo Gandini argues that
color provided the definitive break between classic and contemporary cinema and ends up
being the formal motif upon which modern noir is constructed (Vernet; Gandini 302). And,
as Nicholas Christopher has further identified, a series of films did indeed emerge during
the decade of the seventies that built upon the foundations of classic noir, with Chinatown
central to this evolution, pushing the genre on into new unexplored territory. For example, in
an era when sex and violence on film was starting to become more explicit, much is made
of the fact that Chinatown begins with close-up photographs of illicit fornication (Naremore
207). Christopher points to two films with contemporary settings that drew on this new
uncompromising neo-noir tradition: Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (Warner Bros; US, 1975) with
Gene Hackman and Walter Hill’s The Driver (20th Century Fox; US, 1978) starring Bruce
Dern (Christopher 240-1).
7 Michael Eaton, on the other hand, in his BFI companion piece for Chinatown, while
maintaining an allegiance towards colored-noir as a progressive tendency within this type
of detective genre, nevertheless posits a slightly alternative kind of noir-revisited position
for the movie, comparing it with two Chandler adaptations of the time, made either side
of the Polanski film. Robert Altman’s updating of a late novel, The Long Goodbye (United
Artists; US, 1973) had Elliot Gould as a rather passive anachronistic Philip Marlowe, while
Dick Richards’ respectful translation of Farewell My Lovely (EK, Incorporated Television
Company; US, 1975) included an “unreconstructed” Robert Mitchum as Marlowe (Eaton
21-2). Other films often cited as companion pieces in this era include Coppola’s The
Conversation (Paramount: US, 1974), John Schlesinger’s adaptation of The Day of the Locust
(Paramount; US, 1975) and Ulu Grossbard’s True Confessions (United Artists; US, 1981).
8 Chinatown is a film allied in part to all of these texts, and yet thirty years on it also remains
somehow detached from them and determinedly unique in its conception. In fact, Chinatown
modernized film noir before modern or, might we even say, post-noir ever surfaced. In terms
of atmosphere, plot devices and especially tonality of image, for example, Polanski’s picture
shares much more ground with 1990’s noir thrillers such as The Usual Suspects (Spelling;
US, 1995) and Se7en (New Line; US, 1995) than it does with the earlier films. Indeed,
Christopher McQuarrie’s script for the former film so successfully reconstituted the noir
legacy that it became the first in the genre since Chinatown to win an Oscar. Additionally,
in the overwhelmingly successful L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, Warner Bros; US, 1997)
and less notable but nevertheless interesting Mulholland Falls (Lee Tamahori, MGM; US,
1996), Polanski’s film has recent pictures that tip their hat far more to Chinatown’s sense of
refinement, languor and cinematographic intent than do any earlier examples of the formula.
This continual mapping of the film’s stylistic and cultural milieu continued apace in the 2000’s
with David Lynch’s nightmarish fable of Hollywood and L.A., Mulholland Drive (Le Studio
Canal+; US, 2001) and the 2006 Academy Award winner for best picture, Crash (Lions Gate
Films).

European journal of American studies, 2 | 2007

68
 ‘Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water’ 4

9 The reason why Chinatown has been impersonated, overlaps, and contrives to associate itself
with, or be joined to, a myriad of other films yet has never quite been eclipsed, is because
Chinatown is clearly a very modern movie. The film is modern because of two central
elements: the first is its visual presentation of a Los Angeles that, while overlaid with some
thirties nostalgia, is really a precursor to the transformation of L.A. in a number of more
contemporary pictures; and the second point is that Chinatown’s history, while again perfectly
recognizable in its relation to events of the approximate era, is in actual fact a prophetic vision
of L.A. to come and a resemblance of the developments and personalities that have dominated
recent times rather more than the depression era. It is that sense of the prophetic and timeless
quality of the picture that explains how and why it has been left in the position of historical
signifier for a series of developments that somehow delineate the identity and outlook of
California in general, and Los Angeles in particular. Chinatown, therefore, is not a postmodern
film in the way that scholars like John Cawelti and Frederic Jameson have argued, particularly
in its relationship to the construction of nostalgia (Cawelti 200). Rather, the movie is what
one would like to describe as proto-modern, and this description can be offered in terms that
link directly Chinatown’s filmic as well as social and economic concerns. In delving into this
argument it is important to point out where and how this notion’s antecedents have arisen and
the manner in which they have, up until now, been articulated.
10 Film historian Neil Sinyard has pointed out that Polanski’s film is modern, if not postmodern,
because it was one of the first to echo Hollywood’s own history by ironically placing a past
master of traditional noir, John Huston, into the heart of the story as the movie’s evil business
magnate, Noah Cross. Huston had of course made his directorial debut with the third film
version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon in 1941. James Naremore’s work on film
noir supports this assertion when he comments that
Chinatown returns wholeheartedly to the past, recreating 1930’s Los Angeles in meticulous detail
and acknowledging its indebtedness to The Maltese Falcon by casting John Huston in an important
role (Naremore 205).
11 This character device certainly reminds the audience of the film’s lineage but, at the same time,
as Sinyard states, shows us, “the distance we have traveled from that world” (Sinyard 128).
Chinatown is therefore self-reverential by virtue of and in connection to its cinematic heritage
even before one begins to dissect its storyline and further historical countenance. Cross,
meanwhile, is not just a filmic signifier but is much more an elongated 20th Century archetype
of Los Angelean history. And that historicity as well as Chinatown’s modernity has tended
to be situated in the film’s – and 1970’s Hollywood in general – allusion to a failing liberal
ethos. Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner suggest that “Chinatown is a striking articulation
of mid-seventies cultural pessimism,” wrapped up, as it was, in the secrets and deception that
were perceived to be allegorical to the simultaneously unfolding crisis of Watergate (Ryan
and Kellner 83).
12 The views of Sinyard, Naremore and Ryan and Kellner are important and it is easy to share
their impressions of the film as both a significant staging post in 1970’s American cinema,
and as a commentary on the social and political events of the era. But Chinatown stretches
beyond these cultural and political boundaries to become a movie whose cinematic vision is
not retrospective at all but more akin to presentations of Los Angeles much later in its, and
Hollywood’s, twentieth century development. It is also a film whose themes and concerns are
not simply a reflection of the times, but are ones redolent of a cultural artifact now trapped
by its pursuit of history, a history vehemently disputed and contested in areas other than the
medium of cinema. But these other areas, histories of California and the city, biographies of
the great and the good who inhabited the West, and political and social observations of the
era the movie purports to represent, nevertheless choose to utilize Chinatown as a bulwark for
and against those very debates in the film about water, power, and corruption in Los Angelean
history. They do this because the film has been eclipsed as fictional yarn and replaced as
documentary evidence for the way a city matured and grew up. But how might we explain
and reconcile these two contrasting, even paradoxical features of period visual recreation and

European journal of American studies, 2 | 2007

69
 ‘Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water’ 5

contemporary historical relevance as a way to endorse Chinatown’s prophetic modernism and

trap it within its own historical materialism?

***

13 Visually, to quote Sinyard, Roman Polanski pumped “poisonous color” into Chinatown mixing
it with “savage violence” (Sinyard 128). The film was something of a cathartic experience
for its director. Firmly ensconced in the comfort of Rome, it was producer Robert Evans
and the prospect of working for a big Hollywood studio again that dragged Polanski back
to Los Angeles, after the death of his actress wife, Sharon Tate, nearly five years earlier.1
The arranged violence of the film, including Polanski’s own cameo as a “midget” hoodlum,
thus had a personal edge to it and, in Evans, there was a legendary producer who wanted
Polanski to do for noir, what Francis Ford Coppola had just achieved for him with the gangster
movie in The Godfather (1972). While the uncompromising sight of more graphic violence
in both films pinpointed the way towards a less censored Hollywood product in the future,
it is also easy to see how and why Evans might want Chinatown to be the next Godfather
(even though Godfather II was already on its way in the same year). While the film would
indeed become rich and evocative, Polanski constantly spoke of wanting to avoid simple
“retro-chic,” as he called it. This debate stretched to an argument on set and eventually led
to the sacking of cinematographer Stanley Cortez just ten days into the shoot.2 Cortez was
replaced by John Alonzo who later wrote of how he had tried to avoid too many gimmicks,
and too much expression with the camera, choosing instead to maintain classic focal lengths
and let the design and costuming of Richard and Anthea Sylbert speak for itself (see Alonzo).
Sylbert himself commented that he sought out all the revivalist white, Spanish style, hacienda
buildings he could find in L.A. in order to give the film a very smooth, sleek look (Gianos
31). Michael Eaton’s analysis in particular picks out Alonzo’s assessment of an uncontrived
presentation for the imagery of the movie as an argument against theorist Frederic Jameson’s
assertion that Chinatown was simply a “recuperation” of thirties Los Angeles (quoted in Eaton
51).
14 Eaton’s analysis is instructive and well observed in this regard. Alonzo and Polanski do
shoot a Los Angeles in the 1970’s that is remarkably modern and ameliorating compared
to some earlier interpretations, and the patina of thirties recreation is not as obvious with
repeated viewings. It is in fact this disturbing, almost dystopian inflection of the city’s
drought-laden and disused riverbeds, together with and mapped on to the final scene’s garish,
neon juxtaposition of the eponymous neighborhood, that has led the likes of Mike Davis to
link the film with radically futuristic visions of L.A., notably Ridley Scott’s science-fiction
classic, Blade Runner (Warner Bros/Ladd; US, 1982).3 But there are other modern cinematic
influences to tap into as well. Chinatown’s sympathy for this incessant sense of image and
recreation is reminiscent of the Los Angeles crafted by cinematographer Victorio Storaro for
Warren Beatty’s political movie, Bulworth (20th Century Fox; US, 1998). In this film, Storaro
adopts his trademark lush colors but arranges them in a unitary lighting collage that sees the
uplands of Beverly Hills painted in soft golden hues while the menacing sanctuary of South
Central L.A. is cast in a dark blue sheen. Storaro, like Alonzo before him, captures the natural
effervescent glow of the city to project an ethereal, otherworldly construction of action and
events. Gandini points out in his analysis that most of the early part of Chinatown is situated
in “an iconographic framework made up of natural scenery of great chromatic intensity”
delicately configuring blue seas, green lawns and orange suns into a richly woven canvas
(Gandini 303). Director Brad Siberling engages in a similar approach for his film, recasting the
signature description of Los Angeles into a literal title for the city’s sense of the secular and the
remote. For in City of Angels (Warner Bros; US, 1999), a loose re-working of Wim Wenders’
Wings of Desire, heavenly creatures really do walk the streets of L.A., surrounding themselves
amongst the building work and construction that notes the city’s unending development, but
which also points to the fragility of human existence in this metropolis.

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 ‘Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water’ 6

15 Chinatown as the jumping-off spot for representations of mortality, as well as finality, are
also re-confirmed in Sidney Lumet’s brief excursion away from his beloved New York during
the mid-1980’s in the Jane Fonda thriller, The Morning After (Lorimar/American Filmworks;
US, 1986). Transforming the L.A. underworld, William Friedkin, with considerable assistance
from his cinematographer Robby Muller, creates an urban cityscape inhabited by disturbed and
disturbing characters in To Live and Die in L.A. (United Artists; US, 1985). And the ultimate
apotheosis of this vision and grand eloquent statement to the city, its dark underpinnings and
constant re-invention in the 1990’s and beyond, comes with Michael Mann’s twin crime epics,
Heat (Warner Bros; US, 1995) and Collateral (Dreamworks/Paramount; US, 2004). Both of
these films, rather like Chinatown, neither simply guard the city’s associative landmarks (in
the way that so many New York films have to fill their scenes with the Statue of Liberty, the
Empire State and Chrysler Buildings for openers) nor avert their gaze from the underside of
the California dream. Heat and Collateral cannot, and indeed must not disassociate themselves
from their own fatalistic pursuits, for just as Jake Gittes is caught in the cleft stick of unsolvable
mystery and urban change unfolding before his very eyes, so the confrontation in the first
film between Robert De Niro’s professional bank thief, Neil Macually, and Al Pacino’s hard-
bitten yet flawed cop, Vincent Hanna, must end in the death of one and the destruction of each
other’s ideals and reverential view of the city. The film’s denouement is then appropriately
played out at L.A.’s most visceral, constantly changing and expansive landmark, LAX airport.
Likewise in Collateral, Tom Cruise’s hit man, symbolically and repetitively also called
Vincent, is a frenzy of action and solitude, a foundling navigating his way through the city’s
darkened, sodium-lit crevices. But as his eyes as well as his state-of-mind darken on his way
to confronting his own mortality, so too the claustrophobic excess of Mann’s photography
reveals a Los Angeles equally closing in on the state of Vincent’s existence. As Edward Porter
comments in his review of the picture:
The lemon-yellow shade bestowed by street lighting is exactly caught, and the orange-red haze
of LA’s smoggy sky appears as something Turner might have come up with if he had ever been
introduced to spray cans. The film’s visual art is immersive: I’m not sure that any other Los
Angeles movie has better evoked the city’s humidity (Porter 15).
16 So each of Mann’s films, as well as the others cited above, constructs their unfolding narratives
in similarly effusive colors and hues; light and darkness matched and constrained by primary
pallets imitative of Chinatown’s own variegated social history. It is these visual pretensions
of a city at once constructing and deconstructing its image, much copied in recent Hollywood
accounts of Los Angeles, that not only give clues to its contemporary cinematic relevance but
which are also an important link to the history played out in Chinatown and in the city’s later
urban development. As Neil Campbell points out in his work on the “new west,” Polanski and
Towne, like Chandler before them, recognized that cities were the lifeblood of the west and
operated in binary aversion to the space around them. Campbell thus comments:
Relationships surrounding this interlocking of rural and urban, wealth and land, imaginary and
real, are at the heart of life in the region and recur in many of its core texts (Campbell 133).
17 Towne drew on this lineage and suggested its future possibilities in his script for Chinatown.
In particular, he was struck by one of the most influential texts of the mid-century period,
Carey McWilliams’ book, Southern California Country, first published in 1946. McWilliams
brought an important philosophical enlightenment to writing on the state as he attempted to
debunk the classic “boosterist” histories that had dominated the scene since Hubert Howe
Bancroft and before. McWiliams indeed owed a great debt of thanks to his inspiration and
patron, Louis Adamic, whose works such as Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America
(1931) did much to reveal the “centrality of class and violence to the construction of the city,”
as Mike Davis describes it (Davis 33-5).
18 Contemporary Californian historian Kevin Starr has commented that McWilliams had an
ambivalent, divided image of the state. Like Jake Gittes and the fictional companions that
follow him, he was “both mesmerized and appalled by the demotic vigor of the Southland,
its confusing profusion of people and half-baked ideas” (Starr 19). Gittes is a disciple of such

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views and films like Blade Runner, To Live and Die in L.A., Heat and Collateral, as well as Joel
Schumacher’s Falling Down (Warner Bros; US, 1992), Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon
(20th Century Fox; US, 1990) and John Singleton’s Boyz ‘n the Hood (New Deal; US, 1991).
All cinematically reinforce a post-structuralist vision of characters in each movie that resent
the intrusion of this metropolitan force upon their lives but who are powerless to resist all
the same. Starr sums up the dilemma for which Chinatown the movie has become shorthand
identification. “Here, after all,” he says, “was an overnight society in search of its history,
which it would both discover and manufacture” (Starr 19).
19 It is in this description that Chinatown finds much of its resonance with L.A.’s expansion.
But, unlike the other contemporary and period movies, at some point the film passed over
from fictional and artistic presentation of the city to mythological cipher for a period fought
over tooth and nail by the descendents and luminaries of California’s past. The plot of the
film seemed clearly to draw its contextual matter from the folklore that surrounded the Owens
River Valley episode early in the century. This was a land deal which acquired thousands of
acres in the San Fernando Valley, an area north of L.A., and water from the Owens River
project, some 250 miles north of the city, would have to flow through it in order to get to the
city. It was this speculative deal that made the fortunes of many of the city’s leading patrons.
In Chinatown, the architect charged with establishing and leading a similar project (only it is
two decades on in the fictional tale) is the head of the city’s water and power division, Hollis
Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling). In real life, the charismatic figure that has come to embody water
politics throughout much of the state’s history is the similarly named William Mulholland. It
was Mulholland, together with former L.A. mayor, Fred Eaton, Reclamation Service engineer,
J.R. Lippincott, and Los Angeles Times proprietor Harrison Otis, who themselves mesmerized
the communities of the southland in the early part of the century and dominated much of
the political landscape, literally and figuratively. Mulwray in Chinatown begins the story by
reminding the public inquiry that is proposing a new dam for the city that a recent disaster
had claimed lives, a reference clearly to the 1928 Saint Francis Dam break in the Santa Clara
valley, a dam Mulholland built. Eaton, Lippincott and Otis are merged into the demonic,
almost biblical figure of Noah Cross and, at the close of the film, it is Evelyn who reminds
Gittes that her father’s power extends as far as control of the police force, a significant
reference for establishing the LAPD’s stranglehold on the city’s politics and society from at
least the 1930’s onwards until today. All of a sudden, it becomes easy to see how, as David
Wyatt comments, Polanski and Towne were actually conducting “an inquiry into the power
of cinematic truth” (Wyatt 146).
20 Chinatown was no longer movie folklore, or cultural narrative, but historical re-enactment.
In the words of Michael Eaton, Chinatown was “not just a place in the past where no one
knew what was going on […] but, much more dynamically, a metaphorical site still mentally
present,” and one could be forgiven for thinking that this was not only Jake Gittes’ destiny
but the film’s raison d’etre as a whole (Eaton 55). Five Fires, Wyatt’s “catastrophic history”
of the natural forces that have swept through California during its growth and development is
a fascinating and, at times, personal account of the state’s evolution. And yet, a fair amount
of his chapter on “the politics of water” is devoted to Chinatown which he describes as “one
of the most sophisticated treatments” of the water story ever told (Wyatt 136). Nowhere
else in the state’s history does such a cultural artifact lie in the path of simple historical
evaluation. In 1991, the New York Times published a piece on water systems in the US, and in
describing L.A.’s experience cited Chinatown as the chronicler of how the city seized control
of water resources. In the 1996 PBS television series Cadillac Desert, based on Marc Reisner’s
excellent history of water politics in the west, Robert Towne got to expand on the reasons
and motivations for his construction of the fictional character Noah Cross, as though he were
and had acted like some real historical figure from the Owens Valley episode. Even Reisner
himself, in dealing with this period and with Mulholland in particular in the book, while never
ever mentioning the film, does contrive to call the relevant chapter Chinatown. In much the
same vein, Ray Pratt’s evidence leads him to conclude that: “Chinatown remains a landmark of

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 ‘Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water’ 8

1970’s American film, incorporating a retro look at genres, locales and actual (my emphasis)
history” (Pratt 118).
21 It is not just those who wish to use Chinatown as a cipher of historical conferment upon a
period of Californian history that end up deferring to its mystical power either. First appearing
in 2000, Catherine Mulholland’s book, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles
sought to once more debunk these persistent mythologists by constructing a painstakingly
revisionist history of her grandfather, his contribution to the building of the southland, and
some reminders about California’s past. At the beginning of the book, she states unequivocally:
Because the water story remains the founding myth of modern Los Angeles, this work also calls
into question many current versions of the so-called Owens Valley controversy. Was there really
rape and betrayal by the city’s leaders? Was the entire building of the Owens Valley Aqueduct
truly the result of a conspiracy among Los Angeles capitalists to acquire water in order to develop
for speculation their holdings in the San Fernando Valley? (Mulholland iv).
22 Mulholland and Los Angeles’ dubious and murky past is therefore set to be given renewed
assessment in her account; but no sooner do we get to page 4 before Mulholland mentions
Chinatown! In fairness calling attention to the movie this early in the book is her way of setting
it free from the shackles of the history it purports to represent, and the so-called inaccuracies
at large in the picture. But in the very citing of the inaccuracies of character and place, she
is herself inadvertently alluding to a founding myth of the film, that Hollis Mulwray and/or
Noah Cross is somehow linked to William Mulholland and therefore Chinatown must, in some
form, be emblematic of the state’s past. Unfortunately, she also doesn’t help her cause much
further by erroneously pointing out that Chinatown was made in 1979, five years on from its
actual production and release (Mulholland 4).
23 Nevertheless, maybe the slip is prophetic, for it constitutes an attempt to let loose Chinatown
from its responsibilities as harbinger of a history that, when the film was set and then later
made, had not yet run its course. Mike Davis is one writer who sees how the picture has
operated as “surrogate public history” but which now ought to be relocated, he thinks, back
into the Chandler/noir legacy (Davis 44). It is from the hard-boiled traditions of that time,
carried on through writers such as Mickey Spillane, James Ellroy and Bret Easton Ellis,
and emphasized in filmic adaptations of their work, as well as stories from other writer/
directors, that Chinatown’s cultural legacy can be re-evaluated. But even Davis cannot escape
the suggestion of a “syncretic” analysis of the picture that hints at its vision of a place in the
process of becoming, and therefore concedes the film as a visionary tableau of the real and
authentic. Over and above the noir tendencies of Polanski’s film, therefore, it is the expansion
of Simi Valley, the control of the LAPD, zoning, immigrant segregation and ghettoization
that bind together the historical and the cinematic. Together with these social inequities, the
“windfall profits” from the Owens Valley created today’s ruling class, this argument suggests,
and Davis’s work at the very least implies. From Mulholland, Eaton and Otis, on through Harry
Chandler, Earl Warren, William Parker, John McCone (future head of the CIA), Reese Taylor
(future President of Union Oil), Senator William Knowland, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan,
Tom Bradley, Richard Riordan and now Arnold Schwarzenegger: these are the people whose
apparitions loom large, those that waited in the wings to copy the modus operandi of the elite
incorporated into Chinatown; those that became its successors and future torchbearers.
24 Therefore, the enduring success and persistence of Polanski and Towne’s movie is its ability
to deliver a flavor of Los Angeles’ excess and its paradoxical energy whether or not it offers
contextual accuracy. Chinatown is tied up with the history it seemingly represents not simply
because of the narrative connotations that appear too similar to ignore, though they are in fact
no more than an amalgamation of events over a thirty year period, but because of the film’s
visual and cinematic heritage. Indeed, it is this emblematic construct within the film that better
locates the movie’s influences and importance. Leonardo Gandini suggests that the shift from
darkness to light (color) is a significant concern for all modern noirs but is additionally a way
to exploit the expressive and subversive potential of a film offering what he describes as the
hyperrealism of Hollywood from the seventies onwards (Gandini 306). The film’s themes are
consequently in its framing, and the camera’s take on thirties society actually belies the critical

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 ‘Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water’ 9

experience of Los Anglean development to come; a city, initially, with little industrial base, a
metropolis with no heart or soul surreptitiously but relentlessly dividing a population by race,
class and the controlling forces of wealth and power.
25 And nor do these controlling forces just get tied up in the evil personification of Noah Cross in
Chinatown. They are about the forces of federal power, of political and economic association
still about to be unleashed on the southland; a conglomerate only just being built in the film’s
1930’s setting. In this respect, then, the movie is much more about the Los Angeles that has
developed since the 1970’s than it is about a city mythologized by some composite pre-war
past. There is a visual stratification in the film that highlights the city’s grandiosity as well
as pointing to its coming fragmentation. The past is constantly superseded by the present and
future. Jake’s nostalgia for a city he once thought he knew and liked is constantly dissipated
by the discovery of urban progress and change that he doesn’t. The penultimate scene, for
example, concludes with Gittes meeting up with Cross at the house where Hollis Mulwray
was killed so he can present his evidence and knowledge of Cross’s complicity in the murder.
Cross’s control of the valley’s water supply, that will result in a bond issue to build a new
reservoir and dam bringing the valley under the control of the city, seems to haunt Jake
almost as much as the man’s murderous actions. Here is more change, more progress, and
more distance being built between Jake’s vision of what he thought the city was like, and the
unending expanse that it is now becoming. As if this binary conflation of opposites - stability
versus change, the past versus the future, rich versus poor - needed laboring one more time in
the picture, the scene prophetically includes the sound of an airplane (clearly apparent in the
‘thirties, though by no means common) circling overhead, a sound that was deliberately left
in the sound mix by Polanski. The noise occurs just as Gittes asks Cross how much money
he needs to control things in the city. Cross shakes his head at the private eye’s naivety and
points out that it is not the money he has acquired which explains his desire for control. Like
the aircraft filtering through the Los Angelean skies, “It is the future, Mr. Gittes, the future!”
Therefore, in sympathy with Cross’s pursuit of corporate immortality, it isn’t nostalgia or
post-noirist pastiche that suffuses the narrative strains of Chinatown; it is an understanding
of the future direction of the city, its iconic and historical reinvention, that locates its cultural
relevance and enduring cinematic vitality.

Bibliography
Alonzo, John A. “Shooting Chinatown.” American Cinematographer. 56.5 (May 1975).
Belton, John. “Language, Oedipus and Chinatown” MLN 106.5. Comparative Literature (December
1991): 933-50.
Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. London: Bloomsbury, 1998.
Campbell, Neil. The Cultures of the New West. Edinburgh: BAAS Paperbacks, EUP, 2000.
Cawelti, John G. “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films.” Film Theory and
Criticism. 2nd Ed. Ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen. London: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Christopher, Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City New York: Owl Books,
1997.
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles. London: Vintage, 1990.
Eaton, Michael. Chinatown. London: BFI Publishing, 1998.
Gandini, Leonardo. “Noir in Color.” Fotogenia 1 (1994): 302.
Gianos, Phillip. Politics and Politicians in American Film. London: Praeger, 1998.
McGinnis, Wayne D. “Chinatown: Roman Polanski’s Contemporary Oedipus Story.” Literature/Film
Quarterly 3.3 (1975): 249-51.
Mulholland, Catherine. William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000.
Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir and its Contexts. London: University of California Press,
1998.

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Porter, Edward. “Damage Imitation.” The Sunday Times, Culture Section (September 19, 2004): 15.
Pratt, Ray. Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film. Lawrence: University Press
of Kansas, 2001.
Ryan, Michael and Kellner, Douglas. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary
Hollywood Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Shetley, Vernon. “Incest and Capital in Chinatown.” MLN 114.5 (1999): 1092-1109.
Sinyard, Neil. Classic Movies. London: Outlet, 1988.
Starr, Kevin. “Carey McWilliams’s California: The Light and the Dark.” Reading California: Art,
Image and Identity, 1900-2000. Ed. Stephanie Barron, Sherri Bernstein and Ilene Susan Fort. London:
University of California Press, 2000. 15-30.
Vernet, Marc. “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom”. Shades of Noir. Ed. J. Capjec. London: Verson, 1993.
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Wyatt, David. Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe and the Shaping of California. Harlow: Addison-Wesley,
1997.

Notes
1 Peter Biskind notes that the first house that was found for Polanski, when he returned in the summer
of 1973, was at the top of Benedict Canyon and required him to drive past his old place on Cielo Drive,
the scene of the murders. Eventually he rented a place in Beverly Hills. See Biskind 151.
2 Polanski had seen the early rushes and thought there was too much “ochre and tomato ketchup” in the
print which gave it an old-fashioned look. Apparently Evans had actually been passing on instructions
to the labs developing the film to make it look like this, something Polanski, when he discovered the
truth, did not take too kindly to. See Eaton 50.
3 Davis makes the connection by way of Blade Runner's original "Chandleresque" voice-over, which
had Harrison Ford's character, Deckard, speaking in Marlowe-like tones. It was not the version director
Scott wanted, however, and when the film got a re-release and new director's cut ten years later, the
voice-over had disappeared. See Davis 44.

References
Electronic reference
Ian S. Scott, « ‘Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water’ », European journal
of American studies [Online], 2 | 2007, document 1, Online since 17 October 2007. URL : http://
ejas.revues.org/1203

About the author

Ian S. Scott
University of Manchester

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 WATER and POWER, r​ eader on
california’s murky water politics