Once it becomes clear that the structuring visual principle of Chinatown is not water as such but the infrastructure of its conveyance—the pipeline—we discover resonant meanings across the film’s historical coordinates. An isomorphic but different kind of pipeline traumatically marks the time of Chinatown’s production and release: the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, or TAPS, whose construction was approved on November 16, 1973, when President Richard Nixon signed the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act. Chinatown was then entering its fourth month of production. The Authorization Act effectively halted all legal challenges to the pipeline mounted by environmental and Indigenous activists, authorizing construction without further delay in light of “growing domestic shortages and increasing dependence upon insecure foreign sources.”
The act was a declaration of a state of exception: this is an emergency, so there can be no more debate and no more delay. “There it is. Take it.” The OPEC oil embargo, announced on October 16, 1973, brutally demonstrating American dependence on Middle Eastern reserves, had already driven up the price of oil fourfold. Eager developers and hawkish politicians took the opportunity to ram through a project that was otherwise highly contested. By authorizing TAPS, the United States effectively recommitted itself to a degree of oil dependency—paradoxically arrived at through fearmongering about “foreign” oil dependency, and insistently referred to in Nixon’s speeches at the time as “energy independence”—that continues to this day.
To the extent that the energy crisis of 1973–74 surrounds the making of Chinatown, we can say, in a literal sense, that Chinatown is about the energy crisis. The film’s first audiences would have had their experiences of a nationwide oil shortage in the present to relate to Chinatown’s depiction of regional water scarcity in the past. To both problems, a pipeline would present itself, in consumerist and capitalistic terms, as the obvious solution. Just as California invented itself with water in the early 20th century—as California historian William Kahrl so powerfully put it in his 1982 book Water and Power—so the United States reinvented itself with “energy” in the 1970s. The pipeline is the sign under which Chinatown links water and power and remediates them through the camera lens. The petropolitics of 1974 are thus displaced in Chinatown to the hydropolitics of 1913.
