The Depths of Sin: Incest and Ecological Catastrophe in Chinatown (1974)

In the 1974 neo-noir film Chinatown, ecological toxicity is caused by patriarchal and capitalist exploitation practices. In other words, the film analyzes the connection between capitalism and patriarchy. The exploitation of water, as a natural resource, exists in a relationship with capitalist exploitation of gendered bodies. The gender-based violence implied in the incest plot stands in metaphorical relation to the slow violence in the scenes of environmental blight. Chinatown utilizes the plot point concerning Noah Cross’s exploitation of his daughter Evelyn Cross to make clear the exploitation of our natural environment: these parallel forms of violence—personal and ecological—are symptoms of the same oppressive structures of power: white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

In Blue Revolution, Cynthia Barnett writes that “if people could see how closely their children’s and grandchildren’s well-being is tied to the health of the land, personal ethics would drive them to cooperate not only on behalf of their families and communities but also for the natural world they inhabit.” 1  Chinatown illustrates the obverse of this idea. The film represents a society where the destruction of the land is inseparable from the corruption of the family. The sickness of the family and the sickness of the land are of a piece: the incestuous relationship between Cross and his daughter is a metaphor for the violence wrought by capitalism—a violence that devastates both human futures and ecological systems. The incestuous relationship provides viewers with a figurative way of perceiving the violence of America’s white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’s destruction of the environment and the future of its own society.

The extraction industry’s past, present, and future is reflected critically in the incest plot. Set in 1937, the film’s narrative is inspired by the historical California water wars of the early twentieth century, which involved disputes over the management of water in Southern California. Specifically, the film depicts the Los Angeles municipality’s plan to take water from Owens Valley through an aqueduct. This bigger social event is introduced in the narrative by the private eye Jake Gittes’ investigation of an individualized intimate moral transgression. Gittes is duped to believe that he has been hired to investigate a marital infidelity. The lie of the initial case is exposed, and the case becomes about an entangled set of transgressions— private and public, and moral and criminal—that eventually show how exploitative white supremacist patriarchal capitalist practices create increasing intergenerational and environmental damage.

Chinatown, taking its historical inspiration from the California Water Crisis or Water Wars, remains a cautionary tale about water usage in contemporary society. 2  Evelyn’s husband Hollis Mulwray is loosely based on William Mulholland, who was, beginning in the 1920s, head of the municipal Water Department. Mulholland began searching for a new water supply, with a plan to set up an aqueduct system to transport water from the Eastern Sierra to Southern California (the first Los Angeles Aqueduct and Owens River system). After the plan was approved by President Roosevelt, water transportation began, and Los Angeles continued to flourish. An issue of concern about Mulholland’s actions is who suffered because of the new system: “there is a widely held view that Los Angeles simply went out to the Owens Valley and stole its water. In a technical sense, that isn’t quite true. Everything the city did was legal (though its chief collaborator, the U.S. Forest Service, did indeed violate the law). Whether one can justify what the city did, however, is another story.” 3  The effects of the system became more prominent by the end of the Great Drought in the 1930s:

the farmers had so badly depauperated the groundwater that the depletion curves were precipitous. Twenty thousand acres had already lost their groundwater and gone out of production; hundreds of thousands more overlay a groundwater table that was becoming dangerously low. Suddenly, the valley’s reserve of groundwater, which had so recently seemed limitless, had only a few more decades of economic life. 4  

The film altered the facts of the case: “the site of the conflict was moved 200 miles closer to the city, the events were advanced by thirty years to the depression-era LA of Raymond Chandler and the story was reconstructed as a murder mystery revolving around conspiratorial land speculation.” 5  Chinatown not only alludes to the historical water wars, but it does so in a way that brings to light patriarchal and white-supremacist toxicity underlying the exploitation of the natural environment.

While the film is set in the 1930s, it was produced in the 1970s and it draws on environmental issues more contemporary to the filming’s timeframe. During the 1970s, the issue of water usage and drought made public headlines again, which made it the ideal time for the film creators to merge the earlier water crisis with their contemporary water usage concerns:

the Owens Valley–Los Angeles controversy was revived as the result of a new local citizens’ movement which was enabled by federal and California environmental legislation. It was in this context that Polanski’s remarkable film Chinatown appeared to an enthusiastic commercial and critical reception. For Los Angeles and national audiences who knew little of the historical background, Chinatown became the LA water story – the political intrigue that made urbanization possible . . . The ironic effect was that the critical narrative underpinning the screenplay was appropriated by environmental activists and a new citizens’ alliance in the 1970s and 1980s. That struggle ultimately succeeded in recovering an important share of Owens Valley natural resources, community control, and local dignity. 6  

Issues that existed during the hardboiled era of Hammett and Chandler were “revived” in the 1970s because of local citizen’s upheaval in response to legislation changes. Chinatown not only speaks to such citizens’ movements and the importance of natural resources to the community, but also that which is beneath the landscape: something that is, to quote Mike Davis in Ecology of Fear, “sinister.” 7  That which is “sinister” is the patriarchal and white-supremacist capitalist forces exploiting the natural environment, driving future ecological harm. As we (re)watch Chinatown in contemporary times, the water resource allocation and management issues are, to borrow Pat Brereton’s works in “Environmental Ethics” on Hollywood tales, “more relevant than ever . . . evidenced by the 2018 summer major fires across the Californian region” amongst many other environmental disasters across the state. 8

The natural environment tries to fight back against the “sinister” forces driving its desecration. Gittes’ investigations involving infidelity and murder are usurped by far-ranging concerns over water usages in the area. This is reflected in John G. Cawelti’s essay “Chinatown and Generic Transformation” when he argues that Gittes’ “initial and deceptive charge involves him in the investigation of a murder, which in turn leads him to evidence of a large-scale conspiracy involving big business, politics, crime, and the whole underlying social and environmental structure of Los Angeles.” 9  Gittes faces off with “a depth of evil and chaos so great that he is unable to control it” or solve it. 10  Not only does this “depth” include the underpinning “sinister” capitalist forces perpetrating environmental blight, but it also includes water itself as it exerts its agency and retaliates against such forces. Eventually, the film makes clear that water can fight back. Water is an explosive element of many scenes in the film and its representation asserts a sense of agency the resource has. 

This assertion is exemplified in a scene involving Gittes in which “the force of the stream batters him and carries him with it until he's brought rudely to the chain-link fence. It stops him cold. He's nearly strained through it.” Here, water, almost anthropomorphized, seems to overpower Gittes, hinting at the idea that this natural resource is capable of outrage at the misuse of it by exploitative forces. The torrent "batters" Gittes, suggesting a deliberate act of aggression. The imagery of him being "nearly strained through" the fence evokes both physical vulnerability and a symbolic sifting—Gittes is nearly destroyed by the very force he seeks to understand. Here, water, as a representation of both nature and commodified resource, is thus transformed into a sentient and violent force. In a certain sense, it arguably mirrors the machinations of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy who exploit water for control and profit. 

The seemingly retaliative emotions, highlighted by the way water is represented in the film, extends to the farmers who are in danger of being displaced from their land by drought. Former Mayor Sam Bagby notes that:

you can swim in it, you can fish in it, you can sail in it—but you can’t drink it, you can’t water your lawns with it, you can’t irrigate an orange grove with it. Remember -- we live next door to the ocean but we also live on the edge of the desert. Los Angeles is a desert community. Beneath this building, beneath every street there’s a desert. Without water the dust will rise up and cover us as though we’d never existed! 

The above is Bagby’s justification for stealing water from farmers. In a town hall meeting, one farmer objects: “you steal the water from the valley, ruin the grazing, starve my livestock—who’s paying you to do that, Mr. Mulwray, that’s what I want to know!” Thus, in a certain sense, the contrast between the imperiled farms and the manicured pond in Mulwray’s lavish and green backyard epitomizes the tumultuous and violent conflict between the Water Department and the farmers. The disadvantaging of farmers continues when the chief deputy of the water department Russ Yelburton says: “we have been diverting a little water to irrigate avocado and walnut groves in the northwest valley. As you know, the farmers there have no legal right to our water, and since the drought we’ve had to cut them off—the city comes first, naturally.” The explosive behavior of water emphasizes its antagonism at being misused by the city. The priority is clear: the city’s agenda is more important than the farmers. This demonstrates the level of control that the Water Department has in that they can, at any point, divert water from the farmers to the city, perpetuating the misuse of the resource. Furthermore, this reveals not only the Water Department’s corruption, but also develops the depiction of water as a volatile, almost sentient force—one that resists its commodification and retaliates when exploited. 

There is one dominant capitalist structures that the films incorporate into the plot concerning water: the patriarchal capitalist structure, highlighted through the incest plot. By representing intimate and historical scales of violence, the films work across a generational notion of inheritance: the films gesture toward the legacies of environmental harm that follow on the wrongful acts of the patriarchal capitalist system. In doing so, it suggests that the consequences of patriarchal and capitalist exploitation are not isolated events but legacies that persist across time—both in families and in the environment. To echo Walter Benjamin’s essay “Capitalism as Religion,” “the idea of sin, is capital itself.” 11  I argue that in Polanski’s noir film, the sin of incest is capital itself. While Gittes cannot solve the crimes of capitalism, his investigation exposes a comprehensive capitalist guilt indexed by incest. Chinatown derives its plot from intimate and political mysteries. In the devolution of this plot, the film indirectly figures the consequences for the environment of America’s overconsuming white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal society. The film draws such perceptions from the incongruent representation of sexual violence: this is turned into a “lens” through which the viewer can further “see” the temporal dimensions of the slow violence wrought by capitalist society against the environment.

Chinatown can be described as having a “double plot” that places in binary opposition the incest plot and the water plot. I argue that the crimes of incest and water diversion are intimately related: they do not exist in binary opposition. In her Black feminist scholarship, bell hooks identifies “interlocking” systems of oppression, exploitation and domination, when she coins the phrase “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” 12  Noah Cross, whose first name ironically registers his role in the Abrahamic tradition of antediluvian (or pre-flood) religious patriarchs, is the epitome of “capitalist patriarchy” in his exploitation of his daughter and the natural environment, while the representation of racialized bodies hints at the crimes of “white-supremacist” capitalism. Noah’s sexual exploitation of his daughter, his raping of Evelyn, comments on a future in which such a system of oppression and exploitation prevails. Briefly, a key plot of the film is how Noah raped his daughter Evelyn, resulting in the conception of Evelyn’s daughter/sister, Katherine. Gittes’ investigation, which involves Noah, becomes closely intertwined with this dark past involving Cross and his daughters/granddaughter. The dual plots come together not only to draw attention to the capitalist infrastructure’s misuse of natural resources, but also the “interlocking” systems of guilt on a temporal scale.

The idea of the film’s double plot is examined by Vernon Shetley in “Incest and Capital in Chinatown.” Shetley re-iterates the two perspectives on the two plots: “for most critics who focus on the daughter plot, the water plot is a distraction, a kind of screen that obscures the real workings of the film, whose conformity to Freudian paradigms is taken for granted. The writers on water policy, conversely, treat the daughter plot, if they notice it at all, as a sensational distraction from the main interest of the film.” 13  To quote Caputo, Chinatown makes clear “the manner in which authoritative structures (religion, the government, media) use tenacity to shape our perception through the construction of conceptual frameworks, such as the inherent benevolence of those in power.” 14  Thus, rather than being a distraction or “the main interest of the film,” the incest plot is a lens through which viewers may perceive capitalist, patriarchal power.

Noah’s family suffers from his incestuous act and the public suffers from his privatization of water. He is a deeply corrupt capitalist whose actions—far from saving the natural world like his Biblical namesake—destabilize the fruitful potential of future generations and their environments. In the Biblical story of Noah (Genesis, Chapters 6-10), God destroys the world in a flood after seeing “that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” 15  but saves Noah because he was “just” and “perfect.” 16  After the Flood, God makes a promise to Noah and his family that He will never destroy the Earth again, and enjoins them to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.” 17  Moreover, God also promised human dominance over nature: “and the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.” 18  This divine grant of dominion is twisted into a justification for violent control, suggesting that the patriarchal urge to control and exploit nature leads not to renewal, but to corruption and irreversible harm.

Noah owns the water supply with Hollis (as opposed to it being owned by the public). Hollis’ altruistic mindset to utilize water for public projects is opposed to Noah’s decision to limit the control of water and to profit from it. He is the epitome of the capitalist incomer, invoking “a distinctive western myth, the crusty, determined, plain-spoken pioneer, whose gruff manner is the outward sign of the quintessentially American qualities of self-reliance, independence, and enterprise.” 19  He attempts to both break “free of the boundaries of a decayed society, and at the same time brings a civilizing order to the wilderness.” 20  

Ultimately, “rather than bringing civilization to the wilderness and making the desert bloom, Cross undermines the social order and blights the landscape (as his confederates dump water and poison wells). He does not repent for his crimes, and, in fact, looks forward to a “future in which he can repeat his darkest crimes” 21  At the conclusion of the film, he is poised to continue both his legacy of incest (by taking custody of his daughter/granddaughter) and to perpetuate his control of the city’s resources. The fact that Noah’s motive for murdering Hollis is not revealed—that is, whether it has to do with his plans for water usage or because of his incestuous crimes—demonstrates how the two plots intersect: there is a continuity of guilt that “blurs the distinction between the two.” 22  In turn, viewers are invited to investigate the relationship and similarities of the two plots.

As Shetley asks, “in what way, then, are Cross’s relations with his daughters like his relations with the water? In what way can incest and land fraud function as metaphors for one another?” 23  As noted, both are linked to the future and capitalism, as epitomized by Noah, who is the creator of a bleak future with an environment saturated in decay resulting from patriarchal and capitalist corruption:

both daughters and water represent the possibility of fertility, of the growth and renewal of life; and so both are significantly linked to the ‘future.’ Each is a means of projecting oneself into the future, either through bloodlines, or the creation of wealth, for what is capital but wealth that has outlived its creation, even its creator? Noah Cross’s incestuous acts and his land swindles turn on his desire to monopolize for himself the possibilities of life and fertility that water and daughters represent; in both cases, what ought to be exchanged is instead hoarded, what should circulate is instead entrapped and held back. 24   

To Noah, diverting water is a simple municipal task: “just incorporate the Valley into the city so the water goes to L.A. after all. It's very simple.” The depiction of water helps us “see” the violence embedded in Noah’s actions in the same way that his incestuous actions help us “see” the ripple effect of his exploitation of water as a resource to supply Los Angeles has on others. Incest becomes a lens through which one can gain a better understanding of the capitalist and patriarchal infrastructure’s violent acts that permeate the environment and perpetuate crises. When Jake asks Noah why he is “doing it . . . What can you buy that you can't already afford?” Noah responds: “The future, Mr. Gittes—the future.” This line is pivotal, first because it commoditizes temporality itself, and second because the audience of Chinatown is in the future and can assess the full ironic implications of Noah’s statement. Environmental exploitation is an ongoing crime in their time, not one that is resolved by the retro neo-noir detective plot. And Noah’s rapacious sexuality will correspondingly continue incestuously into the next generations with his daughter/granddaughter.

Evelyn’s ocular birthmark can be understood as a defect she inherited from her father, serving as a sign of his incestuous actions and the future of the environment. As Gittes observes, “there’s something black in the green part of your eye.” Noah’s incestuous relationship with daughter Evelyn is an act through which one can better recognize how the capitalist and patriarchal infrastructure is screwing over future generations. Noah’s incestuous crime becomes a trope in which to better understand or “see” invisible and violent rapacious acts against the environment. To quote Polan, Jake’s “investigation of local (which is originally sexual) infelicities within the city becomes a political path to deeper discovery of a corruption seemingly inherent to the social space of the urban as such.” 25  Gittes’ investigations and the relationship between incest, murder and theft become interlinked, suggesting that “that understanding” (in this case, harm against the environmental) “is a deeper process than mere sensory perceptions.” 26  

Evelyn’s birthmark and the contrast of green and black colors in her eye insinuate that there is both harm and decay but also the opportunity for things to grow, flourish, and change. Unfortunately, because Evelyn’s birthmark is genetic, there is no way for the green to overpower the black, and her own daughter/sister is at risk of harm, which suggests a bleak near- future of our natural environment. When Evelyn dies a senseless death, such violence mirrors the capitalist infrastructure’s senseless behavior in exploiting the environment as an object with infinite extractable resources. The meaninglessness also contributes to the audience’s feelings of incomprehension and reaffirms my previous analysis of perception: “the terrifying revelations at the end of Chinatown lead not to final comprehension but final incomprehension, stupefaction that what has come to pass has indeed come to pass, accompanied by total bafflement at its genesis and secret lineage.” 27  The lineage of the films suggests a necessity to continue to supplement the record of environmental desecration and political corruption.

Other critics of Chinatown have already noted the film’s symbolic treatment of the incest plot. Walton, for example, notes how the film extends “the sexual symbolism of rape to the vile association of money and political power” 28  What is missing in this insight is how sexual symbolism also has an intergenerational and therefore futural dimension. The temporality of the incest plot allows the viewer to see the temporal scale of the film’s environmental concerns. The film thus presents the plot, traumatic and devastating, as a symbol or analogy: as intergenerational incest has a destructive impact on the future of the victim, so capitalist extractivist practices will have a destructive impact on the future of the environment.

In short, in Chinatown, the intricate interplay between incest and ecological catastrophe serves as a haunting critique of patriarchal capitalist exploitation. The film adeptly juxtaposes personal moral transgressions with broader socio-political issues, revealing how individual actions are inextricably linked to systemic violence against both bodies and the environment. Noah Cross embodies the destructive nature of this system, as his exploitation of his daughter mirrors the way natural resources are pillaged for profit. The narrative, set against the backdrop of historical water wars, becomes a cautionary tale that transcends its time, highlighting the consequences of unchecked greed and the intergenerational trauma it fosters.  

Footnotes

• 1

   Cynthia Barnett. Blue Revolution: Unmaking America's Water Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 29.

• 2

   See, for example, Thom Andersen’s 2004 film essay and documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself.

• 3

   Marc Reisner, “The Origins of LA’s Owens Valley Water Theft,” The AVA, https://theava.com/archives/237530, 129

• 4

   Reisner, “The Origins of LA’s Owens Valley Water Theft,” 616.

• 5

   John Walton, “Film Mystery as Urban History: The Case of Chinatown,” in Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. T. Fitzmaurice and M. Shiel (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 47.

• 6

   Walton, “Film Mystery as Urban History,” 48-49.

• 7

   Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (London: Verso, 2022), 16.

• 8

   Pat Brereton, “Environmental Ethics and Energy Extraction: Textual Analysis of Iconic Cautionary Hollywood Tales: Chinatown (1974), There Will Be Blood (2007), and Promised Land (2012),” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 27, no. 1 (2020): 10. It is also worth noting in this context that Sue Grafton’s hardboiled alphabet mysteries (set in Southern California), over the course of the last few installments, tell an ongoing story of the slow violence created by drought conditions, the creation of a new dust bowl.

• 9

   G. John Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Keith Barry Grant and John G. Cawelti (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021), 284.

• 10

   Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” 284.

• 11

  Walter Benjamin. “Capitalism as Religion,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 288–291, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996 [1921]), 289.

• 12

   bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2015), 171.

• 13

   Vernon Shetley, “Incest and Capital in Chinatown,” MLN 114, no. 5 (1999): 1093.

• 14

   Davide Caputo, Polanski and Perception: The Psychology of Seeing and the Cinema of Roman Polanski (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 192.

• 15

   Genesis 6:5

• 16

   Genesis 6:9 

• 17

   Genesis 9:1 

• 18

   Genesis 9:2 

• 19

   Shetley, “Incest and Capital in Chinatown,” 1096.

• 20

   Shetley, “Incest and Capital in Chinatown,” 1096.

• 21

   Shetley, “Incest and Capital in Chinatown,” 1097.

• 22

   Shetley, “Incest and Capital in Chinatown,” 1097.

• 23

   Shetley, “Incest and Capital in Chinatown,” 1098.

• 24

   Shetley, “Incest and Capital in Chinatown,” 1098.

• 25

   Dana Polan, “Chinatown: Politics as Perspective, Perspective as Politics,” in The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World, ed. John Orr and Elzbieta (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 109.

• 26

   Polan, “Chinatown: Politics as Perspective, Perspective as Politics,” 118.

• 27

  John Orr, “Polanski: The Art of Perceiving,” in The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World, ed. John Orr and Elzbieta (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 12

• 28

   Walton, “Film Mystery as Urban History,” 56.