Water and Contemporary Cowboy Economics: *Quantum of Solace* and *Water*

Quantum of Solace (2008) takes water rights issues to the world stage in a genre that draws on the neo-noir of Polanski’s Chinatown. In Quantum, a private detective is replaced with a British Secret Service Agent. But the mystery in both films incorporates a utility company’s attempts to control water and results in multiple action sequences and deaths. Ultimately, the corporation in both films is defeated, but in Quantum, the hero becomes an eco-warrior encapsulating the activist spirit of Bolivian peasants in Cochabamba.             

           

Contemporary water rights issues come to the fore in Quantum of Solace, with control of land and water like that found in Chinatown nearly replicating the 1998-2000 Cochabamba, Bolivia water wars instigated by the World Bank, a connection noted only by Joshua Clover in the Film Quarterly review, “Cinema for a New Grand Game.”  These wars began when the World Bank “refused to guarantee a $25 million loan to refinance water services in the city of Cochabamba unless the local government sold its public water utility to the private sector and passed on the costs to consumers” (Barlow and Clark 154). Bolivia complied, giving control of water to Aguas del Tunari, “a newly formed subsidiary of the U.S. construction and water giant Bechtel,” but when water rates increased by almost 35%, tens of thousands of Cochabamba citizens protested for a week, with 90 percent of residents opposing Bechtel, so the Bolivian government broke its contract with Bechtel. The World Bank President Wolfensohn argued against the change, but protest coordinator Oscar Olivera disagreed, declaring, “I’d like to meet with Mr. Wolfensohn to educate him on how privatization has been a direct attack on Bolivia’s poor…. Families with monthly incomes of around $100 have seen their water bills jump to $20 per month—more than they spend on food” (155).

Dick Clement’s Water, a farce from 1985, however, also demonstrates the power of water as a commodity and its connection with environmental history and popular culture. Although Walter Goodman of  The New York Times claims the film “operated on the theory that a lot of eccentric people doing nutty things produce hilarity” and that in kidding everything, the movie leaves us uncertain about whether anything is being seriously kidded,” the film highlights bottled mineral water as a resource worth more than oil. In this spoof exploring the effects colonialism had on islands in the West Indies, mineral water is discovered by accident when an American oil company shoots a commercial beside its now useless oil derrick on the imaginary island of Cascara. Battles between the American company, the British and Cuban governments, and an ineffective but musical liberation front tie the film to a history of colonial exploitation of native people and their resources, especially to the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada.

These films build on a history of water rights debates beginning with a revision of the riparian concept in the 19^th Century American West where riparian rights were “believed to have emerged from English common law and consequently centered around individual property rights,” according to Vandana Shiva (22).  The Doctrine of Prior Appropriation and what Shiva calls “Cowboy economics” take water privatization further, defining water as a commodity that should be marketed according to the “lawlessness of the frontier,” Shiva argues. Both Quantum of Solace and Water support her assertions.