Water in the Desert: Chinatown (1974) and California's Continuing Drought

The current drought in California broaches multiple multiple perspectives on water rights. But these responses rest on a cultural and legal history that goes back to at least the 19th century. Water rights films like Chinatown (1974) illuminate this history for a popular audience. Chinatown serves as the quintessential water rights film: Murder, infidelity, and incest all become integrally connected with water as a commodity in 1930s Los Angeles, a context established by an FDR picture in the opening shot of the J.J (Jake) Gittes (Jack Nicholson) private investigator’s office. Jake is introduced to an infidelity case but discovers the perpetrator is Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the chief engineer of Los Angeles’s Water and Power. 

According to Water and Power, Los Angeles is on the edge of the desert. Without water, the valley would turn to dust, and the Alto Valley Dam will save it, but Mulwray opposes the dam because it is shoddy and ineffective and because he discovers his former partner Noah Cross (John Huston) is dumping gallons of water from the Los Angeles reservoir into the ocean to prove the need for the dam. Ultimately Mulwray is murdered by the very water he serves. “Los Angeles is dying of thirst,” says a sticker near Jake’s car, but, as one police officer explains, “Can you believe it? We're in the middle of a drought, and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.”

While investigating Mulwray’s murder, Jake discovers that the water department is not irrigating as they claimed. A clandestine group is poisoning the farmers’ wells and shooting out their water tanks, so they will sell their property to “ghost” buyers who are either dead or elderly relatives of wealthy LA socialites. In fact, Noah Cross killed Hollis when he hindered his plan to incorporate the valley into the city of Los Angeles by buying up farmland to grow even richer on its resources, declaring, “Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water,” underpinning the continuing connection between water rights and environmental history in Chinatown and other films centering on water.