Pipeline Noir: Seeing Oil Through Chinatown

Watching Chinatown fifty years after its release reveals hidden connections to today’s energy and climate crises

Pipeline Noir offers a fascinating interpretation of Chinatown, a classic of New Hollywood cinema, through the lens of petromodernity. Michael Rubenstein reimagines the film as an allegory for the 1970s energy crises, revealing how its focus on water infrastructure in early-twentieth-century California serves as a surrogate for the oil pipelines shaping the postwar global order. Introducing the concept of the ＂petroscope,＂ Rubenstein demonstrates how the film’s cinematic style mirrors the worldview shaped by petroleum’s dominance in modern life.

Blending appreciation and analysis, this book uncovers layers of Chinatown’s narrative that resonate urgently today, and Rubenstein’s meticulous examinations of the screenplay’s draft history and of key scenes in the finished film shed new light on the film’s cultural and environmental significance. By aligning Chinatown with the emerging field of petrocriticism, Pipeline Noir offers a compelling contribution to film theory and the energy humanities.

Michael Rubenstein is associate professor of English at Stony Brook University. He is author of Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial and coauthor of Modernism and Its Environments.