Chinatown System Today

The irony of the film title, Chinatown, is that the corporate-government syndicate is something like the opposite of Chinatown. Here's a story in today's NYT that shows the development model is alive and well: buy and control a natural resource whose value you increase through government connections.  (Don't think about Trump here, think about Milken, a real California story.)

(Photo is of Milken's Opportunity Zone in Nevada under a federal program "designed to spur economic development and job creation in distressed communities.")

Chinatown on Noir Capitalism

What's the connection between Gittes and Marx? Here's the slide from Thursday's lecture.

The film Chinatown doesn't say anything directly about 1. It does say something indirectly: Gittes quits the police force, where he is an employee subject to the practice of getting paid less than the value his labor produces.  As a private eye, he is self-employed, which in theory would reduce his exploitation. (He gets to exploit Walsh instead!)

The film has a lot to say about 2 and 3.  Above all, it claims that mega-development depends on the corrupt use of political power.   "Market forces" such as constant migration to California do play a role.  There was quite a bit of migration from the Midwest in the 1920s and 1930s, and some famous literature tried to capture the results, like The Day of the Locust.  But the demand for low-cost housing could have been satisfied by hundreds of small builders rather than by large tract development.  Chinatown is about how moguls override the supposed invisible hand to concentrate their own wealth through force-based control of the political system.  Exploited labor is visible, but mostly around the edges of the film, in the form of mostly Japanese-American servants and gardeners.

Chinatown Issues for building a quiz question

First, there are those slides that summarize the real Owens Valley deal on which the Chinatown screenplay is based.

The movie does quite a good job of translating the real history.

What's noir about this complicated, multi-year business deal? Hmm, that could be a good quiz question.

Then there's Gittes' failure, which I rushed a bit at the end of that lecture.

We can decide together when you want to discuss noir economics (monopoly capitalism as Cause #5) or Gittes's middle-class weakness.