There’s a famous scene in the 1974 film Chinatown where protagonist Jake Gittes confronts the film’s puppet master villain, Noah Cross, the wealthy tycoon responsible for a greed-driven water shortage in the San Fernando Valley, and who — spoiler — raped and impregnated his own teenage daughter.
“How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford?” Gittes asks him.
“The future, Mr. Gittes,” Cross tells him.
The scene is at the heart of the film’s warning about extreme wealth, its limitless accumulation, the undue power it brings, and the way it perverts — literally and figuratively — both the person who holds it and everything he touches. It holds more than a few parallels, in other words, to the real-life story of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who excitedly wrote out almost the entire exchange between Gittes and Cross in an April 2018 text message to his new friend, former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, only as an analogy to the exciting possibilities of the cryptocurrency industry.
“Interesting crypto, everyone wants in,” Epstein texted.
“It’s the future mr goetz (Chinatown),” Bannon replied, badly misspelling the name of Jack Nicholson’s private eye while helpfully slipping in the name of the movie he was quoting, prompting Epstein to write out the Gittes-Cross dialogue. “Love this film,” Bannon replied.
In many ways, the person most illuminated by the Epstein documents released last month by the House Oversight Committee isn’t even the billionaire pedophile himself, but Steve Bannon, whose communications with Epstein are laid bare at length in the disclosures. And the staggering obliviousness of that text exchange, in which both Epstein and Bannon appear to identify themselves with the movie’s ultrawealthy rapist villain, is the fundamental hypocrisy of Bannon’s larger project in microcosm: a working-class rebellion against a decadent elite led entirely by well-connected…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
