Back in 1991 the BBC chatter Los Angeles to expect if it was the metropolis of the future . Their answer ? Yes , but not in a skillful way .
As someone who moved to L.A. back in 2010 , the metropolis I see in this BBC special is a portrayal of dystopia that ’s rather unfamiliar to me . Is Los Angeles a dreadfully Sunday - souse hellscape awash in railroad car and dripping with cynicism ? Sure . But it ’s a unusually different dystopia than was predicted in 1991 .
Boing Boing’sColin Marshallfirst spotted this documentary on YouTube and points out that in 1991 the metropolis had yet to see the riots of 1992 and the Northridge Earthquake of 1994 . A mess has changed since those days in the ealry nineties . I spoke with Marshall last summer for his podcastNotebook on Cities and Culturewhere we speak about the various dytopias of Los Angeles .
The city of L.A. was an solely different beast in 1991 than it is here in the former 21st century . The smogginess , the gang violence , and the gated nature of L.A. have ebb and flowed during the last 25 years . These things all still exist , but their essence are nowhere near as crippling to the human spirit . Our modern apprehension is one that is perhaps harder to pin on extraneous force within the metropolis .
The BBC episode look like the metropolis of the 1993 anti - hero movieFalling Down . Whereas the genuine dystopian vibe of L.A. today might be closer to The Jetsons meets Blade Runner — one part cartoonish Space Age romanticism , two part high - tech crime thriller .
By the end of the documentary there ’s no mistaking what the BBC think of Los Angeles and the future tense it represents . And it ’s not frightfully kind in its judgement , even if it ’s just a “ public debate . ”
“ Meanwhile , the disputation continues about whether the California Dream will become a postmodernist nightmare , ” the storyteller says ominously .
Top figure of speech : Los Angeles in 1992 , the twenty-four hour period after police military officer were acquitted for the whacking of Rodney King via the Associated Press
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