The clip is brief — about 30 seconds — but it evokes a whole Hollywood historical past. Posted to Los Angeles Dodgers Aerial Photography, a little-followed account on X, previously often known as Twitter, it opens on an out-of-focus shot of Dodger Stadium, filmed via a rain-slicked helicopter window. The rhythmic thump of propellers is the one sound we hear. Eventually the digital camera focuses, and we see what it’s we’re meant to see: The stadium seems as if it’s sitting in the midst of a moat amid Elysian Park’s sparse red-brown hills. Its iconic palm timber jut out of the water like props in a postapocalyptic film. In the background, the downtown skyline emerges from a pillowy haze.
The put up itself doesn’t inform us what we’re taking a look at. Its caption, as sparse as these hills, presents solely “Dodger Stadium this morning” — Aug. 20, the day that Tropical Storm Hilary doused Southern California with unusually heavy rains — {followed} by a wave of innocuous Dodgers-related hashtags. But to anybody who grew up watching the bombastic catastrophe flicks of the Nineteen Nineties and aughts — fare like “Escape From L.A.,” “Independence Day” and “The Day After Tomorrow” — it might need appeared as if a few of Hollywood’s prophecies had lastly come true. The film trade’s obsession with Los Angeles’s destruction has made this sort of picture a key a part of the nation’s psyche, in spite of everything. In his movie essay “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Thom Andersen argues that, if Hollywood’s obsession with the subject is any indication, the destruction of Greater Los Angeles is a kind of broadly held fantasies, just like the bootstrapping fantasy, that binds Americans into one thing like a standard goal. In John Carpenter’s 1996 B-movie basic, “Escape From L.A.,” an earthquake floods the San Fernando Valley and cuts Los Angeles off from the remainder of California, turning town into an island. The nation’s newly elected, fanatically evangelical president condemns all these he considers heathens to life in L.A.
In these motion pictures, Los Angeles represents some ethical offense rectified solely by the area’s drowning (or burning, or crumbling). When the aliens in “Independence Day” place a ship over the U.S. Bank Tower in downtown Los Angeles, ditsy rooftop revelers collect atop the skyscraper to welcome them — solely to turn into the primary of the invaders’ victims, incinerated by a laser beam. In the thriller “2012,” Los Angeles is among the many first cities claimed by an historic prophecy of doom. The film’s protagonist escapes by airplane simply as an earthquake alongside the dreaded San Andreas Fault demolishes town; we’re handled to gratuitous photos of terrified motorists disappearing into the earth, dying as they lived, sitting in site visitors. In a cheekier take, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s “This Is the End” phases the biblical apocalypse as a bummer disruption to a Hollywood get together, casting L.A. as Sodom’s logical successor.
This subgenre means that town is a stand-in for America’s worst tendencies — environmental depredation, materialism, the worship of celeb, venal capitalism. It’s as if we’d exorcise these flaws by ritually punishing L.A. by way of movie. Within the context of Tropical Storm Hilary, X customers assimilated that transient stadium clip right into a collection of catastrophe narratives that had the craving high quality of wishful considering. Don Van Natta Jr. of ESPN posted a nonetheless of the venue and proclaimed, very matter-of-factly, that “Dodger Stadium is an island.” That loosed a cascade of critics. Holier-than-thou urban-planning lovers chirped that the supposed flooding was town’s comeuppance for its poor land-use insurance policies. Amateur historians claimed that the stadium was constructed onto Chavez Ravine, the positioning of a Mexican district that was destroyed to make means for what was then the Brooklyn Dodgers’ new dwelling in Los Angeles, and subsequently vulnerable to flooding.
Source: www.nytimes.com