January 27

Demolition Man: to Destroy LA is to Build LA

Filed Under arts, ideas 

(By Nicola Bozzi)


Due to a mostly comedy-oriented film education as a kid, I had missed Marco Brambilla’s action-classic Demolition Man (1993) back when I had the chance to catch it in its box-office semi-freshness (17 years ago it took a while before a movie passed from the movie theater to the TV screen). I have recently made up for this lack, and while the roughly-cut screenplay, the flat characters, and the unlikely fighting choreographies might have amused me much more when I was 10 years old, I have to be thankful I could enjoy a first impact with the movie after reading Mike Davis‘ City of Quartz and watching a couple of documentaries about the riots that shook Los Angeles in the 90s. In the analysis that follows, this article here has also been a big inspiration in terms of the movie’s relationship with Hollywood and LA’s urban and social landscape.In a nutshell, Demolition Man is the story of a super-tough cop (Sylvester Stallone) fighting his old-time criminal counterpart (a reckless and unquestionably evil Wesley Snipes) in the future, after both have undertaken a punitive cryogenic hybernation that Stallone obviously didn’t deserve.

The story is set in 2032: Los Angeles’ urbanization has now expanded to include San Diego and Santa Barbara, and is therefore called San Angeles. The infamous violence that characterized the City of Angels has been banned, and even cursewords are punished with fines (a continuity detail hilarously carried on for the whole movie, unlike the protagonist’s sub-quest for his missing daughter, apparently cut off). This Brave New World-inspired LA has turned into a peaceful hi-tech heaven, where malice, sexuality, and phyisical contact are frowned upon. The policentric nature that makes Los Angeles such a controversial ground in terms of urbanism has also disappeared, since the city was rebuilt after a terrible earthquake. The patchwork urban fabric has now been replaced by some sort of gentrified suburbia, where Taco Bell is a chain of high end restaurants. The rich wear kimonos (a hint to the Californian New Age trend or to the growing Japanese interest in the city, also described by Mike Davis?) and the underclass is now living underground, eating rat-burgers.

I find this spatial verticalization of class difference particularly significant and contrasting with the paradoxical ghetto/gated community polarization of the actual LA. In Demolition Man, this dialectic is brought back by the return of Simon Phoenix, the super-villain played by Snipes. Pheonix is so crazy he looks like a black Joker, but unlike Gotham City’s most dangerous criminal he has a geographical origin: he is said to be based in South Central, the battle ground where he and Stallone first come to blows at the beginning of the movie. No need to point out the movie was made just one year after the riots breaking out in that area, following the acquitting of the four officials responsible for the Rodney King bashing.

In comparison to the dystopic and apocalyptic present both antagonists come from – a 1996 which, when the movie was made, was already the future – the new San Angeles reality lacks direct confrontation with poverty and racial diversity, both relegated in the sewers. The infamous police brutality that made Los Angeles the perfect setting for any cop movie has also disappeared, making guns unnecessary and the new policemen inept when it comes to fighting. But, like the only African-American in the SAPD says, it takes an old-fashioned cop to catch an old-fashioned criminal.

Interestingly enough, although Phoenix is the unquestioned villain in the movie, the person responsible for his return is the apparently peaceful and enlightened Dr. Raymond Cocteau, the city’s savior and basically the one who has single-handedly created the San Angeles lifestyle utopia. Cocteau needs the criminal to kill the leader of the underground rebels, a bunch of motorized and weirdly-dressed graffiti-writers coming from the sewers. Obviously the rebels eventually benefit of Stallone’s help and Truth is somehow re-established.

We could compare the newfound conflict between Stallone’s character and the ridiculously stereotyped villain he’s trying to stop like a Clockwork Orange-style awakening, in which the Hollywood spirit making Los Angeles almost synonymous with violence (at least in certain contexts) is brought back to life. More than a celebration of urban diversity, Demolition Man looks more like a reclamation of the city as a battleground, where masculine and physical values overcome a spineless and boring future and shake the precarious balance obtained by the ruling powers with a dose of reality. The film’s reality is of course not a multi-ethnical and socially complex fabric, but an epic polarization of Good and Evil. Although not shown, the Hollywood sign we see burning at the very beginning of the movie is restored at least in spirit at the end: through the demolition of the peaceful utopia of San Angeles, the city as a violent simulacrum can be restored.

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