Beyond Blade Runner

Beyond the blade runner is an interesting perspective into Los Angeles and also provides an insight to the systematics way of adaptation. Mike Davis uses Los Angeles as the model for the Blade Runner concept, reason being that “Los Angeles’s dystopic alter ego” is why the county is in such a divide of culture and identity. Los Angeles has always been known as the city of fame, often times referred to as the city with all the neon lights, wealth, and as this yellow peril. However, Los Angeles is the county of Ghost that have come to haunt and conform their actions to date, it is the county that to Mike Davis has become “a carcass covered with too many maggots” and has now created a society of repairs instead of replacement.

Mike Davis references many of the key problems that Los Angeles faces, indicating as well how society was much more active to just repair the problem opposed to trying to fix the problem. The very first few problems that were dwelled upon was the Los Angeles riots of 1990s, the problems that had stem from the haunting idea of another riot and the reaction from the public. Society had vindicated a certain subset of people that were to blame for these riots, and had began to change their society to help separate themselves from the problem.

One of the biggest things that occurred during the riots was people looting and robbing stores, homes and other buildings that had wealth to them. This problem had instilled dire fright into the residence of Los Angeles, which had drove them to advance their own security within their homes and created free-fire zones, “Social Control Districts”, Neighborhood watch programs, and bars on homes and local markets that had concluded in a prisoning society. All of these were implemented and these actions were taken in response to the Riots and the rise in gang violence, drug dealing, and widespread crime. These all assisted in help covering up the truth behind Los Angeles, and the perpetuated problems that had came along with the growing numbers of crime and the response by those that were acting in revolt of the growing disparity of the poor.

The reality of Los Angeles was proven through the power of Simulation, Mike Davis lays out another city in California that had gone through the same structural problems. Hollywood has always been known for it glamour and fame, however Hollywood had progressed through several stages and always avoided to highlight the problems that arose. Hollywood had gone through the “Movie-made Spectacle” to the “Citywalk (LA)” and through all of these there had been the perception that Hollywood was this Movie pub that was amazing and great. It however, neglect the ugly truth of what is happening in the background. This exactly what allowed LA to absorb the problems, instead of facing the problems and the things that caused them. Mike Davis argues that the “Blade runner is not so much the future of the city as the ghost of past imagination” indicating that the future is only going to reflect the problems that still haunt them and were never left unsettled and unsolved. In order for LA to solve this they would have had to address that “it was the culmination of a decade of declining economic opportunity and rising poverty followed by two years of recession that tripled unemployment in Los Angeles’s immigrant neighborhoods” that correlated to the riots and the perpetuated problems directly after.