Why L.A. Is Synonym for Disaster
Mike Davis is the author of "City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles." In novels written before 1970, when Los Angeles was still the most WASPish of large U.S. cities, racial hysteria was typically expressed as fear of invading “hordes”--variously yellow, brown black, red or their extraterrestrial metonyms. Apart from the impressive Martian armada in the 1953 film version of “War of the Worlds,” most of Los Angeles’s space invaders were low-budget campers, like the aliens who raised Dracula and Vampira from the dead in Ed Wood’s gloriously awful “Plan Nine from Outer Space”, or the invisible Martians who terrorized Hollywood starlets in “The Day Mars Invaded Earth”. With their insistence that “aliens are already among us,” these tales echoed highly publicized claims that “real” extraterrestrials were on a sexual crime spree in the Los Angeles suburbs. “California Here I Come” has been replaced by bumper stickers vowing “Not Yet L.A.” If Los Angeles’ fictional disasters in some sense track national discontents, they also mobilize deep-rooted cultural predispositions.
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