Mike Davis says something interesting

The always-rewarding Bldgblog has a fun interview with Mike Davis, who wrote the iconic history of Los Angeles City of Quartz. Davis is flacking a new book, Planet of Slums, which I won't read because the couple of books after Quartz so enraged me with their shoddy reporting and conclusions -- things lots of people go after Davis for, as Bldgblog points out in the intro to the interview.



Anyway, the new book is about the shape of global urbanization, how it's mostly poor and underdeveloped. So fine -- old territory for professional amateurs in urban theory like myself. But here's the cool part of the discussion:

Davis: I think, actually, that if Blade Runner was once the imaginative icon of our urban future, then the Blade Runner of this generation is Black Hawk Down - a movie I must admit I'm drawn to to see again and again. Just the choreography of it - the staging of it - is stunning. But I think that film really is the cinematic icon for this new frontier of civilization: the "white man's burden” of the urban slum and its videogame-like menacing armies, with their RPGs in hand, battling heroic techno-warriors and Delta Force Army Rangers. It's a profound military fantasy. I don't think any movie since The Sands of Iwo Jima has enlisted more kids in the Marines than Black Hawk Down. In a moral sense, of course, it's a terrifying film, because it's an arcade game - and who could possibly count all the Somalis that are killed?



BLDGBLOG: It's even filmed like a first-person shooter. Several times you're actually watching from right behind the gun.



Davis: It's by Ridley Scott, isn't it?



BLDGBLOG: Yeah - which is interesting, because he also directed Blade Runner.



Davis: Exactly. And he did Black Rain, didn't he?



BLDGBLOG: The cryptic threat of late-1980s Japan…



Davis: Ridley Scott - more than anyone in Hollywood - has really defined the alien Other.

I might even amplify, though Bldgblog didn't link it, by saying "the Alien Other." And that's classic Davis, worth paying attention to even when he's nutty, and writing books about international urbanization without ever leaving his office. I never made the connection between Ridley Scott and my own internal visualization of how cities work since the future has moved beyond Blade Runner. For Davis, it's a throwaway line.