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The clip is brief — about 30 seconds — but it evokes a whole Hollywood historical past. Posted to Los Angeles Dodgers Aerial Images, a little-followed account on X, previously often called Twitter, it opens on an out-of-focus shot of Dodger Stadium, filmed by a rain-slicked helicopter window. The rhythmic thump of propellers is the one sound we hear. Ultimately 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 course of a moat amid Elysian Park’s sparse red-brown hills. Its iconic palm bushes jut out of the water like props in a postapocalyptic film. Within the background, the downtown skyline emerges from a pillowy haze.
The submit itself doesn’t inform us what we’re . Its caption, as sparse as these hills, affords 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. However to anybody who grew up watching the bombastic catastrophe flicks of the 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 business’s obsession with Los Angeles’s destruction has made this type of picture a key a part of the nation’s psyche, in spite of everything. In his movie essay “Los Angeles Performs Itself,” Thom Andersen argues that, if Hollywood’s obsession with the subject is any indication, the destruction of Better Los Angeles is a kind of broadly held fantasies, just like the bootstrapping fantasy, that binds People into one thing like a typical function. 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 the 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. Financial institution 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. Within 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 the town; we’re handled to gratuitous photos of terrified motorists disappearing into the earth, dying as they lived, sitting in visitors. In a cheekier take, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s “This Is the Finish” levels the biblical apocalypse as a bummer disruption to a Hollywood social gathering, casting L.A. as Sodom’s logical successor.
This subgenre means that the town is a stand-in for America’s worst tendencies — environmental depredation, materialism, the worship of celeb, venal capitalism. It’s as if we would exorcise these flaws by ritually punishing L.A. through movie. Throughout the context of Tropical Storm Hilary, X customers assimilated that temporary stadium clip right into a sequence of catastrophe narratives that had the craving high quality of wishful pondering. 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 fanatics chirped that the supposed flooding was the town’s comeuppance for its poor land-use insurance policies. Newbie historians claimed that the stadium was constructed onto Chavez Ravine, the location of a Mexican district that was destroyed to make approach for what was then the Brooklyn Dodgers’ new residence in Los Angeles, and due to this fact vulnerable to flooding.
