Watching the Train Wreck or Looking for the Brake?

Abstract

In this article I critique several recent films that speak to our current urban malaise, and take stock of their political substance—how well each frames the city, the causes of contemporary crises, and potential solutions. The anarcho-liberal politics that define Beinh Zeitlin's acclaimed fantasy film, Beasts of the Southern Wild are cynical and offer little hope for addressing the broad ecological and social challenges we face. The liberal documentarian approach of Jonathan Demme's I'm Carolyn Parker and Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's Detropia rely on a strategy of exposé that may inspire empathy among some audiences, but lacks the kind of historical and critical analyses that might spur citizens to act in effective ways to solve the contemporary problems of poverty and underdevelopment. Chad Friedrichs's The Pruitt-Igoe Myth and Luisa Dantas's Land of Opportunity, however, provide grounded accounts of contemporary urban disasters, framing the massive dispossession, hellish environs, and new forms of vulnerability that define many cities as consequences of poorly crafted public policy. These latter films encourage the revitalization of a progressive left politics that might begin with the most pressing needs of urban dwellers and through democratic planning, create more just forms of city life.

Keywords:

• cinema
• Detroit
• disaster
• documentary film
• Hurricane Katrina
• New Orleans
• planning
• urban crisis

Notes

Cedric Johnson, ed., The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism and the Remaking of New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Jaime Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (Oxford: Oxford University, 2010); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University, 2005).

Patricia Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002); Ethnic Notions, DVD, Directed by Marlon Riggs (1986: San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel, 2004).

See, Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin, 2009).

It is disappointing, but certainly not surprising, that Red Dawn, the eighties cult classic about teenagers banding together to defend their small town from Soviet invasion would be remade for these anxious times. In the 2012 version, the “Wolverines” repel a North Korean invasion.

Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002). For critical examinations of the Florida, see Brian Tochterman, “Theorizing Neoliberal Urban Development: A Genealogy from Richard Florida to Jane Jacobs,” Radical History Review Winter, no. 112 (2012): 65–87; Peck, “Creative Liberties,” in Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, 192–203; Larry Bennett, The Third City: Chicago and American Urbanism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010).

Katharine G. Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architecture Education 44, no. 3 (1991): 163–171.

Charles Jencks, “The Death of Modern Architecture,” in The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1986 [1977]), 14–20.

Nicole Trujillo-Pagan, “Hazardous Constructions: Mexican Immigrant Masculinity and the Rebuilding of New Orleans,” in Johnson, ed., The Neoliberal Deluge, 327–353.

John Arena, Driven From New Orleans: How Nonprofits Betray Public Housing and Promote Privatization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012).