L.A. Futureized
by Gary Phillips
Michael Moorcock, and no, he’s not a porn actor, is slated to write a new Doctor Who novel. Mr. Moorcock is a big time science fiction writer with something like 100 sci-fi and fantasy novels to his credit. One of his characters, Elric of Melinboné, has been done up in prose and comic books, and fans have waited decades for a movie version, or at this point they might even settle for one of those cheesy cable movie gems the recently renamed SyFy Channel cranks out.
If memory serves, Elric is a skinny red-eyed albino, apparently the product of inbreeding, who wields the mother of all swords, Stormbringer. In a kind of vampiric bit, the black sword when it kills steals the soul of the vanquished, sending the strength into the sorcerer-king Elric. I seem to recall the sword sang a mournful tune as it did so. And Doctor Who has been in all kinds of media from prose to comics to movies and TV, so this seems like a marriage made in geek heaven.
Elric of Melinboné
But it’s not Doctor Who nor Elric I have on my mind so much as the late National Rifle Association’s president (and among the Hollywood contingent who attended the March on Washington decades earlier) Charlton Heston. I’m working on an outline of a book I’m trying to sell, set in a near future, somewhat dystopian L.A., and I’ve been dredging up past pop cultural references beyond Blade Runner. I thought of Heston specifically in his role as another doctor, Robert Neville, in The Omega Man, the second film version of Richard Matheson’s 1954 horror novel, I Am Legend. This one set in a desolated downtown Los Angeles of the ’70s.
In the novel Neville battles moms and dads and grocery clerks turned into vampires in and around bucolic Gardena. Matheson (who also wrote the short story of the classic middle-aged man terrorized by anonymous truck driver the TV movie Duel was based on) has stated he used his house, as he was living in Gardena at the time, as the house of the main character. The bloodsucking condition was spread by mosquitoes biting a vampire, then going on to bite humans. Vincent Price starred in the first version, Last Man on Earth, and Will Smith was Neville in I Am Legend, the recent big-budget version set in a Manhattan overrun with vegetation, lions, and mindless ragers like in 28 Days Later, who’ve been exposed to a laboratory spawned virus, an unintended consequence of a search for a cancer cure.
In Omega Man, Heston’s Neville is a military doctor who, when his helicopter crashes, inject himself with a serum he’d helped concoct. For it seems biological warfare between Red China and the Soviet Union wipes out most of humanity or turns them into albinos who can’t go out in the daylight, and are led by Anthony Zerbe as Matthias, a former TV personality turned religious anti-technology nut. Imagine Rush Limbaugh as leader of the zombies (I know, he already is). At one point Neville is captured by the dark glasses wearin’, black robes with hoodie sportin’ “Family” Matthias heads, and is going to be burned at the stake in Dodger Stadium.
Now that’s entertainment. Plus an extra on the DVD is famed anthropologist Ashley Montagu dropping by the set to chat with Heston about the symbolism of Neville’s struggles.
There’s also Escape from L.A., the follow up to Escape from New York. Kurt Russell is back as the eye-patched, bad tempered ex-soldier, Snake Plissken. A mighty earthquake has separated a large swath of the Southland from the mainland, and Los Angeles Island is a massive prison like in the New York version. The Christian zealot, Moral Majority-type president played by Cliff Robertson (Who bans porn but guns too? Come on, he’d insist on one gun per person.) has to send the snarling Snake into L.A. to retrieve the tech controlling the Sword of Damocles, satellites capable of destroying computer programs worldwide via electromagnetic pulse.
Turns out that prior to John Carpenter getting his 1996 Escape from L.A. out, there was a little seen quickie called New Crime City that rolled out in 1994. In this film a convict named Anthony Ricks is executed but somehow brought back to life. He’s then sent into Los Angeles where there hasn’t been an earthquake, but a several-miles-long sectioned-off part called Crime Zone erected in the middle of the city. One of the dudes running things in this zoo of gangs and cliques is called Ironhead, who is threatening to wipe out people with a virus he’s gotten ahold off unless he’s kicked loose.
In an article by Richard Foss about fictional apocalyptic L.A. in the late, lamented CityBeat, he begins the piece with a description about a 17-year-old surfer named Gil from the sci-fi novel Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The novel is about pieces of a comet striking the earth and, in this passage, causing a massive tsunami that sweeps in from the Pacific across the Southland. Gil and other surfers do some ultimate shredding.
Below him now was Santa Monica Boulevard. The wave swept over the Mall, adding wreckage of shops and shoppers and potted trees and bicycles to the crashing foam below.
I believe too Plissken rides the waves to save his ass in Escape from L.A. Interesting too that Blade Runner, based on the master of dystopia and paranoia, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was transported to L.A., as the book is set in San Francisco. His Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is set in L.A, in a neo-fascist America. Where a la South Africa on steroids, the black population has been forcibly sterilized, and everyone needs an ID card or be sent to a labor camp.
Jason Taverner, a Dean Martin-Johnny Carson kind of cat, is a singer, with a variety show host seen by 30 million viewers, and a Six, genetically enhanced to be the best. But after a pissed-off lady friend slaps an alien parasite on him, he wakes up the following day with no one remembering who he is or any identification. He’s become a non-person and not only does he miss being a celebrity, in the New World Order, he has no way of obtaining an ID card.
I haven’t seen it yet, but the critically panned but looks to be box office juggernaut 2012 gets in gear as Los Angeles is destroyed in the mama jamma of all special effects excursions. Though I’ll probably wait to catch the flick on a double bill with Zombieland. While Battle: Los Angeles, which is said to be shooting, is about marines going to-to-toe with aliens here in town—maybe with the Coliseum becoming the 21st century Alamo. Ironically standing in for war torn L.A. will be Baton Rouge and Shreveport.
Well, I’ve got some raw material to work with from alien zombies to born-again vampires out to steal our precious body fluids. I’ll have a a stalwart hero, flawed, but true, and colorful villains set against a landscape where the buses don’t run, except nobody notices, the subway system still isn’t finished, City Hall is an armed fort, and where you’ll still probably find a Starbucks open.
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