A Los Angeles Science Fiction Sublime

Is it possible to claim that there is now a Los Angeles sublime in the history of science fiction (SF) cinema? Is there a representational space that is a view of Los Angeles that is both sublime and structured by the conventions of the SF film? By definition, this space would have to convey both awe and terror, as in those views of Mont Blanc that so profoundly inspired the Romantic poets Shelley and Wordsworth, for instance. As a guideline, we could follow Philip Shaw’s (2006) assertion that the “underlying structure of the sublime,” which produces astonishment, stresses “baffled aspiration and the recourse to inarticulacy” (p. 113). As for SF cinema, Scott Bukatman (1999) claims that the “precise function of science fiction, in many ways, is to create the boundless and infinite stuff of sublime experience, and thus to produce a sense of transcendence beyond human finitudes” (p. 256). Certainly, the cinema provides ample opportunity for astonishment as it not only employs special effects to create worlds beyond our imaginations but is also, itself, a special effect that endows light, in the words of Bukatman (1999) “with an overwhelming physicality” (p. 271). This is crucial, to the extent that the sublime is produced in the dialectical movement between that which is presentable and that which is beyond symbolization, leading Shaw (2006) to observe that “the sublime has always, in some way, wavered in its relation with the material” (p. 131). Thus, broadly speaking, the interplay between presence and absence produces the sublime affect, and this can be readily seen in the tradition of sublime landscapes, which emphasize the techniques of luminism and monumentalism, which produce a transcendent experience that both exceeds and is bound to things in the world (Bukatman, 1999). As Shaw (2006) writes, “Objects that come to signify this beyond thus become infinitely attractive, fearful, overbearing, more simply sublime” (p. 135).

One approach to these themes is to note, as Susan Sontag (1969) does, the perverse pleasure experienced in watching monuments destroyed in SF disaster films. In these scenarios, the substance of the monument is annihilated, made absent. Freud’s discussion of the Uncanny, in which the dialectic between the familiar and the unfamiliar creates dizzying senses of anxiety, also exhibits the ambivalence that lies at the heart of the sublime. In fact, while the Uncanny is typically associated with the horror and gothic genres, both Sontag (1969) and Vivian Sobchack (1997) have pointed out that the structure of SF films fully relies on the anxiety that emerges in viewing familiar things that have been de-familiarized, often by way of massive and violent destruction. In this sense, we can see why a Los Angeles SF sublime would borrow from the disaster and horror genres and feature characters and objects, including monuments, subjected to radical de-familiarization.

Disaster and the Uncanny certainly provide opportunities to experience the unsettling and negative capacities of a future Los Angeles, but SF is also driven by the more affirmative tradition of presenting images of wonder. In fact, wonder and de-familiarization routinely share much ground in SF, and the genre gains significant intellectual and affective value by emphasizing estrangement, often by undercutting a sense of wonder with depictions of dread. Phillippe Mather (2002), for instance, claims that “the sense of wonder created by SF’s estranged worlds is the bait or sugarcoating that allows the genre’s cognitive or didactic dimension to operate” (p. 188). He argues that Darko Suvin’s concept of “cognitive estrangement” encourages viewers to make sense of alien images and sounds by, on the one hand, naturalizing the unfamiliar (e.g., characters accept alien sights and sounds as normal) and, alternatively, presenting everyday occurrences and familiar things as strange and threatening. In an SF film, the city often serves the purpose of creating a sense of awe that is associated with beauty, sometimes in the exaggerated celebration of the “Wonder City” (Staiger, 1999). In particular, this is an affect achieved in the canyons of skyscrapers that are somewhat unique to New York City but now serve as shorthand for modern urbanization and an aesthetic that showcases the triumphs of technology—what has been referred to as the technological sublime (Marx, 1967; Nye, 1994; Staiger, 1999). In SF cinema, this representational space was first established by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis (1927), which was, significantly, influenced by Lang’s 1924 trip to the United States that included a harbor landing in New York City (Sobchack, 1999). In this film, the city features elaborately designed skyscrapers connected by spectacularly suspended tubes, bridges, and motorways.

This is not the appeal of Los Angeles, which, until recently, tended to eschew the cold rationality of modernism and its vertical thrust away from the earth. Instead, Los Angeles was typically depicted as suburban space, a lateral arrangement of urban development, effectively undercutting the sense of wonder associated with downtown verticality. In Los Angeles films, natural living, or living in nature, is depicted as a teleological result of rational planning and healthy desires, particularly as regards the promotion of life in Southern California as a profound version of the plenitude, health, and bounty associated with the American Dream (Scott, 2009). Good examples of this theme’s influence in recent SF films include the playground scenes in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991), the beach and boardwalk scenes in Strange Days (Bigelow, 1995), and the golden-hued view of downtown in Battle: Los Angeles (Liebesman, 2011). For instance, in the first U.S. version of H. G. Well’s The War of the Worlds (Haskin, 1953), 1950s’ Los Angeles is represented as coterminous with the wild. The Martians’ initial assault is not on downtown but, instead, approximately 50 miles away in a rural setting, where we are encouraged to appreciate the grand scale of the onslaught by viewing herds of startled animals and flocks of birds fleeing over open ground.

So vital is the image of the wild that is associated in the public mind with Los Angeles that even the original studio cut of Blade Runner (R. Scott, 1982) plays on this theme. Although it is a film profoundly influenced by the expressionist imagination of Metropolis, this cut includes a conclusion that represents an escape to nature for Deckard and Rachel. Not surprisingly, this version, and especially its blatant use of deus ex machina to secure a happy ending, is routinely criticized as being naive and condescendingly escapist. Largely because of the effect of this film, though, Los Angeles SF films now routinely depict the future as a dystopian diorama of all that went wrong, shrouded in a corporate industrial and transnational night that obliterates Southern California’s sunshine. Blade Runner is a striking film from this perspective, because it provocatively embraces the dialectical conflicts and contradictions between the beautiful and the sublime that we have seen as foundational for the SF film. “Like the best science fiction and city films,” observes Bukatman (1997),

Blade Runner incorporates at once the magisterial gaze of the panorama, the sublime obscurity of the phantasmagoria and the shifting fields of the kaleidoscope. Blade Runner’s elaborate mise-en-scène and probing cameras create a tension that is fundamental to a period of inexorably advancing technological change. (p. 12)

Our first and lasting impression of this future Los Angeles is one of astonished terror, and its de-familiarized representation of the decaying Wonder City serves as a powerful example of the cognitive estrangement that emerges from the hybridization of nature and culture. Moreover, Blade Runner’s profound association with this city, in particular, makes clear that a Los Angeles SF sublime is anchored in thematic and formal conventions that emphasize the overwhelming scale of the integration of nature and culture in the future. Indeed, the film’s sense of terrible wonder derives from every element of its environment, which is dense with opportunities to consider the theme of hybrid identity: the excessively natural qualities of the replicants; the floating billboards that also serve as the sky; the postmodern architecture that suggests a built environment that far exceeds, but complements in this excess and in its organicism, the natural world; and the photographs that constitute memory. All of this is flamboyantly implied and framed in the opening sequence of the film: plumes of flame flashing up in the refinery landscape mise-en-scène that is a spectral distillate of the film’s themes, all of which can be read as a celebration of the nature and culture dialectic that is at the heart of the Los Angeles SF sublime.

Blade Runner’s influential style and themes have been appropriated broadly in global SF film, but it is necessary to recall that its uncanny combinations and integrations of nature and culture, and the sublime effects of hybridization that the film showcases, are also a reasonable extrapolation of a multitude of elements that derive from spaces associated with the Los Angeles region. For instance, militarism and aerospace science at Pendleton, Andrews, and Miramar merge with sun and sand tourism in Malibu, Santa Monica, and San Diego, and this blends with the global media “command and control centre” of Hollywood, which, itself, rubs shoulders with the world’s largest agribusiness in the Grand Central Valley. Nonetheless, particular as this space is, influenced on so many sides by a variety of distinct regional historical traces and industrial forces, it is also clear why a Los Angeles SF sublime serves as a template for the representation of contemporary world systems. Like Los Angeles, these world systems merge the activities of simulation, surveillance, and spectacle. In the context of SF film, the dissemination of fantasies about “gorgeous and monstrous Los Angeles,” as Bukatman (1997, p. 25) describes it, nonetheless also confirms the relationship between U.S. cultural imperialism and neoliberalism—as though the contemporary world’s memories are stills from Blade Runner.

The sprawled-out future Los Angeles, familiar from SF films, rarely inspires naive transcendence and instead creates a sublime quality most often associated with intense crises in technology and nature. This dystopic perspective borrows much from film noir, and in Los Angeles SF films, detectives regularly serve as our way into spaces of infinite complexity, providing access to an interior that contrasts with our outsider perspective. The relationship between elaborate special effects and the detective, as an elite reader of the labyrinthine spaces of densely layered production design, is also central to Los Angeles SF sublime. Blade Runner inaugurates the motif of investigation, but this theme is popularized in numerous films, including The Terminator (Cameron, 1984), The Thirteenth Floor (Rusnak, 1999), Strange Days, and The Matrix (Wachowski, 1999). The labyrinth of space (but also of time travel) serves as a recurrent figure in this oeuvre, the majority of which have been produced after 1980. As others have noted, the nostalgic effect of the detective story has a powerful resonance in Los Angeles, where the most famous writers of popular hard-boiled literature often lived and set their stories (Bukatman, 1997; Davis, 2006; I. Scott, 2009). If we consider Los Angeles as emblematically postmodern, the nostalgia for the detective character in Los Angeles SF reinforces Fredric Jameson’s (1991) view that nostalgia is one of the core characteristics of postmodern style.

Until the late 1970s, few SF films featured Los Angeles, but the city’s prominence in the period of postmodernism has led to greater visibility in SF films. So striking is this development that contemporary SF films routinely present the case that the end of civilization is intimately connected to threats against Los Angeles. For instance, in Battle: Los Angeles, a character describes the crisis: “There are massive casualties in Moscow, Paris . . . we’ve lost communication with Tokyo, Rio, and New York . . . we cannot lose Los Angeles!” This is in stark contrast to earlier disaster films and SF cinema in which the destruction of Paris, New York, and London are depicted as legitimate threats to human progress, while the destruction of Los Angeles, usually considered synonymous with Hollywood, was considered a benefit to civilization (i.e., the cleansing of the modern world by eradicating a new Sodom and Gomorrah). In the period of postmodernism, and the society of the spectacle, Los Angeles has achieved top ranking among world capitols. As Lerner and Arnwine (1998) claim,

Los Angeles may have gained the oxymoronic status of a postmodern archetype for urban development, taking the place once occupied by Baron Haussmann’s remaking of Paris, the vertical extrusion of New York’s Flatiron Building, or the concentric circles of Chicago. It was, after all, at John Portman’s Bonaventure Hotel that Frederic Jameson began his much-debated analysis of postmodernism. (p. 2)

Because there are only a few other things that stand as monuments in Los Angeles, it follows that the Bonaventure becomes part of a Los Angeles SF sublime. City Hall is cast prominently in The War of the Worlds, but in most SF films about Los Angeles, the entertainment industry tends to be front and center, with the Hollywood sign an overused target. In a sense, this points to a lack of imagery with which to build a Los Angeles SF sublime, as though there is just not enough symbolic fabric to make the quilt. This is well illustrated by the moment, in Panic in Year Zero (Milland, 1962), when the central character looks back from the hills to see an atomic bomb explode downtown. In the 1960s, so underdeveloped is the sense of dread associated with Los Angeles SF disaster that the producers felt it sufficient to signify the destruction of the city with only a brief flash of overexposed footage—no demolished monuments or decapitated landmarks; no abandoned streets, parks, or public squares; and no emergency meetings of government.

It is tempting to explain Los Angeles’ conspicuous absence in American SF film prior to the 1980s as a consequence of the city’s lack of easily recognized monuments. As noted in regard to the landscape sublime, monumentalism is a crucial component of sublime affect, as it articulates a clear symbolization of the dominant order, the limits of which will be tested by a critical event. As Miranda J. Banks (2002) points out,

The national monument, already a part of the national imaginary, becomes a site of condensation and displacement. The Statue of Liberty, The Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial serve as physical embodiments of aspirations and ideals, and as such carry with them a series of associations related to the nation and the political body. (p. 145)

The War of the Worlds is again instructive because it has very few shots of urban Los Angeles in the first hour, preferring to stay in the hills outside the core. The first shot of the city appears only after the initial Martian attack. However, there is only this one shot of the city before a lengthy montage takes us away from California, to explain the global effect of the Martian invasion, featuring images from several world capitols, including their monuments, before returning to the United States, only to settle in D.C., of course. Even when the story returns to California, it initially stops in San Francisco, signaled by the Golden Gate Bridge. In the period 1950 to 1980 it is not only the lack of recognizable monuments but also the perceived lack of political significance that hinders the production of the spaces of Los Angeles SF film. Ultimately, in The War of the Worlds, the city does get obliterated, and it is a powerful, but not sublime, sequence of destruction. While the special effects now seem laughable, there is a profound irony in these scenes in that, by the 1980s, the very space cleared by Martians in the film was the site of the Bonaventure and several other towers that were redefining the look of the city. The downtown of 1953 is now barely recognizable, but in Hollywood SF’s crystal ball, the movies had effectively previewed urban development in Los Angeles.

While the Hollywood sign, City Hall, and the Bonaventure serve as recognizable Los Angeles built environment, there is also now general recognition of the Los Angeles skyline—as it has been developed since 1980—as a monumental landscape. In part, what is recognizable about this collection of towers is its location within a spectacular sprawl of unspectacular buildings. The view of contemporary downtown Los Angeles recalls that of the Emerald City in Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939)—the structures quickly reach to the skies in jagged increments surrounded on all sides by a generic flatness that crawls with life (in Oz it is fields of poppies, and in Los Angeles, it is a seemingly infinitesimal series of low-rise structures stretching nearly 100 miles from Orange County to the Simi Valley and the same distance again from the ocean to San Bernardino). Visually, this reinforces the sense that Los Angeles is a disease or a virus that spreads: “In the neo-organicist city we encounter a shift of emphasis away from an anatomical conception of space as an assemblage of individual organs towards a neurological reading of space as a diffuse and interconnected realm of human interaction” (Gandy, 2005; p. 29). The affect of this reorientation is sublime.

If there is a single monument that currently serves to focus the attention of a global audience on the city, it is the Hollywood sign, and several notable SF films have used it to represent dread. For instance, Demolition Man (Brambilla, 1993) opens with a title indicating that we are in Los Angeles 1996, as a helicopter shot takes us over a burning Hollywood sign and into a war zone below—clearly social relations have deteriorated quickly after the 1992 riots. In general, populist films use dystopian spectacles such as this to register a collective sense of social unease and panic about ethnicized armed struggle in Los Angeles. Escape from L.A. (Carpenter, 1996) also trades in this populism, but its sense of the perceived threat of a multicultural Los Angeles is highly ironic, to the extent that the film’s premise, like the director’s earlier Escape From New York (1981), jettisons the city from the mainland, making it an island that is characterized by uneven development, violence, criminality, and guerilla warfare. It is dominated by the arch Aryan leadership of the United States, which baldly shows its true colors, as xenophobic and paranoid. That this is intended as an allegory for contemporary attitudes to a racialized Los Angeles is clear, but it is notable that the disaster that sets the story in motion is an earthquake, which again showcases nature as the author of a Los Angeles SF future of wonderful terrible dimensions. The Bonaventure tumbles, the basket weave expressways collapse, and a dilapidated Hollywood sign surveys it all.

The principal scene of destruction in The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich, 2004), an ecstatic rendering of a Los Angeles SF sublime, also features the Hollywood sign, which is vacuumed up like a dust bunny by one of several tornadoes that move menacingly through the valleys. The exterior scenes of the disaster are intercut with shots inside an office, where a cleaner polishes floors and an office worker makes out with his girlfriend. True to the conventions of the disaster film, by the time the couple realize that a tornado is bearing down on their location, they are sacrificed to the devastation, and the entire building goes dark and silent. From the perspective of the cleaner, who has survived, we see a bright light emitting from the cracks around the worker’s closed office door, and when the cleaner opens it, the view cuts to a reverse-angle shot. This is an exterior helicopter shot that frames the cleaner, initially, and then pulls back to reveal a panoramic view of Los Angeles destroyed. Tornadoes slither into the distance, leaving wreckage and devastation in their wake. In the middle ground stands the US Bank Tower, with one of its sides sheared off—rebar, electrical cables, concrete, and paper spilling into the sky. Eventually, as the camera pulls away to reveal the Los Angeles basin, it is difficult to recognize the miniscule cleaner, on the edge of the crumbling tower near the top, gazing out the office door that he has opened.

The immediate effect of cutting from the cleaner’s interior view to the omniscient view of the exterior is one of estrangement, to be sure, for we are initially disoriented by the radical change in perspective. But the shot also impresses us because it presents the scale of the catastrophe by depicting this human character as just another tiny object, comparable to the paper, desks, and office equipment that we also see on the edge of the building. On the left side of the frame is the destroyed column, sheared in half so that now offices spill their contents 50 stories above sea level. As the camera pulls back to reveal the tornadoes receding into the valley beyond, the composition of the frame is such that we are reminded of famous sublime landscape paintings, in particular those by the American painter Thomas Cole. Cole’s paintings depict nature as a sight of terror, wonder, and dread, and they are, as Maurizia Natali (2006) has argued, examples of the history of sublime representations that are integral to the foundational principles of an American imperialist imaginary. Cole’s famous contribution to this imaginary is his five-painting series titled The Course of Empire (1833-1836), which tells the story of a rising empire that swells to bloating and eventually crumbles in decadent splendor. The five massive landscapes represent progressive stages of the “day” of the empire, the sun moving across the canvases left to right, while the built environment rises and falls and the sublime peaks and clouds endure. The composition of the frame in The Day After Tomorrow (with the crumbling US Bank Tower in the middle ground) is eerily similar to many of Cole’s mythic paintings, including Desolation (1836), the last of the paintings in the Empire series. This canvas depicts the final stage of U.S. imperialism, a period characterized by decay and the creeping, triumphant return of nature.

As The Day After Tomorrow illustrates, recent representations of Los Angeles in SF cinema have emphasized the verticality of the city with powerful results. But it is worth noting, as well, that some films continue to take advantage of the lateral sprawl of the city to evoke the sublime. For instance, in 2012 (Emmerich, 2009), massive earthquakes (again) rock the major fault lines in Los Angeles, and huge tracts of land just fall away as the central characters make a getaway by plane. As their small craft attempts to get airborne, we share their perspective, watching one neighborhood after another disappear below, and we imagine that the city has finally all gone to hell. Notably, while it is true that these scenes begin with an attention to horizontal space, their sublime effect is ultimately achieved by reintroducing verticality: instead of looking up, though, we stare down into gaping nothingness, as the earth is sucked into a void. Another depiction of Los Angeles sublime that features the surface of the city, initially anyway, is found in The Core (Amiel, 2003), in which the Space Shuttle, on its return to Andrews Air Force Base, finds itself over 100 miles off its intended reentry path. Fundamental, subterranean changes at the core of the planet have disrupted electromagnetic technology, and the Space Shuttle is now barreling toward downtown. To avoid a cataclysmic crash, the crew does some quick calculations by hand and prepares to make an emergency landing in the Los Angeles River. The ship narrowly misses Dodger Stadium and eventually crash-lands along the concrete basin, shearing its wings and tail, careening under bridges, and finally coming to a halt inches away from a scaffold on which a lone (unaware) worker has been abandoned.

Like the cleaner in The Day After Tomorrow, this character serves as a figure through which we are meant to consider the enormity of the event. But these scenes also suggest the persistence of class relations as a structuring element within commercial entertainment. It is not insignificant that the working class is regularly positioned in SF and action-adventure films as a witness to modernity’s crisis—as though the proletariat exists in American movies as a spectator of environmental catastrophe and the disaster of global capitalism. As well, the use of the river as a site for this landing is inspired, to the extent that it suggests the uniqueness of a Los Angeles SF sublime. Appearing in Los Angeles SF films as early as Them! (Douglas, 1954), the concrete basin of the river is a metonym for nature and reminds us of the way that Los Angeles, exemplary of contemporary urban development worldwide, has created a built environment that simulates, and simultaneously extinguishes, nature. It is in Los Angeles, for instance, that Walt Disney began the project of building theme parks that present popular entertainment spectacles as a natural expansion of the “persistence of the rural idyll” that Ian Scott (2009) recognizes as inherent in the city’s ethos. This reinforces the sense that the nature and culture hybrids of famous Los Angeles SF sublime films, like Blade Runner, are prefigured by the history of the city itself, as though its future was already shaped by its archive of simulations.

Edward Soja (1996) and Mike Davis (1999, 2006) have reminded us that Los Angeles, as much as it is a center for global entertainment culture, is also at the heart of Southern California’s aerospace and military science industries. Acknowledgement of the city as a space of vanguard technology is reflected in the Los Angeles SF films that are made after Blade Runner. The term tech noir (which is derived from the name of a bar in The Terminator) has been used to designate this aesthetic, and it accurately describes the expressionist mise-en-scène of the films, as well as referring to the contemporary reality of Los Angeles as a hi-tech hub. Given that the term suggests a hybridization of SF and detective genre conventions, it also presents Los Angeles as an exemplary urban space (unlike earlier SF that emphasized the city’s proximity to nature). These characteristics are fully displayed in the worlds presented in Blade Runner, Strange Days, Virtuosity (Leonard, 1995), The Thirteenth Floor, and the films in The Terminator and The Matrix series. In Los Angeles SF sublime, then, high-concept design, including spectacular visual effects, provides the framework for what Michelle Pierson (1999) describes as “techno-futurism”: “an aesthetics which is at once inclined towards simulation and mimesis—and a decidedly more synthetic, visibly more plastic, mode of visualization” (p. 173). Pierson’s claim is that special effects in the 1980s and early 1990s, before the extensive use of computer-generated imagery, which works to seamlessly integrate the actual with the virtual, present themselves in highly conscious ways such that the effects become the attraction.

A variety of scholars have followed a similar line of thinking, defending SF special effects as the actual content of the films (Bukatman, 1999; Landon, 1992; Tuck, 2008). Tuck argues, though, that the heightened attention to the discourse of special effects in SF films runs the risk of undermining their sublime affect. He writes,

The sublime is not simply more spectacle precisely because it is not quantifiable. If the image is simply numerically increased there comes a point when the risk simply exhausts both narrative and audience. Indeed, a vital part of the experience of the sublime is exposure to danger from a position of safety: the threatening vertiginous rocks are seen from the safety of a wide ledge, the powerful storm is experienced from a place of protection. (p. 258)

Thus, to recall the workers in The Day After Tomorrow and The Core, we can see that their safe vantage points, viewing the destruction of Los Angeles, evoke the sublime. They are tiny relative to the destruction, and this contrast of scale creates a sense of awe, while the multiple tornadoes that careen up the valleys or the Space Shuttle’s crash landing can be seen, following Tuck (2008), as examples of spectacle. Nonetheless, Sean Cubitt (1999) argues that special effects are always potentially sublime precisely because they are the supplement to a film’s narrative. Considering three films that feature Los Angeles in disaster scenarios, Cubitt claims,

As in the most monumental ceilings of the Baroque, we confront in the special effect as such—the effect as it appears in films like Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996), Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) or Volcano (Mike Jackson, 1997), not in the service of narrative but as the purpose for which the narrative exists—not the representation but its obverse: the sublime. (p. 127)

Cubitt’s (1999) reference to the Baroque is not only consistent with the postmodernism that we have noted as being central to Los Angeles but also serves as an appropriate characterization of the period of neoliberalism that gives rise to the Los Angeles SF sublime. By way of these films, we can understand how power and capital have been deterritorialized (Harvey, 1989, 2006) and why it is that the sublime, in a secular culture, is now fully expressive of the ecstatic capacities of consumerism, market speculation, and media spectacles. In contrast to an SF sublime that is historically connected to the values and social imaginaries associated with national and political monuments, Los Angeles SF sublime features monuments that are implicated in the cultural and financial sectors, suggesting that while power was once represented as unfolding within the realm of politics, a future Los Angeles represents all power as emerging from culture and capital. One of the consequences of this displacement, the absorption of political spaces by the spaces of commodity culture, is the heightened sense of irony and nostalgia that forms the affective core of Los Angeles SF sublime. Take, for instance, the “tech noir” aesthetic: Its fetishization of the hard-boiled detective and chiaroscuro lighting seems to ooze nostalgic affect, but in being articulated in such broad strokes across a variety of media, there is also a sense of ironic detachment in the seemingly compulsory requirement to apply this style to films set in Los Angeles. As well, in Los Angeles SF sublime, we are invited to feel nostalgic about humans (including intimate personal relationships and cherished human qualities such as love, honor, and dignity), but, as spectators, we are also encouraged to be ironic in this commitment to humanism because we are also attending to the films’ hyperbolic technological spectacle of effects. Moreover, and notwithstanding Cubitt’s (1999) argument, we rarely take the narrative content of these films too seriously because they tend to be highly derivative and, in a sense, we already know how they will turn out.

Sontag (1969) and Jameson (1982), among others, argue that SF invites us to encounter and contemplate our own present crises. What insight into contemporary social and power relations does a Los Angeles SF sublime permit? Along with identifying the important characters of the detective (as a figure that allegorizes our society’s investment in investigation and information) and the designer (as a figure that allegorizes the rationalized production and management of contemporary spaces), the sublime affects in these works also illustrate core values in our symbolic order. Paraphrasing Slavoj Žižek, Philip Shaw (2006) states: “The sublime ought, therefore, to be seen not as a founding myth, generated by the symbolic, but rather as that which must be excluded so that the symbolic order can maintain its consistency” (p. 140). Moreover, if the sublime is that which is left uncovered by the symbolic order, effectively exceeding its ability to contain it, then the sublime image of the burning and crumbling US Bank Tower, for instance, also reveals the operation of ideology, where the dialectic between that which can be revealed and that which must remain hidden takes place. As Žižek (1999) himself explains,

One can categorically assert the existence of ideology qua generative matrix that regulates the relationship between visible and non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as the changes in this relationship. (p. 55)

Without question, then, as an image that intimates the twilight of American empire, the figure of the tower in ruins is in place specifically to ensure the maintenance of the ideology of the American empire. Just as surely as Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire presented sublime images of destruction and the exhaustion of imperial symbols only to reaffirm the primacy of empire, we can see that the image of a devastated US Bank Tower ensures the glory of American capital, just as forcefully as the sublime image of Christ suffering on the cross affirms the eternal glory of God. It is in the moment, when the worker opens the office door, linking the unimaginable with the imagined, that the ideological operation is revealed, and the Los Angeles SF sublime is experienced. And, when Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken, at the end of Escape From L.A., extinguishes the last match on earth, saying with irony, nostalgia, and husky indifference, “Welcome to the human race,” the sublime affect of his nihilism ultimately affirms our investment in the ideology of humanism.

In Battle: Los Angeles, humanity’s last stand takes place in the city. The film begins with a montage that represents the alien attack, followed by a fade to black and a title card that reads, “Enemy contact minus 24 hours.” This is followed by a helicopter shot that rises over a mountain peak to reveal the city on the day before the attack, revealing downtown Los Angeles as an SF “Wonder City,” immersed in a golden luminescence that bathes the US Bank Tower and the cluster of skyscrapers that are now recognizable as the city’s monumental skyline. Tupac Shakur’s “California Love” accompanies the rising shot of downtown, providing an ironic comment on the images of Los Angeles under attack by aliens that opened the film. While the battle in the story takes place primarily in Santa Monica, the image of downtown Los Angeles, specifically the US Bank Tower, is reprised on several occasions, and at the film’s conclusion an exact repetition of the rising helicopter shot reveals, beyond the ridge of mountains, a downtown that is now ablaze. The US Bank Tower, a literal representation of American capitalism, is engulfed in flames. But, as we now understand, such sublime images do not necessarily represent the end of American empire. The image of the burning building is a supplement of the symbolic order, jettisoned so as to ensure the hardening of empire and the continued expulsion of all that cannot be allowed in that symbolic order.

Recalling other SF presentations of the destruction of Los Angeles, we will note that the sublime affect is, as Tuck (2008) suggests, insured by the safe vantage points that characters occupy as they witness the crises. The workers in The Core and The Day After Tomorrow, the replicant slaves in Blade Runner, the criminals in Escape From L.A., and the marines and civilians in Battle: Los Angeles all witness this destruction from spaces that allow them to safely express their awe, fear, and indifference. As much as the destruction, itself, has to be expelled from the imperial symbolic order, it is equally true that the fear and indifference shared by those marginalized by the discourse of empire must be eradicated. A Los Angeles SF sublime, then, presents both the image of destruction that threatens the empire and the resentment of those that are excluded from the rewards of that system. It is this resentment, suggesting a global network of indifference to U.S. ideology and empire, that fully provides the capacity for SF films, set in Los Angeles, to produce a space of sublime experience. For, by way of these witnesses, the unpresentable is presented, revealing that which the symbolic order cannot abide: resistance to U.S. imperial power.