The beach versus "Blade Runner" : recasting Los Angeles' relationship to modernity

This paper seeks to interpret and elaborate on the mural, as follows: In the first section I expand on the mural’s narrative about Los Angeles. According to this (familiar) narrative, the city exemplifies modernist patterns of development, often to the detriment of minorities, the poor and nature. The high-visibility of Los Angeles’ modernist excesses (as represented by the Faustian destruction of the cottage and its inhabitant) has, however, obscured the fact that a broad stratum of Angelinos have historically shown ambivalence toward development and change. Thus while the movie “Blade Runner” is taken by some critics to accurately reflect the city’s technology-and-change obsessed soul, Los Angeles’ relationship to modernity deserves to be reexamined. In this paper, for example, I show that in the early 1970s Angelinos’ attachment to place—in particular to the coast, a natural environment with the beach as its center—served as a barrier to modernist development. By joining the statewide movement to “save the coast” Angelinos stood up to a powerful local growth machine and indicated that, in certain contexts, their attachments to place could transcend their traditional allegiance to anti-big government, pro-private development values.