The Los Angeles River in Film

Multiple films use the Los Angeles River and drainage system as both setting and integral plot device. Some of the most popular films highlighting this LA system connect this reconstructed river to science fiction creatures, which are also transformed, typically by a variety of human-caused eco-disasters. In Them! (1954), for example, giant queen ants mutated when they are exposed to atomic tests in New Mexico enter the L.A. drains to build nests for their enormous eggs. The juxtaposition of two types of transformed nature—concrete river drains and radiated ants—amplifies the film’s argument against exploiting the natural world. 

In more recent science fiction films, the connection between the transformed natural environment of the L.A. River and some kind of monster merges with technology and the modern city. Both Transformers (2007) and In Time (2011) primarily use the river as a backdrop that accentuates the films’ sci fi themes. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), however, highlights the environmental consequences and ultimate human costs of war. In Earth’s near future, ultimate cyborg weapons turn against their human creators. In a battle for the planet played out in the LA drains, two of these cyborgs travel back in time to either destroy or save John Connor (Edward Furlong), the future leader of the human resistance.

           

Most of the films that transform the Los Angeles River and drainage system, however, demonstrate that the environmental impact of this concrete-covered waterway has been treated as natural and desirable. Characters in a variety of films set in LA conform to this view of urban culture through their acceptance of environmental degradation in the form of both a transformation of natural and man-made landscapes. In these films, the LA River is transformed again for multiple uses. It becomes a racetrack for car chases and drag races in films as diverse as Grease (1978), Blue Thunder (1983), The Italian Job (2003), and Drive (2011). It serves as a gun range in films such as Point Blank (1967), Cleopatra Jones (1973), Gumball Rally (1976), Repo Man (1984), and Last Action Hero (1993). Most recently, the world franchise series Taken 3 (2014) is set in L.A., where the hero on the run from the police discovers the storm drain system underneath a suburban home’s garage and escapes undetected into its swirling waters.

The Neo-noir Chinatown (1974), on the other hand, uses the LA River and drainage system to showcase a water rights theme. In Chinatown murder, infidelity, and incest all become integrally connected with water as a commodity in 1930s Los Angeles, a context established by an FDR picture in the opening shot of the J.J (Jake) Gittes (Jack Nicholson) private investigator’s office. Jake is introduced to an infidelity case but discovers the perpetrator is Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the chief engineer of Los Angeles’s Water and Power. According to Water and Power, Los Angeles is on the edge of the desert. Without water, the valley would turn to dust, and the Alto Valley Dam will save it, but Mulwray opposes the dam because it is shoddy and ineffective and because he discovers his former partner Noah Cross (John Huston) is dumping water from the Los Angeles reservoir into the ocean to prove the need for the dam. Ultimately Mulwray is murdered by the very water he serves. “Los Angeles is dying of thirst,” says a sticker near Jake’s car, but, as one police officer explains, “Can you believe it? We're in the middle of a drought, and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.”

Despite this plethora of films showcasing the L.A. River and drainage system, the underground infrastructure showcased in Chinatown seems to be ignored by most film critics studying film noir and the city. Instead, when critics examine what have been defined as noir films in relation to the city and its modern foundation, they highlight the spaces above this underground, especially in relation to cultural context rather than filmic history.

Underground rail systems also play a big part in film noir. Subways, like the underground sewer and water drainage systems in other films, are first constructed and then reconstructed to serve the needs of the films’ protagonists. In Pickup on South Street (1953 Sam Fuller), Murder by Contract (1958 Irving Lerner) and Dark City (1998 Alex Proyas), for example, a noir underworld becomes a literal underworld in scenes shot in a dark angled subway or sewer used primarily as a hiding place for protagonists and/or their enemies. In film, the underground serves as a cinematographic wonderland, an aesthetic as well as ecological space that serves both function and form for noir films from He Walked by Night to Chinatown.

On Dangerous Ground (1952) and Foreign Land (1996) and Conflict between Nature and Culture

In both 20th and 21st century movies, nature and culture are typically bifurcated, with the urban representative of the culture binary usually constructed as dangerous, suffocating, and many times deadly. Nature, on the hand, is primarily represented as a haven, a pastoral escape from a deteriorating city environment where all life seems to be threatened. Such a division is particularly striking in film noir.

In Nicholas Ray's film On Dangerous Ground (1952), Detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) finds solace in the rural hills, away from the decaying noir urban setting he escapes. Wilson has become so embittered by his dealings with the heartless criminals of the urban underworld that his superiors notice his violent episodes of torture with his suspects. To curb his violence, he is ordered out of the city to pursue a young girl’s killer in the mountains up north. 

In this idyllic pastoral setting, Wilson gains self-awareness, with the help of Mary (Ida Lupino), the murderer’s blind sister, and frees himself of his own rage. Nighttime urban shots in the film maintain Wilson’s cynicism and desperation, but gradually, as his view of the world changes, rural shots brighten, suggesting that Wilson’s own blindness about himself has lifted. In film noir, the city is a dark, shadowy, and dangerous underworld separate from a life-giving natural environment.

This same view of the city as an oppressive space occurs outside the United States. The cityscape of Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’s Brazilian neo-noir Foreign Land (1996) resembles that of On Dangerous Ground. Foreign Land chronicles the union between Paco (Fernando Alves Pinto), an aspiring actor living in Sao Paulo, and the virtuous Alex (Fernanda Torres), who works as a waitress in Lisbon, Portugal. Like Jim Wilson, Paco seeks to escape the decay of the city and the empty seediness of his role there and find solace in San Sebastian, his dead mother’s home. Paco feels trapped by forces beyond his control, in this case literally trapped by the role of “mule” forced upon him after his mother’s death.

Devoid of a clear sense of self, Paco, like Wilson, frantically battles the city and its underworld while searching for salvation outside the city and its corruption. As in On Dangerous Ground, a virtuous woman and pastoral solution to urban corruption contribute to the salvation Paco seeks. Although Paco’s attempts to escape a broken city in wild nature fails, both On Dangerous Ground and Foreign Land provide opportunities to explore representations of nature in the cities where we live. They also highlight the connections between cinema and both modern and postmodern constructions of urban space.

The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971) and Anthropomorophism

The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971) applies multiple levels of anthropomorphism. It first applies the primitive psychology level of anthropomorphism; highlighting that insects’ drive to fulfill their basic needs aligns with that of humans. Hellstrom claims, “In fighting the insect we have killed ourselves, polluted our water, poisoned our wildlife, permeated our own flesh with deadly toxins. The insect becomes immune, and we are poisoned. In fighting with superior intellect, we have outsmarted ourselves.” Yet that so-called immunity is based on one element humans and insects share: “only humans and insects as species are on the increase.” Humans radically change the earth, and insects adapt to any changes they can make, Hellstrom declares. Yet his attempts to separate humans from the insect world fall flat because he bases his arguments that insects will inherit the earth on their similarity to humans.

Hellstrom also draws on the folk-psychology level of anthropomorphism when describing the cooperative behavior of insects. At the same time Hellstrom separates bees from humans because of their perfect cooperative culture, he connects the cooperative harvest ants to human farmers when he suggests they were “the first to take steps toward agriculture,” a parallel that aligns with folk-psychology. Hellstrom draws on both traits and folk-psychology anthropomorphism when he maintains that these insects’ “instinct to harvest is an instinct of greed,” just as in the human world. He makes similar comparisons with a termite mound society, “one of the first experiments in social order” that he visually compares to a computer at the California Institute of Technology.

Hellstrom contradicts himself in similar ways when exploring warring elements of nature, elements that again apply a traits level of anthropomorphism. He calls insects and carnivorous plants “macabre masterpiece[s] of revenge,” explaining that flying insects spread contagious diseases to human populations, while we observe carnivorous cobra plants capturing and eating insect victims. He anthropomorphizes other carnivorous plants, as well, using primitive, traits, folk-psychology, and emotional levels of anthropomorphism to make his points about their villainy: a Venus flytrap has “gaping jaws” and a “menacing hunger” that “beckons with gentle perfume.” The sundew is “beautiful,” “a murderess in disguise.” Other insects “become instrument[s] of death,” as well, Hellstrom declares, connecting their violent behavior to that of humans. At the same time, however, Hellstrom maintains that insects’ violence is not based in the greed and revenge he pointed to previously. Hellstrom declares, “Man will point to nature, claiming war was meant to be. But here they died with reason––through selflessness, not greed.”

Near the film’s end, footage and voice-over again contradict this claim, combining images and commentary that illustrate folk-psychology and traits levels of anthropomorphism.  Images of insect violence, including those of ants from The Naked Jungle (1954), illustrate these anthropomorphic levels. Ants use their bodies as bridges, build trenches to prepare for war, and act as sentries and guards to launch attacks and bring back their kill. Hellstrom proclaims that these driver ants are a “mindless unstoppable killing machine, dedicated to the destruction of everything that stands in its way. Each of them is completely blind, driven forward through the darkness by a single demanding need within––the need to kill and plunder.”  Through pillaging, their young are fed, Hellstrom tells us, and an ant-covered lizard is shown being dragged back into their fortress. Other animals and insects are also brought back to share with the rest of the colony: a snake, a caterpillar, a scorpion and a butterfly.

Hellstrom ends the film with the diatribe, “The true winner is the last to finish the race,” but his narrative and film footage suggest insects will inherit the earth not because they are superior to humans but because they are us. By integrating multiple levels of anthropomorphism, The Hellstrom Chronicle turns insects into monsters possessing the worst human traits and exploiting them for the most destructive reasons.