Die Hard 2 continues the pessimistic view developed in the first film in the series, but to much more incisive ends. In the first Die Hard Bruce Willis's solo cop John McClain goes up against terrorists, hindered by the stupid, greedy, or willfully malicious. The film is built around the notion that the USA in the 1980s might be a land in terminal decline that can only be saved by a few good guys who know the ropes and don't take shit from nobody. As deadly as the terrorists are dimwitted cops, FBI agents used to treating the USA like Vietnam, duplicitous yuppies, moral-less newshounds. The vital forces of action shown actually getting things done are New Women (gutsy like men, in business, although Bonnie Bidelia's Holly is defined mostly by her marriage to McClain and her family), the Japanese (the action takes place in what feels something like foreign soil, or an everyplace, a chunk of California signed off to Tokyo), and a gang of multi-national/racial terrorists.
Die Hard 2 of course repeats this, unhelpful cops and conniving bureaucrats and so forth, although actually the air control staff are depicted as resourceful and courageous: possibly, like Billy Elliott, a segment of the workforce that had struck a blow against neoliberalism, and becomes its victims (the PATCO strike of 1981), was being rehabilitated. If anything the film's failure at being as wholly enjoyable comes from repeating the first film on a vastly smaller scale (also Willis wanted out by this point, asking for his character to be killed off). What is more pointed here is that the film draws direct links between the USA's overseas wars and the military-industrial complex. The backing of a Latin American drug dealer leads to a team of US Special Forces turning rogue in a bid to free him from prison: such as links are well established and still being raised.
Though 90s action films are largely fluff, some seem very remarkable when looked back on.
Either in their vision of the 1990s as a grim near-future, or chaotic distant 'dark age':
Or in fairly critique/contempt for the government from within the military:
Something of a 'Praetorian guard taking over the republic' feel to all of it really.
In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras! They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want.
Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone."
"The night-time economy can bring many benefits to an area,
but how can councils ensure that it's properly managed? Get it right, and the
night-time economy can boost your financial prospects locally, enhance the
sense of community, in your area and also improve local services during the
day. But if councils get it wrong, a community can be plagued by antisocial
behaviour and alcohol-fueled violence."
"The panel learned that the town centre was seen, by some
influential key players, as the ‘engine room of the local economy’ and the
future economic success of Middlesbrough is tied up with the performance of the
town centre. Developing a more diverse evening economy can bring many opportunities
and economic success to the town in terms of job creation, attracting
businesses and people and altering the image of the town."
By the cashpoint, half past 1. Idling about waiting for friends to restock on
money so we can go back into the club and carry on drinking. Lad slumped at a
distance from the cashpoint: head lolling about, clumsily try to manipulate a
smartphone. We eye him and walk on by; offer sage advice, for example “You
wanna watch that mate, someone’ll have it off yeh” or the sturdy, “Are yeh
alright?” Can’t quite remember what I
said but it might have been “You want to get yourself a taxi home.” Think later
that I should have maybe done something more for him, helped out; try and fight
the idea it’s his own stupid fault for getting in a state. He isn’t there when
we roll out a few hours later into the pizza shop; hopefully he didn’t come to
any harm. Wonder where his friends were.
Second floor near the bar; guy in a dark coat appears. Starts
talking to me (his accent Eastern European?) quite friendly-like: he’s clearly
fucked. You can see from his face the links between body and brain have been disjointed
by intoxication; seen this sort in here before and don’t like it. Friends
return and we proceed towards the ground floor to meet up with others, dark
coat following. He grabs one of my friends by the throat and holds him against
the wall at the top of the stairs; we don’t make a move, appreciating the precarious
situation. Dark coat turns to me and inquires of my friend whose throat he’s
got his fingers wrapped around: “Do you know him”. Indeed I do. He releases him
and wanders off after giving me a friendly ‘cya around’ sort of gesture. Friend
who’d been restrained turns to me and says “Who the fuck was he, did you know
him?” No, but I did feel worried for him: if he’d tried that when the friend we
were going to meet on the ground floor was about, the one who’s been drinking
since about 4, he’d have ended up at the bottom of those stairs without a
doubt.
Outside, the smoking area. A friend has been chatting to a
girl we’ve met: plenty of people floating about, smokers, black-coated bouncers,
hi-visibility coppers in the distance. Guy turns up amongst the four of us: “That’s
my girlfriend.” Friend who was walking to her replies “Alright then.” Guy
(never do find out if he is her boyfriend, the girl’s edgy and starring with
quite appropriate disapproval) acts quite genially but in no certain terms
offers to fight all three of us: “Bring your two friends”, he says to my friend,
“they don’t mean anything to me.” We’re frankly stunned, the guy’s fairly
out-of-shape looking, and obviously the worse for drink but even still you’d
have to be a lot more drunk than this to embark on something as plainly idiotic
as this. Eventually the situation is defused in the way these things are and we
drift off. See the girl again that night on her own: understandable.
Very late in the night/early in the morning. Cooling towers,
chemical works, orange flaring from towards Dormanstown. Too tired to speak or
say anything or look at anyone. The taxi skirts its way through what’s left of
the little Hercules of British industry in the sad pre-dawn as we are driven
ages for no reason to drive to an outer suburb to drop a friend off. It’s only
when I’m this tired and this drunk that I start thinking about inanities: my
dad’s stories about working at a steel foundry and a warehouse amongst the
stacks in the now carved-out and ‘redeveloped’ docklands; Ridley Scott’s
memories of the industrial skyline and its impact on the imagery of Blade
Runner; the permanent orange glow just beyond the Eston hills.
There’s still industry here but it’s no more convincing than
when the Deputy Prime Minister visits a shop floor somewhere: this is what Britain
still does the news and the politicians are telling you, it’s all about the classics,
the cars and airplane engines and so on. What they would find it difficult to
say is that the real action is behind me in the town centre: young men and
women leaning against walls with tears in their eyes; a broken bottle arcing
down a face leaving red memories and lost sight; three police kicking a man in
the gutter and hefting him into the back of the van with the rest. A utopian
idea in the 1990s about clubs suggested they could become zones of alternative
reality, fuelled on E-nergy and rave optimism/hedonism. Dream on.
It's difficult to comprehend the utter depravity of contemporary global capitalism, until you see something like this, in which a deeply amoral market trader expresses his disbelief at the amorality of the financial system. When the bewildered civilisations of the future look back at us, they will think we make the late Roman Empire look like a particularly austere nunnery.
London is a city few people understand, and those that are least likely to understand it are its residents and its proselytisers. The reason so few understand it is because hardly anyone knows that London possesses a deep, dark secret. It's a secret I found out quite by chance in the mid-nineties, and have kept to myself ever since, largely because so few people I could tell it to would recognise it, and, even if they recognised it, would be prepared to ever admit it.
The first job I took after I left university in 1994 was as an engineer installing escalators on the London Underground. This was a time when London Underground Limited was well into a programme of refitting every single escalator in its stations subsequent to the King's Cross fire of 1987, in which the old wooden-step escalators were (erroneously) suspected of contributing to the conflagration that had resulted in the death of 31 people, and were to be replaced with brand new units, such as the ones my company manufactured, that featured steel and aluminium steps.
When you step onto an escalator on the Underground, what you may or may not realise is that underneath your feet is another large room, at least as big as the concourse in which you are standing. This underground room is where the escalator is maintained, which is why you never see anybody working on a stopped escalator - all the maintenance is carried out underneath. This underground room possesses an upper chamber, where the escalator controls are mounted (that regulate the escalator's speed, the co-ordination between steps and handrail etc.), a concrete staircase that leads down between each pair of machines, and a lower chamber. Behind the lower chamber, sealed off with a dividing wall, is the pump room, where a water pump operates to ensure the chamber is not flooded by ground water.
We were never allowed to enter the pump room, which was the responsibility of a different company, but what struck me at the time, in every station that I worked, was just how noisy the pumps were. Rather than a slow, muffled thump, the pumps emitted a rapid dakka-dakka-dakka, as though they were at the very limits of their operation. One night, however, while I was in one of the lower chambers at King's Cross, the maintenance engineers for the pump turned up for a scheduled inspection. I took the opportunity to peer through the open door of the pump room, and was amazed to see that not only was the pump indeed operating at an almost manic speed, but that the sunken floor in the pump room was under about six inches of water. Despite my alarm, the pump crew assured me that this was "normal".
The reason why the pumps in the Underground were all working flat-out, I was to subsequently discover, was that the water table in London was rising, and had been since the end of the Second World War. Surprisingly, far from this raising of the water table being the result of human "development", it was quite the opposite - London's water table was returning to its natural level. What had kept it well below its normal level was the fact that up until the 1950's, the ground water had been heavily utilised by London's extensive manufacturing industry. Nowadays we are unfamiliar with the idea of London being a centre for industry, but it was in its heyday one of the great industrial cities of the world, all be it mainly specialising in light and medium industry (the most profitable kind, it should be said).
The disappearance of London's industry was partly a sympton of the general decline of British industry in the post-war years, but it was also partly due to the decline of London as a port with the adoption of freight containerisation - there was no longer any point in locating a factory in proximity to London's docks if you were actually importing and exporting via Harwich or Felixstowe. It was this realisation that the capitol had lost it's two main raison d'etre's - its function as a port, and its purpose as an industrial city, that lead me to comprehend its deep, dark secret: that London is obsolete.
Which is another way of saying that London is dying. It is dying in the same way that Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, Sunderland, Liverpool, Sheffield, Belfast and all the other major British industrial cities are dying. And once I understood that London was dying, everything that happened there started to make sense: the inner-city riots of the 1980's, the chronic under-investment in transport that had led to the fire in the room in which I stood, the Big Bang that tried to breathe new life into the metropolis via unhinged credit expansion, the bizarre obsession with "vibrancy" that revealed the underlying fear of cultural death.
London had become a city that no longer made anything of substance; it only made words and images. It's proselytisers would speak of the "culture industry", but ultimately what it was making was simply guff.
The underlying reason for the riots of the last few days is the same underlying reason for the riots of the 1980's - absent any viable industry, London cannot provide secure, well-paying jobs for its people. If it cannot provide secure, well-paying jobs for its people, then it will precipitously decline. Unlike the 1980's there will not be any more adventures in the financial industry to give the illusion of economic viability. You can also be sure that the one thing the authorities in London will not do, regardless of political stripe, is encourage the return of industry to the metropolis. The best that Londoners can expect is perhaps an angry play that "confronts" the "issues".
And so what we have seen over the last few days is simply the first murmurings of London's long-overdue Detroitisation. Over the coming decades, London will no longer be encroaching on the Green Belt. Rather, the Green Belt will be encroaching on London.
