Post Modern City: Las Vegas

The above picture taken from http://www.photos4travel.com/las-vegas/las-vegas-night.jpg shows Las Vegas at night. The image shows a replica of the Eiffel Tower and shows Las Vegas as a themed city and also represents nostalgia. Las Vegas presents itself as a Post modern city through its use of many other themed environments including Eve Quillin - disney world theme, Caesar's Palace - Roman themed and Mandalay Bay - Southeast Asia themed.

These themed environments include hotels, restaurants, bars and shops. Las Vegas uses theming as signs to represent itself and create a world your inside that is familiar. This leads to stereotyping and expectations. Las Vegas displays borrowed aspects of particular cultures in order to simulate the culture and appeal to the population, due to the demand of nostalgia for cultural signs . These simulations however are not always culturally accurate.

This world of simulation leads to a lack of authenticity where what people are seeing is not actually real and the memorabilia is not authentic. Las Vegas portrays a weak hyper-reality where people are aware of the difference between the real and the fake (due to the situation of replica iconic buildings not in their original countries of origin) and choose to accept it. This aspect of postmodernity can cause some concern where people are arguably perhaps no longer open to new cultural ideas.

Se7en - Car Scene - Justification of Sins

David Finchers 1995 film Se7en provides a narrative based around the seven deadly sins: gluttony, greed, lust, envy, wrath, pride and sloth. The scene I have chosen is from the height of the film where the character John Doe, played by Kevin Spacey, is providing his explanation as to why he has commited the murders surround the seven deadly sins. His rationale for doing so is a reaction towards those in society who he believes are unpure. Although his methods are flawed due to the fact you cannot murder someone because you don't agree with their behaviour, to him his actions are justified and a consequence of a post modern society which John Doe is very judgemental towards and craves to change and improve.

Se7en raises many concerns regarding the city and society. Arguably however the way in which the city is portrayed is in accurate of a post modern city. It shows the city in a negative way with constant imagery of a wet and dreary place to be and portrays it as a permanent dystopia. Society is shown to be very disconnected, a consequence John Doe believes to be of this post modern world.

Los Angeles - Shopping Mall

Los Angeles has 86 languages spoken in the schools, 13 major ethnic groups, and 140 incorporated cities across the county. Then, Charles Jencks expresses Angelenos as "heterophiliacs" to explain how much Los Angeles symbolises American postmodern city. Los Angeles is a part of a broader and more complex global restructuring of urban cities and metropolitan life.

Many scholars note that Los Angeles has a possibility to be utopia more than other adjacent cities. The existence of shopping malls can be one of remarkable examples of Los Angeles’ utopia. The image above is Beverly Center Mall which is located at the edge of Beverly Hills in Los Angeles. This mall contains 160 boutiques and restaurants and 13 film theatres, and the Rooftop Terrace showcases panoramic views stretching from downtown Los Angeles to the famous Hollywood sign. Beverly Center provides its customers hyperreal vastness of artificial wonder and disneyfied sublimity, therefore it can become themed space which is separated from real outside. At the same time, this separation from outside makes a kind of another world in Los Angeles. This phenomenon links to the erasure of space because the interior is the place of postmodernist perfection where technology allows us to exist in an atmosphere of purified air, perfect temperature, and steel and glass armour plating. Contrary to the separation from real world, the structure of architecture is the seamless flows of space in such shopping malls or domestic interiors. This loss of experience of real world prompts people to gain information of the rest space of Los Angeles through TV or other mediums. Therefore, shopping malls like Beverly Center expand interiorisation.