It's alright ma (it's only creative destruction).

 

At the start of Schwarzenegger's real breakout role, in James Cameron’s Terminator (which we will consider more fully later), the titular Terminator is beamed back from the future to then-present-day LA. The place he finds himself is an urban dead zone strewn with rubbish and populated by some unlikely looking (and acting) Punks, whose clothes he immediately steals, thus swathing himself in a subcultural glamour that combines the trappings of motorcycle leather boy Brando in The Wild One, with the militaristic; flat-topped, beefed up, gimlet-eyed. The city the Terminator is sent back to is in many respects a typical city vision of the time though by the time T3 comes around that vision will have shifted significantly. The failed or failing cities of the Seventies, those emblematic of America's decline are New York and Detroit, though New York will have been “saved” by the mid- Eighties.

In a sense the destruction and decay of New York is too horrible to really contemplate, a surplus of reality that must be transformed in fantasy (even as the city is itself is being transformed by a resurgent Wall Street, gentrification, zero-tolerance policing). As of 2012 Manhattan residents are 265 percent wealthier on average than residents of the Bronx. In order to see something of the transformation of New York, at least in its representations in film you need only look at the distinction between the start of Woody Allen's own 1971 Bananas when he is menaced by emerging action hero Sylvester Stallone on a graffiti covered subway and the rhapsodic black and white vision of the bourgoise enclave that is Manhattan.

If Allen’s black and white retro-rapture over the preservation of Manhattan as a different kind of paradise two other highly influential the movies represent the New York on the 70s as a kind of abject wonderland, places whose very decay and decline generate startling new forms of mutation, innovation and hybridization, Walter Hill’s The Warriors and John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. in which the city has become a huge open-air prison. The opening of 1987s The Secret of My Success well captures the vibe of Neoliberal New York with a proto-hipster montage of an agog Michael J Fox taking in the combination of subcultural and multi-ethnic delights alongside the clean and gleaming new skyscrapers, his opening line is “Well, I guess we are not in Kansas anymore”. The edginess and diversity of the newly gentrified city are what has drawn him, along with the opportunity to make big bucks.

"There is a new  world  in sight/ what a chance  for the new, modern man."

 

Post segregation, post stonewall, post Vietnam and with a newly reconfigured finance capitalism on the rise with the world is reconfigured as a wonderland, and exoticism and the offer of immersion in luxury and erotic adventure lay on the other side of the Seventies abyss. For those who are lucky enough to be able to live inside the bubble that it is.

The cities and states that are growing and prospering are in the South.