Category Archives: Film – Repertory

In between penning scabrous satiric novels about the soul-crushing pitfalls of modern life, Martin Amis tends to return to his original job as newspaperman and would do the odd newspaper or magazine feature piece. Sometimes those pieces would also feature the soul-crushing pitfalls of modern life. Write what you know.

Back in 1990, the now-defunct Premiere magazine sent Amis to Houston write about Robocop 2, the best-forgotten Frank Miller-scripted homage to cinematic overkill. It’s a scathing piece (collected in the anthology Visiting Mrs. Nabakov), but particularly memorable for this reflection on the modern city:

The main precincts are deserted after 6pm — for this is a modern city, and no one is seriously expected to live in it. You work in it. Elegantly alienated youths rollerskate through the empty malls. They aren’t sullen or simmering or smashed; they are just not interested. Later, the night sky will contain the faint reports of gunfire: the crack wars of the crack gangs. Driving through the more depressed areas the next day, you will find the streets littered with beercans, hookers (“Hey, white boy!”), undergarments, human wigs-and the nomadic poor, clustered in the steel and concrete crevices of the city; soon, the police will come and briskly pressure-hose them out of there, and they will be obliged to regroup somewhere else. But not downtown, where the future is contentedly going about its business. Look into the magenta glass of the looming skyscraper, and what do you see? The reflection of another skyscraper — and another, and then another.

Technically, the film was set in Detroit, but clearly what Amis saw could stand in for any number of post-residential American downtowns, new theories about the return of the urban center notwithstanding.