The Cultural Representations of Disaster in the New York-based 70-80s Exploitation Movies. A socio-political overview

International audienceIn the nineteen sixties and seventies, the grindhouses were local movie halls which showed uninterrupted independent films of series B quality, today known as “exploitation flicks” or exploitation films. The 70-80s have produced copious of these exploitation movies flirting with imagination of disaster. This paper explores some key figures of the cultural representation of politics, crime, justice and law offered in (post)apocalyptic New York–based movies. We examine particularly the imagination of a vertical geography of justice; the urban vigilante hero; survivalist themes and the figure of local democracy after social disaster(s). A recurrent theme of post-apocalyptic fictions is the reference on the scale of values connecting justice and morals in the New York social structure. Why New York? Because in these fictions the city is generally showed as the symbol of the organized life of ordinary people (especially in “survivalist” fictions) while metaphoric function of Washington, DC, is to reflect the seat of power. So, the first target of directors focusing on New York relates to the dysfunctions of the local and domestic democracy as a symbol of the ordinary world. This paper discusses these issues with Boltanski, and Foucault human geography concepts about justice and heterotopias