Woooo!
Gates was hired to bring his LA to the screen, and Open Season is, indeed, Daryl Gates’ L.A: a fallen cathedral, where the good and moral and quiet wait in fear of multicultural street scum, creeping over some liminal threshold into white suburban reality. Naturally, per Gates, gang terror is enabled by social welfare programs: “This is an all-girl Hispanic gang,” Carey reads in the LAPD files. “To enter and stay in the gang a girl must rob at gun-point a retail business. Many of these girls are unwed mothers and receive public assistance.”
In this LA, a city of “dirtbags, creeps and losers,” graffiti is an “urban blight.” Mothers entreat the police to “make [the] streets safe for the children,” and the cops can’t bear “to see the little children and the innocent families hurt by all the street violence.” A cop is killed walking a woman to her car. A little girl hugs Carey when he solves the gruesome murder of her father. Gay men and sex workers are lascivious. Black characters say things like “Yo, I be fly today!” and “This be my ‘hood. I be Raymond Jones da third.” (Asked to comment by Vibe on that, Gates ducked the blame: “I told [Sierra] that these people use the same language that you and I use.”)