One particularly striking aspect of the construction of Anderson and Cabrini-Green is their resemblance to badlands. While “badland” is a vague and nebulous term, Ross Gibson works through particularly useful concepts of it in Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. Despite the fact that Gibson’s work refers to a rural stretch of Australian highway, several of these concepts are reflected in the urban spaces of Precinct 13 and Candyman.
One of the most basic of these concepts is the idea that, in the badland, “violence begins to seem natural”. In Gibson’s Australian badland, this is due to catastrophic natural disasters displacing and disenfranchising subsequent generations; in Anderson and Cabrini-Green, on the other hand, violence is simply the natural order of things. In Precinct 13, cops accept the “Friday night rush” as the normal way of life, while Lawson expects to be shot at from the moment he enters Anderson. In Candyman, Lyle talks about children regularly being shot in Cabrini-Green, while her research partner, Bernadette Walsh, reacts to the project the same way that Lawson reacts to Anderson. Newspapers, too, are quick to recognise that violence is an expected part of everyday life in Cabrini-Green: a headline reads that “life in the projects” was the cause of death of Ruthie Jean, the last victim of the gangster who called himself Candyman.
Candyman also offers a history of violence in Cabrini-Green. Candyman himself died there: his hand was cut off, and he was tortured by stinging bees before being burned to death in retaliation for miscegenation. The site becomes “a revelation of horrors past” when this history emerges within Cabrini-Green. Swarming bees infest a public bathroom where a boy was mutilated, and as Lyle discovers, Candyman is a prominent feature of the project’s graffiti. His face dominates the spare room behind the murdered Ruthie Jean’s apartment, the refrain “sweets for the sweet” appears in areas he is said to have haunted, while another wall depicts his torture and death. Interestingly, these “horrors past” are hardly acknowledged elsewhere. Dolores Hayden notes that, when this is the case (as it often is, in the histories of American minorities), the community may create alternative means of public commemoration. One of the most notable ways of doing this is through public art. Unlike the bees in the public toilet, Cabrini-Green’s graffiti is not simply an eerie reflection of the past, but rather, a deliberate reminder of it — although it remains hidden to most of Cabrini-Green’s residents nonetheless.
Another of Gibson’s observations is that the term “badland” originally referred to “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition”. Anderson and Cabrini-Green, being inner-city residential areas, were certainly successfully colonised. Nonetheless, they still bear a striking resemblance to the lawless desert frontier. This is most evident in Precinct 13’s Anderson — which is perhaps no surprise, given that Carpenter was inspired not only by Romero, but also by Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo. Even geographically, Anderson resembles a border town: the streets are wide, the houses small; barren, empty lots stretch across the ghetto; and area has more dead lawns than it does greenery. Fittingly, the Anderson police station resembles a stronghold or fortress that would not be terribly out of place in a Western about the American Civil War.
