It all happens in the first two minutes of Alan Pakula's masterpiece The Parallax View. The golden elevator rises up the slender stem (or beam) of the Space Needle and enters the "flying disk." The scene dissolves into a view of downtown Seattle from the disk's observation deck. It's a clear day and Elliot Bay and Harbor Island — one of the busiest bodies of water and ports on the West Coast — are ominously vacant. There are no massive cruise ships, ferries, barges, cargo ships; it's as if the only life in this city is here, behind the deck, in the core of the disk that hovers over the-then, 1973, 100-year old city.
Designed by Victor Stienbrueck for the 1962 World's Fair, the Space Needle is to Seattle what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. In his essay on the Eiffel Tower, the semotician Roland Barthes stated the writer Guy Maupassant often lunched in the tower's restaurant because it was "the only place in Paris where [he didn't] have to see it." The same can be said of the Space Needle. It is seen everywhere — from Queen Anne to Capital Hill to First Hill to the business district. It flies overhead as you walk across the city. And because it is everywhere in reality, it is also everywhere Seattle appears in the movies: McQ, Say Anything, Assassins, Sleepless in Seattle.
The Space Needle is the only architectural work that distinguishes Seattle in the global imagination (London has five (the bridge, the House of Parliament, Big Ben…); Paris six (the Louvre; Notre Dame de Paris, Arc de Triomphe…) New York City seven (and all of them are in Manhattan…the bridges, the towers, the square). Seattle has just one. (However, Rem Koolhaas's Central Library, which was completed in 2004, and the Weiss/Manfredi's Olympic Sculpture Park, completed in 2007, are the only other architectural works that in the future could draw some attention and symbolic power away from the Space Needle.) It's not an exaggeration to state that without the Space Needle, Seattle would be invisible.
Sleepless in Seattle and It
Happened at the World Fair
For example, a film like Bad Company (not the one you're thinking but the other one, the one with the hottest interracial sex scene in the history of Hollywood — between Laurence Fishburne and Ellen Barkin), though set in Seattle, the city itself can not be recognized (and therefore is of little importance, it's a mere backdrop) because the Space Needle does not appear in the film. Not only does the monument distinguish Seattle, it also communicates the present meaning (or economic base) of Seattle: it is the home of major hi-tech corporations. For example, in Stealth (2005), a movie about a top-secret military program, when army engineers are trying to find answers for what has gone wrong with the computer system of an experimental fighter jet, the film cuts to: EXT. DAY/THE SPACE NEEDLE. What this cut communicates to audiences around the globe is: Seattle equals computer/software programmers.
The Seattle we see from the deck of the disk in The Parallax View is a pre-software (Disclosure), pre-grunge (Singles), and pre-Starbucks (Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me) Seattle. What we see (the business district, Elliot Bay, Harbor Island) instead is a post-1962 World Fair (It Happened At The World's Fair) Seattle, an event that expressed the city's ambition to play a central role in the lucrative space race. The Space Needle has no other origin than the Cold War and its major races and profits. And because this is its founding meaning, it's the best location for a movie about anxieties directly tied to the technological, political, economic competition between the USA and USSR, The Parallax View.
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It all happens in the first two minutes of Alan Pakula's masterpiece The Parallax View. The golden elevator rises up the slender stem (or beam) of the Space Needle and enters the "flying disk." The scene dissolves into a view of downtown Seattle from the disk's observation deck. It's a clear day and Elliot Bay and Harbor Island — one of the busiest bodies of water and ports on the West Coast — are ominously vacant. There are no massive cruise ships, ferries, barges, cargo ships; it's as if the only life in this city is here, behind the deck, in the core of the disk that hovers over the-then, 1973, 100-year old city.
Designed by Victor Stienbrueck for the 1962 World's Fair, the Space Needle is to Seattle what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris. In his essay on the Eiffel Tower, the semotician Roland Barthes stated the writer Guy Maupassant often lunched in the tower's restaurant because it was "the only place in Paris where [he didn't] have to see it." The same can be said of the Space Needle. It is seen everywhere — from Queen Anne to Capital Hill to First Hill to the business district. It flies overhead as you walk across the city. And because it is everywhere in reality, it is also everywhere Seattle appears in the movies: McQ, Say Anything, Assassins, Sleepless in Seattle.
The Space Needle is the only architectural work that distinguishes Seattle in the global imagination (London has five (the bridge, the House of Parliament, Big Ben…); Paris six (the Louvre; Notre Dame de Paris, Arc de Triomphe…) New York City seven (and all of them are in Manhattan…the bridges, the towers, the square). Seattle has just one. (However, Rem Koolhaas's Central Library, which was completed in 2004, and the Weiss/Manfredi's Olympic Sculpture Park, completed in 2007, are the only other architectural works that in the future could draw some attention and symbolic power away from the Space Needle.) It's not an exaggeration to state that without the Space Needle, Seattle would be invisible.
Sleepless in Seattle and It
Happened at the World Fair
For example, a film like Bad Company (not the one you're thinking but the other one, the one with the hottest interracial sex scene in the history of Hollywood — between Laurence Fishburne and Ellen Barkin), though set in Seattle, the city itself can not be recognized (and therefore is of little importance, it's a mere backdrop) because the Space Needle does not appear in the film. Not only does the monument distinguish Seattle, it also communicates the present meaning (or economic base) of Seattle: it is the home of major hi-tech corporations. For example, in Stealth (2005), a movie about a top-secret military program, when army engineers are trying to find answers for what has gone wrong with the computer system of an experimental fighter jet, the film cuts to: EXT. DAY/THE SPACE NEEDLE. What this cut communicates to audiences around the globe is: Seattle equals computer/software programmers.
The Seattle we see from the deck of the disk in The Parallax View is a pre-software (Disclosure), pre-grunge (Singles), and pre-Starbucks (Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me) Seattle. What we see (the business district, Elliot Bay, Harbor Island) instead is a post-1962 World Fair (It Happened At The World's Fair) Seattle, an event that expressed the city's ambition to play a central role in the lucrative space race. The Space Needle has no other origin than the Cold War and its major races and profits. And because this is its founding meaning, it's the best location for a movie about anxieties directly tied to the technological, political, economic competition between the USA and USSR, The Parallax View.
The Parallax View
The party that's happening in the disk of the Space Needle at the opening of The Parallax View is for a Cold War-era presidential candidate, Senator Charles Carroll. As people drink and talk, a mediocre jazz band plays "Moon River." Senator Carroll is handed a microphone and begins to make a speech about the importance of Independence Day. Shots are fired. The presidential candidate is hit two times in the chest. The exit wounds smear blood on the window. Chaos overwhelms the party. The assassin pockets the gun and flees the scene. He leaps onto the sloping top of the disk. It is 1973 and Seattle's skyline is dominated by the Miesian Seafirst Building (called "the box the Space Needle came in").
A secret agent pursues the assassin. Two more agents appear from the other side of the disk's top. The agents close in on the assassin. Below them is the stretch of the viaduct, which rises from a tunnel under Belltown, Seattle's former film row and future condo paradise. In the distance is West Seattle, a neighborhood whose popular beach area (Alki) is to be, two decades later, the site for a touching scene in American Heart. Also, on the eastern side of downtown is the newly completed highway (1-5). Here, a year later, John Wayne will pursue a truck in McQ.
The assassin is tackled by an agent; the assassin stumbles/tumbles backward, rolls of the edge of the disk and falls to his fate. The death of the assassin concludes the most cinematic moment in the 150-year history of Seattle.
Charles Tonderai Mudede is an associate editor for The Stranger. He was born in an Africans-only hospital in Que Que (now called Kwe Kwe), Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe), in 1969 — Kwe Kwe was, and still is, a steel town, much like Charles Dickens's Coketown. Mudede is also an adjunct professor at Pacific Lutheran University, and his work has appeared in The Village Voice, Sydney Morning Daily, and The New York Times, among others. Mudede reads Lolita at least three times a year.
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ParaNorman
The Debt
The Broken Tower
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