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Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea
Film
5 out of 5 stars
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Time Out says
5 out of 5 stars
Narrated with morbid relish by John Waters, this witty doc
chronicles the rise and ruination of the Salton Sea, a tiny inland
ocean once promoted as “California’s Riviera” but now a festering,
apocalyptically hideous ecological disaster zone. The man-made sea was created by accident in the early 20th century
when a poorly engineered irrigation project collapsed, flooding a
lakebed that had been dry for centuries. The nearly 400-square-mile
lake was expected to disappear, but snowmelt and agricultural runoff
have perpetuated it, albeit at the cost of steadily rising salinity. The sea was developed into a glamorous resort area in the 1950s, but
in 1976 flooding caused by inept irrigation management destroyed local
infrastructure and turned the lake into a reeking cesspool subject to
cycles of algal bloom, bird and fish die-offs and biblical fly
infestations. It’s pretty much the armpit of the universe, but a
handful of hardy and self-reliant souls choose to live there. Some are
old-timers too stubborn to let a mere cataclysm push them around;
others—including a leathery old nudist, a boozy Hungarian
insurrectionist and a Jesus-freak folk artist—were drawn to the
deserted lake by its frontierlike atmosphere of freedom. Saddest and
funniest of all, however, are the real-estate speculators sitting on
huge tracts of hell and ritually persuading themselves that renewed
good times are just around the corner.
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