In defense of movie magic
by Will White
I first saw LA through the teeny-weeny window of British Airways flight BA281. Months of prep, of forms and visa paperwork, of working at the pub to save up the money. I’d finally made it …
… and it was hammering down with rain.
Despite the initial disappointment, the wallet-scrunching taxi from LAX and the soaked socks I got from lugging my suitcase in the hurriquake, I was exactly where I wanted to be.
Now, as I see the flight home looming on my calendar, I think back: LA never lived up to the myth. To be fair, it never could, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t loved it. It might be my favorite place in the world.
In his book, “America,” Jean Baudrillard says that “the American city seems to have stepped right out of the movies.” Now this isn’t to say that anyone coming to LA should expect the beautiful neon-tinged romance of “La La Land” for as Baudrillard also notes, “it’s as if the city has come out of paintings, and not the other way around.” In a sort of anti-mimesis, the movies made the city: not vice-versa.
When we wander down York Boulevard or have a drink under the neon glow of Walt’s bar, we are seeing — being within — a landscape that’s an imitation of something on screen. When we look downtown from Griffith, don’t we feel like Mia and Sebastian? But when was the last time someone in the movies asked you for change, or you saw a body lay cold next to needles on the sidewalk. With around 70 thousand homeless in the county, the real LA is filled with less dancing than struggle and suffering.
Maybe it’s this disconnect that makes LA so compelling. For all the city purports to be, it never quite makes it; the ‘92 riots were an outcry at just how much this city can fail people. What’s so funny about the whole thing is that because of the movies, LA is the only city in the world that has regularly reproduced, and sold en masse, a vision of its own perfection. I see it everywhere: in the dumptrucks and bulldozers strewn like children’s toys, idle by a pillarhenge that stumps everyone, to the graffiti-scrawled Oceanwide Plaza seen by Angelenos from Freeway 10 to the Sixth Street Bridge, to the hummingbirds that fly outside my window here in Eagle Rock, and sup at the pink flowers in the morning sun. There’s always something happening, never a moment that feels like it doesn’t have a story, that couldn’t have some sort of happy ending.
So when, in “Notes from a Native Daughter,” Joan Didion calls California a place “in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here […] is where we run out of continent,” I think I know what she means. If it can’t work here, it can’t work anywhere. So it must work, here more than anywhere else. Movie magic isn’t real but, under the desert sky, it’s as though there’s nothing that cannot be done; we’ve seen it all before on the silver screen.
Contact Will White at wwhite@oxy.edu
by Ruby Gower
Hating LA puts you in a bad spot. A lot of people seem to hate it, for reasons that range from the painfully cliché (too hot, too many celebrities) to writer Jamie Taete’s complaint that there is “HIPPIE BULLSH*T ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE” (the eye-grabbing capitalization is his). But these are ultimately trivial – celebrities are easy to avoid, and you can take off your sweater if you’re hot. I hate LA for a reason that affects every interaction I have with the city and every plan I try to make within it. The city is incredibly spread out, and switching from one activity to the next requires getting in a car and driving for an undetermined amount of time. It gives rise to a profound loneliness of the kind I rarely felt on the NYC subway or the Beijing subway (北京地铁).
LA has plenty of beautiful buildings and things to do — the Getty Museum is one of America’s most iconic pieces of architecture, and the Griffith Observatory can be found on postcards sent all over the world. The house where Occidental’s second-most famous alum wrote “Good Will Hunting” is a fantastical building straight out of a fairytale, crowded with native wildlife and smooth white walls. But that’s part of the problem. LA has some of the most engaging and aesthetically pleasing city life in America, but you have to get in your car — or worse, an Uber — to do any of it. It seems symptomatic of American individualism as a whole — you have to be incredibly self-reliant here, alone in your car, navigating miles of identical streets.
Other comparably large cities have tightly packed downtown areas, meaning that even people without access to cars can engage with the kinds of art, culture and general tourism one expects to find in name-brand cities like LA. In London or New York, one can go easily from a museum to a vintage store to a walking tour of historical monuments. This is certainly possible in select places in LA, but by keeping downtown small (it’s just shy of six square miles) and neighborhoods (with their unique charms) physically separated from each other, the city’s design discourages widespread enjoyment of what this place has to offer. Young people, disabled people, people who can’t afford cars and a host of other groups benefit much more from walkable cities with low-cost public transit. On that front, LA is 0–1.
Will writes passionately about LA’s “movie magic.” But there’s nothing “magical” about needing a gas-guzzling car to see your city’s famous landmarks or even a friend. One could go so far as to say LA’s zoning and consequent car culture is elitist, short-sighted and artificially preserves an archaic American way of life that no longer exists in much of America. I won’t. But one could.
Contact Ruby Gower at gower@oxy.edu
