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Lecture 4: The Los Angeles Myth Builders. Professor Michael Green. The Day of the Locust (1975) Directed by John Schlesinger. This Lesson. L.A. Boosters and Debunkers Utopia vs. Dystopia Chinatown , Blade Runner and The Day of the Locust
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Lecture 4:The Los Angeles Myth Builders Professor Michael Green The Day of the Locust (1975) Directed by John Schlesinger
This Lesson L.A. Boosters and Debunkers Utopia vs. Dystopia Chinatown, Blade Runner and The Day of the Locust More Myth Builders
L.A Boosters and Debunkers Lesson 4: Part I L.A. Story (1991) Directed by Mick Jackson
Impressions of Los Angeles • What are our impressions of Los Angeles? • More than many other big cities, L.A. is built on competing, often contradictory, myths rather than authentic “history.” • This is largely because the town was being sold to outsiders since its inception. • Hollywood capitalized on the myths/images and mediated them for a mass audience. • Almost since its birth, L.A. has been portrayed as both a utopia and a dystopia.
Los Angles Intellectuals • Davis writes in City of Quartz, “To evoke ‘Los Angeles intellectuals’ is to invite immediate incredulity, if not mirth. Better then to refer to a mythology – that confirms more to received impressions that are at least partially true.” • Despite importing myriads of talent for its immense Culture Industry, L.A. has never been able to cultivate a homegrown intelligentsia in the way that, say, S.F. has. • Pure Capitalism has been seen as destroying true intellectuals.
Spectacle and Fraud • Davis: “To move to Lotusland is to sever connection with national reality, to lose historical and experiential footing, to surrender critical distance, and to submerge oneself in spectacle and fraud.” • This is dramatized in The Day of the Locust.
Contradictions • “Yet this very rhetoric indicates powerful critical energies at work. For if Los Angeles has become an archetypal site of massive and unprotesting subordination of industrialized intelligentsia to the programs of capitol, it has also been some of the most fertile soil for some of the most acute critiques of late capitalism, and, particularly, of the tendential degeneration of its middle strata.” • Davis
“Successive Migrations of Intellectuals” There will be Blood (2007) Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson The Boosters The Debunkers The Noirs The Exiles The Sorcerers The Communards The Mercenaries
The Boosters • Writers, antiquarians and publicists – in league with the L.A. Times and the city Chamber of Commerce – who at the turn of the century created a comprehensive fiction of Southern California as the promised land of a millenarian Anglo-Saxon race odyssey. • They Mediterraneanized an idyll of New England life into the perfumed ruins of an innocent but inferior ‘Spanish’ culture.
The Boosters (continued) • In doing so, they wrote the script for the giant real-estate speculations of the early 20th century that transformed Los Angeles from small town to metropolis. • Their imagery, motifs values and legends were in turn endlessly reproduced by Hollywood, while continuing to be incorporated into the ersatz landscapes of suburban Southern California.
Land Rush L.A was built on real-estate capitalism: the culminating speculation of the generations of boosters and promoters who subdivided and sold the West. L.A. was sold mainly to the affluent classes of the mid-west. Many of these people moved to L.A. before there was any industry to support the region. This transformation required myth-making and literary invention. 11
The Mission Myth The mission myth – a capitalization of Los Angeles’s fictional ‘Spanish’ past crept into literature, architecture and landscape. It emphasized ideal climate, a happy history of race relations (still Anglicized) and a Mediterranean metaphor. Mission-style design is still predominant in L.A. landscape and architecture, adopting as true a false history. 12
The Debunkers • The writer Louis Adamic debunked the Booster myth by emphasizing the centrality of class violence to the city’s construction. • Others had already attacked Los Angeles’s philistinism and skewered its apologists. They included Upton Sinclair, Nathanael West, Mayo, Modern artists, and Carey McWilliams, who in Southern California Country, deconstructed the Mission Myth and recounted the seldom-told story of 19th century genocide and native resistance.
Utopia vs. Dystopia Lesson 4: Part II Strange Days (1995) Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Definition: Utopia Utopia: An ideally perfect place, especially in its social, political, and moral aspects. It is derived from a 1516 book by Sir Thomas More that describes an imaginary ideal society free of poverty and suffering. The expression utopia is coined from Greek words and means ‘no place.’ Examples include Shangri-la (from the novel Lost Horizon) and the Earth depicted in Star Trek. 17
Definition: Dystopia Dystopia: A state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad as from deprivation or oppression or terror. A society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, overcrowding. A work of fiction describing an imaginary place where life is extremely bad because of deprivation or oppression or terror. Examples include 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, V for Vendetta. 18
Dystopia as Noir • Representations and warnings of dystopian societies grew out of the Depression, worries over fascism, the oppression of Labor and the faltering dreams of the middle class. • A major form of dystopian representation is known as Noir, which features anti-heroes and repaints L.A as a “deracinated urban hell. Writing against the myth of El Dorado, [the noir writers] transformed it into its antithesis; that of the dream running out along the California shore.”
Early Literary Noir • Literary examples of Noir from the 1930s include: • The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936) by James M. Cain • The Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) by Horace McCoy. • The Day of the Locust (1939) by West • The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler • Hollywood would adopt the form in the 1940s.
Examples • Chinatown and Blade Runner are two of the most famous and important representations of Los Angeles as dystopia. They function very differently. • Blade Runner (1982) imagines a future of environmental devastation, perpetual night, fascism, virulent racism and slavery. • Chinatown is (1974) is set in the past and shows that under a beautiful, sunny L.A. veneer lies murder, incest, depravity and wealthy exploitation of the middle classes
Blade Runner • Directed by Ridley Scott and based on a short novel by Phillip K. Dick. • Part of a group of films “on the environmental destruction of L.A. and human devolution” that includes Planet of the Apes, Omega Man and Escape from L.A. • Blends elements of dystopian science fiction with elements of film noir, including a Raymond Chandler-esque detective story. • Pause the lecture and watch clips 1 and 2.
Chinatown • Directed by Roman Polanski and written by Robert Towne. • Along with its sequel, The Two Jakes, synthesized the big L.A. land grabs and speculations of the first half of the 20th century. • Is squarely in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West. • Manifests 1970s cynicism and anxiety. • Pause the lecture and watch clip # 3.
The Day of the Locust • Written by Nathanael West in 1939. • Considered an important Modern novel. • #73 on the Modern Library list • A touchstone book for the debunking of L.A. and Hollywood. • Movie version made in 1975, directed by John Schlesinger. • Pause the lecture and watch Clip #4.
More Myth Builders California Institute of Technology Lesson 3: Part III
Davis’ “Intellectuals” The Boosters The Debunkers The Noirs The Exiles The Sorcerers The Communards The Mercenaries 26
The Exiles Between the Nazi’s seizure of power and the Hollywood witch hunts, Los Angeles was the address in exile of some of Central Europe’s most celebrated intellectuals. Despite their acknowledgment that L.A. seemed like paradise, they soon left for NY or to return to war-ravaged Europe. They complained about an absence of sophisticated culture, a sense of history and critical intellectuals. 27
The Sorcerers From the 1920s, there was an extraordinary concentration of Nobel laureates founded around Cal Tech, including Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Linus Pauling. They worked on aeronautics, oil industry problems and rocket technology, all of which lead to CA post-war science-based economy. Nowhere else in the country did there develop such a seamless continuum between the corporation, laboratory and classroom as in Los Angles. 28
The Sorcerers Science was in conflict with the local bedrock of Midwestern fundamentalism. Contemporary ‘science,’ in the guise of astounding powers and arcane revelations, become the progenitor of an entire S.C. cult stratum, which included Scientology. Before the emergence of a full-fledged, ‘science fiction’ milieu in the ‘40s, and in the absence of popular science, they filled in the cracks between ignorance and invention and meditated between science and theology.
The Communards • For the Los Angeles ‘hipster’ generation that came of age in the late 1940s and 1950s, there was little alternative but to form temporary ‘communes’ within the cultural underground that burgeoned for almost a decade. • There was underground music (jazz), art and independent film that strove for a more contemporary aesthetic, advanced racial progressiveness and unified against segregation and police brutality.
The Mercenaries • In the 1980s, a continental and international shift to the West Coast was not dissimilar to the great Hollywood immigration of the ‘30s. • The broad trend of this immigration was towards international real-estate capital. • The large scale developers and their financial allies, together with a few oil magnates and entertainment moguls, built a public-private coalition that created a cultural superstructure for Los Angeles’s emergence as a “world city.”
