Lecture 4: The Los Angeles Myth Builders

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Lecture 4The Los Angeles Myth Builders

• Professor Michael Green

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This Lesson

• L.A. Boosters and Debunkers
• Utopia vs. Dystopia
• Chinatown, and Blade Runner
• More Myth Builders

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L.A Boosters and Debunkers
L.A. Story (1991)

Directed by Mick Jackson

• Lesson 4 Part I

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Successive Migrations of Intellectuals

• The Boosters
• The Debunkers
• The Noirs
• The Exiles
• The Sorcerers
• The Communards
• The Mercenaries

There will be Blood (2007) Directed by
Paul Thomas Anderson
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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Mission Myth

• The mission myth a capitalization of Los
  Angeless 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.

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Mission Style Architecture
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Mission Style Architecture
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The Debunkers

• The writer Louis Adamic debunked the Booster myth
  by emphasizing the centrality of class violence
  to the citys construction.
• Others had already attacked Los Angeless
  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.

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Utopia vs. Dystopia
Strange Days (1995)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow

• Lesson 4 Part II

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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, Dont They? (1935) by Horace
  McCoy.
• The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
• Hollywood would adopt the form in the 1940s.

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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

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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.

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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.

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More Myth Builders
California Institute of Technology
Lesson 3 Part III
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Davis Intellectuals

• The Boosters
• The Debunkers
• The Noirs
• The Exiles
• The Sorcerers
• The Communards
• The Mercenaries

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The Exiles

• Between the Nazis seizure of power and the
  Hollywood witch hunts, Los Angeles was the
  address in exile of some of Central Europes 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Angeless emergence as a world city.

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End of Lecture 4