New Round of Scrutiny : Media, L.A.: A Cycle of Fascination

Only three years ago, Southern California was coming of age.

“With the opening of two major exhibition spaces for contemporary art, the city is on the verge of attaining world-class status,” the New York Times Magazine declared of Los Angeles in 1986.

Before long the media narrative had expanded: With planning, the Southern California metropolitan area “might even emerge as the Western Hemisphere’s leading city in the early 21st Century,” the Atlantic Monthly reported in 1988.

Now the story line has shifted again: “This most extravagant of cities faces a growing perception that it has reached a limit,” the New York Times magazine declared in July.

Traffic at Standstill

Traffic is standing still, says a run of Southern California stories in the national press. The air is coal black with smog, streets are overrun with immigrants, housing costs are beyond reason. People are fleeing to Oregon.

“The Golden State, in short, is no longer so golden,” concluded a July Newsweek cover story entitled, “California: American Dream, American Nightmare.”

“The dream that materialized for many,” proclaimed the Wall Street Journal in June, “is dying.”

In the space of a few years, the national narrative about Southern California has turned from paternal to respectful to bleak. Why?

The issues cited are all real enough, but they are not nearly so sudden as the recent shift in the press would imply. Does the new story line signify some change in Southern California, or a change in the nation at large? Is it really as bad here as they think out there?

Some who write about the state suggest that the change in tone about California reflects a national uncertainty about the future in general. In an era of globalization, Los Angeles has become the metaphor by which we Americans will look at our problems.

Break With Tradition

Another thesis is that, the criticisms at least take the region seriously and represent a break with the traditional view of El Lay as a city of vapid narcissism and venal excess.

In fact, a closer look suggests that the current media cycle is part of a longer fascination with the region, in which three enduring Southern California mythologies have folded in and out and back over each other, the mood alternating between pessimism and optimism, dismissal and seriousness.

One, perhaps the oldest, is the mythology of “Fruits and Nuts,” the notion of California as a place of social anarchy, the end of land where all the country’s seekers and oddballs gathered.

The second is the mythology of what John Gunther called “Iowa With Palm Trees,” the idea that Southern California is a powerful place rich in resources but void of sophistication.

The third is that Southern California represents the city of the future. Yes, this one isn’t new either. Even the current variation, the declaration of the dream turning to nightmare, is familiar.

“The easy life is coming to an end in the country’s third largest city,” U.S. News & World Report proclaimed in 1965, after the Watts riots. “After 25 years of haphazard growth, and unprecedented prosperity, Los Angeles now faces the same tough economic and social problems that confronted older cities years ago.”

Results of Poll

Jane Pisano, president of The 2000 Partnership, a civic task force working on a plan to improve the city, dates the current dream-becomes-nightmare cycle in part to a Los Angeles Times Poll in April that found that nearly 60% of the respondents said they thought life had gotten worse, not better in Los Angeles, in the last 15 years.

More than half still were “pleased” with life here, but the number had been 70% four years earlier.

The press was quick to seize on the findings, including such regional papers as the Boston Globe: “Residents of Southern California, fed up with congestion, pollution, crime and can’t touch-em housing prices, are heading 950 miles up the Pacific Coast.”

Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Paul Nussbaum said his “everybody is leaving L.A. story” got “more response and more wire play (on the Knight-Ridder service) than anything I have done” in three years of covering the West.

The falling city theme has generalized to other subjects, too.

View From New York

Consider this New York Times story about rock music: “The Hollywood dream of endless, expensive pleasure that animated a broad segment of Los Angeles rock (music) for two decades has soured . . . ,” the story said, “now that Los Angeles is wracked with pollution, crack and AIDS.”

Even the National Geographic--hardly in the business of bashing--found room for a zinger in an August piece about San Diego, where now “growth threatens to bring with it the pollution and congestion of Los Angeles, which is often evoked as the ultimate bad example.”

Historian Kevin Starr, author of three books on California, argues that Americans use cities as metaphors to help them think about their prospects, and the notion of a declining Southern California is a metaphor for fears about the decline of the American Century.

“In this time now,” he argued, “this very confused violent strange time that American culture is going through as it is simultaneously globalizing its trade and finance, and losing world influence, Los Angeles becomes the city through which the United States is going to think about these problems.”

Hence embedded in these stories are sub-texts, Starr said, “as Los Angeles is used as a code gloss” for a range of other concerns, including racism. “You can talk about L.A. when what you are really talking about is blacks or immigrants.”

Code Words in Writings

Whether intended or not, such code words exist in some of the current prose, as when the Wall Street Journal writes that, “Americans, drawn for decades to the area, are starting to leave” Southern California.

Many immigrants are Americans, too, of course. And actually, more people from other parts of the country are still arriving in Los Angeles than are leaving.

In much the same way, maintained Starr, some of the bashing of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, in jokes, literature and even congressional investigations “has always been a reservoir for displaced anti-Semitism.”

Joan Didion, the author and former Southern Californian who frequently writes about the region for the New Yorker magazine, agrees that the city-of-the-future theme seems to have found resonance again in some mood of pessimism.

“They have this narrative about it being the future, and now they have this narrative about the future failing, the dream failing,” she said. “It is just one of those stories.”

A Sense of Relief

Among some Southern Californians, one reaction to all this, actually, is a sense of relief. While the stories are often Kafkaesque in their bleakness--”stray gunfire plagues parts of the city,” said the Journal--at least they no longer dismiss Southern California as lightweight.

A Los Angeles Times Magazine article in January by Ronald Brownstein cited a “noticeable upsurge in interest in Los Angeles on the part of serious writers and thinkers,” which it welcomed as a break with the traditional perception of L.A. as “a city of shallowness, vapid self-absorption and orgiastic materialism.”

Now, the article said, Southern California is being recognized as a “testing ground for fundamental changes in the way America lives.”

In part, the change recognized that Southern California’s automobile-based decentralization was the model for 20th-Century American cities and also that the region’s immigration was a window on America’s future.

But, in fact, even the theme of Los Angeles as the city of the future is not new.

School of Thought

There is “a growing school of thought that it might very well be on its way to becoming the greatest of all American cities,” wrote Holiday magazine in January, 1950.

“Almost everybody who lives in Los Angeles believes that someday it will be the largest city in the world,” Life magazine wrote in 1943, when--before freeways--it actually took even longer to move about by car than it does today.

“I remember when they were talking about Los Angeles being the lab of the future in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and it wasn’t,” Didion said. She contends that what was giving the country its particular tone at that time was the Caribbean, from New Orelans to Miami.

In her own New Yorker writing, Didion a year ago wrote, “What is striking about Los Angeles after a period away from it is how well it works.”

In truth, journalism’s distortion is that it must take the specific and infer the general, using stereotypes and metaphors, references to what is familiar, all to communicate things in ways that seem relevant.

Intellectual Illusion

And the idea that Los Angeles is about to become, or in fact already signifies anything, is inevitably an act of intellectual illusion, ignoring one thing in favor of something else.

It is in the nature of cities, after all, that they contain bits of everything. That is what attracts great numbers of people to them in the first place.

Actually, over the 100 years that the nation has tried so vigorously to explain Southern California, the narrative about the region has not really evolved at all.

It is a story of three mythologies: the city of tomorrow (all that wealth), a place without cultural or intellectual moorings (Raymond Chandler called it “a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup”), a place of aberrant social behavior (it was Frank Lloyd Wright who supposedly said that if the country were tilted, everything loose would tumble here).

And all three visions have their roots in the Gold Rush, which, according to historian J. S. Holliday, introduced to the American consciousness the expectation of instant riches.

Stark Contrast

Holliday, author of the Gold Rush history, “The World Rushed In,” said that the expectation of something for nothing stood in stark contrast to the ideas in force when the nation was built. “Always before, Americans could only reap what they had sown, the basic agricultural economy.”

The Gold Rush allusion so powerfully challenged this that intellectuals of the day were offended. Henry David Thoreau called the Gold Rush “the world’s raffle” and bemoaned the idea of men groveling like pigs.

There were two subthemes here, too, Holliday said. One was that failure was acceptable, endemic to an economy based in part on luck. The other is anonymity. “Here you can change your stripes,” Holliday said, “give up being a Catholic or come out of the closet, whatever.”

Together, these ideas held, and gradually adhered themselves most firmly to Southern California.

“The result,” Holliday said, is that California is seen by the rest of the nation as a socially anarchic place where “the restraints and inhibitions that hold people back in Minnesota and Maryland don’t apply.”

Hollywood’s Role

If the Gold Rush laid the foundation, Hollywood, of course, played its role too. At first it seemed a merely “racy” place filled with actors and actresses who were “spoiled darlings,” said Otto Friedrich, author of the Hollywood history “City of Nets.”

But when the scandals grew to include the murder of director William Desmond Taylor and the sexual assault and manslaughter trial of actor Fatty Arbuckle in the 1920s, Hollywood strengthened California’s reputation as a place of moral and social anarchy.

The industry, fearing a puritanical American backlash, set up the Hays Office to censor the movies, and the result was an avalanche of “clean-cut movies about the boy and girl next door,” Friedrich said.

“It was all phony, of course. People still went to the movies to see Hedy Lamarr more than they did to see June Allyson.” But the industry’s image did change, and it really did not return to that same sense of kooky hedonism and self-absorption until the late 1960s and 1970s.

In between, the differing mythologies shifted in emphasis and dominance.

Viewed as Insipid

There was always the Southern California of the insipid, from William Faulkner (“Everything . . . is too large, too loud and too banal in concept”) to Aldous Huxley (“Thought is barred in this city of dreadful joy”) to Woody Allen (“The only cultural advantage is that you can turn right on a red light”).

This particular view of Southern California may have its most permanent personification in Disneyland, said Jonathan Miller, the Londoner who recently directed the “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera:

Disneyland “is a white pioneer’s view of what America is,” Miller said. “Wacky American animals, American conviviality, zappy, zany, congenial and nice, like a parade of demented, bright Shriners.”

But at other times, “In between these down cycles, there have been moments when it seemed profitable, interesting, valid to talk of a new Los Angeles,” said Thomas Hines, professor of history and architecture at UCLA.

During the Great Depression, for instance, there was unmistakably the city of the future, where people came to seek their fortunes, and Al Jolson was singing “California, Here I Come.”

Idea Gains Momentum

That idea gained momentum after World War II, when soldiers who had discovered Los Angeles by going through Union Station on their way to the Pacific came back to resettle.

In the 1950s and into the 1960s, the notion of swimming pools and barbecues, Gidget movies and surfer music, all “projected the image of alertness, of optimism,” Starr said.

And always attendant to this city-of-the-future mythology has lurked the darker underside, which principally rests on the notion of California as a syllabus of environmental and planning errors, a wonderful ecology abused beyond recognition.

This had powerful force in the early 1970s, and, Didion said, again in the early 1980s when any kind of natural disaster seemed to bring reporters to her doorstep doing stories about California falling into the sea: “Now they will see the folly of their ways.”

This fantasy of Angeleno Apocalypse echoes the hellfire that engulfs the city at the end of Nathanael West’s 1939 novella, “Day of the Locust.”

Fear of Immigrants

More recently has come the fear of immigrants, perhaps most hauntingly visualized in the 1982 film “Blade Runner,” a futuristic rendering of 21st Century Los Angeles, in which the streets are ruled by Asians and Latinos speaking a street language that blends Japanese and Spanish.

Whites, most of whom cannot speak the dialect, live in high-rise buildings and travel between them without ever walking the streets.

Los Angeles-based Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews said the same set of facts about immigration gives him a different story line:

“My foremost hobby horse and the one story I spent most of last year writing (about) is that the transformation going on here is the very definition of what it means to be an American.”

Constant Avocation

Perhaps, in the end, it is precisely because Southern California is so difficult to define thanks to its expanse, so familiar thanks to Hollywood, and physically so far from the rest of the country, that describing it remains a constant avocation of the East.

As director Miller said last week after an extended visit, “It is a geometropolitan predicament rather than a city. You can no more administer it than you could administer the solar system.”

In the generous library of Los Angelesisms, that isn’t half bad.

Researcher Aleta Embrey also contributed to this story.