How Movies Design Los Angeles (And Which One Got it Right)

March 22, 2023 7:18 AM

“For over a century, movies have been our window into Los Angeles, capturing a mean, superficial, car-infested city. How much if that is actually true, though?”
posted by ob1quixote (29 comments total)

I was going to call this a less reflective knockoff of Los Angeles Plays Itself, but then it actually quoted that documentary, which is somehow already 20 years old.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 7:54 AM on March 22, 2023 [12 favorites]

Was going to come in and make the same comment Just the one swan, actually. Will be checking this out later, thank you for the post/share. :)
posted by Fizz at 7:56 AM on March 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

I, of course, also thought of Los Angeles Plays Itself immediately, but I was drawn to Luna's relation of his own experience of the city to how it is portrayed on screen.
posted by ob1quixote at 8:32 AM on March 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm 1500 miles away so take this with a grain of salt. I liked the Los Angeles as seen in the series Bosch. That seemed to be the actual city, rather than the generic version we see in so many series and movies.
posted by Ber at 10:00 AM on March 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

My favorite quote about Los Angeles is from Mad Men:

"Los Angeles is not what you see in the movies; it's like Detroit with palm trees."
posted by rhymedirective at 10:37 AM on March 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

Los Angeles isn't really a defined thing. First, it's a center of the universe. Lots of things orbit around it.

Second, it's big at a level that defines explanation. If you started at the ocean, and drove 60 mph east, in an hour you are still in Los Angeles.

Saying that a moment in a film or a photo is Los Angeles is like saying a sentence from the library of congress is the whole book.

That said, if you want LA moments, drive down the miracle mile at 2am. Go to the Labrea tarpits. Walk the Venice boardwalk. Try to pick someone up at LAX. Drive down Mulholland. Drive to randy's donuts. (LOTS OF DRIVING). Drive over the mountains to the Central Valley. Drive through Manhattan beach. Go buy a bike in silver lake. See a movie at the cinerama. Walk through downtown and skid row.

I moved there after living overseas for 4+ years ,.Moved from Helsinki, lived in Marina Del Rey in the shadow of condominiums owned by Russian oligarchs. It was the worst place I ever lived.

Now that I don't live there I like it. It's still horrible, awful, and unpleasant, everything wrong with the world today, but it doesn't pretend it's anything but. It knows it's shit, it knows it's amazing, it knows that it contains every single thing you can imagine in the universe.

So yeah, film, tv, books, stage are all accurate representations of the city.

*yes, it might be riverside, or some area around Los Angeles, but for the layperson, it's contiguous.
posted by Lord_Pall at 10:51 AM on March 22, 2023 [15 favorites]

I've lived here for 27 years this July. Never expected to be here this long, but the Kerouac quote and the thesis that LA is a brutally lonely place is correct. Kerouac's wacky comradeship is forced on you in older cities like NY. You don't have a choice about living and breathing with others. LA, you do.

This is a city that will happily let you glide along, never quite touching real earth, real community. You could be here in a cocoon for a hundred years and never really connect with others since you are separated in many ways.But man, if you find your anchor point - find your piece of real earth and this place blossoms.

It's a giant sprawling mess. It's been deeply corrupted/conflicted/racist/beautiful since the Gabrielenos left the Mission to found the puebla. I walk out my driveway and stare at the apartment complex across the street, I turn to the left and am blown up with the San Gabriels hanging over my head.
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:00 AM on March 22, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'm not a resident, but a visitor for months a year for the past 12 years. I work there too, during that period, often in a local office. It's just a city to me, kind of generic in that it's basically indistinguishable from any of the other, smaller cities I pass through between there and home on I40, just larger. They all have something that makes them unique - maybe less, but it's something. LA has many things that make it unique and many things that are extremely generic.

One set of my relatives even randomly lives one house over from me in that we both live a bit less than 1 mile north from a major freeway running east/west but in a neighborhood with a crappy commercial area to the east, so driving to their home is a like a weird deja vu. My McDonalds is slightly better than theirs. They have more hills.

In that, I don't find it any more lonely or more car dependent or 'sprawly', corrupt, or anything than any other place. I find it extremely friendly, and with digital help, very easy to navigate. Traffic is bad occasionally sure, but it's a big place. I like that they allow fireworks and where I live it rains far more, but they are banned. I find it hilarious, and 4th of July feels like a real holiday.

Pertaining to the video, I don't think it's odd to declare that some point in the past was LA's golden years. I mean, it used to have pretty good transit and be quite a bit smaller. So if transit-accessibility means it's getting better, then the period when it all fell apart had to feel like regression. My relatives have lived there since the 1920s, they describe a very different LA and Southern CA than the current one. Even my wife, resident since the 1970s, though she laments every lost 7-11 like it's some big deal and I can't cotton to that, describes a different LA than the one now. I like the one now just fine, and hope it gets better in the future.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:32 AM on March 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

That was really thoughtful and I didn’t expect where it was leading to, so I found it pretty satisfying (if a little sad). I’ve never thought of LA as lonely, but I can’t deny that when I’m there the feeling does sort of permeate. Nothing ever feels good enough. Lots to think about here.
posted by Mchelly at 11:53 AM on March 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

LA today looks exactly like it did in the original Blade Runner. I refuse to believe otherwise.
posted by slogger at 11:55 AM on March 22, 2023 [9 favorites]

This thread is fascinating. I only ever visited LA as a tourist, so I'm not judging. Anyway, I did totally not expect that final movie but I.... agree?
posted by flamewise at 12:09 PM on March 22, 2023

I'm looking forward to checking this out after work. I had forgotten all about Los Angeles Plays Itself, which I had meant to check out but somehow never remember to. I've lived all over LA (county) my whole life, and it's enormous. There's few greater disappointments in meeting new people here than finding out they live in Venice, or Encino, or Torrance, or Northridge and you live in Pasadena and you both nod sadly because that's a long-ass drive to hang out. At the same time, there's all these cities/neighborhoods that feel like a small-town; with insular enclaves where everyone knows each other (and their bizness). LA, like the people who live here, contains multitudes.
posted by ApathyGirl at 12:43 PM on March 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

That's so true ApathyGirl. I live in Venice. One of my friends lives in the Valley. Never see them. Another friend lives Mid City area. Never see them. The logistics always get in the way. But the people I know in Venice I see all the time. I can't wait for Star Trek style transporters.
posted by downtohisturtles at 12:54 PM on March 22, 2023

Yeah, I'm up in the corner in Pasadena and boy does that put me out of a lot of people's orbits!
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:01 PM on March 22, 2023

It seems really weird to me that this film about Los Angeles has so many quotes from Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. Maybe he's never heard of William Mulholland, Mike Davis or Reyner Banham?

I think television has done a better job of capturing the city than film has. Especially newer TV shows like Pamela Adlon's "Better Things". Even that skews towards the more affluent parts of the city though.

The oft-repeated notion that Los Angeles has no history doesn't have the currency it once had. Increasingly, movies set in Los Angeles are starting to function as time capsules for a Los Angeles that no longer exists. I'm thinking of films like Jacques Demy's ,"Model Shop", or Charles Burnett's, "Killer of Sheep". Films like "Valley Girl" or "Dogtown and Z-Boys".
posted by spudsilo at 1:07 PM on March 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think the problem with "LA Has no history" isn't that LA doesn't have any - it's just that this whole region has been growing and destroying what was here so efficiently.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:32 PM on March 22, 2023

I think the problem with "LA Has no history" isn't that LA doesn't have any - it's just that this whole region has been growing and destroying what was here so efficiently.

All my relatives' homes are 60+ years old, so I guess it depends on what you are talking about destroying. I use this as my WTF: almost all the locations from The Karate Kid movie, filmed in 1984, still exist, almost as they did in 1984! It's also a good example of the how LA is not a 'place' in the movie - these sites are all really far apart. I'd say that's pretty static, and that the original 'main street downtown' era as it's colloquially referred to didn't last as long as these sites in the Karate Kid movie.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:45 PM on March 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

From my east coast perspective, a 60 year old house is still new. It was built with electricity and plumbing and a telephone.
posted by octothorpe at 2:13 PM on March 22, 2023

Not a movie but I always thought The Shield really manage to capture the feel of the city.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 3:19 PM on March 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

From my east coast perspective, a 60 year old house is still new. It was built with electricity and plumbing and a telephone.

Comparatively yes, some of the oldest houses in New England are older than that. But the highest median in all of NE is 60 years old, and the median age of homes in California is on the older side, at 45 years old. That basically means that its primary single family home growth happened in 1975 and has dramatically curtailed off afterwards.
posted by The_Vegetables at 3:20 PM on March 22, 2023

This made me think that Houston is the twin city of LA. Water, traffic, 100 miles of city, the occasional environmental disaster, massive wealth disparity...
posted by Jacen at 3:22 PM on March 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

Second, it's big at a level that defines explanation. If you started at the ocean, and drove 60 mph east, in an hour you are still in Los Angeles.

Yeah but that's because we're still stuck on the 405!
posted by loquacious at 5:13 PM on March 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

I love the individual places in Los Angeles (and technically I'm a native since I was born in Monterey Park) but it's a hassle to get from place to place.

My wife and I bonded over L.A. Confidential when we first started dating, and our first big out-of-town trip was to L.A. to see locations from the movie. It was really cool to see them in person, and impressive how they made the locations look like the '50s when most of them are right in the middle of modern L.A.
posted by kirkaracha at 5:30 PM on March 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

Go buy a bike in silver lake

Not anymore. Golden Saddle’s building is getting razed for a luxury hotel.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 5:48 PM on March 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ive been to LA twice, for about two weeks. I don't drive, but I loved that city deeply. I keep thinking that I could carve out a life in Echo Park or Silverlake or maybe bits of Pasedena or Koreatown, or near UCLA, wihtout a lot of problem, but getting b/w the adonized little cities was expensive.

The buses and subway worked better than I thought.
posted by PinkMoose at 7:05 PM on March 22, 2023

I've also been to LA twice, and as a New Yorker, I was interested in using the transit system and going to walkable areas. I spent a lot of time in DTLA, as well as some in Hollywood and Santa Monica.

But when I talked to people I knew out there, many seemed puzzled about why I was mostly getting around on the trains. More than one of them admitted to never having used them at all.

I suspect some of them consider the trains to be unacceptably dangerous/dirty/unpleasant, tho nobody came out and said so. But it's a sentiment I've seen some Angelenos express online. Funny: I have found their subway system to be, for the most part, quite clean, modern, and efficient.

Luna's conclusion seems spot on: There's a real urban fabric to LA, a network of genuine communities, but many people just kind of hover above it, in privileged isolation. It's out of sight, out of mind -- a world for a class of people they are glad not to be part of.

It's almost like there's an urban LA and a suburban LA, but suburban LA isn't out on the fringes -- instead it's layered on top of and woven around urban LA. But for the most part, they're oil and water.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 8:11 PM on March 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

More than one of them admitted to never having used them at all.

Lots of it is basically brand new. It started in 1990, and had major expansions to necessary places throughout the early 2000s to 2015. So it's not that weird that people don't use it much. The median LA resident has lived in their current home only slightly shorter than it has existed.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:48 AM on March 23, 2023

To add to the Metro thing - this "city"/region is huge (as has been stated). I looked at what it would take to do my commute of 30 miles (one way) via the metro because that would be great! It would, assuming I hit all my transfers, take me a minimum of 2 hours with about a mile of walking.

I'm not going to anywhere obscure - my former office, when that was a thing - is located right next to LAX. That should, by most reasonable metrics, be a slam dunk commute. I mostly use the Metro to head to DTLA/Union Station because I could spend hours in that building enjoying the view.
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:11 AM on March 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

…but suburban LA isn't out on the fringes -- instead it's layered on top of and woven around urban LA.

To be fair, they were out on the fringes when they were planned/built. But, they were pretty quickly surrounded by the expanding metropolis.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:59 AM on March 24, 2023