time (the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood, and, most recently, an emergent university-museum mega-complex), in constructing or deconstructing the mythography of Los Angeles. I am interested, in other words, not so much in the history of culture produced in Los Angeles, as the history of culture produced about Los Angeles – especially where that has become a material force in the city’s actual evolution. As Michael Sorkin has emphasized, ‘L.A. is probably the most mediated town in America, nearly unviewable save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers’.4
I begin with the so-called ‘Arroyo Set’: writers, antiquarians, and publicists under the influence of Charles Fletcher Lummis (himself in the pay of the Times and the 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 racial odyssey. They inserted a Mediterraneanized idyll of New England life into the perfumed ruins of an innocent but inferior ‘Spanish’ culture. In doing so, they wrote the script for the giant real-estate speculations of the early twentieth century that transformed Los Angeles from small town to metropolis. Their imagery, motifs, values and legends were in turn endlessly reproduced by Holly-wood, while continuing to be incorporated into the ersatz landscapes of suburban Southern California.
As the Depression shattered broad strata of the dream-addicted Los Angeles middle classes, it also gathered together in Hollywood an extra-ordinary colony of hardboiled American novelists and anti-fascist European exiles. Together they radically reworked the metaphorical figure of the city, using the crisis of the middle class (rarely the workers or the poor) to expose how the dream had become nightmare. Although only a few works directly attacked the studio system,5 noir everywhere insinuated contempt for a depraved business culture while it simultaneously searched for a critical mode of writing or filmmaking within it. Although some principal noir auteurs, like Chandler, went little further than generalized petty-bourgeois resentment against the collapse of the Southern California dream, most claimed Popular Front sympathies, and some, like Welles and Dmytryk, alluded to the repressed reality of class struggle. Despite the postwar witch hunt that decimated Hollywood progressives, noir survived through the 1950s to re-emerge in a new wave in the 1960s and 1970s. The huge popularity of Didion, Dunne, Wambaugh, Chinatown, Blade Runner, the Chandler and Cain remakes, and, finally, the arrival of the ‘post-noir’ of James Ellroy’s Los Angeles Quartet, stand as proof of the genre’s durability. Although recuperated as an ambience shorn of its 1940s radical affinities, noir has nonetheless remained the popular and, despite its intended elitism, ‘populist’ anti-myth of Los Angeles.
While the cinematic translation of the noir vision of Los Angeles engaged some of the finest European writers and directors resident in Hollywood in the 1940s (giving them an invaluable medium for political and aesthetic resistance), the relationship between the city and the community of anti-fascist exiles deserves separate consideration. It was a potent common moment in the cultural histories of Southern California and Europe, generating its own mythology that helped shape critical reaction to the postwar Americanization of Europe. Without necessarily subscribing to the ‘nightmare’ anti-myth of noir, the exile sense of Los Angeles was unremittingly pessimistic. Here was the ultimate city of capital, lustrous and superficial, negating every classical value of European urbanity. Driven by one epochal defeat of the Enlightenment to the shores of Santa Monica Bay, the most unhappy of the exiles thought they discerned a second defeat in Los Angeles as the ‘shape of the things to come’, a mirror of capitalism’s future.
It is hard to exaggerate the damage which noir’s dystopianization of Los Angeles, together with the exiles’ denunciation of its counterfeit urbanity, inflicted upon the accumulated ideological capital of the region’s boosters. Noir, often in illicit alliance with San Francisco or New York elitism, made Los Angeles the city that American intellectuals love to hate (although, paradoxically, this seems only to increase its fascination for postwar European, especially British and French, intellectuals). As Richard Lehan has emphasized, ‘probably no city in the Western world has a more negative image’.6 To repair this image, especially among the cultural elites, local corporate patrons have sponsored a third major immigration of intellectuals, comparable to the Hollywood-bound diaspora of the 1930s, but now dominated by architects, designers, artists and culture theorists.
As Los Angeles – propelled by financial, real-estate and military booms – has rushed forward to Manhattanize its skylines (increasingly with offshore capital), it has attempted to Manhattanize its cultural super-structure as well. The largest land developers and bankers have coordinated a major cultural offensive, whose impact has been redoubled, after decades of mere talk, by a sudden torrent of arts capital, including the incredible $3 billion Getty endowment, the largest in history. As a result, a wealthy institutional matrix has coalesced – integrating elite university faculties, museums, the arts press and foundations – single-mindedly directed toward the creation of a cultural monumentality to support the sale of the city to overseas investors and affluent immigrants. In this sense, the cultural history of the 1980s recapitulated the real-estate/arts nexus of early twentieth-century boosterism, although this time around with a promotional budget so large that it could afford to buy the international celebrity architects, painters and designers – Meier, Graves, Hockney, and so on – capable of giving cultural prestige and a happy ‘Pop’ veneer to the emergence of the ‘world city’.
These, then, are the three major collectivized interventions by intel-lectuals in the culture formation of Los Angeles: what I somewhat awkwardly abbreviate as the Boosters, the Noirs, and the Mercenaries. The Exiles, as a fourth, more parenthetical, intervention, have linked the indigenous process of city-myth production and its noir-ish antipode to European sensibilities about America and its West Coast. They have integrated the spectre of ‘Los Angeles’ into fundamental debates about the fate of Modernism and the future of a postwar Europe dominated by American Fordism.
It may be objected that this historical typology is one-sidedly slanted towards literateurs, filmmakers, musicians and artists – that is, toward fabricators of the spectacle – and neglects the role of practical intellectuals – planners, engineers, and politicians – who actually build cities. And where are the scientists, Southern California’s most precious crop, who have shaped its rocket-propelled postwar economy? In fact, the fate of science in Los Angeles exemplifies the role reversal between practical reason and what Disneyites call ‘imagineering’. Where one might have expected the presence of the world’s largest scientific and engineering community to cultivate a regional enlightenment, science has consorted instead with pulp fiction, vulgar psychology, and even satanism to create yet another layer of California cultdom. This ironic double transfiguration of science into science fiction, and science fiction into religion, is considered in a brief account of the Sorcerers.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the paramount axis of cultural conflict in Los Angeles has always been about the construction/inter-pretation of the city myth, which enters the material landscape as a design for speculation and domination (as Allan Seager suggests, ‘not [as] fantasy imagined but [as] fantasy seen’).7 Even though Los Angeles’s emergence from the desert has been an artifact of giant public works, city-building has otherwise been left to the anarchy of market forces, with only rare interventions by the state, social movements or public leaders. The city’s most Promethean figure – water engineer William Mulholland – was enigmatic and taciturn to an extreme (his collected works: the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the injunction ‘Take it’). Although, as we briefly note, residential architecture has episodically served as a rallying point for cultural regionalism (for example, the Craftsman bungalow of the 1910s, the ‘case-study’ home of the 1940s, the Gehry house of the 1970s), celluloid or the electronic screen have remained the dominant media of the region’s self-expression. Compared to other great cities, Los Angeles may be planned or designed in a very fragmentary sense (primarily at the level of its infrastructure) but it is infinitely envisioned.
Yet we must avoid the idea that Los Angeles is ultimately
