You need the virus to build the antidote, and so it should come as no surprise that movies made in Los Angeles are among the most powerful remedies to the sickness of general schadenfreudian hope for an LA conflagration.
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I was on the New York City subway shortly after the Eaton and Pacific Palisades fires began tearing through Los Angeles when I heard a pair of tall, gangly models talking about the tragedy, apparently on their way back from church. “It’s crazy what’s happening,” one of them said. “Well, Hollywood always has it coming, huh?” The reply: “Yeah, you can’t mock God.”
I honestly was not shocked by the callous moralizing of this conversation. If there is one thing Los Angeles is famous for besides the movies, or smog, or traffic, it’s the notion that the city is doomed. And before you wonder if these models’ sentiments are simply a reflection of an overzealous religious fundamentalism, remember that Los Angeles as a place of manifest destruction is an idea that goes back to at least the inception of the movie colonies, stemming not from churches but from writers trying to make it in show business.
Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust famously centers the creation of a painting called The Burning of Los Angeles. And in one of her California essays, Joan Didion wrote that “the city burning is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself.”1 Indeed, she is talking here about the Santa Ana winds, the same weather phenomenon that contributed to the recent January fires. Los Angeles as America’s Sodom extends beyond the conservative pulpit, taking its place in a totalizing mythology of Los Angeles’ destiny and thereby its fundamental identity. In fact, the purveyors of this myth are often led by its most famous residents: the moviemakers.
The LA disaster films stand alongside Didion and West as key poems in the larger destruction mythology. In his study of the city’s representation on film, Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Andersen rails against the cinematic demolition of the city in action movies like Independence Day (1996) and Earthquake (1974).
Hollywood has gotten a bad rap almost since the beginning. Back in the early 1920s, anti-Hollywood sentiment was brewing. Rupert Hughes (yes, Howard Hughes’ uncle) took it on himself to make a movie counteracting these newly fomented moral attitudes. The film is Souls for Sale, a 1923 comedy-drama about the Hollywood adventures of Mem (Eleanor Boardman), the daughter of a hellfire preacher (Forrest Robinson). The one sermon we see her dad preaching rails against the movie industry. (“O Hollywood! Hollywood! Thou movie-mammon that leadest our children astray,” etc. etc.) In what may seem like a non sequitur, we learn that Mem is betrothed to a murderous psychopath (Lew Cuddy). She is forced to jump off her honeymoon-bound train and is taken in by a film crew shooting on location nearby.
Public domain image of poster, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Souls for Sale is a stunning archive of real moviemaking in Los Angeles around the early ’20s. The movie features clips from the actual sets of Charlie Chaplin, Erich Von Stroheim, and Fred Niblo; classic silent directors, many of whom would go on to acquire significant 20th-century reputations, are seen here as workaday laborers in the dream factory. It’s pretty exhilarating to watch, tonally uneven and wildly melodramatic though the movie may be.
The climactic end of Souls for Sale actually involves its own little Hollywood disaster set piece. Even this early hymn to Hollywood’s better angels can’t help but indulge in setting the town ablaze. Mem, having found her home among the movie people, becomes a successful actress. But her jilted ex is still after her. A big outdoor set built on one of the studio lots for a circus sequence catches fire when lightning strikes one of the tents. Soon the entire place is up in flames. The ex uses the confusion to try to get after Mem but, on finding her in harm’s way, ends up sacrificing himself for ultimate redemption. Everyone’s a good guy in the end, especially Hollywood, which is always prepared to burn a little for its sins.
You need the virus to build the antidote, and so it should come as no surprise that movies made in Los Angeles are among the most powerful remedies to the sickness of general schadenfreudian hope for an LA conflagration. In the wake of the recent fires, you hear a lot more about the collaboration, hope, and solidarity Angelenos are building as they literally pick up the pieces. And thinking about the people who live in this city – ideally meeting them, but also encountering them in films – provides a much truer picture of what Los Angeles is than the city’s dominant mythos.
I live in New York now, but I grew up in LA. When I want to hang out with Angelenos in a movie, I turn on Model Shop (1969). In it, George (Gary Lockwood), a 26-year-old architect, is down on his luck, out of a job, and in the twilight of his relationship with flower-child-turned-corporate girlfriend Gloria, when car repossessors show up at his house in Marina Del Rey to take away his 1950 MG TD. To make matters even bleaker, George is expecting his draft notice to arrive any day now.
Model Shop is the quintessential LA driving movie. We spend a significant amount of time with George driving around the city and taking in the tenor of Los Angeles’ acme: movement. Back in 1968, Demy told LA Times film critic Kevin Thomas, “I learned the city by driving – from one end of Sunset to the other, down Western all the way to Long Beach.”2 Demy understood the native Los Angeles principle that the city must, at least in part, be understood through the windshield and the rear-view mirror.
George shirks off the bank’s men by promising to come up with the $200 he owes them by the afternoon, setting off his adventure on the streets of Los Angeles. When George fails to get money from one of his friends, he succeeds in briefly encountering a beautiful and mysterious French woman named Lola (Anouk Aimée). This brief encounter upends George’s reality, and now everything is about the girl. He follows her in his car.
George follows Lola up into the hills. When she goes into a mansion (we never learn what she is doing there – she is not, as you will see, rich), he takes a moment to get out of his car and revel in the view of the basin from the hilltop. Sprawling shades of silver blink under the bright southern sun and fan out in the distant haze. It seems to make George sad, as if the city’s grandeur is a party he’ll never be invited to or a possession he could never afford.
He follows Lola, eventually, into her workplace: a “model shop” where guys pay 12 bucks to take photos of a model from a catalog. George thumbs through until he finds Lola. “So she’s your type, huh?” the desk attendant observes after George points to her picture. George proceeds to photograph Lola, but he’s really only interested in talking to her. She’s sad and so is he.
George finds a good friend willing to lend him the $200. In this interaction, Demy offers us a didactic form of his film’s thesis. The director speaks through his images, which hail a sprawling, moving, transient space of limitless possibility. The camera is always moving with the car or dollying in still moments (cinematography by Michel Hugo). But Demy renders his visual thesis in words when George says to his friend:
I was driving down Sunset, and I turned down one of those roads that leads up into the hills [George decides to omit the detail that he was following a woman], and I stopped at this place that overlooks the whole city. It was fantastic. I suddenly felt exhilarated, you know? I was really moved by the geometry of the place; its conception, its baroque harmony. It’s a fabulous city. To think some claim it’s an ugly city when it’s really pure poetry, it just kills me. I wanted to build something right then, create something.
A delightful bit of character exposition stands in for the larger thematic impulse driving the whole story. The sad longing that permeates the movie is really Demy’s vision of Los Angeles.
The longing stands in for a kind of hope, a hope more powerful than hope, or you might say, an honest hope. Hope expressed amidst destitution is really a study in emotional honesty. And that study is the great gift this movie offers. Model Shop is a palimpsest of Los Angeles, a sketch of its emotional architecture. It offers a powerful counter mythology, a story of Los Angeles’ destiny that has nothing to do with apocalyptic cleansing or barefaced destruction.
In spite of George’s stalking, he and Lola become something like friends. Indeed, George confesses that he loves her. She doesn’t love him. Her heart has been irrevocably broken by her ex-husband. She has been working at the model shop to raise money for her flight back to France, where her teenage son is waiting for her.
If broken hearts, interrupted dreams, and the displacement of transient Angelenos represent the existential building blocks of Model Shop, it is no surprise that it had to be a driving movie. Not only does the car provide the best view of the city – it clarifies Los Angeles’ spiritual vitality. In Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, architecture critic Reyner Banham writes, “If motorway driving anywhere calls for a high level of attentiveness, the extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical.”3 Banham reminds us that the automobile, almost from its inception, is an extension of the single-family home – that other mainstay of LA life – and also, thereby, a kind of identity-generating vehicle. Los Angeles is well-suited to Demy’s creative impulses. His films celebrate cinema’s ability to turn artifice into ineffable beauty. His instinct is to tap immediately into transcendent reality’s most garish parts; Demy builds his own mythology seemingly out of nothing except, perhaps, the lifeblood of his subjects.
The draft notice comes for George. He is to report for duty in San Francisco Monday morning. After a night of mutual consolation and lovemaking with Lola, George telephones her to ask about getting together, perhaps for the last time. Her roommate answers and informs George that Lola has already left for France. George, on the cusp of either a nervous breakdown or a life-changing eureka moment – we don’t know – informs the roommate that he wanted to tell Lola that he “was gonna try to begin again. Always try,” he repeats, “always try. Always try.” The screen fades to black.
Model Shop ends, then, also in a sort of LA conflagration. There are no buildings or tents on fire, but the whole story builds toward an inevitable destruction: the razing of George’s life. As such, he becomes a kind of metaphor for Los Angeles as it actually exists, which is to say a Los Angeles defined most by the people who live there: the young artists in Koreatown (it’s no longer 1968 and Marina Del Rey is too expensive for young upstarts) who arrive seeking opportunity and reinvention, the Ethiopian single mothers who wait tables in Los Feliz to send their boys to UCLA. Los Angeles as the headquarters of the dream factory; it’s never just been about the Hollywood studios. And maybe that’s really why the burning myth has been so unwavering. How dare a place dream so wantonly, so exuberantly?
The defiant commitment to continue, to always try, is a much clearer and more indelible picture of the city than enclaves on fire will ever be. If this defiance makes the city all the more hated, it is also the seed of its perpetual remaking, the same thing that drives each of us, if we’re honest. When bowing to forces bigger than us seems inevitable, Los Angeles never gives in. Leave it to the city marked for destruction to provide the loudest rallying cry to keep going.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.
- Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961, 220. [↩]
- Kevin Thomas, “Demy, Anouk Meet Again – in LA, of All Places,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1968, C14. [↩]
- Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. University of California Press, 1971, 196-197. [↩]
