California 2010: In Which I Assess How Los Angeles Played Itself

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—As it turns out, my friend and I more or less stuck around in Los Angeles for the weeklong duration of our trip last week. No San Diego, no Sequoia National Park, no Santa Barbara wine country, as I had originally hoped; all will have to wait for my next voyage to the West Coast.

Nevertheless, Los Angeles offered its own considerable fascinations and rewards...and it's such a sprawling city that not even a week was enough to take in all there was to take in. I will surely be back.

For now, though...some rough impressions of Los Angeles:

Obviously, my impression of the town is skewed by the fact that I was a tourist for only a week, not a resident for years/life. But, if I had to boil my experience of the City of Angels down to one phrase..."fascinatingly contradictory" would sum it up, for me.

For many visitors, one of the great selling points of Los Angeles is the chance to explore the place which has become synonymous with American cinema; I speak, of course, of Hollywood. But "Hollywood" has become not just a section of the city of Los Angeles, but a state of mind, one associated with larger-than-life celebrity, international stardom, glamour, privilege. I imagine most people who visit, or even live in, Los Angeles come, at least in part, to tap into that mindset, both mentally and physically: to bask in that privilege, whether or not you are part of that class, and to walk the same streets as these real and/or imagined icons you've no doubt seen in the movies, in the news, in tabloids, or what have you.

Hollywood also famously carried the nickname "The Dream Factory"...and, at its best, walking along Hollywood Boulevard a couple days last week, as well as touring through Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Bel Air on the Starline Celebrity Homes Tour, the place felt like many of my classical-Hollywood-cinema fantasies flickering to life. (The fact that the sun shone brightly just about endlessly on those days only added to the splendor.)

And yet, as much as Hollywood holds the (unspoken) promise of getting physically closer to a lot of those celebrities you know and love, the town makes as much of an effort to enforce the bridge between a celebrity and his/her adoring public as it does encouraging that public to try to cross that bridge. I mean, why else stage a sumptuous red-carpet premiere for the recent romantic comedy-drama Letters to Juliet in front of the legendary Grauman's Chinese Theatre—out in the open, mind you—and implicitly encouraging a horde of people to gawk at movie stars coming out of stretch limousines...only to deny those adoring fans a particularly good glimpse of the stars they came out to see?

In that way, Hollywood is the equivalent of a parent who wiggles a reward in front of a child, then pulls it away from them with an "Unh unh unh" when that child expresses excitement at seeing that reward. Hollywood The Town teases us in the general public with the hopes of getting close to movie idols, but then it imposes further barriers, maintaining that distance. In that way, it truly is a "dream factory"—because it's all about furthering dreams.

That's probably not such a bad thing. Me, I love to dream; if I didn't, I probably wouldn't love the cinema as much as I do. As much as one may wish to get physically or even emotionally closer to movie stars in Hollywood, enforcing the mystique is perhaps the only way Hollywood can truly thrive. In any case, this contradiction that drives Hollywood The Town and Hollywood The State of Mind tickles me to no end—but only during my travels last week did I fully grasp it.

***

There's one other major contradiction in Los Angeles...though actually, it's more a "division" than a "contradiction," really—a class division.

Film scholar Thom Andersen touches upon this in his 2003 video-essay epic Los Angeles Plays Itself—which, thanks to a VHS rip floating around on torrent sites (the only way to see it short of keeping an eye out for rare theatrical screenings), I watched again on the way to and from L.A., and which gained so much more in resonance after I had spent some time in the city of which he speaks. In its closing stretches, most pertinently, Andersen extols American low-budget "neorealist" films like The Exiles (1961), Killer of Sheep (1977) and Bush Mama (1979) for collectively bringing to public consciousness the less exposed aspects of lower-class life in Los Angeles.

Even without fully refreshing myself on Andersen's insights before embarking on the trip, however...well, if you venture into Los Angeles's famously less-than-wholly-reliable Metro public-transportation system, as my friend and I did on a handful of occasions, you can't help but notice that, for the most part, only certain kinds of people seem to take Metro trains and/or buses: middle- and lower-class folk, college students, tourists and the like. Unlike in New York, you are far less likely to see, say, men in business suits in L.A. Metro subway lines; at least, I don't recall noticing any people of that type during the times I rode those Metro trains.

That, of course, is the side of Los Angeles most people don't really see in the media (and alas, I didn't think of trying to capture that hidden side with my own camera; that photo above is courtesy of the LA Times, not of my own taking)—and that, of course, is one of Andersen's core ideas driving Los Angeles Plays Itself. This side of Los Angeles, it appears, is often literally driven underground.

My visceral awareness of this wide gap between the haves and have-nots as it plays out in Los Angeles increased the more my friend and I spent swimming in wealth above ground: seeing all those luxe celebrity houses, eating overpriced food in chic restaurants, even exploring old-Hollywood stardom at the Max Factor Building-set Hollywood Museum. More often than not, we felt more like outsiders immersing ourselves in a faintly alien environment, feeling awkwardly out of place amidst the glitz.

Fitting, then, that, on the night before we flew back to New Jersey, we decided to have dinner at Noodle Planet, a cheap Asian-food place in the UCLA area. I can't speak for my friend, but I certainly felt more at home there than at, say, Spago or Mr. Chow. The latter, especially, was noteworthy for being an upscale Chinese restaurant that felt far more like a nightclub than any Chinese restaurant I went to in Beijing a couple years ago; they didn't even offer chopsticks as a utensil choice! (The food at both places was still quite excellent, I have to admit, even if way overpriced for the portions served.)

This is not to say that I necessarily felt more comfortable in those subways either; it's a bit disconcerting to see so relatively few people in Los Angeles subway stations compared to New York subway stations. (The fact that L.A. subway lines are essentially free to ride doesn't seem to have made a difference in that regard.) But then, New York's extensive MTA system actively encourages usage, since it extends just about everywhere in New York City that you would think to go. Los Angeles's far more complicated and less extensive Metro system, by contrast, seems to just encourage people to stay above ground and drive wherever they need to go—unless, of course, they're forced to take buses above ground.

No wonder there's that notorious big cloud of pollution hanging overhead!

***

By the way, I say all this not to denigrate the town. I could certainly be mistaken in my impressions; Angelenos, by all means, feel free to correct me if you think I'm presenting an inaccurate view of your city! I still very much enjoyed my week there, and if nothing else I loved the experience of being able to step way outside of my geographical comfort zone and experience, on my own, an unfamiliar part of the world.

I guess that's another way of saying that I've come to love traveling. Maybe all these years of traveling to all sorts of imagined cinematic worlds have instilled a wanderlust in me in the real world.

Tsai Ming-liang Plays Himself

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—Hope all of you had a relaxing and stomach-filling Thanksgiving weekend! Despite the fact that I worked on Thursday (but eh, no big deal, I'm used to it by now, and at least we got fed something Thanksgiving-like in nature), my holiday weekend was quite fine. On Friday evening, I celebrated a good friend's birthday at a Japanese restaurant in midtown (the damage my dinner did my wallet, though, made my eyes pop out at the end of the evening; I definitely went overbudget, though I suppose it was worth it, in the end). And on Saturday, I saw two good-to-possibly-great films yesterday: An Education at an indie theater about half an hour away from my house, and Afterschool via IFC On Demand. I aim to say a few words about one or both of them soon enough.

For now, however, my film-review catch-up continues with a contrasting pair of films...

The Hole (1998; Dir.: Tsai Ming-liang)

After being puzzled and exhilarated by Tsai's Face six days earlier, I decided last weekend to take in another film by the fanciful Taiwanese auteur shown at the Asia Society (part of a rather incomplete retrospective programmed there): his sci-fi/musical fantasy The Hole. This wondrous film by no means dims my newfound fascination with this director.

Based on the three films of his I've seen—Face, The Hole and his 2006 Malaysia-set I Don't Want to Sleep Alone—it seems to me that Tsai is, at least in part, interested in articulating the wide-open gap between hidden and expressed desires. All three of those films have long stretches with barely any dialogue passing between characters, simply an intense sense of longing that both of them, for one reason or another, are only too careful about expressing too loudly. Tsai utilizes the kind of long-take aesthetic made popular by compatriot Hou Hsiao-hsien, which might suggest that he's aiming for Hou's brand of patient realism. But Tsai alternates stretches of slow-burning realism with surreal, fourth-wall-breaking flights of fancy, boldly pointing up the vast differences between brightly colored fantasy and glum reality, and in the process suggesting, through such juxtapositions, the depths of his characters' wants and needs.

All of this can be seen in The Hole, in which Tsai turns a sci-fi premise—a deadly plague that strikes Taipei in the last days before the year 2000—into a romantic two-character pas de deux between Tsai's usual protagonist, Hsiao-Kang (played by Tsai's usual leading man, Lee Kang-sheng) and a woman downstairs (Yang Kuei-mei). The characters never quite fully articulate their thirst to connect with each other amidst the dreary, apocalyptic madness (it never stops raining in this world); perhaps they are too fearful of getting infected by the "Taiwan fever" to risk forming a human connection. But Tsai intervenes to articulate their desires for them: every once in a while, he throws in elaborately dreamlike song-and-dance numbers, music supplied by 1950s Chinese pop hits sung by Grace Chang, all cleverly connected to a certain physical and emotional moment.    

When they do finally connect, after a moment in which they both fear they have lost the opportunity to do so forever, the sense of joy—quietly expressed by a simple image in which one almost literally lifts the other from the depths into the light—is overwhelming; only another song-and-dance number can do it justice. I hope I have come close to doing some justice to just how wonderful a film is The Hole, in which Tsai Ming-liang—as seems to be his directorial métier—is willing to follow his instincts and risk absurdity in pursuit of deep emotional truths and sublime visionary beauty.

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003; Dir.: Thom Andersen)

The splendors, such as they are, of Los Angeles Plays Itself are, by their very nature, cerebral rather than visceral; nevertheless, it must be said that Thom Andersen's 169-minute video essay on the depiction of the many facets of Los Angeles throughout cinema history does offer the immediate pleasures of epic ambition, a dizzying wealth of information and film clips, and assorted moments of revelatory critical insight. Alas, my interest in this oft-celebrated, rarely screened documentary more or less ends there.

Look, it's not that I find Andersen's aims totally unworthy. Fundamentally, he's trying to dig underneath what he sees as Hollywood cinema's misrepresentations of his beloved city geographically, historically, sociologically, or otherwise—in other words, trying to find the realities behind distortions about the city that we perhaps have accepted as close to the truth because they have been seen in popular and independent American cinema for so many decades. That's certainly the kind of goal I instinctively find valuable as a wannabe film critic—and yet, even so, it's one that I ultimately find myself less than wholly sympathetic with here. I mean, we're dealing with movies here; I would like to think that most of us recognize from the outset that what we see flickering on movie screens, even after all these years, through films like Chinatown, Blade Runner, Short Cuts, and even that trashy 1986 Sylvester Stallone flick Cobra, isn't necessarily true to reality. In seeming to prize more accurate depictions of Los Angeles in films like The Exiles and Killer of Sheep (certainly great films, both) over those of more blatantly fictional constructs like the ones mentioned above, it almost seems to me like he's going rather self-defeatingly against the grain of what is possible in cinema.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: I'm sympathetic to Andersen's interest in exposing the many truths about Los Angeles behind the cinematic fictions, and one could insightfully apply his methods to other major cities commonly represented in film over the years (Woody Allen's upper-class fantasy conception of New York versus the real New York, for instance). I suppose I just don't get as upset about those fictions as Andersen apparently does—certainly not enough to make, or sit through, a nearly three-hour documentary essay methodically (and rather dryly) subverting them. I'm not against truth; I just take the fictions in stride more than he does.

All that said, Los Angeles Plays Itself is admittedly still worth seeing and arguing over—especially in its third section, titled "The City as Subject," in which Andersen gets makes some fascinating political points about how fictions about Los Angeles class and race relations are created, and who has the power to create them (he suggests that it's the artists with money who create these alternate cinematic representations). Whatever you may think about whether what he's ultimately doing is actually worth doing or not, the film as a whole will offer new ways of looking at individual films and of cinema in general. In that sense, it succeeds as the kind of provocative film criticism that imbues genuine life into the field. And considering the way that the film-criticism field seems to be going these days—with high-profile critics jumping into film-festival programming, for instance—I suppose I shouldn't be too picky about deeply intelligent and well-researched works like this one. Maybe one day I'll be able to fully embrace it.

(Los Angeles Plays Itself was screened on Nov. 21 at 92YTribeca; there's another screening scheduled at New York University on Dec. 2. It's not available on DVD, but it's freely available as a torrent, if you're not a stickler about such things.)