Lecture 4:
The Los Angeles Myth Builders
The Day of the Locust (1975)
Directed by John Schlesinger
Professor Michael Green
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This Lesson
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L.A. Boosters and
Debunkers
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Utopia vs. Dystopia
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Chinatown, Blade
Runner and The Day
of the Locust
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More Myth Builders
L.A Boosters and Debunkers
L.A. Story (1991)
Directed by Mick Jackson
Lesson 4: Part I
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Impressions of Los Angeles
• What are our impressions of Los Angeles?
• More than many other big cities, L.A. is built
on competing, often contradictory, myths
rather than authentic “history.”
• This is largely because the town was being
sold to outsiders since its inception.
• Hollywood capitalized on the myths/images
and mediated them for a mass audience.
• Almost since its birth, L.A. has been
portrayed as both a utopia and a dystopia.
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Los Angles Intellectuals
• Davis writes in City of Quartz, “To evoke ‘Los
Angeles intellectuals’ is to invite immediate
incredulity, if not mirth. Better then to refer to
a mythology – that confirms more to received
impressions that are at least partially true.”
• Despite importing myriads of talent for its
immense Culture Industry, L.A. has never
been able to cultivate a homegrown
intelligentsia in the way that, say, S.F. has.
• Pure Capitalism has been seen as destroying
true intellectuals.
Spectacle and Fraud
• Davis: “To move to Lotusland is to sever
connection with national reality, to lose
historical and experiential footing, to
surrender critical distance, and to submerge
oneself in spectacle and fraud.”
• This is dramatized in The Day of the Locust.
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Contradictions
• “Yet this very rhetoric indicates powerful
critical energies at work. For if Los Angeles
has become an archetypal site of massive
and unprotesting subordination of
industrialized intelligentsia to the programs of
capitol, it has also been some of the most
fertile soil for some of the most acute
critiques of late capitalism, and, particularly,
of the tendential degeneration of its middle
strata.”
– Davis
“Successive Migrations of
Intellectuals”
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The Boosters
The Debunkers
The Noirs
The Exiles
The Sorcerers
The Communards
The Mercenaries
There will be Blood (2007)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
The Boosters
• Writers, antiquarians and publicists – in
league with the L.A. Times and the city
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 race odyssey.
• They Mediterraneanized an idyll of New
England life into the perfumed ruins of an
innocent but inferior ‘Spanish’ culture.
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The Boosters (continued)
• In doing so, they wrote the script for the giant
real-estate speculations of the early 20th
century that transformed Los Angeles from
small town to metropolis.
• Their imagery, motifs values and legends
were in turn endlessly reproduced by
Hollywood, while continuing to be
incorporated into the ersatz landscapes of
suburban Southern California.
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Land Rush
• L.A was built on real-estate capitalism: the
culminating speculation of the generations of
boosters and promoters who subdivided and
sold the West.
• L.A. was sold mainly to the affluent classes
of the mid-west. Many of these people
moved to L.A. before there was any industry
to support the region.
• This transformation required myth-making
and literary invention.
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The Mission Myth
• The mission myth – a capitalization of Los
Angeles’s fictional ‘Spanish’ past crept into
literature, architecture and landscape.
• It emphasized ideal climate, a happy history
of race relations (still Anglicized) and a
Mediterranean metaphor.
• Mission-style design is still predominant in
L.A. landscape and architecture, adopting as
true a false history.
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Mission Style Architecture
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Mission Style Architecture
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The Debunkers
• The writer Louis Adamic debunked the
Booster myth by emphasizing the centrality
of class violence to the city’s construction.
• Others had already attacked Los Angeles’s
philistinism and skewered its apologists.
They included Upton Sinclair, Nathanael
West, Mayo, Modern artists, and Carey
McWilliams, who in Southern California
Country, deconstructed the Mission Myth
and recounted the seldom-told story of 19th
century genocide and native resistance.
Utopia vs. Dystopia
Strange Days (1995)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Lesson 4: Part II
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Definition: Utopia
• Utopia: An ideally perfect place, especially in
its social, political, and moral aspects.
• It is derived from a 1516 book by Sir Thomas
More that describes an imaginary ideal
society free of poverty and suffering.
• The expression utopia is coined from Greek
words and means ‘no place.’
• Examples include Shangri-la (from the novel
Lost Horizon) and the Earth depicted in Star
Trek.
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Definition: Dystopia
• Dystopia: A state in which the conditions of
life are extremely bad as from deprivation or
oppression or terror.
• A society characterized by human misery, as
squalor, oppression, disease, overcrowding.
• A work of fiction describing an imaginary
place where life is extremely bad because of
deprivation or oppression or terror.
• Examples include 1984, Brave New World,
Fahrenheit 451, V for Vendetta.
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Dystopia as Noir
• Representations and warnings of dystopian
societies grew out of the Depression, worries
over fascism, the oppression of Labor and
the faltering dreams of the middle class.
• A major form of dystopian representation is
known as Noir, which features anti-heroes
and repaints L.A as a “deracinated urban
hell. Writing against the myth of El Dorado,
[the noir writers] transformed it into its
antithesis; that of the dream running out
along the California shore.”
Early Literary Noir
• Literary examples of Noir from the 1930s
include:
– The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and
Double Indemnity (1936) by James M. Cain
– The Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935) by
Horace McCoy.
– The Day of the Locust (1939) by West
– The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
• Hollywood would adopt the form in the
1940s.
Examples
• Chinatown and Blade Runner are two of the
most famous and important representations
of Los Angeles as dystopia. They function
very differently.
• Blade Runner (1982) imagines a future of
environmental devastation, perpetual night,
fascism, virulent racism and slavery.
• Chinatown is (1974) is set in the past and
shows that under a beautiful, sunny L.A.
veneer lies murder, incest, depravity and
wealthy exploitation of the middle classes
Blade Runner
• Directed by Ridley Scott and based on a
short novel by Phillip K. Dick.
• Part of a group of films “on the environmental
destruction of L.A. and human devolution”
that includes Planet of the Apes, Omega
Man and Escape from L.A.
• Blends elements of dystopian science fiction
with elements of film noir, including a
Raymond Chandler-esque detective story.
• Pause the lecture and watch clips 1 and 2.
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Chinatown
• Directed by Roman Polanski and written by
Robert Towne.
• Along with its sequel, The Two Jakes,
synthesized the big L.A. land grabs and
speculations of the first half of the 20th
century.
• Is squarely in the tradition of Raymond
Chandler and Nathanael West.
• Manifests 1970s cynicism and anxiety.
• Pause the lecture and watch clip # 3.
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The Day of the Locust
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Written by Nathanael West in 1939.
Considered an important Modern novel.
#73 on the Modern Library list
A touchstone book for the debunking of L.A.
and Hollywood.
• Movie version made in 1975, directed by
John Schlesinger.
• Pause the lecture and watch Clip #4.
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More Myth Builders
California Institute of Technology
Lesson 3: Part III
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Davis’ “Intellectuals”
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The Boosters
The Debunkers
The Noirs
The Exiles
The Sorcerers
The Communards
The Mercenaries
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The Exiles
• Between the Nazi’s seizure of power and
the Hollywood witch hunts, Los Angeles
was the address in exile of some of Central
Europe’s most celebrated intellectuals.
• Despite their acknowledgment that L.A.
seemed like paradise, they soon left for NY
or to return to war-ravaged Europe.
• They complained about an absence of
sophisticated culture, a sense of history
and critical intellectuals.
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The Sorcerers
• From the 1920s, there was an extraordinary
concentration of Nobel laureates founded
around Cal Tech, including Einstein,
Oppenheimer, and Linus Pauling.
• They worked on aeronautics, oil industry
problems and rocket technology, all of which
lead to CA post-war science-based economy.
• Nowhere else in the country did there develop
such a seamless continuum between the
corporation, laboratory and classroom as in
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Los Angles.
The Sorcerers
• Science was in conflict with the local bedrock
of Midwestern fundamentalism.
• Contemporary ‘science,’ in the guise of
astounding powers and arcane revelations,
become the progenitor of an entire S.C. cult
stratum, which included Scientology.
• Before the emergence of a full-fledged,
‘science fiction’ milieu in the ‘40s, and in the
absence of popular science, they filled in the
cracks between ignorance and invention and
meditated between science and theology.
The Communards
• For the Los Angeles ‘hipster’ generation
that came of age in the late 1940s and
1950s, there was little alternative but to
form temporary ‘communes’ within the
cultural underground that burgeoned for
almost a decade.
• There was underground music (jazz), art
and independent film that strove for a more
contemporary aesthetic, advanced racial
progressiveness and unified against
segregation and police brutality.
The Mercenaries
• In the 1980s, a continental and international
shift to the West Coast was not dissimilar to
the great Hollywood immigration of the ‘30s.
• The broad trend of this immigration was
towards international real-estate capital.
• The large scale developers and their
financial allies, together with a few oil
magnates and entertainment moguls, built a
public-private coalition that created a cultural
superstructure for Los Angeles’s emergence
as a “world city.”
End of Lecture 4