Mirage Factory: the movies that define Los Angeles
No Content for Old Men
with Matt Craig
In this week's newsletter: An essay about Los Angeles, a city I was drawn to and learned about by watching movies. Do those movies tell the truth? And what can be learned from this silver screen syllabus.
Word Count: 1,678 words
Approximate Reading Time: 7 minutes
Los Angeles
City of stars, are you shining just for me?
I have never felt more and less like an Angelino than the first time I ate lunch at Sqirl. It was mid-January, which is to say jeans and a t-shirt weather, and enough sunglassed patrons found themselves with nowhere better to be at noon on a week day than filling sidewalk tables and forming a line around the block to order what writer Marian Bull once called, “athleisure for breakfast.”
Spending my entire life in the Midwest, I never imagined I’d be the guy waiting my turn for brioche toast with ricotta and strawberry jam, or a sorrel pesto rice bowl with lacto-fermented hot sauce. But here I was, wedged into a barstool next to a man with a tattoo sleeve and his sundress-clad girlfriend, hating how much I wanted to fit in.
“A meal [at Sqirl] has come to symbolize everything that defines the most stereotypically bourgeois notion of a contemporary Los Angeles lifestyle right now,” Hull says in her excellent story for EaterLA. “Photogenic scenery, friendly vibes, food that is both virtuous and delicious. We roll our eyes, then thirst for it anyway.”
Having only moved to Los Angeles three months prior, I clearly did not belong here. My pilgrimage to the Silver Lake hot spot came merely as an escape from the stuffy smell of my 275-square-foot Westside apartment — a smell synonymous with first LA apartments — and from an 11-out-of-12 day stretch of work days at my minimum wage restaurant job (another check on your LA stereotype bingo card).
I looked around self-consciously. Of course, a few stools down from me sat Aziz Ansari, casually eating lunch with a friend. And nobody acknowledged him. Because honestly, he was probably like the ninth coolest guy in the place.
The story still makes me laugh because it so neatly encompasses the California dream. Like you're living in a movie. Sunshine, palm trees, movie stars. Beautiful people, beautiful food. Hopeless aspiration.
It's a dream that has been manufactured and sold to us for now over a hundred years (see Gary Krist's excellent book, "The Mirage Factory"), wielding the power of perhaps the greatest marketing vehicle the world has ever seen. The movies tell us Los Angeles is the city of beaches and Beverly Hills, the city of hope and Hollywood, the city of making it big.
I'll be honest, I too am a victim of this silver screen dream. I wanted to move to Los Angeles since at least December of 2016, when I sat between two strangers for a sold out screening of La La Land and horrified them both by ugly-crying through Emma Stone’s “What if I’m not good enough?” monologue and subsequent chorus, “Here’s to the fools who dream, crazy as they may seem.”
This city full of dreamers became the only destination for a helpless aspirant like myself. My first visit in 2017 turned it into an unofficial tour of La La Land film locations: Griffith observatory, Lighthouse Cafe, Hermosa Beach pier, "You Are the Star" mural, Smoke House restaurant, and Angels' Flight.
Now I live right across the street from the Sony Studios lot, originally home to MGM, where they shot The Wizard of Oz and Singin' in the Rain. Were it not for movies, I would not have sought out the first date restaurant from Jerry Maguire or the Mexican restaurant from Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, the motel from "Goliath" or the Bradbury Building from Blade Runner (and 500 Days of Summer!).
These are ordinary places that have been made iconic by their inclusion in the grand canonization of Hollywood. Don't believe me? Try to name five streets in, say, Cincinnati. Here, there's Mulholland Drive and Sunset Boulevard, the literal names of (very good) movies; "Melrose Place" is the name of a TV show; everyone knows Rodeo Drive from Pretty Woman; countless movies have shown the Venice Beach boardwalk; and the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard is famous for literally inscribing movie stars' names in the pavement.
It's a chicken or the egg question. Did the movies create the this -- as is the case with Sqirl, filled with those either living the California dream or wishing they could -- or reflect it? Because there's an obvious interest in what goes on here. I doubt Beverly Hills Cop would've reached the same audience if Eddie Murphy's Axel Foley stayed in Detroit the whole movie, or the Russell Crowe neo-noir L.A. Confidential would've won two Oscars if it was Phoenix Confidential. Would people go see Steve Martin if L.A. Story became Lexington Story? Or care about Willem Dafoe's cat-and-mouse chase in a movie called To Live and Die in Charlotte?
I could go on. The city of Los Angeles plays a central character in classics like Chinatown, The Big Lebowski, Barton Fink, The Long Goodbye, The Player, Short Cuts, Rebel Without a Cause, Boyz in the Hood, Swingers, Training Day, Heat, Boogie Nights, and so many more. It's the most photographed city in the world.
But the real question for me, as someone who watched every single LA movie I could get my hands on before moving here, and for you if you've read on this far: can movies explain Los Angeles, rather than simply perpetuating its legend?
The following are the best movies to describe modern Los Angeles, to define the current state of that elusive California dream. I'm hoping to use art as some kind of Freudian filter through which we can see the subconscious of the city.
Or, these are just seven movies you'll enjoy watching:
La La Land: The first choice is the most obvious. On the surface this movie presents a city of dreamers, people who orient themselves not by where they are now but where they are going. And I think the movie also hits on another fundamental compromise, not unique to Los Angeles but potentially exaggerated in this place and specifically in this generation. The romantic ideal is attached to career instead of personal pursuits, where fulfilling one's dreams comes not from marrying the girl but by letting her go.
Ingrid Goes West (Hulu): If I'm being honest to my own experience, I think this is probably the best movie about modern Los Angeles. The one thing I promised myself I did not want to do is pack up and move across the country because I wanted to live inside of an Instagram picture. Unfortunately, that's what our protagonist Ingrid (played by Aubrey Plaza) has done, infiltrating the life of her favorite Instagram influencer by remaking herself as a stereotypical Venice hipster. It works, until things go disastrously wrong. And Ingrid learns that Los Angeles is a real place outside of the rose-filtered life of her phone screen.
The Invitation (Netflix): Community in a city like Los Angeles is what you make it. You can't step out of your door and be "in it" the way you might in New York or Chicago or even some small town. Since you're always driving, every social engagement comes from a conscious choice. Thus, the prevalence of dinner parties, especially among those who have dropped several MILLION dollars on a house with a view. Except, the thing about intimate social settings like dinner parties, is you can often feel trapped there. Which is bad luck, when a handful of people at the party have taken the L.A. self-improvement spirituality to the extreme. The result is 100 minutes of hyper-tension, a masterwork from director Karyn Kusama.
(Last year I reviewed Kusama's other L.A. movie,)
Under the Silver Lake (Amazon Prime): The protagonist of this mystery, played by Andrew Garfield, is the type of guy who definitely would frequent a restaurant like Sqirl. He carries the common L.A. delusion that his life is the plot of some epic screenplay, where every action carries with it the corresponding significance and every girl he meets could be the heroine. When one such beautiful neighbor mysteriously disappears, it sends him on a wild goose chase around Los Angeles' east side searching for clues, and often finding them (or fabricating them) in seemingly innocuous coincidences. As can happen amongst our Aspirant Class, the gap between his aspiration and reality widens past a dangerous threshold.
Greenberg (HBO): If there's one class of people who do not fall under the romantic spell of Los Angeles, it's New Yorkers. Roger Greenberg (played by Ben Stiller) is a neurotic New York jew lost in a mid-life crisis he's not really ready to accept, spending a summer in the city he claims to hate. If this sounds like the plot of a Woody Allen movie (and in fact, it is, Annie Hall), then you're only supporting my longtime argument that Noah Baumbach is the spiritual successor to Allen. But the interesting cultural insight here is the interplay between the L.A. stereotypes which Greenberg claims to hate, and the way those stereotypes play out in real life, which he can't help but love. As someone who waited a half-hour for eye-roll worthy sorrel pesto rice with lacto-fermented hot sauce, and then found it to be delicious, I can relate.
Nightcrawler: What happens when that L.A. aspiration gets twisted with evil intentions? It gets rewarded, unfortunately. This movie is unsettling, thanks to a brilliant lead performance from Jake Gyllenhaal. It shows the underbelly of the city's celebrity complex, spotlighting the life of a news cameraman who will do anything to get the money shot for the evening news. The movie reinforces the idea that success comes at a price, especially in a city that isn't steered by a moral compass.
The Bling Ring (Netflix): The crazy true story of a group of high school kids who broke into their favorite celebrities' houses to steal their clothes and jewelry late last decade. They were already rich, already privileged, and instead of using that aspiration as motivation to become successful they felt entitled to the lifestyle that comes with it. The movie represents everything bad about Los Angeles -- vanity, celebrity-worship, drugs, sham spirituality -- a side of the city I don't know well but would have to be blind to deny and negligent not to mention here.
Trailer Watch: The Wrong Missy
Just in case you needed to be reminded just how valuable Adam Sandler is to Netflix, look no further. The company gave a few of his co-collaborators the same paid-vacation-posing-as-movie deal Sandler has gotten for years, to make the same kind of obvious cookie-cutter comedy. The most baffling part of this trailer is just how out of place David Spade is as a romantic comedy leading man. Yikes. And yet, because this movie is dropping on Netflix during a quarantine, I'm sure than I and millions of others will watch it. Can't wait.