Media Scrutiny : California: A Cycle of Fascination

Only three years ago, Southern California was coming of age.

“With the opening of two major exhibition spaces for contemporary art, the city is on the verge of attaining world-class status,” the New York Times Magazine declared of Los Angeles in 1986.

Before long the media narrative had expanded: With planning, the Southern California metropolitan area “might even emerge as the Western Hemisphere’s leading city in the early 21st Century,” the Atlantic Monthly reported in 1988.

Now the story line has shifted again: “This most extravagant of cities faces a growing perception that it has reached a limit,” the New York Times magazine declared in July.

Traffic is standing still, says a run of Southern California stories in the national press. The air is coal black with smog, streets are overrun with immigrants, housing costs are beyond reason. People are fleeing to Oregon.

“The Golden State, in short, is no longer so golden,” concluded a July Newsweek cover story entitled “California: American Dream, American Nightmare.”

“The dream that materialized for many,” proclaimed the Wall Street Journal in June, “is dying.”

Irvine Called ‘Stifling’

Orange County and the city of Irvine, New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger sniffed late last year, are “a sea of housing developments interrupted by an occasional freeway, shopping mall or cluster of high-rise commercial buildings. . . . There is lots of neat, prim good taste in Irvine, and not a neon sign to be found, but the world that it gives us is not liberating; it is stifling.”

In the space of a few years, the national narrative about Southern California has turned from paternal to respectful to bleak. Why?

The issues cited are all real enough, but they are not nearly so sudden as the recent shift in the press would imply. Does the new story line signify some change in Southern California? Or a change in the nation at large? Is it really as bad here as they think out there?

Some who write about the state suggest that the change in tone about California reflects a national uncertainty about the future in general. And Los Angeles, in an era of globalization, has become the metaphor by which we Americans will think about our problems.

Another view is that the criticisms at least show that the region is being taken seriously and that they represent a break with the traditional view of “El Lay” as a city of vapid narcissism and venal excess.

In fact, a closer look suggests that the current media cycle is part of a longer fascination with the region, one in which three enduring Southern California mythologies have folded in and out and back over each other, the mood alternating between pessimism and optimism, dismissal and seriousness.

One, perhaps the oldest, is the mythology of “Fruits and Nuts,” the notion of California as a place of social anarchy, the end of land where all the country’s seekers and oddballs gathered.

The second is the mythology of what John Gunther called “Iowa With Palm Trees,” the idea that Southern California is a powerful place rich in resources but devoid of sophistication.

The third is that Southern California represents the city of the future. Yes, this one isn’t new either. Even the current variation, the declaration of the dream turning to nightmare, is familiar.

“The easy life is coming to an end in the country’s third largest city,” U.S. News & World Report proclaimed in 1965 after the Watts riots. “After 25 years of haphazard growth and unprecedented prosperity, Los Angeles now faces the same tough economic and social problems that confronted older cities years ago.”

Results of Polls

Jane Pisano, president of The 2000 Partnership, a civic task force working on a plan to improve Los Angeles, dates the current dream-becomes-nightmare cycle in part to a Los Angeles Times Poll in April that found that nearly 60% of the respondents thought life had gotten worse, not better, in Los Angeles in the last 15 years.

More than half still were “pleased” with life here, but the number had been 70% four years earlier.

Orange County residents, however, gave their communities rave reviews in a separate poll done for The Times Orange County Edition this year. An overwhelming majority--96% of those surveyed--said they are happy here, and one-third agreed that “living in Orange County is the closest thing to paradise in America today.”

But the Orange County respondents had few good things to say about Los Angeles. Only four respondents out of the 600 surveyed said they would rather live in Los Angeles; 18 said New York City would be their first choice.

The press was quick to seize on the pessimistic findings of the Los Angeles poll, among them such regional papers as the Boston Globe: “Residents of Southern California, fed up with congestion, pollution, crime and can’t-touch-’em housing prices are heading 950 miles up the Pacific Coast.”

Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Paul Nussbaum said his everybody-is-leaving-L.A. story got “more response and more wire play” on the Knight-Ridder service “than anything I have done” in three years of covering the West.

The falling-city theme has been applied to other subjects too.

View From New York

Consider this New York Times story about rock music: “The Hollywood dream of endless expensive pleasure that animated a broad segment of Los Angeles rock for two decades has soured . . ,” the story said, “now that Los Angeles is wracked with pollution, crack and AIDS.”

Even the National Geographic--hardly in the business of bashing--found room for a zinger in an August piece about San Diego, where, it said, “growth threatens to bring with it the pollution and congestion of Los Angeles, which is often evoked as the ultimate bad example.”

Historian Kevin Starr, author of three books on California, argues that Americans use cities as metaphors to help them think about their prospects and that the notion of a declining Southern California is a metaphor for fears about the decline of the American Century.

“In this time now,” he argued, “this very confused violent strange time that American culture is going through as it is simultaneously globalizing its trade and finance, and losing world influence, Los Angeles becomes the city through which the United States is going to think about these problems.”

Hence, embedded in these stories are subtexts, Starr said, “as Los Angeles is used as a code gloss” for a range of other concerns, including racism. “You can talk about L.A. when what you are really talking about is blacks or immigrants.”

Code Words in Writings

Whether intended or not, such code words exist in some of the current prose, as when the Wall Street Journal writes that “Americans, drawn for decades to the area, are starting to leave” Southern California.

Many immigrants are Americans too, of course. And actually, it is still true that the number of people from other parts of the country arriving in Los Angeles is greater than the number that are leaving.

In much the same way, maintained Starr, some of the bashing of Hollywood and Beverly Hills--in jokes, literature and even in congressional investigations--”has always been a reservoir for displaced anti-Semitism.”

Joan Didion, the writer and former Southern Californian who frequently writes about the region for the New Yorker magazine, agrees that the city-of-the-future theme seems to have found resonance again in some mood of pessimism.

“They have this narrative about it being the future, and now they have this narrative about the future failing, the dream failing,” she said. “It is just one of those stories.”

A Sense of Relief

Among some Southern Californians, one response to all this is actually a sense of relief. Although the stories are often Kafka-esque in their bleakness--”stray gunfire plagues parts of the city,” said the Journal--at least they no longer dismiss Southern California as lightweight.

A Los Angeles Times Magazine article in January by Ronald Brownstein cited a “noticeable upsurge in interest in Los Angeles on the part of serious writers and thinkers,” which it welcomed as a break with the traditional perception of Los Angeles as “a city of shallowness, vapid self-absorption and orgiastic materialism.”

Now, the article said, Southern California is being recognized as a “testing ground for fundamental changes in the way America lives.”

In part, the change recognized that Southern California’s automobile-based decentralization was the model for 20th-Century American cities and that the immigration to the region offered a look at the future of America.

In fact, however, even the theme of Los Angeles as the city of the future is not new.

School of Thought

There is “a growing school of thought that it might very well be on its way to becoming the greatest of all American cities,” wrote Holiday magazine in January, 1950.

“Almost everybody who lives in Los Angeles believes that someday it will be the largest city in the world,” Life magazine wrote in 1943, when--before freeways--it actually took even longer to move about by car than it does today.

“I remember when they were talking about Los Angeles being the lab of the future in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and it wasn’t,” Didion said. She contends that what really was giving the country its particular tone at that time was the Caribbean, as seen in cities from New Orleans to Miami.

Writing in the New Yorker a year ago, Didion said, “What is striking about Los Angeles after a period away from it is how well it works.”

In truth, journalism’s distortion is that it must take the specific and infer from it the general, using stereotypes and metaphors, references to what is familiar, all to communicate things in ways that seem relevant.

Intellectual Illusion

And the idea that Los Angeles is about to become, or in fact already signifies, anything is inevitably an act of intellectual illusion, ignoring one thing in favor of another.

It is in the nature of cities, after all, that they contain bits of everything. That is what attracts great numbers of people to them in the first place.

Actually, over the 100 years that the nation has tried so vigorously to explain Southern California, the narrative about the region has not really evolved at all.

It is a story of three mythologies: the city of tomorrow (all that wealth), a place without cultural or intellectual moorings (Raymond Chandler called it “a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup”), a place of aberrant social behavior (it was supposedly Frank Lloyd Wright who said that if the country were tilted, everything loose would tumble here).

All three visions have their roots in the Gold Rush, which, according to historian J. S. Holliday, introduced the expectation of instant riches to the American consciousness.

Stark Contrast

Holliday, author of the Gold Rush history “The World Rushed In,” said that the expectation of something for nothing was a stark contrast to the ideas in force when the nation was built. “Always before, Americans could only reap what they had sown, the basic agricultural economy.”

The Gold Rush illusion so powerfully challenged that notion that the intellectuals of the day were offended. Henry David Thoreau called the Gold Rush “the world’s raffle” and bemoaned the idea of men groveling like pigs.

There were two sub-themes here too, Holliday said. One was that failure was acceptable, that it was endemic in an economy based in part on luck. The other was anonymity. “Here you can change your stripes,” Holliday said, “give up being a Catholic or come out of the closet, whatever.”

Together these ideas held, and they gradually adhered themselves most firmly to Southern California.

“The result,” Holliday said, is that California is seen by the rest of the nation as a socially anarchic place where “the restraints and inhibitions that hold people back in Minnesota and Maryland don’t apply.”

Hollywood’s Role

If the Gold Rush laid the foundation, Hollywood, of course, played a role too. At first it seemed a merely “racy” place filled with actors and actresses who were “spoiled darlings,” said Otto Friedrich, author of the Hollywood history “City of Nets.”

But when the scandals grew to include the murder of director William Desmond Taylor and the sexual assault and manslaughter trial of actor Fatty Arbuckle in the 1920s, Hollywood lent strength to California’s reputation as a place of moral and social anarchy.

The industry, fearing a puritanical American backlash, set up the Hays Office to censor the movies, and the result was an avalanche of “clean-cut movies about the boy and girl next door,” Friedrich said.

“It was all phony, of course. People still went to the movies to see Hedy Lamarr more than they did to see June Allyson.” But the industry’s image did change, and it really did not return to that same sense of kooky hedonism and self-absorption until the late 1960s and 1970s.

In between, the emphasis and dominance of the differing mythologies shifted.

Viewed as Insipid

There was always the Southern California the insipid, as described by everyone from William Faulkner (“Everything . . . is too large, too loud and too banal in concept”) to Aldous Huxley (“Thought is barred in this city of dreadful joy”) to Woody Allen (the “only cultural advantage is that you can turn right on a red light”).

This particular view of Southern California may have its most permanent personification in Disneyland, said Jonathan Miller, the Londoner who recently directed the “Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny” at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera: Disneyland “is a white pioneer’s view of what America is,” Miller said. “Wacky American animals, American conviviality, zappy, zany, congenial and nice, like a parade of demented bright Shriners.”

But at other times, “in between these down cycles, there have been moments when it seemed profitable, interesting, valid to talk of a new Los Angeles,” said Thomas Hines, professor of history and architecture at UCLA.

During the Great Depression, for instance, there was unmistakably the city of the future, where people came to seek their fortunes, and Al Jolson was singing “California, Here I Come.”

Idea Gains Momentum

That idea gained momentum after World War II, when soldiers who had discovered Los Angeles going through Union Station on their way to the Pacific came back to resettle.

In the 1950s and into the 1960s, the notions of swimming pools and barbecues, Gidget movies and surfer music all “projected the image of alertness, of optimism,” Starr said.

And always with this city-of-the-future mythology has lurked the idea of its having a darker underside, an idea that principally rests on the notion of California as a syllabus of environmental and planning errors, a wonderful environment that has been abused beyond recognition.

This idea had a powerful force in the early 1970s and, said Didion, again in the early 1980s, when any kind of natural disaster seemed to bring reporters to her doorstep who were doing stories about California falling into the sea: “Now they will see the folly of their ways.”

This fantasy of Angeleno Apocalypse echoes the scene of hell fire engulfing the city at the end of Nathanael West’s 1939 novella, “Day of the Locust.”

Fear of Immigrants

More recently has come the fear of immigrants, perhaps most hauntingly visualized in the 1982 film “Blade Runner,” a futuristic rendering of 21st-Century Los Angeles in which the streets are ruled by Asians and Latinos speaking a street language that blends Japanese and Spanish. Whites, most of whom cannot speak the dialect, live in high-rise buildings and travel among them without ever walking the streets.

Los Angeles-based Washington Post reporter Jay Mathews said the same set of facts about immigration gives him a different story line: “My foremost hobbyhorse and the one story I spent most of last year writing is that the transformation going on here is the very definition of what it means to be an American.”

Constant Avocation

Perhaps, in the end, it is precisely because Southern California is so difficult to define, thanks to its expanse; so familiar, thanks to Hollywood, and physically so far from the rest of the country that describing it remains a constant avocation of the East.

As director Miller said last week after an extended visit: “It is a geo-metropolitan predicament rather than a city. You can no more administer it than you could administer the solar system.”

In the generous library of Los Angelesisms, that isn’t half bad.

Times staff writer Jean Davidson and researcher Aleta Embrey also contributed to this story.