Secession or no, Valley is hesitant to embrace its art

In the opening frames of “Punch-Drunk Love,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s cockeyed new romantic fable, a nebbishy, passive-aggressive toilet-supplies salesman named Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) stands by the curb of a generic San Fernando Valley thoroughfare, sipping his morning coffee. We seem to be watching an ordinary man in a prosaic landscape where nothing of consequence ever happens.

Then -- violently, unexpectedly, unfathomably -- something does. As Barry’s staid existence collides head-on with chaos, this gawky, insular being is forced to look deeper into himself until finally he discovers a new identity buried in the wreckage of his own past.

On Tuesday, something big and potentially life-changing could happen in the Valley, which for nearly a century has chafed in bit-player roles, metaphorically serving as grudging makeup girl and best boy to the self-absorbed glamour-pusses Over the Hill. But, as with the events that befall Barry Egan, it’s still a tossup whether this change will be a heaven-sent boon or a curse in disguise.

Barry, an awkward boy-man whose skittish mix of naivete and resourcefulness, sweetness and explosive anger suggests he’s either a grandson of Buster Keaton or a distant cousin of Pee-wee Herman, desperately yearns to be treated like a grown-up. But he’s nervous about the duties of adulthood. All his life he has defined himself by his seven sisters’ mostly dismissive and patronizing impressions of him. When finally forced to stand on his own feet, he rises, painfully but triumphantly, to the occasion.

So, too, may the new city of San Fernando Valley or Camelot or whatever it’s called, if secession passes. Do the separatists have a case? You bet they do. Subpar services and a distant City Hall bureaucracy are only part of the story. What really galls Secessionistas is the sense that the rest of L.A. looks down its nose at the Valley while happily pocketing its property taxes.

But instead of rushing to sever its umbilical attachment to its overbearing metropolitan Mommie Dearest, the Valley maybe should concentrate on nurturing its unique cultural identity, regardless of outsiders’ perceptions and prejudices. Louise Lewis, director of Cal State Northridge’s art galleries since 1980, says she hasn’t yet made up her mind about secession. But she thinks that the Valley should focus more on its assets than on what it lacks or what nonresidents think -- just as postwar Los Angeles needed to shake free of East Coast expectations so as to become the self-possessed city it is today.

How can the Valley develop a positive self-image if it’s constantly in “reactionary” mode, promoting itself “in terms of what we’re not getting?” Lewis asks rhetorically. “I don’t think enough attention to that has been given by the [secession] movement.”

Culturally the Valley already has plenty of assets, some in plain view, others requiring time to discover. That’s why the Los Angeles Conservancy has begun sponsoring tours of the area’s Googie-style architecture. That’s why the North Hollywood NoHo Arts District is recognized for producing some of the region’s best small theater.

The Valley is home to three filmmaking giants: Walt Disney, Jack Warner and Carl Laemmle at Universal, who parlayed chutzpah, genius and an understanding of the American public that any politician would envy into sprawling entertainment empires. Another great filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, might well have designed the Warner Center, the Valley’s Potemkin urban nexus.

Nor is there any sign that the Valley’s home-grown talent pool, unlike William Mulholland’s water supply, is in any danger of running out. Take the aforementioned P.T. Anderson, a mild-mannered Valley native who’s rapidly morphing into the Louis Malle of Sherman Oaks.

The late Phil Hartman once joked to a Daily News reporter that when he identified himself as a Valley resident to industry colleagues from Over the Hill, he could see them back away so as not to get “loser dust” over their designer duds. But in actuality, thousands of industry professionals make their homes in the Valley, having found they don’t have to be bound by simplistic divisions of urban versus suburban, hipster versus homebody.

That’s the brilliant duality of the Valley, its split personality, its internal yin and yang. It’s the world’s porn capital, yet many triple-X moguls choose to live in bland tract homes and conduct themselves as model suburbanites. It’s the place where the old, Ayn Rand-style libertarian mind-set jostles with a new set of progressive political imperatives brought by waves of immigrants from Asia, Mexico, Central America.

It’s a giant sound stage where sociological dramas play out daily, where the Brady Bunch home symbolized ‘60s family values and Hollywood’s paranoid fantasies blurred into the terrifying spectacle of the 1997 North Hollywood bank shootout.

Some of us even find the Valley’s lack of pretensions refreshing, preferable to the relentless boosterism of L.A.’s civic fathers and their relentless chatter about our weird, effusive metropolis as the “City of the 21st Century.”

But as author D.J. Waldie (“Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir”) has written, the secession backers may be peddling their own form of boosterism. What they’re selling, he observes, is a new version of paradise to replace the supposedly lost paradise of acre-sized lots studded with orange trees and uncrowded freeways, which lured Midwestern interlopers here in decades past.

Human beings, however, weren’t built for paradise. Sooner or later we all have to exit Eden and go rough it on our own. Practically from the year of its invention, the Valley has languished in a state of arrested development, trapped between its preternatural growth spurts and L.A.’s benign neglect. But culturally the Valley has already come of age. Whatever happens on Tuesday, the secession debate demonstrates that the Valley is of age politically too.

Let provincials Over the Hill stick to Brentwood and Silver Lake for now. Word will spread. They’ll eventually find out what they’re missing.

In “Punch-Drunk Love,” Barry’s salvation lies in discovering that he’s not as isolated from love or the rest of humanity as he’d always believed. But before gaining his independence he first must accept his interdependence.

Smart concept. Good movie. Don’t forget to vote.

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Reed Johnson can be reached at reed.johnson@latimes.com.