Los Angeles Evades Itself

on Thom Andersen's miserablist epic

Before the redevelopment … Bunker Hill as seen in Shockproof (1949)

Like every other city in this country, Los Angeles is unlike anywhere else. That cities whose histories go back further than 30 or 40 years develop an essence—a certain look to the architecture, a flavor of salt on the wind, a unique shit smell in the garbage—that distinguishes them from other places is easy to understand. Actually identifying that essence, understanding that look, flavor, and smell, and connecting them back to the biology, geography, horticulture, and most importantly, history of the place from which they emanate and come to represent—that’s another matter. 

Los Angeles is a city within a county of 5,000 square miles, of 10 million people, of over 80 cities, neighborhoods, and municipalities. If Los Angeles’ GDP were ranked among the countries of the world, it would come in 17th, between Indonesia and Turkey. Los Angeles’ history stretches back centuries, weaving between British settler, Spanish settler, Mexican, and Indigenous rule; before the film camera was even invented, the Los Angeles Basin had already been the site of numerous civil wars, waves of colonization, processions of world religious practices, and centralized infrastructure plans.

As surely, as totally, and as blindly a fish encounters the water it swims through, the people of Los Angeles encounter the essence of the city they call their home as they move through it. One can hardly blame individuals for stopping to have a long think on what the city’s whole thing really is, and what it’s not. Especially when one of the defining attributes of Los Angeles is its movie industry, which over time has assumed a dominant role in shaping the public imagination toward things, its own self included. 

Reese Witherspoon tears up the valley in Freeway (1996)

When one thinks about Los Angeles, what does one really think of? Is it our own thoughts, or is it movie images? Are we thinking about Los Angeles the place, or Hollywood the idea? “Los Angeles is the place where the relation between reality and representation gets muddled,” Thom Andersen notes astutely in his 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself. Andersen is one such Angeleno who decided to have his crack at answering the question: what is Los Angeles?

Over the course of his sprawling three hour film essay, composed simply of film clips and narration, written by Andersen and voiced by Encke King, the filmmaker is at his most articulate when he’s speaking to all the things Los Angeles isn’t—the representations of both the city and the idea that frustrate him, nag at him, make him groan (in a scene that’s actually not played for laughs, Andersen refers to the Hollywood walk of fame, with its notable lack of blacklisted screenwriters, as the “walk of shame”). But when the stone rolls past the solemn ledgers of criticism, condescension, and scorn to reveal, even momentarily, the open cavity of passion, which beckons Andersen to make an offering, some tribute to the city he claims to love, claims even to have made this film for love of, he is found empty handed.

John Cassavetes looks over the city from the Ennis House in The Night Holds Terror (1955)

The worst part of Los Angeles Plays Itself is not Andersen’s insultingly shallow analysis (modern architecture was designed to promote peace, Andersen explains, yet everywhere in Hollywood movies it is used for villains’ lairs. His conclusion? Hollywood filmmakers make their films for the express purpose of waging a reputational “war on modern architecture”), it’s not his unforgiving, rationalist approach to what is largely a libidinal and deliberately self-contradictory medium (the director of City of Industry is “lying,” in Andersen’s words, when a chase sequence stitches together the Venice canals and the L.A. harbor, 30 miles apart from each other), and neither is it assertions that are oddly ahistorical (“No building is over 100 years old in Los Angeles”) given his handwringing dictum to “be honest,” repeated again and again throughout the film. It’s none of those, though their strenuous framing of the clips on screen spoils much of their inherent appeal as unselfconscious products of the glamor machine. 

No, what prevents Los Angeles Plays Itself from playing neither as a good film or a good essay is Andersen’s unwillingness or inability to accept Los Angeles on its own terms. Ultimately, Hollywood is not separate from Hollywood, and neither are separate from Los Angeles. The consumerist buffet of the beaches, the perverted modernism of the hills, and the “dismal flatland between” are all Los Angeles. The glitz, fakery, and schadenfreude that power the movie business are as real as the “lumpenproletariat” Andersen often paeans to, but rarely actually analyzes in his film. Tragically, ironically, Andersen’s rigid refusal to embrace the fluctuating and often unserious contours of Los Angeles the place leads him to repeat in his own work that which he detests most: obfuscation and misrepresentation. That the city’s sheer vastness can foil the efforts of even the most determined of cataloguers, however, might be a clue to its true essence.

It ends: L.A. in Volcano (1997)