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.” 5 Movies that “boost” the region as a land of sunlight and opportunity populated by fit and great-looking people include Grease (1978), Valley Girl (1983), Pretty Woman (1990), and 500 Days of Summer (2009) television shows include CHiPs, The Hills, Baywatch, and Beverly Hills 90210. Writes Davis, “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. 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.” 4 Their mission was to entice white folks from the East and Midwest, sick of industrialism, urban density, bad weather, and immigrnts, to come California way (and bring their capital). The contrasting takes on the scenario illustrate two historically predominant ways of representing Los Angeles in the movies: as utopian or dystopian, or as Mike Davis puts it in his seminal book on the history and culture of the city, City of Quartz, as “sunshine or noir.” 2 Davis argues that Los Angeles has been contradictorily presented to the nation by successive waves of “boosters” and “debunkers.” 3 Boosters included the early writers and publicists – working with the L.A. His motorists might not be moving, but they revel in having a spare moment on this lovely “winter” day, leading them to burst from their vehicles and into the movie’s ecstatic first song-and-dance number, “Another Day of Sun.” Where Schumacher’s framing is claustrophobically tight, his camera a low, slow creep, Chazelles’s camera lifts and flies down the traffic-choked freeway.
1 The setup in both films is virtually the same, right down to the crappy cars, with the key distinction being that D-FENS is trapped underneath an overpass while the commuters in La La Land sit on top of one. There is little traffic (after the opening scene), no crime (other than Ryan Gosling’s singing), no industrialism, no poverty, no homelessness, and very little cultural or geographical diversity.ĭirector Damien Chazelle has said that he intended the beginning sequence of his musical La La Land (2016) as the antithesis of Joel Schumacher’s opening to Falling Down (1993), in which Michael Douglas’s disenfranchised government worker, D-FENS – stalled in rush hour traffic and driven to madness by a hectoring fly – suffers the final mental break that will send him careering on a Dantean journey of violence and insanity through a racialized Los Angeles. The filmmakers depict a clean, spare, elegant city, sluiced in mid-century Technicolor, consisting almost exclusively of jazz clubs and studio backlots, dreamy piers and sodium lamps, starlight and cappuccinos.
Few movies have represented LA with such fawning reverence and nostalgia as La La Land.
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