Iconic and prototypical, Los Angeles has been made to serve as both micro- and macrocosm for filmmakers wishing to discuss American lives.
Its sprawling landscape, ethnographic history, and charismatic reputation make LA more than just a convenient backyard for Hollywood storytellers. As their methods of interpretation and representation have changed, so too has American cinema undergone significant shifts as a reflection of the popular consciousness.
Breaking With Illusion
During the silent era, Hollywood instituted a tradition of self-glorification. When it appeared on-screen Los Angeles was a paradigm of glamor and show business-fueled excitement. This image was first called into question in the late 1930s as the film noir era saw LA serve as a shadowy cityscape where criminals worked their schemes.
Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) uses the Californian metropolis as a place for murder to bubble up through the idyllic facade of the American dream. Later, with 1950's Sunset Blvd., Wilder would finalize his vision of Hollywood's dark dream.
The portrayal of Los Angeles as something other than a dreamland was not completed until the 1960s and the arrival of the New Hollywood movement, led by the likes of Robert Altman, whose The Long Goodbye (1973) placed famed film detective Philip Marlowe in a shockingly realistic Los Angeles run over by counterculture and youth, his bygone 1940s morals no longer applicable.
Altman would continue to indict American values, using Los Angeles as an archetype of greed and corruption as late as 1992's The Player. The film's black irony and ambiguous conscience point to the problems of moral certitude. A year later, in Short Cuts, Altman would choose LA as a setting of convenience, designating it the only American city vast and diverse enough to contain the series of Raymond Carver stories adapted for his complex, interwoven screenplay.
Return to Illusion
During the 1990s Los Angeles returned in part to the illusory stage of the silent era. An explosion of high concept features and the accompanying advances in special effects resulted in disaster films like Escape from L.A. (1996) and Volcano (1997) in which LA was quite literally unreal, taking the form of a computer-generated image.
Comedies also figured importantly in this era of relative fantasy, with L.A. Story (1991) and Clueless (1995) leading a group that needed only an attractive, silly, and typically American city to take place in. Surreal images of Los Angeles in experimental works such as David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001) add to the distance from a realistic view of the city.
Room for Realism
A contemporary inspection of common depictions of Los Angeles gives an idea as to how the subject has been dealt with historically perhaps as well as any prior context. With a record that contains trends favoring both realism and illusion, filmmakers may respond in kind to whichever posture best suits their storytelling needs.
This dichotomy is clearly manifest in a single body of work; that of Paul Thomas Anderson. An admirer of Altman and the New Hollywood, a film like Anderson's Magnolia (1999) recalls both the disaffection with shattered illusion of Sunset Blvd. and the sprawling ensemble narrative of Short Cuts. Despite this embrace of naturalism, Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (2002) takes the opposite approach, placing its protagonist in a hazy, largely unseen and slightly unreal urban space that could be anywhere.
Balancing the creative imagination that produces illusory images with film's ability to signify reality is the charge of every film artist. As evidenced by so many notable examples and shifting historical tendencies, American film's image of Los Angeles is still evolving, and still contradictory.
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