Letter from Los Angeles

On Saturday night my cousin and I drove down Mullholland drive into the city. It was clear and the lights of Los Angeles shimmered down the basin to Long Beach. He's lived here a year and I've been visiting about that long. Both of us commented how wrong we were: back east LA embodied every lame quality in the culture, but now we both loved it.

I didn't feel comfortable with the thought. When I lived in Chicago and Boston, LA was superficial, money-grubbing, parvenu, violent, polluted, contemptible. Which is not to say LA is not those things: the day I came down, there had been an extraordinary bank robbery in North Hollywood, and the television newscasters reported it with apoplectic hyperbole. Robust beneath absurd wigs, they were studies in the dramatic point, eyebrows arched in emphasis, like pitchmen in detergent ads. The best they could muster by way of insight was that the whole affair resembled a gangster movie.

Which gets to the heart of why LA is so despised elsewhere in the country: because Hollywood is here, and movies come from Hollywood, and deep within a lot of us we fear and hate what Hollywood has done to us, we hate Los Angeles. And what Hollywood has done to us is challenge, at a visceral cultural level, a remnant Puritanism.

Movies are pagan idolatry. We know this, somewhere in the collective unconscious, suspended as we are over the yawning pits of hell simply by virtue of a merciful God. Our Puritan forebears strictly censured acting and painting, the plastic arts full of human imitation and sensual possibilities. No drama compared to the glory of creation, and no painting contained the inscrutable majesty of the Lord. On that straight and narrow path the aesthetic principle of American culture was founded, and even superseded by three centuries of artistic experimentation, that principle continues to nurture a deep suspicion of art.

Hollywood and Los Angeles, the geographic centers of our most powerful, popular, god-forsaken artistic expressions (short of Rock 'n' Roll) labor fully under a Puritan suspicion. But we need movies and television too much to hate them outright. They fill out the mean corners of our existence; they kill time successfully; they spur the dinner conversations of the banal. And so all our mistrust is displaced, foisted upon LA.

Think about it: all those qualities the East despises are manifestations of this simple Puritan legacy. Only the person focused with inquisitorial zeal upon the authenticity of personality would condemn a person or place as superficial. It isn't the money-grubbing of Los Angeles that offends, it's the new wealth, the riches without effort, the movie star an overnight millionaire without ever doing a hard day's work. Surely New York or Boston is more avaricious-but they aren't ostentatious; they're smug with the Puritan conceit that God rewards the virtuous with wealth. No one in LA shares that confidence. There are too many overnight paupers here.

As is Los Angeles, if Chicago were bordered to the east by mountains, it would be just as polluted. But Midwesterners comment on the smog in LA as if it were a consequence of misbehavior, rather than a toxic combination of high mountains, still air, and too many cars. Earthquakes are similarly imparted to the low moral standing of Angelenos, as are fires, mudslides and other acts of caprice, random chance and natural viciousness. Yet the assumption is Angelenos are somehow to blame. No one could be so stupid: don't those people know that sooner or later the big one's gonna dump the whole polluted cesspool into the Pacific? --And they keep living there!

Yes, they do. And for good reason: Los Angeles is a standing rebuke to everything still tied to the old Puritan worldview. As it stands, Angelenos survive earthquakes, riots, fires and monoxide miasma with relatively little effort, and they earn their fame, riches and power just as easily. They know nothing of the idea that life is struggle, a deep melancholy thing against which they must labor tirelessly. Angelenos are not predestined to sin and suffer; they are not weighed down by life. The weather is always beautiful, the food is fine, people are lovely. It is all effortless. And nothing could be more repugnant to a Puritan.

As to the apocalypse: they accept it. Angelenos do know they live on a fault line; do know that sooner or later their own relentless class pressures will result in some appalling act of senseless violence. And people grow old and die generally forgotten in LA; they drown in the fresh instant joy of a youth-obsessed culture. So people sink in quiet desperation here just like they do in Cleveland or Newark. But in LA, no one ever expects it to be otherwise, no one broods on the tragedy of existence. They accept life at its core as hard, cold, and isolate. And settle for sun, and drinks by the poolside, and beautiful young people.

Because, frankly, they have no choice.