Los Angeles Plays Itself Page #11

...an effort advertised in a few films,

But even artists found the

new urbanism daunting.

For movie-makers,

...a real downtown existed only

in the past or in the future.

The wartime downtown evoked by

Edward James Olmos in American Me...

...was a dangerous place

for Mexican-Americans.

Olmos didn't need the

alibis of artistic license...

...to isolate where and when it all

went wrong for Los Angeles:

June 1943,

...the Zoot Suit Riots.

Stirred up by racist

propaganda in the local press,

...gangs of sailors went

on a week-long rampage,

...beating and stripping

self-styled pachucos...

...because their baggy suits had become a

provocative symbol of a defiant ethnic identity.

Olmos depicts these assaults

as a humiliating defeat...

...that disgraced and disarmed the

greatest generation of Chicanos...

...and produced a sick culture of

amoral masochistic toughness...

...as a reaction formation.

"Which one, ese?"

"Don't matter."

"F*** it, homes."

"La Primera lives!"

The downtown of the future...

...appeared with a

vengeance in Blade Runner,

...a movie set in 2019.

By then suburbia has

moved off world.

The dark satanic mills of

the industrial sublime...

...are belching overtime,

...and the smog has

turned to acid rain.

Blade Runner has been called

"The Official Nightmare" of Los Angeles,

...yet this dystopian vision is,

in many ways,

...a city planner's dream come true.

Finally, a vibrant street life.

A downtown crowded with

night-time strollers.

Neon beyond our wildest dreams.

Only a Unabomber could find

this totally repellent.

The streets are littered with

electronic parking meters,

...but there are no cars

parked next to them.

The VTO has replaced the SUV,

...but there are no traffic

jams in the sky.

The hero Deckard drives his car

home from his job downtown,

...yet when he pulls into the grounds of the

hundred-story apartment building where he lives,

...he finds a parking place right

next to the front door.

Apparently he is the

only tenant with a car.

Blade Runner is easy to criticize.

Pauline Kael noted...

...that it lacks even the slightest curiosity

about how the world got to this state...

...in just forty years.

Harrison Ford diagnosed its narrative

deficiencies in his complaint,

..."I played a detective

who did no detecting."

No one seems to agree about

what the film means,

...not even the film-makers themselves.

Director Ridley Scott

and his collaborators...

...couldn't even agree on whether

the protagonist is a human...

...or a replicant.

"It's too bad she won't live...

...But then again, who does?"

Yet Blade Runner continues to fascinate.

Perhaps it expresses a nostalgia...

...for a dystopian vision of the

future that has become outdated.

This vision offered some consolation...

...because it was at least sublime.

Now the future looks brighter,

...hotter, and blander.

Buffalo will become Miami,

...and Los Angeles

will become Death Valley,

...at least until the rising

ocean tides wash it away.

Computers will get faster,

...and we will get slower.

There will be plenty of progress,

...but few of us will be any

better off or happier for it.

Robots won't be sexy and dangerous.

They'll be dull and efficient,

...and they'll take our jobs.

As Blade Runner is the Los

Angeles movie of the eighties,

...another period film,

L.A. Confidential,

...is the Los Angeles

movie of the nineties.

The period is the early fifties,

...and it got it right,

...by not trying to make

everything look up-to-date.

In reality, we live in the past.

That is the world that

surrounds us is not new.

The things in it,

...our houses,

...the places we work,

...even our clothes and our cars...

...aren't created anew everyday.

So any particular period...

...is an amalgam of many earlier times,

...and L.A. Confidential acknowledges

the pastness of its present.

Like Chinatown,

...L.A. Confidential

evokes real events,

...real scandals.

The scandal-mongering

magazine Hush-Hush...

...is based on the pioneering

tabloid Confidential...

...and the TV series

Badge of Honor...

...is based on Dragnet.

"Excuse me, ma'am. Just the facts."

Dragnet made its debut

on radio in 1949...

...and moved to television in 1952.

Some real historical figures...

...appear in the cast of characters

without fictional names.

"Johnny Stompanato."

"A hooker cut to look like

Lana Turner is still a hooker."

"Hey!"

"She just looks like Lana Turner."

"She is Lana Turner."

"What?"

"She is Lana Turner."

A real scandal:

In the early morning hours

of Christmas day 1951,

...drunken cops had beaten seven

prisoners arrested after a bar fight,

"This is for ours, Poncho."

...and the Daily News came to call it:

"Bloody Christmas."

Other scandals were fictional.

"It may surprise some that a man in public

office would admit to making a mistake..."

...but after due consideration...

"...I'm changing my position on

the matter before the council."

Blackmail wasn't necessary

to build the freeways.

"From downtown to the

beach in twenty minutes."

And there was no conspiracy within

the Los Angeles Police Department...

...to take over the local rackets...

...from Mickey Cohen's gang

in the early fifties.

"What does Exley think of all this?"

"You know, I haven't told him yet..."

"...I just came straight

from the Records Bureau."

L.A. Confidential suggests another

secret history of the city.

The police conspiracy is smashed

and its mastermind is killed,

...but the good guys achieve a

strictly private victory.

"Beginning with the incarceration

of Mickey Cohen..."

"...Captain Smith has been assuming

control of organized crime..."

"...in the city of Los Angeles."

"This includes the assassinations

of an unknown number..."

"...of Mickey Cohen lieutenants..."

"...the systematic blackmail

of city officials..."

"Captain Smith admitted as much to me..."

"...before I shot him

at the Victory Motel."

There is a coverup,

...and the public never

gets the real story.

"If we can get the kid to play ball..."

"...who's to say what happened?"

"Maybe Dudley Smith died a hero."

Cynicism has become the

dominant myth of our times,

...and L.A. Confidential preaches it.

"It is with great pleasure

that I present this award..."

"...to Detective-Lieutenant

Edmund Exley..."

"...two time Medal of Valor recipient."

Cynicism tells us we are

ignorant and powerless,

...and L.A. Confidential proves it.

Actually the real scandal of the day...

...was on the front pages

of the newspapers...

...almost every day

from December 1951...

...to May 1953.

It took a public battle to

destroy public housing,

...a tragedy from which Los

Angeles has yet to recover.

The defeat of public housing doesn't

demonstrate that the people are powerless.

Just the opposite.

After its opponents began to denounce

public housing as "creeping socialism",

...the people voted it down.

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