15 - Essaying Los Angeles

Summary

After several decades of inquiry, scholars agree that Los Angeles defies the conventions of urban theory. To some, it models a new paradigm of decentralized development, although others find in the city's sprawl extremes of the excess and deprivation characteristic of capitalist cities. Still others depict Los Angeles as the immigrant entrepôt of the twenty-first century. While detractors still dismiss it as one big movie set, recycling the myth of Tinseltown, in America (1988), Jean Baudrillard extends the notion of Los Angeles as a land of simulation beyond Hollywood by noting the effects on the regional life and landscape of such signature Southern California industries as informatics, genetics, the fitness industry, and New Age therapies. Like all cities, Los Angeles excites a range of emotions, but as the twelfth-largest urban area in the world, brimming with almost eighteen million inhabitants, Los Angeles remains fixed in the urban imagination. How do we know Los Angeles and where does that knowledge come from? This is a complicated question with too many easy answers. It has become a cliché, for example, to implicate Hollywood in spinning a marketable identity of Los Angeles through a century of film and television production. That “knowledge,” prone to distortion, hyperbole, and much mythology, is suspect, but the images rendered on television and movie screens nonetheless continue to shape popular understandings of the city.