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I have only been to Los Angeles once, and even then, just for a couple hours, and even then, I wasn’t really in Los Angeles, I was in Pasadena, northeast of downtown L.A. I’m a college football fan, and more than that, I’m a college football fan from the Midwest, and so I had come to pay homage to the Rose Bowl, my favorite sport’s mecca. It was late July, not New Year’s Day, but it was no less beautiful, and in a twist of fate, while taking a stroll around the now-century-old bowl-shaped stadium I ran into a couple Minnesota transplants out for their evening walk, and we shared stories. I snapped a photo on my disposable Kodak of my Ford Tempo in front of the Rose Bowl sign and I remember seeing a youth soccer game happening across the way. I don’t often stop and think about how my life might have turned out different, but in that brief moment, I did, wondering how my life might have looked had I grown up playing youth soccer in the shadow of the Rose Bowl rather than in the shadow of the Waukee, Iowa High School. Probably I would have just dropped out of the University of California, Los Angeles rather than the University of Iowa. 

It was only years later that I realized how my lone trip to Los Angeles was on account of a myth. I mean, yes, the Rose Bowl Stadium is real, and the San Gabriel Mountains, those are real too, and the Rose Bowl Game itself, that’s real, except maybe the 2021 version, but the Rose Bowl was always more than that, or maybe just something different than that, a utopian sort of vision. There is reason why the first national color TV broadcast was of the Tournament Roses Parade, and there is a reason why the first football game broadcast nationally in color was the Rose Bowl, “images of college football games beamed back to Midwesterners and Northeasterners drinking bad coffee in their freezing living rooms,” Spencer Hall once wrote. “Someone watching the immortal, glorious sunset against the San Gabriels had to look and think: Why am I here, and not there? The Rose Bowl wasn’t just the place teams went when they were very, very good. It was a little piece of a whole life anyone could have simply by having the will to go.” In the end, even the hallowed Rose Bowl is just one more way to peddle real estate. I fantasize about home ownership as much as I fantasize about an alternate life, but on those few occasions when I do, I imagine a California Bungalow.

It probably makes some sense, then, that my other hobby and/or passion would eventually emerge as movies, given they are nothing more, really, than mythical flickering images on a screen. Their spiritual epicenter is Los Angeles too, or Hollywood, anyway, and though what we see up on those glorious big screens are generally not real, they often involve real Los Angeles geography and locations, nonetheless. This is what Sarah Kendzior wrote about in her newsletter in the wake of the horrific Los Angeles wildfires, how she had never been to Pacific Palisades, but had seen it in “Carrie” and “Teen Wolf,” and how she had never been to Altadena, but she had seen it in “Beverly Hills 90210.” “To watch Los Angeles burn feels like losing America’s collective consciousness,” she wrote. “It’s the destruction of childhood escape, the annihilation of fake places remembered more vividly than real ones. It is grief by association.”

I wonder how Thom Andersen would feel about that. He’s the documentary director who helmed the landmark “Los Angeles Plays Itself” (2003) which he constructed almost exclusively from scenes of actual Los Angeles locations in movies, demonstrating how myriad myths and perceptions of L.A. are created and then challenging them one by one to excavate the real city underneath. The voiceover, both in its writing and Encke King recitation of it, skews cynical, even outright angry, and yet, in dissecting sacred cows like “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” it excoriates “cynicism (becoming) the dominant myth of our times,” how their portrayals of conspiracy and corruption might take dramatic license with real stories but but also imbued a sense of a city not worth saving. Andersen links the mosaic drama “Grand Canyon” with the futuristic neo-noir “Blade Runner” as Los Angeles-set movies in which “the social fabric is disintegrated” but with virtually no interest in “try(ing) to understand how it happened.” Those critiques evoke Defector’s Patrick Redford lamenting the apocalyptic language surrounding the Los Angeles wildfires as a “cynical...mode of thinking.” He writes: “If the fires are envoys of a force that is fundamentally beyond our comprehension, let alone control, what is the point of grappling with them or even understanding them?” 

A considerable number of Americans clearly do not want to grapple with nor understand these fires in any meaningful way. That’s why misinformation flooded the zone almost immediately, including eerie-“Chinatown” like conspiracy theories, and many on the right, from actual elected officials to their conservative media bootlickers, hardly tried to hide their glee over the city getting what was coming to them for committing the sin of liberalism. In “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Andersen touches on Hollywood’s propensity for destroying Los Angeles, and while other cliches stick in his craw, this one, not so much. “Disaster movies remind us how foolish and helpless we really are and thus demonstrate our need for professionals and experts to save us from ourselves,” says King. If Andersen’s documentary can sometimes feel prophetic, here it feels just the opposite, shockingly naive. He also cites another famed prophet of Los Angeles, the late Mike Davis, who argued that the entire world seemed to take pleasure in the city being ruined over and over, again and again. Andersen sees it more as a case of “economic expediency...Hollywood destroys Los Angeles because it’s there,” but in all that thinly veiled contempt at a city burning, it was difficult not to think that David had it right all along. 

There is another disaster movie that “Los Angeles Plays Itself” does not discuss because it was released 12 years later. That was “San Andreas” in which the titular fault is discovered by Caltech seismologist Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) to be shifting, triggering earthquakes in San Francisco and Los Angeles. With little time to spare upon his realization, Hayes and students hack the media and go rogue on live TV to get the word out. In another piece for Defector, Diana Moskovtiz highlighted the crucial job performed by Los Angeles local media during the wildfires, providing pertinent, life-saving facts even as social media spluttered the opposite. Such media, as Moskovitz notes, is a public service and, by extension, “a key piece of our democracy.” But because it’s a key piece of our democracy, it’s also been bled dry by anti-democratic bad actors, and though government investing in media on a national level could help rectify the crisis, such investment is hard to imagine from a know nothing government that casts the media as an enemy. And one can only hope that when the next climate change-fueled disaster strikes, which will surely be sooner rather than later, real-life experts don’t have to literally hack the airwaves to get the word out.