City of Quartz - Mike Davis

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The Gold Coast [1988]) that exploited Southern California’s unsure boundary between reality and science fiction. As David Dunaway has pointed out, Huxley’s important contributions to Los Angeles’s anti-mythography are seldom acknowledged these days. If Swan, with its grotesque and scarcely veiled portraits of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davis, inspired Welles’s Citizen Kane (1940), then Ape and Essence, with its savage vision of the post-apocalypse, was the ‘predecessor of science fiction films on the environmental destruction of Los Angeles and human devolution’ – a list that includes Planet of the Apes, Omega Man, and Blade Runner.48

      The early science fiction of Ray Bradbury, meanwhile, showed a strong noir influence derived from his sci-fi mentor, Leigh Brackett, who styled herself after Chandler and Hammett. Bradbury’s uniqueness was that he was a son of the Folks turned ‘poet of the pulps’. A Depression emigré from Wisconsin, he attended L.A. High (but never learned to drive) and became an enthusiastic member of West’s dreaded fanocracy:

      I was one of Them: the Strange Ones. The Funny People. The Odd Tribes of autograph-collectors and photographers. The Ones who waited through long days and nights, who used other people’s dreams for their lives.49

      Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950) revolves around contradictions between the Turnerian, ‘westering’ quest for new frontiers and poignant nostalgia for small-town America. In a sense, Bradbury took the angst of the dislocated Midwesterner in Los Angeles and projected it as extra-terrestrial destiny. As David Mogen has pointed out, Bradbury’s Mars is really Los Angeles’s metaphysical double: ‘a product of fantasies imposed upon it . . . magical promises and disorienting malevolence’.50

      But the most interesting transit across Los Angeles’s literary scene in the 1940s was probably the brief appearance of Black noir. Los Angeles was a particularly cruel mirage for Black writers. At first sight to the young Langston Hughes, visiting the city in the Olympic year of 1932, ‘Los Angeles seemed more a miracle than a city, a place where oranges sold for one cent a dozen, ordinary Black folks lived in huge houses with “miles of yards”, and prosperity seemed to reign in spite of the Depression.’51 Later, in 1939, when Hughes attempted to work within the studio system, he discovered that the only available role for a Black writer was furnishing demeaning dialogue for cotton-field parodies of Black life. After a humiliating experience with the film Way Down South, he declared that ‘so far as Negroes are concerned, [Hollywood] might just as well be controlled by Hitler’.52

      Hughes’s disillusionment in Los Angeles was recapitulated, more harrowingly, by the experience of Chester Himes. At the beginning of the war, Himes (who had spent the early Depression in the Ohio State Penitentiary on a robbery charge) headed West with his wife Jean for a fresh start as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers. Despite a formidable reputation as a short story writer for Esquire (the first ‘convict writer’ of renown), Himes encountered an implacable wall of racism in Hollywood. As his biographer describes the incident, ‘he was promptly fired from . . . Warner Brothers when Jack Warner heard about him and said, “I don’t want no niggers on this lot” ’.53 Racebaited from the studios, Himes spent the rest of the war years as an unskilled laborer in internally segregated defense plants wracked by outbursts of white violence. As he recalled later in his autobiography, it was a searing experience:

      Up to the age of thirty-one I had been hurt emotionally, spiritually, and physically as much as thirty-one years can bear: I had lived in the South, I had fallen down an elevator shaft, I had been kicked out of college, I had served seven and one half years in prison, I had survived the humiliating last five years of the Depression in Cleveland; and still I was entire, complete, functional; my mind was sharp, my reflexes were good, and I was not bitter. But under the mental corrosion of race prejudice in Los Angeles I had become bitter and saturated with hate.54

      Himes’s Dostoyevskian portrait of Los Angeles as a racial hell, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), is noir as well-crafted as anything by Cain or Chandler. Set in the long hot summer of 1944, it narrates how white racism, acting in utterly capricious circumstances, launches the self-destruction of Bob Jones, a skilled ‘leaderman’ in the shipyards. As a critic has noted, ‘fear is the novel’s major theme . . . the progressive deterioration of a personality under the deadly pressure of a huge and inescapable fear’.55 Himes’s next novel, Lonely Crusade (1947), is also given a nightmare setting in the racially tense Los Angeles war economy. This time fear eats the soul of Lee Gordon, a Black UCLA graduate and union organizer under the influence of the Communist Party. Together, Himes’s two Los Angeles novels, ignored in most critical treatments of the noir canon,56 constitute a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the psychotic dynamics of racism in the land of sunshine.

      However inadvertently, Himes’s caricature of the local ‘red conspiracy’ in Lonely Crusade also prefigured the emergence of an ‘anticommunist noir’ in the Korean War years. While the Hollywood Inquisition was cutting down the careers of a majority of the writers, directors and producers of hardcore film noir, a redbaiting, bastard offspring – frequently set in Los Angeles – appeared on the B-movie circuit (for example, Stakeout on 101) and the drugstore paperback-rack (Mickey Spillane’s sado-McCarthyite thrillers). Meanwhile through the 1950s, Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) continued to churn out reasonably well-written detective noir in a Chandleresque mode, usually with some pointed contrast between the primitive beauty of the Southern California seacoast and the primitive greed of its entrepreneurs.57

      A major revival of noir occurred in the 1960s and 1970s as a new generation of emigré writers and directors revitalized the anti-myth and elaborated it fictionally into a comprehensive counter-history. Thus Robert Towne (influenced by Chandler and West) brilliantly synthesized the big landgrabs and speculations of the first half of the twentieth century in his screenplays for Chinatown and The Two Jakes. Where Chinatown established a 1920s genealogy for 1930s and 1940s noir, The Two Jakes and John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions extrapolated it into the postwar suburban boom; while Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (cleverly reworking the plot of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) depicted a stunningly Chandleresque Los Angeles of the third millennium. More recently, Ray Bradbury, returning to the genre for the first time in forty years, has ‘softboiled’ noir in an unabashedly nostalgic mode to recall Venice Beach of the 1950s – before urban renewal and gentrification – in his Death is a Lonely Business (1985).

      Parallel to this project of a noir history of Los Angeles’s past and future (which actually has come to function as a surrogate public history), other writers in the 1960s re-experienced the moral chill that shivered down the spines of Cain’s and West’s anti-heroes. John Rechy’s City of the Night (1963) captured, from the standpoint of its gay ‘Lost Angels’, the image of the city as a fugitive midnight hustle – ‘the world of Lonely America squeezed into Pershing Square’ between anonymous sex acts and gratuitous police brutality. But where Rechy could ultimately find a certain nihilistic exhilaration along the shore where ‘the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black sea’,58 Joan Didion found only nausea. More haunted than anyone by Nathanael West’s dystopia, she described the moral apocalypse of 1960s Los Angeles in her novel Play It As It Lays (1970) and her volume of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968). For Didion – on the edge of a nervous breakdown – the city of the Manson murders was already a helter-skelter of demeaned ambition and random violence. Her visceral revulsion was recalled years later by Bret Easton Ellis, L.A.’s ‘bratpack’ writer of the 1980s. His Less Than Zero (1985), a Cainian novel of gilded Westside youth, offered the darkest Los Angeles yet: ‘Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. . . . Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left.’59

      Finally, sixty years after the first short stories in The Black Mask and The American Mercury announced the genre, Los Angeles noir passes into delirious parody in the over-the-top writing of James Ellroy, the self-proclaimed ‘Demon Dog of American Literature’.

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