“It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”
— Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
I’m leaving Los Angeles soon. I need to get that out of the way, because it’ll color everything that I write for the next few months. I’m leaving Los Angeles soon, after eight years and some change.
I feel off-balance. The neon sunsets are mocking me, amping up their wattage through a scrim of carbon dioxide and refinery smoke. I’m driving past the Scientology building and the billboards that say EYE SYPHILIS IS REAL going omg I’ll miss you with zero sense of irony.
The crumpled-velvet mountains goad me into staring just a little bit longer, trying to memorize every gully and crag. It’s impossible; I know this, but I keep trying.
Few places do nostalgia like Los Angeles does; the skyline has been refracted across so many TV screens and film projectors that it’s hard to discern my own memories from the ones I’ve merely ingested. But I know I’ve been here a long time. I also know that – for now – it’s time to go.
A disclaimer: I won’t pretend to actually understand a city that is known for being amorphous and inane, and anything I say about it will be colored by my very specific, and very limited, middle-class experience. But I understand the idea of Los Angeles – I think – and that’s what I’d like to talk about today.
To move to a city is to buy into its mythology, and Los Angeles’ is very easy to comprehend. Its main export is stories, usually about itself. These stories tend to fall into one of two meta-narratives: Los Angeles as promised land, Los Angeles as wasteland.
Neither are true, you know that already. Any life in any city is mostly dominated by mundane shit, no matter how glittery the skyline. But the city’s extreme sense of contrast is impossible to miss. The more or less perfect weather means that wealth and poverty are equally obvious in their visual representations; nothing is shoved indoors. A car-centric culture makes the bright, plasticky colors all blur together, which can feel sickening at times, and the desert light seems to make every face more beautiful just as it makes every shadow just a bit sharper. But the city’s diverging narratives are far from a modern phenomenon.
Like all American cities, Los Angeles’ history is soaked in blood. The forceful seizure of land by the Spanish and, soon, American empires in the 18th and 19th centuries decimated indigenous populations and ways of life, making the land seem new, ripe, fresh for the taking. For them, heaven; for the displaced, a new hell.
It remained a small military outpost throughout the Gold Rush, and its liminal existence between American and Spanish zones of influence left plenty of room for Old West lawlessness. In the mid-19th century, the homicide rate hovered around 158 per 100,000 – that’s more than 10 times the rate in New York City at the time. Lynchings and gang violence were common, and perhaps because of this fearsome reputation, the population stayed low, around 15,000 in LA county, until the final quarter of the 19th century.
Then the storytellers came – flim-flam men and scam artists, religious zealots and health food freaks. The first transcontinental railroads built stops in Alameda and Los Angeles, and their marketing departments framed the area as an ideal retirement destination. Boosters sold cheap land to midwest nobodies and east coast strivers, enchanting them with promises of healing coastal breezes and mountain air.
The city’s Chamber of Commerce even set up shop at the World’s Fair and sent an exhibit called “California on Wheels” on a railroad car around the country, aiming to lure residents and tourists with examples of the area’s agricultural products. These efforts worked. The resulting influx of migrants found oil, throttled the river, and started movie studios – roughly in that order. Traditional industry grew in tandem with the burgeoning silent film business, which attracted a steady stream of smooth-skinned, vaguely delusional young people that has yet to dry up.
The films they created acted as yet another outlet for advertising the peculiar California dream, which balanced the classically American drive toward prestige with an emphasis on health and self-actualization. The county ballooned to more than 500,000 by 1910, and essentially doubled in population for three consecutive decades after.
Relentlessly pleasant weather and plentiful land made it an easy approximation of paradise, and the city’s rapid expansion perfectly coincided with the mass adoption of the automobile. Its multi-lane boulevards and disparate neighborhoods seemed futuristic. The twenties roared loudly, and LA’s status as “the best advertised city in the world” likely reached its zenith with the 1923 erection (tried to find a better word, couldn’t) of the Hollywood sign. Originally reading “Hollywoodland” to mark a real estate development nicknamed “the Kingdom of Joy and Health,” the sign’s utility as a piece of advertising was quickly eclipsed by its use as a symbol – for the movies, for California, for America itself.
In his 2011 book on the sign,1 Leo Braudy points out just how odd the sign is among American landmarks. It’s not a human image or a depiction of a recognizable object, it doesn’t mark a specific place, and it doesn’t commemorate an event or moment in time. Instead, “it is a group of letters, a word on the side of a steep hill that, unlike so many other cherished sites, cannot be visited, only seen from afar. Its essence is almost entirely abstract.”2
He compares a visit to the Hollywood sign (or really, to the area around it) to other ‘standard’ American icons: “instead of looking at the Liberty Bell or the Lincoln Memorial and appreciating their importance and the history they represent, we look at the Hollywood sign and it looks back at us, enlarging our sense of our own prestige by its symbolic aura.”
Enlarging our sense of our own prestige by its symbolic aura. Leo skinned me alive with that one. I’ve DEFINITELY taken a bit of solace from catching the sign in the corner of my eye on hard days, reminding myself that my unspecial life was at least taking place in a special city. In other words, the spell cast in 1923 fucking worked on me, a full century later.
But even in the 1920s, the dream of Hollywood as dream factory was obviously artificial; and the marketing materials for Hollywoodland barely gesture at the film studios sprouting up around it. By that point, the first wave of show-business scandals had already broken – Virginia Rappe, a 30-year-old starlet, was reportedly raped and killed by silent-film comedian Fatty Arbuckle in 1921, and two prominent young stars, Olive Thomas and Wallace Reid, died of overdoses shortly thereafter. A growing gossip press amplified and exaggerated these stories, underlining the darker connotations that “Hollywood” was starting to pick up.
The corruption and recklessness at the city’s core was still present, and when the Great Depression hit, that darkness truly came to the fore. Southern California had the world’s highest suicide rate in the late 1920s, a phenomenon that Edmund Wilson described at the time as “the last blind feeble futile effervescence of the great burst of the American adventure.”3
Millions of western-gazing wanderers had migrated there, seeking salvation, and when that failed, they had nowhere further to go. In Wilson’s blunt terms, “the idea of the setting sun suggests to them the idea of death.”
The city’s most famous suicide – and yes, I recognize that’s an insane set of words to put together – came in 1932, when 24-year-old Lillian Millicent “Peg” Entwhistle allegedly jumped off the “H,” crashing into the rocky hillside and rolling several hundred feet into a ravine. A note left in her handbag read, in part, “I’m afraid I’m a coward. I am sorry for everything.” Entwhistle was an actress; she’d spent six years on Broadway and had just starred alongside Myrna Loy in the Radio Pictures (later RKO) pre-Code thriller Thirteen Women. The urban legends around her death imply that she took her own life due to career issues. Some versions even state that a call for filming showed up in her mailbox the day after her death, adding an ironic twist. This is likely untrue; as noted, she already had a stable acting career, and the specifics of the filming notice are different in even the earliest press clippings. She may have taken her own life due to a broken love affair or been killed elsewhere and dumped in the ravine with a fake suicide note; regardless, her death marked one of the first moments when the sign’s symbolic potential – in both the positive and the negative directions – was fully recognized. And it certainly contributed to the emergence of the other key element of Los Angeles’ municipal personality: noir.
I’m pulling heavily from Richard Rayner here, who wrote a fantastic book about LA in the ‘30s that I was forced to read for work and haven’t stopped thinking about since.4 He describes “a mood of disenchantment, an intense spiritual malaise” that seeped into LA’s popular culture in the early- to mid-1930s, most obviously in crime fiction and the sexed-up, shadow-swathed film adaptations that followed. Allow me one long-ass quote:
“L.A. is a city of big dreams and cruelly inevitable disappointments where noir is more than just a slice of cinema history; it’s a counter-tradition, the dark lens through which the booster myths came to be viewed, a disillusion that shadows even the best of times, an alienation that assails the senses like the harsh glitter of mica in the sidewalk on a pitiless Santa Ana day.”
If I can write one sentence as insanely underlineable as that in my lifetime, I will be satisfied, but that’s beside the point.
Both the tradition (Los Angeles as heaven) and the counter-tradition (Los Angeles as hell) carried through the 20th and into the 21st century – we’d be here all day if we listed all the examples, but think The Hills vs. Nightcrawler, Entourage vs. Tangerine, La La Land vs. Day of the Locust. Drop your faves in the comments, if you’re so inclined.
Both narratives are intense, and seem to be compulsively repeated, in real life and in fiction. The gulf between them, dried out by hot, strange winds, gives LA a surreal quality that has also, at this point, become a cliche. The white neon crosses glowing through mist, the coyotes trotting down suburban streets, the whispers of dead film stars and Manson girls, the scammy billboards, the washed-up actors. It’s all heightened, it’s all obscene, it’s all dusty and gross and romantic. Sometimes, it’s all too much.
I guess this is where I tell you about the story that the city sold me, and to what degree I was intoxicated. The classic LA transplant story doesn’t quite apply because I moved here for college (go Trojans), and didn’t intend to work in entertainment. Looking back, my decision had little logic behind it. Los Angeles simply felt right, its scale and sense of goofy self-importance commensurate with the type of adult I wanted to become. The whole place felt alien, with vast, exposing skies that looked nothing like the scant dapplings of sunlight I was used to in the Northwest. The extreme newness felt like reason enough. I also got a fuckload in scholarships, which helped.
When I told folks in my hometown about my college choice, they tended to express a mild, sometimes disgusted, sense of shock. Los Angeles, they’d say over their coffee mugs, isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t everyone fake there? I’d offer some mealy-mouthed explanation about how I wanted to be a Very Serious Reporter and needed to be near the media industry – eliding the fact that “media” circa 2016 was more of a content-forward pyramid scheme than an industry, and that I had serious doubts about making a living in it. The truth is, I wanted to be in Los Angeles because I felt a pull toward its mythic status. I wanted the city to carry me away, and in many ways, it did. I met my closest friends within weeks of moving, landed moderately-impressive jobs without much effort, fell in love when I needed to and out of it when I didn’t, and had enough B-tier celebrity sightings to staff up an HBO miniseries.
After four-plus years of post-college life, I feel I have a true community here. I’m worried that my departure is, in some way, a rejection of the blessings I’ve received (celebrity sightings excluded – I’ll be just fine if I never see Eric Andre jogging again). There’s also a level of embarrassment to leaving – an admission that the adult life I’ve found here, while comfortable, doesn’t match up with my current needs and ambitions. The cruelest parts of my brain remind me that on some level, I failed to launch. I might’ve become too entranced with the larger story, too content to stare at that stupid sign to do anything of substance.
I don’t blame Los Angeles for this, not completely. My quarter-life crisis was inevitable, and the pandemic didn’t help, but the easy rhythms and sparkly edges of the city made it too easy to accept a life that simply was not working for me. I got stuck. I’m not proud of that. And I’m scared I’ll end up equally stuck, somewhere else, without the cozy connections that have kept me afloat.
The doe-eyed life coaches on Instagram Reels would call this a “scarcity mindset,” or tell me that I’m giving too much power to my own fear. They’re right. Consciously, I can remind myself that there will be plenty of new friends and opportunities in my next chapter, and that it may even be liberating to make new connections without carrying around the baggage of my 18-, 22-, and 25-year-old selves. I can tell myself that I am charming enough to start new connections, funny enough to keep them going, caring enough to make them last; that I’m brave and interesting and want nothing more than to be dunked in a pool of cold water (existentially) to prove how well I can swim.
I know these things to be true, tell them to myself over and over. The fear still roars. I learned to be an adult in LA, a city hell-bent on never growing up. Faced with the prospect of leaving, I fear I have some catching up to do.
But (and I’m saying this with my eyes rolled all the way back in my head) that’s the point, right? In this period of my life, I’m committed to combating my more comfort-seeking qualities at every turn. I’m a big believer in using the idea of expansion vs. contraction as a heuristic for life decisions; I’ve become comfortable in LA, which is no small feat, but I’m ready for a new set of challenges and stories. Good things rarely come from holding on too tightly, and even the best stories are, ultimately, just an abstraction.
At this point, I have 24 sunsets left before I leave for Thanksgiving, a (badly-timed but nonrefundable) Europe trip, and the holidays. When I return from Christmas, I’ll have a few more, and on January 1, I’ll be gone.
The sense of finality feels foreign. This city has been a lot of things – a cradle, a funhouse, a boogeyman – but for me, it has never, ever, been finite. Contrast may be the defining trait of Los Angeles, but it’s closely followed by excess — space and stretching. Have you ever flown into LAX from the east? The city starts 30 minutes before touchdown, and the white-and-red rivulets of freeways never stop churning. It’s massive, incomprehensibly so. Nearly 10 million people live in LA County now. When I leave, a few dozen of them will notice my absence. Meanwhile, the oil derricks will keep bobbing. The palm trees will keep swaying. The Dodgers will keep winning, and Jacob Emrani will keep putting up those weird-ass billboards. I’ll be a tiny blip in the city's story, but it will be a massive, irreplaceable part of my own.
Thank you, Los Angeles, for everything. I’ll be back soon.
if you got this far, I love you to the ends of the earth in the most respectful and non-boundary-crossing way possible. if this was oversharing, just wipe it from your cute lil cortex and move along. I probably said things that I’ll soon disagree with, but I tried to capture where I’m at in the most unflinching way possible. and yes, my whole spiel about rejecting narrative is extra-hypocritical when you consider that I’m going to the only city more afflicted with storyline fever than los angeles on the north american continent. easter egg!
birthday post coming later this week. she’s almost 27 and she’s WRITING!
which, yes, I did steal from the USC bookstore
Braudy, Leo. The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon. Yale University Press, 2012.
Wilson, Edmund. The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump . Scribner, 1932.
Rayner, Richard. A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age. Anchor Book, 2010.
One of my favorite obscure LA-related pieces of art is Gabriel Kahane's album "The Ambassador" from 2014.
A line from the last track that always hits me, as a west coast native: "Is there defeat in a train from LA // When Manifest Destiny brought us all this way?"
this makes me sad but also proud of you for doing the thing everyone here is scared to do! worst best city ever, you captured its aura really beautifully here