Los Angeles Plays Itself
I think there’s this weird thing at work now with the way people relate to, specifically, mainstream cinema. When they watch those movies they like to be on the receiving end. . . . The sound is so loud, and the images are so powerful, they want to be totally passive. But then, a few months later, the same film is on DVD, and they can watch it and they own it. And the relationship is inverted. They own that moment, that scene. They also control that diverse, complex relationship they have with film actors. They can watch this or that in slow motion or image by image. –Olivier Assayas in a 2003 interview
These days a film’s politics and criticism sometimes need to be disguised if it’s to succeed as entertainment. Our culture is so ambivalent about edification that we virtually demand to be hustled–even when it comes to the current presidential campaign. If parts of Los Angeles Plays Itself contain elements of a con job, it’s because Andersen knows that if he owned up to doing something serious and complex–such as defying the American taboo against discussing class–we’d be less likely to pay attention.
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Despite the film’s exemplary simplicity, lightness, and clarity, this subterfuge, which often takes the form of crankiness and sarcasm, runs the risk of creating a false impression about Andersen’s attitude toward his subject. Most critics have responded to his film with enthusiasm, but a few of the smarter ones, such as Gary Indiana and A.O. Scott, have expressed irritation. “Do I really feel superior to Hollywood movies, as A.O. Scott claimed in the New York Times?” Andersen asks in an article in the fall issue of Cinema Scope. “I would say that I take them more seriously than someone who has to write about them twice a week can afford to.” He has also noted in interviews that virtually all his clips and the way they’ve been edited by Yoo Seung-hyun demonstrate that he appreciates the movies in question, even if he’s tweaking them in his narration. Indifferent to what passes for high and low fashion in his academic neck of the woods–he teaches film and video at the California Institute of the Arts–he quotes approvingly from both Richard Schickel and Pauline Kael, stomps twice on David Thomson, and has the following to say about Los Angeles’s chicest spokesperson: “Forget the mystical blatherings of Joan Didion and company about the automobile and freeways. They say, ‘Nobody walks.’ They mean, ‘No rich white person like us walks.’”
A good example of Andersen’s criticism at its finest is a single sentence about the films of John Cassavetes: “His comedies face up to tragedy and reject it.” What’s startling about this terse observation is that none of Cassavetes’s films, with the possible exception of Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, and Gloria, has been regarded by critics as a comedy–certainly neither of the films Andersen shows brief segments of, A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Love Streams (1984), though both clips focus on behavior that some might regard as comic.
The next logical step is to introduce us to some of the more famous neighborhoods and sites in various films, including the steps in Silver Lake navigated by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy when they attempt to move a piano in The Music Box (1932); the Spanish colonial revival house occupied by Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944); the 1893 Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway, inspired by Edward Bellamy’s evocation of a socialist utopia and used as a Burmese hotel in China Girl (1942), a London military hospital in The White Cliffs of Dover (1944), and an apartment house of the future in Blade Runner (1982); Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House (1923) in numerous appearances stretching over 66 years, from Female (1933) to a 1999 music video, often with different interiors; and Union Station, a favorite site for movie kidnappings.
As someone who loves both Los Angeles and Point Blank, I’m not sure what to make of Andersen’s declaration, but he did help me see the grotesqueries of this modernist thriller’s interior decoration in a different light. And when it comes to Robert Altman, the narration is brilliant both when it decries his “condescension toward the outer suburbs” and the way his characters “lead lives of noisy desperation” in Short Cuts (1993) and when it admires the way Elliot Gould’s Marlowe in the 1973 The Long Goodbye (“Altman’s best film”) serves to deconstruct and expose aspects of the city’s environment.
