Looking For Los Angeles in La La Land

Los Angeles is an invented city. That truism, coaxed or hammered into insight, has driven a lot of writing, talking, and hectoring about the City of Angels. It offers expansive ground upon which to offer analyses having to do with making something out of nearly nothing. The specifics of the invention litany are varied. Los Angeles is too big for its location. It ought not be where it is. It is unaccountably far from the coast, and thus should not be. It does not have enough local water supplies to meet the thirst of its many millions, its industries, its citrus, grains and fruits, its pipes and infrastructure, not to mention all those lawns. Yet, behold: Los Angeles comes to pass.

Invention stretches from the place itself to what people do there, to the business end of all that inventing going on in Southern California. As an invented city, the logic seems to follow, Los Angeles invites—no, germinates—invention: of technology, media, artistry, creativity. Since Los Angeles is invented, it launches other inventive impulses in the air, as it were, to mingle with all that sunshine. The result is downright febrile. Up springs the motion picture industry and all that its revolutionary technology has spawned. Los Angeles invents modern fame and glamour. Media and artistry flower in path-breaking forms. There is then the concomitant re-invention of person, identity, the opportunity to take different paths toward fulfillment or self-realization. Start anew in Los Angeles, rejuvenate, regenerate, recreate and re-create. Come to Los Angeles and try to keep up with all that inventing and re-inventing going on. Start the clock over as to the job, or in spirit and faith, the body, relationships, self-expression—whatever. It is exhilarating and exhausting all at once.

Novelist and non-fiction writer Gary Krist presents his take on all that making going on in Los Angeles in The Mirage Factory. Historian Ronny Regev offers a complementary discussion in Working in Hollywood, her fine book on the inner mechanisms of the Hollywood studio system. The two make for a good pairing: one a sweeping account of a few Promethean figures at work in the clay that would become Los Angeles, the other a smart social history of the studio system, a mirage factory if there ever was one.

Krist takes as his subject the creation of Los Angeles itself, or at least modern Los Angeles, but he puts a biographical spin on the concept from the get-go. Set in the topsy-turvy decades before World War II, Krist’s book is lively, a yarn spun well. He wraps his story around three compelling lives that intersect in time and place and forever—he insists—change both. Meet filmmaker D.W. Griffith, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, and civil engineer William Mulholland. All three are known already, famed in their time and, though less so, ours. Putting them alongside one another in the pages, paragraphs and settings of this book reveals new facets about Los Angeles. None started out there, all made their way there, and, as this story goes, they made the place that made and then broke them. It sounds Biblical, and it is meant to be thus. Yet Krist also makes the conceptual point that even if all of the inventing going on may be a ruse, a mirage is the promise of salvation just beyond reach, brought to imagined life by desperation.

As described by Krist, Griffith, Mulholland, and McPherson each achieve two different and lasting things on the far west coast. They drive modern Los Angeles into being and, in so doing, epitomize the place and its willful imagining into existence, shape, and meaning.

It is an understandable reflex, this organizational scheme beholden to three lives boldly...