West's The Day of the Locust and Shepard's Angel City: Refiguring L.A. Noir

West's The Day of the Locust and Shepard's Angel City: Refiguring L.A. Noir LEONARD WILCOX Angel City (1976) represents a culmination of the first decade of Sam Shepard's work. It bears the unmistakable stamp of Shepard the avant-gardist with its surreal dream structure, its creative transfonnations of character, and its collage construction. It exhibits Shepard's inventive engagement with popular culture, which he had developed and perfected in plays like Mad Dog Billes and The Tooth of Crime. And it brings to fruition Shepard's bizarre sense of humor with its satiric attack on Hollywood. Oddly, relatively little has been written about the play.' And in spite of its subject matter, little discussion has been devoted to the play's position in an American tradition of "anti-Hollywood" literary works. It is my contention that Shepard's Angel City belongs to the genre of L.A. nail'. Shepard's play bears a striking resemblance to one of the most influential works in this genre - Nathanael West's The Day ofthe LoClIst. Locust's dystopian and nightmarish vision of Hollywood - combined with surreal, dreamlike sequences and black humor - has been profoundly influential for contemporary chroniclers of the L.A. experience (such as Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and Thomas Pynchon), and has obviously influenced Shepard's treatment of Hollywood. West's text is essentially a modernist one devoted to the task of preserving imaginative autonomy against the depredations of the media industry. Angel City, on the other hand, is a postmodernist text which blends high art and popular culture and which makes direct imaginative contact with the popular energies of media and film. Angel City in fact is a postmodern L.A. nair, a pastiche and parody ofthe /lair genre which incorporates and plays ironically on fictional patterns found in Locust and other lIoir texts (literary and cinematic). Specifically, Angel City's ironic allusions and parody are directed at two salient features of L.A. nail' - the inner landscape of nightmare with its deep obsessions and dark compulsions and the outer geography of doom and apocalypse. In a larger sense Shepard's play is an ironic treatment of the Model'll Drama, 36 ([993) 61 62 LEONARD WILCOX notion of deeper states, of richer intensities of meaning that are characteristic of modernism. Shepard's refiguration of L.A. nair registers the distance between modernist notions of an inner self - and unconscious desire - and a postmodern consciousness subject to and indistinguishable from the images, spectacles, and messages that circulate through mass media and mass culture. His play also reveals a dark vision of "no exit" from the simulated and mediated world of Hollywood, and from the "already written" universe of pop discourses. A comparison between The Day of the Locust and Angel City, then,suggests the contours ofthe transformation ofL.A. nair from its modernist to postmodemist form. It also underscores the degree to which Shepard's refiguration of noir is an example of contemporary theatrical innovation. For Brecht, Los Angeles symbolized both heaven and hell, but its representation in the Itoir genre symboJized the latter. As Mike Davis puts it, "/loir was like a transformational grammar turning each charming ingredient of the boosters' arcadia into a sinister equivalent."! The dystopianization of Los Angeles was the theme of nair writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Budd Schulberg and directors like Orson Welles and Edward Dmytryk. The L.A. nair corpus (or "Hollywood nair"), represented in films like Sunset Boulevard, has emerged in a new wave since the sixties not only in novels by Didion and Dunne, but in drama by David Rabe (Hurlyburly) and David Mamet (Speed-the-Plow), and in films like ChinatowlI, Blade Runner (a sci-fi pastiche of the 1I0ir genre complete with deadpan detective voice-over and an apocalyptic setting), the Coen brothers' Barton Fillk, and most recently in Altman's The Player. All these works display to a greater or lesser extent the main characteristics of L.A. 1I0ir: the anti-myth of Los Angeles, the dream become nightmare, L.A. as a "deracinated urban hell"3 teetering on the brink of apocalypse. From the novels of Chandler and James M...