Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles.

Ascarate, Richard John

Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles.

Vincent Brook. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8135-5456-3 Paper 311 pp. $27.9

"This book exhumes the many faces, facets, and feces of Los Angeles by viewing the Tonga-village-turned-world-city as a rhetorical text," declares Vincent Brook in Land of Smoke and Mirrors: A Cultural History of Los Angeles (5). He explains that this involves delving into the "physical spaces and genealogical traces of Los Angeles (as city, county, and region) ... via the myriad, often contradictory, images of Los Angeles that have been projected from within and without its geographical and psychological borders" (5). In the ten chapters that follow, he largely succeeds in his project, offering a well documented, good-humored account of how one of America's most culturally diverse metropolitan sprawls has been represented from pre-cinematic times to the present.

Brook opens by excavating the city's archaeological substrata, noting that the first Angelinos were the Tongva Indians, who themselves displaced or absorbed even earlier Native American peoples sometime before 500 CE. The Tongva also bore the brunt of the Spanish policy of cultural obliteration and religious conversion several centuries later, a practice that moved an indignant Helen Hunt Jackson in 1879 to write Ramona. Jackson intended her enduring novel of forbidden love set in ranchero-era California to cast light on the unjust treatment of the Indians, to restore to them a dignified place in history. Through no fault of her own she failed. L.A. boosterism and the burgeoning film industry uncoiled their tentacles and co-opted the story for commercial exploitation. Four film versions, an annual pageant, and competing claims about the true site of Ramona's onetime residence ensued. As Brook argues, "Ramona, rather than serving as a vehicle for social reform, became a mother lode for L.A.'s fledgling tourist and real estate trades" (29).

The author then investigates the two camps--"East Coast movie-industry interlopers, top heavy with European Jewish immigrants and other hyphenated Americans," and "staid Midwesterners" (67)--that fought for the soul of L.A. from the turn of the century. The era witnessed rampant anti-Semitism as Jewish directors, studio heads, and theater owners enjoyed increasing success purveying and exhibiting films the WASP establishment found offensive, if not downright pornographic. Brook provides a short, informative sketch of Will Hays, the Presbyterian deacon hired by Hollywood's moguls to head the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. Hays's mission was to clean up an industry tainted by news stories of celebrity divorces, affairs, rape, murder, drug use, and bigamy. Despite the deacon's establishment of a production code to govern behavior onscreen and a morals clause in actors' contracts to govern it everywhere else, he failed as well, again due to forces larger than himself. In the end, Hollywood's reputation for depravity had "boosted box-office returns and tourist revenues" (74).

No cultural history of Los Angeles would be complete without pausing for film noir, and Brook does not disappoint. "As a challenge to both classical Hollywood cinema and U.S. society," he argues, "and through its associations with Weimar cinema's artistic aspirations, film noir offered exiled filmmakers the nearest thing to dialectical exchange with the culture industry as was possible from within the belly of the beast" (107). He recounts the history of the genre, from H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan's Black Mask magazine of the 1920s to the crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett. He elucidates Raoul Whitfield's novel, Death in a Bowl (1931), whose title refers to the Hollywood Bowl (then less than a decade old) and whose plot features the obligatory private eye, along with a movie star, a director, and a variety of thinly veiled characters modeled after contemporary celebrities and film executives. Brook then looks at how automobiles--prevalent in films noirs--function in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946), and Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955). Symbolizing growth in commercial mass production after the lean years of the Second World War, cars also represented a new way to move about and view an increasingly decentralized Los Angeles. The author astutely analyzes how automobile metaphors insinuate themselves even into the flirtatious dialogue of insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity.

In the last section of the book, Brook peers at multicultural L.A. as inflected through the kaleidoscopic lenses of Latino, Black, Asian, Anglo, and LGBT representations. He points out that Los Angeles has always already been multicultural and provides 1781 census data (!) to back up the claim: a Spaniard, a Criollo (born in America of Spanish ancestry), a mestizo (mixed Spanish and Indian), two blacks of African ancestry, eight mulattos (mixed Spanish and black), and nine Indians comprised fully half of the colonial outpost's first residents (153). The author follows with an analysis of the film, Mi familia/My Family (Gregory Nava, 1995), placing the multigenerational story of a Mexican American family in the context of immigration following the Mexican Revolution and the growth of industry (and an Eastside Mexican ghetto) in L.A. during the early part of the twentieth century. But he also reveals historical lacunae in the film, as well as in Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit (stage version, 1978; film version, 1981). And in a separate chapter, Brook traces the African American presence in Los Angeles from the city's first black mayor, Francisco Reyes, through Depression-era migrations, the Watts riots of 1965, and the 1992 riots following the acquittal of four police officers in the Rodney King beating case. He demonstrates how the films Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin, 1995), Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977), and Boyz N the Hood (John Singleton, 1991) reflect these events, along with the countless dreams deferred if not extinguished by gang violence, police oppression, and class disparities. Finally, Anglos receive close analysis through the character of laid-off defense-industry engineer Bill Foster (Michael Douglas) in Falling Down (Joel Schumacher, 1992), and the LGBT community, through the work of Englishman Harry Hay, who founded the Mattachine Society, the first gay rights group in the United States.

The author does not quite do justice--perhaps no one can--to L.A.'s Asian communities, devoting a mere 19 pages to the county's sizable Chinese (mainland and Taiwanese), Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Indian communities. He provides thumbnail histories of various Asian migrations to California in the 1800s, prompted by political turmoil of the Taipei Rebellion and Opium Wars back home, as well as induced by claims of opportunity and wealth via the Gold Rush and railroad construction. He also describes reality for the new arrivals: discrimination, exclusion laws that prohibited entry of Chinese females, stereotyping, and, decades later, property confiscation and internment for the Japanese. Flashing forward to the recent past, the author analyzes two films, Charlotte Sometimes (Eric Byler, 2002), an independent work about two mismatched Asian couples, and Better Luck Tomorrow (Justin Lin, 2002), based on a 1992 murder by Chinese American high school students in Orange County. The former raises the question of "what it means to be 'real Asian'" (201), given the cast's Japanese, Hong Kong-Chinese, Korean, and Indonesian backgrounds, while the latter explores the consequences of Asian parents' drive to make their children models of assimilation and success.

Affiliated with several L.A.-area universities, Brook blends first-hand accounts and photographs of many landmarks, festivals, and personalities into his analysis, giving his prose an engaging anthropologist-in-the-field quality. His book will be of interest not only to cultural historians and film scholars, but to anyone pondering a visit or move to Los Angeles--and certainly to natives as well. The study serves as a handy back-story to the city's sun-drenched splendors and infelicities. As Brook notes in the conclusion: "Los Angeles has come a long way since the days when Indians were slaughtered, Chinese massacred, Mexicans deported, Japanese interned, blacks brutalized, gays and lesbians harassed, and all groups symbolically annihilated" (242). Land of Smoke and Mirrors gives an honest report of how far the City of the Angels has come since those days while bearing hopeful witness to how far it still has to go.