“Los Angeles is the city of the future,” goes the old joke, “and it always will be.” That makes it as suitable a point from which to begin this exploration of the world metropolises of the Pacific Rim, as does the fact that I spent the past four years living there. But I didn’t move to Los Angeles in the first place because of its promise of a vision of things to come — though having arrived from Santa Barbara, the small, wealthy coastal town built a hundred miles up the coast with legally mandated Spanish Revival quaintness and home, primarily, to “the newlywed and the nearly dead,” any proper city would have seemed excitingly dynamic. Santa Barbara boasts certain lifestyle advantages, no doubt, but all of them put together couldn’t ultimately compete with my sheer fascination about Los Angeles, which drew me down as inexorably as a tractor beam.
This phenomenon didn’t begin with me; Los Angeles has had that effect on people for well over a century. During the city’s first major population boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, other Americans came in to populate it from all over the rest of the country: Midwesterners who’d already made their modest-to-immodest fortunes, for instance, or farmers whose agricultural careers back home had, for one reason or another, come to an end. But as the decades wore on, farther-flung foreigners, especially western Europeans, got wind of this city that had grown with strange suddenness near the southern California coast, one that looked and felt in some ways like the urban areas they knew, but in most others resembled them not in the least.
One of my favorite expressions of this mixture of wonder and disgust takes the form of a two-minute segment of a 1969 French television documentary. “At the feet of this kingdom another decorative city bustles about and whispers,” intones the narrator (whose calm Francophone delivery puts me in the mind of Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, but then most things do) over footage of various representatively twentieth-century buildings and streetscapes captured from, of course, a passing car. “A blue, flat city: Los Angeles. Fractured into multiple working-class areas that ignore each other, inhabited by individuals who live together but never meet, a city wedged between the desert and the ocean, constantly under threat, its heaving heart torn, dislodged, deprived of a center by the existence of the desert.”