Los Angeles is an unreliable narrator. The very cityscape is an illusion, albeit on the grand scale—streets and buildings, the human design of it, erected on a bed of sand and tar. If you want to know what it is about the place, you need only visit my favorite local site, the La Brea Tar Pits, where the kitsch of Fiberglas mammoths comes face to face (literally and figuratively) with the existential reality of the tar lake, which are the existential realities of Los Angeles itself. The tar, after all, is where the city emerged from, and it is the tar to which we will eventually return—a sinister coeval to the false cheer of the palm trees and the sun. As such, perhaps, the tar is the only reliable narrator, since everything that’s been constructed upon it will disappear. In the end, the truest thing about Los Angeles may be that we are all just making it up as we go along.

I wanted to play with signifiers of noir in my novel, Thirteen Question Method, which features its own unreliable narrator, a character hiding out from both his past and the larger present, in a bungalow court in Hollywood. Noir, I’ve long imagined, is an essential Southern California aesthetic, not only, or even mostly, because of all those glorious black and white movies of the 1940s and 1950s (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place, Kiss Me Deadly), but rather because of what the late Mike Davis characterized in his touchstone work City of Quartz as “the master dialectic of sunshine /and noir.”

For Davis, sunshine/noir was a defining dichotomy, a conundrum that arose from the city’s status as aspirational—a place both to succeed and fail. That’s a cliché of Los Angeles, although that doesn’t mean it is untrue. If our sense of this place and its essence has densified and broadened since Davis introduced the idea in 1990—less a city of transplants than a complex mix of communities and cultures, many of which have been here for millennia—the essential relevance remains. What happens when you aspire to something and it doesn’t happen? What happens when you take the risk and it fails? That could mean moving to California to pursue a dream that turns into a nightmare, which is where the story of noir begins. “The real city,” the narrator of Thirteen Question Method observes, “unfolds in apartment complexes and bungalow complexes, in the sprawl of neighborhoods over crests and flatlands, in 4 million people trying to make it through the day.”

Part of what the Tar Pits conceal are the real stories of some of those people: I’m reminded of La Brea Woman, the first known homicide in what is now Los Angeles, who was beaten to death, her body discarded in the Tar Pits, until 9,000 years afterward, her fossilized remains were recovered and preserved.

Who was La Brea Woman? We’ll never know the answer; in that sense, she is another vivid emblem of the city’s unreliability. It is we who impose the burden of story on her. It is we who assert significance. “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?” Raymond Chandler writes near the end of The Big Sleep. “In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill.  You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.  Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”

Chandler is saying that it is easy to get lost here, that it is easy to be erased. This is what happens, after a fashion, in Thirteen Question Method, which is built around a narrator who wants nothing more than to get out from under his history, to live in a never-ending present tense. In that regard, he is a quintessential sort of Angeleno, rootless, disconnected, adrift in an ever-deepening state of dissolution—noir after the sunshine is eclipsed.

I wanted to tell this story because I am drawn to the unreliable. I have long found myself surrounded by unreliable narrators, both in Los Angeles and everywhere else. I began writing the novel in 2015, but I hit a wall and set the book aside for a number of years. The reason was simple: the necessities of narrative. As an essayist, I’m used to living the story before I write it. As a novelist, I don’t have that luxury. Luxury? Yes, the ability to know where it is going, although in the unreliable city, how much can we ever truly know?

When I returned to the book in the summer of 2020, I was as isolated as the central character; locked down in the early days of COVID, experiencing Los Angeles as a scrim, a stage set, something to be viewed in two dimensions through a window, except during the long walks I took every morning, before anyone else was out. I was beset by the lies of the Administration, the president’s insistence that the pandemic was some sort of ruse. “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” he wondered at an April White House briefing. “… [S]upposing you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way.”

Then, there was the insurrection of January 6.

Could there be a more unreliable narrator than the author of that fiction? There’s a reason my narrator, when he needs to leave the bungalow court, puts on a blue suit and a long red tie.

Also important was the matter of my own unreliability, all the things about the character, about this narrative, that I did not (want to) know. I was compelled by these ambiguities, much as I have long been when it comes to Los Angeles. My narrator had been married at one point, but where his spouse might be now was an open question. He had the money to support himself, but I couldn’t say how. As the novel progressed, he began to go mad, in the 19th century sense of the word. I found I didn’t want to assume too much—or perhaps the better word is: control. Instead, I wanted to observe, to discover what would happen; I wanted to see where he might go. Because he was living in a willful twilight, drinking too much and devoted to forgetting, it seemed useful for me not to possess too much foreknowledge, not to understand much more than the character did himself.

Such amnesia, let’s call it, has long been a hallmark of Los Angeles; it is a city that erases itself. “The most photographed and least remembered city in the world,” the urbanist Norman M. Klein has written, referring to the countless times it has appeared on television or in the movies, often “playing” somewhere else. That’s the case as well for those who, like the narrator of Thirteen Question Method, wash up here with nowhere else to go. Sunshine/noir, the mammoths and the tar lake—what we’re getting at, really, is artifice and authenticity.

This is less a divide than a sliding scale: a circularity. What is true about the city is equally untrue about the city. Something similar might be said of noir, which is the quintessential form of Los Angeles narrative because it reflects the city’s starkest polarities. What is authentic here is unreliability. What is authentic here is all we do not know as we live it day to day, moment to moment, caught between the darkness and the light.

The post Los Angeles Is an Unreliable Narrator appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Wednesday night, Simon and Shabazz came together before a packed auditorium at a Zócalo/Getty “Open Art” event to consider the question, “Does Art Capture Reality Better Than the News?” It’s a subject that Simon, a former newspaper reporter turned television writer, and Shabazz, a former U.S. Army soldier who later worked for a spell as a corrections officer while building his photography career, have had frequent occasion to explore, both personally and as artists.

But Wednesday’s conversation, moderated by Peter Tokofsky, an education specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum, encompassed many other themes, chief among them the role that art can play in witnessing and even healing society’s wounds (and the limits of that role); and how writers, photographers, musicians, and other artists can craft beauty and truth out of mundane, sometimes ugly and discouraging, daily existence.

For many viewers, Simon’s television dramas, including The Wire and Treme, conjure visions of modern America that are more textured and credible than most anything they witness on the evening news. Similarly, Shabazz’s four decades’ worth of photographs of street scenes provide an insightful running commentary on the trials and exhilarations of African American life that’s not regularly found in daily newspapers.

Shabazz believes part of his duty as an artist is to serve his community and “sound the alarm” about the threats facing it—the crack cocaine epidemic of the early 1980s, the scourge of AIDS, and the damage inflicted by political policies that reinforce old racist stereotypes.

“I have chosen the camera as the weapon to combat what I’m seeing,” said Shabazz, adding that he works from a sense of obligation to keep documenting the impact of social forces on the lives of African Americans—sometimes friends, other times total strangers whose trust he first must earn.

“I never run out of stories to tell,” he said.

At the same time, he never wants to sensationalize the problems afflicting some of his subjects. “My community was already under siege and I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire,” he said.

Simon’s artistic apprenticeship took form differently. He spent many years covering cops as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, and even today, as an Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, Simon retains the sensibility of an old-school newspaperman. In answer to Tokofsky’s question as to whether Simon the reporter still lurks inside Simon the television writer, he replied: “To be honest with you, if newspapers had not taken the turn they did I’d probably still be working in newspapers,” said Simon, whose life took a decidedly different turn. “Now I’m stuck. I’ve gotten used to it,” he said of his second career.

Simon sharply contrasted journalism as it was when he practiced it 30 years ago with today’s social media-driven maelstrom of factoids, fake news, and “citizen journalists,” a phenomenon that Simon slapped with an expletive.

“Daily journalism, if it’s honest, it’s the known facts,” he said. “In this modern era, it’s whatever you can throw up on the internet.”

The two artists, both born in 1960, hadn’t met each other before Wednesday evening, but quickly discovered much common ground, particularly in their mutual penchant for patient observation and taking intimate, humanizing perspectives on their subjects.

“What you want … in every story I ever wrote, you want to leave people with absolute dignity,” Simon said.

Likewise, Shabazz’s photographs of subway riders, boys at play, and others (some of which were projected onto the walls of the Getty auditorium during the talk) capture the effusive street-style fashions and diversions of African American youth. He records the hopes as well as the anxieties of the Nixon-Carter-Reagan years: the welcoming atmosphere of a neighborhood African American barbershop, as well as the tension of a young man awaiting his Vietnam draft notice.

Simon said that Shabazz’s photos reminded him of a truism: that the most honest things often happen between two people in a kitchen or some other quietly ordinary domestic setting.

Shabazz, who calls himself “a child of the 1960s,” said he learned much from musical urban chroniclers like Marvin Gaye. From books like Leonard Freed’s Black In White America he absorbed a slew of new words and terminology—“racism,” “lynching,” “Jim Crow.”

He also credited Life magazine covers and Playboy interviews with introducing him to people like Fidel Castro and Malcolm X. “Then I would look at the pictures [in Playboy] and learn about light and composition,” he joked, drawing laughter from the Getty crowd.

Simon, who was greatly influenced by New Journalism innovators like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe, wrote journalism so packed with the stuff of drama that Hollywood eventually came calling. Like Shabazz, he too said he fell under pop culture’s powerful sway, citing a scene in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) in which one character pummels another with a pool cue. That taught Simon that such unexpected, seemingly incidental details can be used by an artist to establish verisimilitude.

“It’s so incongruous that it made it more real,” Simon said of the memorable screen moment.

The discussion prompted an audience question from Howard Rosenberg, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times former TV critic, who asked whether there’s a greater burden on mainstream journalism today to take a more active role in shaping the message, away from the spin zone.

Simon replied that in our contemporary society, it takes truth longer to catch up with the stampede of rumor and falsehood streaming across our cellphones.

Earlier, Simon also acknowledged the limitations of what art can achieve, particularly when it has to make a profit. There are three things that sell on commercial television, he said: violence, sex, and comedy.

“The moment you step away from that and are trying to capture anything else in the human condition, you’re saying goodbye to a mass audience,” Simon said. Art, by itself, can’t bring real enlightenment to a male TV viewer who’s only glued to his set because he’s hoping to see some blood or get a quick glimpse of skin.

“You can’t fix that guy with art,” Simon said. Nor can art, by itself, revive the rundown areas of Baltimore, or end violence.

“Picasso put up Guernica,” Simon said, “and they just kept bombing cities.”

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