Title: Crossing the Border in a Theater Seat
he epistemology of culture, media and society develops from an individual's experiences and education. Without the inclusion of the phenomenon of Los Angeles in the study of modern knowledge, the ability to judge and regulate society, to converse intelligently about the intermingling of cultures, and to understand the reality of the ever-imposing television is acutely impaired. We can readily see the daily relationships between the changing landscape and its perpetual sculptors - Los Angeles and its people - in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. But as compelling as the stories are, they are by nature articles, a textual medium that demands facts and statistics, things many of us have become desensitized to in an age of information saturation. Today, we allow ourselves to become enveloped in the quasi-reality of the cinema, encouraging every good book towards a film contract so that "the masses" can more readily digest it. The portrayals of and references to Los Angeles in the three films Falling Down, El Norte, and Sullivan's Travels are powerful agents in the deconstruction of the ideal metropolis, and combine to lay open its thick-skinned layers of society in ways that are engaging, but also disturbing.El Norte unfolds the mystical freedom of Los Angeles first in the mind of an aged Guatemalan woman who has seen the pictures in a popular American magazine, their glossy images of sterile kitchens and flushing toilets a fanciful dream in the near-medieval life of her village. To her family, she seems a silly, tale-telling dreamer, what with her statement that, "In the north, even the poor have flushing commodes." We, the American viewers, chuckle to ourselves, thinking perhaps that these people are far below what we would consider poverty. Certainly, if Rosa and Enrique were not forced from their village, the idealization of Los Angeles might have developed into proportions as perfect and unattainable as Heaven. There are several indicators of their fate to travel north: the scene in which Enrique speaks to his old friend at the watermill, we see cross-cuttings of water pouring down into darkness...the only way to go from here is up. The foul-mouthed Mexican trucker sports a Confederate flag from the U.S. Civil War on the front of his truck, symbolic of the proud southern United States. The unspeakable feeling of homelessness is realized in Tijuana's city of boxes (reminiscent of scenes in John Ford's 1940 adaptation of Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath), as Rosa and Enrique imagine "El Norte" to be the end of all their troubles. Rosa gives up more than her mother's necklace in this desolate and dusty place of transience - she loses her link to her own heritage, for they must get to the north. Los Angeles has real, tangible value to the two now; they'll give up everything to be part of it, even their sanity as they are besieged by a flood of hungry rats in claustrophobic sewer pipes. Enrique and Rosa then become part of the "'flood' or a 'tide'," as Richard Rodriguez calls it, flowing into Los Angeles and looking for work.
The brother and sister are sympathetic characters, and yet born-American viewers will begin to struggle with a confused anger of their own when subjected to the personal stories that continue. The impossible problem of overpopulation, shrinking job markets, and crime due to illegal immigration has been pounded into us by vote-seeking politicians, news media, and sometimes even personal experience has proved it - especially living here in Los Angeles. Rodriguez brings the alternative point alive, presenting the folly of this anti-immigrant publicity in his articles Illegal Immigrants: Prophets of a Borderless World, An Ideal of America is Clubbed, and in his autobiography of essays, Days of Obligation. His concept of border-culture is strongly illustrated in El Norte, showing us a city of promise and wealth on the south side, then the "real" Los Angeles (the north), a place of expense and exile which demoralizes and destroys.
Sullivan's Travels continues with the examination of Los Angeles from the inside, particularly with Hollywood, the birthplace of its own illusory existence. Hollywood is an exclusively migrant landscape, varying in landscape, meaning, and size in every person's mind, because it only exists on film. Little bits of Los Angeles sometimes become incorporated in these films, and our recognition of these places delivers a mixed message of reality and painted backdrop. Sullivan lives solely in Hollywood - a fictitious man in an unreal city. He sees the "hobos" on the screen, romanticized and free, and perhaps even happy, like Charlie Chaplin. To travel across Rodriguez's border, he has but to step outside of Los Angeles, but he cannot help but retain his Hollywood mentality. Sullivan knows he's not a bum, and we begin to realize the real border he has to cross is his own naiveté. This is only possible by the real loss of his identity, which renders him powerless and hopeless. Sullivan is incapable of learning anything as long as Hollywood is on his mind, but as soon as he loses the entire memory of the place, he becomes subjected to real life - painful, unjust, dirty, cruel. As once said by Gabriel Toshome, "Hollywood is a state of mind," so Sullivan lives it out for us on screen.
The last two films have shown us the crossing of two types of borders, Mexican-American and Hollywood-Reality. Falling Down has yet another to offer in the mind of Bill, or "D-Fens," as his license plate says. Bill succeeds in crossing several borders on his havoc-march through Los Angeles, his progress much like that of an immigrant through various territories. He travels a geographical distance, from inland to oceanside, from sanity to insanity. He travels through the poorest and richest of places, he intends to go from one insular, personal space (his car) to another (his home) - to a home as unaccepting as the world of Rosa and Enrique. He reveals to us in the course of events that he is everything in extreme: passive/aggressive, rational/obsessive, loving/deadly, intelligent/unemployed. Bill is an angry white male provoked by his need to succeed in the fashion of idealistic. We see evidence of this in one of the first scenes of the film: a beautiful, tanned woman on a billboard with a comical cartoon graffiti sprayed on between her cleavage saying, "Help!" Bill is clearly feeling the same way, asphyxiating in a world of commercialism, and he wishes to do something about it, which eventually results in his confrontation with the road crewman and the consequent destruction. He claims to stand up for his rights as a consumer, in a world that caters to the masses, not to individuals (unless they are plastic surgeons or rich golf-club members, it seems). Society has effectively "moved on" from these ideals, and it will crush his rebellion without question.
The three films discussed here all have strong relevance to the ideologies promoted by Hollywood and news media of Los Angeles. In our daily newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, we see evidence of changes constantly - just today (May 15) major articles can be found on both the theme of illegal immigration (Freedom Dreams, Kenneth Chang) and the attempt of the San Fernando Valley to secede from Los Angeles (Council Opposes Secession Measure, Hugo Martin). These films are of immediate interest to our city's culture, society, and its understanding of itself, by offering us more sides of the story than just our own. Though we do no more moving than shifting in our seats, the viewing of these movies can allow us to cross those borders with the characters, to see through the illusions of Hollywood, to have more understanding and perhaps compassion, and to understand the foundations of our own anger.