Los Angeles Plays Itself

In 2003, CalArts cinema studies professor and filmmaker Thom Anderson made a lengthy video essay called Los Angeles Plays Itself, a treatise on the ways in which his beloved city has been used and misused by the movie industry. Until recently, the movie could only be seen at lectures presented by the director himself, at occasional screenings at the American Cinematheque, or on bootlegged DVDs. But this year, with new copyright rules about “fair use” of film clips coming into play, Cinema Guild has upgraded Anderson's fascinating dissertation to high-definition and given it an official theatrical release. This is a great gift. Though the film is more of a personal commentary than a traditional documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself is no mere YouTube fan-edit or supercut, in which disparate film clips have been spliced together to create an obvious sensation or a trite observation. Like Rodney Ascher’s 2012 film Room 237, the subject of which was the many conspiracy theories surrounding Stanly Kubrick’s The Shining, this assemblage of clips from old movies, intercut only with narration and images filmed by the director, amounts to a rich meditation on myriad themes.

I welcome the opportunity to view movies that I know well through someone else’s eyes. Watching a film from another person's perspective can offer fascinating insights that were never intended by the films' creators. These unexpected revelations can have a cumulative effect on a viewer’s conscious and subconscious perceptions. The best example of a film that generates this result is Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet, inspired by Vito Russo’s seminal book on homosexuality's depictions in cinema from the invention of the movie camera to the late 1980s. That film, which is a traditional talking-head documentary and not a personal essay, accomplishes the extraordinary feat of making a contemporary heterosexual viewer experience and understand how the first century of cinema looked and felt to a gay audience. Los Angeles Plays Itself, although its perspective is confined to that of a single individual, achieves a similar effect, inviting viewers to look at movies from the point of view of someone who loves the city of Los Angeles more than the Hollywood film industry that inhabits and often dominates it.

At first, Anderson's observations seem trivial and easily dismissed. What native of a major city hasn’t lamented the ways their  hometown can be appropriated and recreated willy-nilly by carpetbagger filmmakers? Many locals mock directors who shoot chases in scenic locations that are miles apart in real life and edit them to looks as if these areas abut each other. Those of us from Boston can be just as prickly about Hollywood movie stars mangling our regional accents as Anderson is about the ways in which filmmakers, both homegrown and “tourist”, as he refers to them, misuse and mischaracterize his city’s signature architecture. He complains about how the low-rent characters in many films could not in reality afford their palatial homes and spectacular views. His almost contradictory lament concerns how the city’s iconic landmarks of modernist design have come to represent all that is evil in the world because directors are consistently using these structures as the homes of drug kingpins and corrupt politicians. He seems unwilling to cede the simple fact that filmmakers choose the most cinematic locations to create an imagined world that, in most cases, only conforms to reality in a metaphorical or stylized way.

Quickly, however, this more than three-hour tour of Los Angeles becomes far more complex and engrossing. We learn how the city is used intentionally and unintentionally as a setting, a character, and, most often, a backdrop. As the picture progresses, Anderson makes a powerful case for reassessing the city, and he offers a history seminar on how the movies create false lessons that are easier to accept than the truths of actual history. Using clips from more than 200 films, both famous and obscure, Anderson demonstrates audiences' love for stories about good and evil that let us off the hook, absolving us from any personal responsibility for political outcomes and societal ills. He devotes significant screen time to Chinatown and LA Confidential; two films about corruption with great villains that we love to hate and can blame for how nefarious pseudo-historical events went down. In actuality, both stories were based on real-world scandals in which a gullible populace was easily manipulated into voting overwhelmingly against their own interests. The movies enable us to believe we have no culpability in sinful deeds. Anderson goes on to examination of how movies depict issues of race, class, geography, urban development, transportation, and privatization of public resources in equally spellbinding detail.

Anderson’s tone may be too discursive for some viewers, and he commits what I consider the cardinal sin of film clip documentaries; he reveals the endings of a couple of classic movies. Despite these impediments, Los Angeles Plays Itself is a film for film lovers, even more than it is a love letter for Angelenos. Anderson takes us on detours through little known and rarely photographed parts of the city that we would never see in a conventional, two-hour multiple-perspective documentary. He makes idiosyncratic and, at times, frustratingly minute connections between landscape and ideology that verge on hyperbolic, but his encyclopedic and authoritative expertise in his subject make his observations difficult to dismiss. There is no question that this personal essay has a deeply political thesis, and Anderson is shy with neither his beliefs nor his accusations. His astute use of film clips to back up his arguments makes this movie a grand success and an edifying experience.