Los Angeles is often depicted as a city to which many seek happiness, and often end up redefining it. Is the goal no longer to find love, but... stardom?--as in "Star Maps." Or is it just hope redefined?--as in the third proposed ending of "Zoot Suit." If indeed Norma Desmond drowns in the glitter of her legendary stardom, then she has found her version of salvation. It is found in "dolls" by the ladies of "Valley of the Dolls." (Incidentally Jacqueline Susann made that up, the word "dolls" for pills; nobody else ever used it.) The "Pretty Woman" finds redemption on Rodeo Drive. The clownish weatherman a lasting affair with a freeway sign.

     Roman Polanski's and Robert Towne's Technicolor "noir" film immediately pays homage to its classic antecedents (especially John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon"): A not entirely noble detective occupies a not quite elegant office within which slatted venetian blinds allow slabs of light and an overhead fan whirrs lazily. In walks a mysterious woman who makes a proposal for the detective to hunt a missing girl, somehow connected to one of the City's most powerful figures. (It also casts Huston in the film.)

     That is only the beginning, because "Chinatown" intends to deal with large themes that play out perfectly within its setting: a desert city bordering the ocean and on the brink of destruction because of the threat to one elemental need, water--"where," one character reminds, "life began." On this vast plain, evil of biblical proportions looms, murderous corruption links with incest.

     Water, gallons of water, are being discarded into the ocean during a severe drought that may destroy the city. L.A. IS DYING OF THIRST, SAVE OUR CITY, a poster informs. In an eerie silent scene, viewed from a distance, a lone Mexican boy mounted on a horse meets a tall imposing man we learn later is the man stealing water--an unheroic Prometheus. Placed on the sun-baked Los Angeles River barely veined by water, this scene of conspiracy assumes a quality of desolation and moral aridity. An angled overhead view of a girl being sought conveys her sense of unique captivity by its being framed by beautiful flowers.

     When asked, "What more do you want?" the powerful Mulwray conniving to rob the city of water so he can buy the resultant cheap property, answers, "The future, the future," a motto of unchecked power that extends into his rationalization for incest and murder: "Given the "right place, right time--we're capable of anything." Setting the ending of the film in Los Angeles's Chinatown--early on identified as the locale of a crime the detective never fully solved or understood--lends lingering mystery and impact to the film's ending. (The film's exploration of unchecked arrogant power becomes timely today as we watch on television the reckless destructiveness of cynical power wielded by the current administration.)

     While white contemporary younger directors seem increasingly to push their explorations of the city toward surrealism, black directors deal more forthrightly with its realities, while adjusting the prepared set.

     MENACE II SOCIETY, directed by the Hughes Brothers, pushes the viewer into a world of no exit, and it does so in part by filming Los Angeles through a brownish murk that camouflages the beauty of the city. The violence is not camouflaged; it saturates the film in blood. Even on this muted set, elements of self-reflective performance occur: The killer of a grocery clerk watches raptly the store video tape that recorded his crime. His religious grandparents, just as enthralled watch a Jimmy Stewart movie--perhaps "It's a Wonderful Life"--on their TV screen.

     The inspired madness of the "Naked Gun" movies relies largely on surrealizing the action, while leaving the city's "real" background intact. In "Naked Gun 33-1/3," the parody of and homage to Eisenstein's famous "steps" sequence in "Potemkin" gains comic impact when we recognize the Park Plaza Hotel in the mid-Wilshire District.

     Katherine Bigelow, in her 1997, "Strange Days," distorts Los Angeles into burning shadows, twisted silhouettes among Los Angeles landmarks, the Bonaventure Hotel, Broadway downtown.

     It is December 31, 1999, the eve of the millennium. Sporadic fires, looting, suggestions of rioting are occurring. (Even these relatively mild intimations assume a humorous aspect when we remember that Los Angeles greeted 2000 with a shrug, perhaps because--I find this endearing--it was the only city to understand that the millennium would not begin until 2001.) A new illicit form of entertainment, "Playback," is now in the hands of black-marketeers, a new pornography that records violent experiences and allows the player to re-experience them, like listening to music with earphones. Recurrently we're seduced into the film's action only to realize that we've really "experienced" "Playback." (In a broad sense, "Playback" suggests the so-called reality shows of today, shows that, however, stop being realistic the moment the camera is aimed.)

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Original material by John Rechy appears frequently on these pages.