There are implications of a collapse of morality. In a dingy club full of costumed revelers, a leggy girl does a sexy song and dance, and an orgy is implied. (Alas, the orgy is even more passive than Kubrick's languorous one in "Eyes Wide Shut.") Bigelow does not make it clear how all this will bring about the apocalypse, on this particular day; no forecasts of computer failure, no terrorists, no connection to "playback pornography," just Los Angeles as tensile set.

     As disparate as the two films are in both content and quality, Curtis Hansen's "L.A. Confidential" opens with a sequence much like that of "L.A. Story"; and as in Sunset Boulevard, the narrator turns out dead. The voice of Danny de Vito itemizes a series of L.A. clichés. Unlike Martin's, this litany is delivered with jaunty irony: "Come to L.A," the voice invites as the camera roams over golden beaches, lush orange groves, a gorgeous landscape. "Life is good, paradise on earth." Yet: How is it possible that in such a city, organized crime can exist?"

     It is not only organized crime that exists in this Los Angeles. Corruption saturates every level of power, especially the Los Angeles Police Force--and note that in virtually every one of these films that indictment occurs, an indictment still prevalent.

     Early on, the intent of the film's exploration is established: What ethics can survive widespread moral anarchy? There are three cops on the moral spectrum: the police chief is overtly corrupt, another cop has a skewed morality--he draws the line on hitting women; and the third, the good cop, refuses to plant evidence, refuses to shoot even a guilty man in the back, the way Ma got it in "White Heat." Their ethics will be tested.

     As the roams through layers of corruption--racism, planted evidence, beatings, murder--impersonation assumes a major importance in the plot. High-priced prostitutes acquire plastic surgery in order to evoke the stars of fantasy: Rita Hayworth, Veronica Lake. A confusion in the impersonations occurs at the famous Formosa Club, where the good detective encounters petty crook and gigolo Johnny Stompanato with a beautiful blonde, who protests the invasion. The cop retorts: "A hooker cut to look like Lana Turner is still a hooker"--only to be informed that she is Lana Turner.

     One cop works as a consultant for a "Dragnet"-like movie, and then we see clips from the actual "Dragnet" series. Location shots look like sets filmed in sepia-tinged colors that suggest the Los Angeles of 1950; occasionally the bright colors of the city are allowed to startle in bright Technicolor.

     In this film, the happy ending is rendered with a telling twist: The implicit morality of it is skewed.

     David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" gave banished deconstructionists hope for a ... comeback, at least for a nudge to queer theorists before they claimed it. Both were emboldened by Lynch himself. "The film is what you see in it," he pronounced about the episodes from a rejected film series pasted together with additional footage.

     Roles are constantly reversed: a "monster" is a homeless person, Diane is Betty, there are two Camillas, one of whom, an amnesiac, took Rita Hayworth's name for a time.

     At a staged theatrical performance, voices are lip-synched, music canned. Lines like: "Don't play it for real until it gets too real" and "Just like in the movies, pretend you're someone else," constantly remind we're watching a film. A cruel manifestation of self-reflective performance is the filming of indomitable old-time star Anne Miller through a kind lens, until the end, when the camera pounces on her in an unveiled closeup.

     "Weird skylines, dangerous parking lots," a voice describes Lynch's Los Angeles. But the skylines look a beautiful. Out of Lynch's jagged forms, the intrepid Los Angeles sunshine bathes the city. Palm trees sprawl majestically. The city glitters at night glitters from a distance as two women, like phantoms, surrender into it from Mulholland Drive.

     And along comes Paul Thomas Anderson's "Boogie Nights." Knights--with a K? Why not?-- since it is something of a modern picaresque, and a highly moral one, too. It is a film that could be set only in Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley, the seat, as it were, of pornography, a most elemental form of performance.

     That sense of performance is affirmed even before the film begins. Its star, Mark Wahlberg, once known as Marky Mark, is a one-time homophobe who in this film gets assaulted by gay-bashers.

     Here, he plays a legendary porn king à la John Holmes, who was reputed to have had the largest endowment of all time. Scenes from antecedent films are replayed throughout. Mark accepts a best erotic player award, just like Anne Baxter did while getting a somewhat classier "Tony" in Mankiewicz's "All About Eve." As Mark's character declines, he become Bette Davis as Margo Channing. A "new kid in town," with rivaling endowment, becomes Eve Harrington, lurking in the wings to snatch the Big title away.

     Echoing Norma Desmond's protest, "Nobody leaves a star, that's what makes one a star," Mark asserts his challenged place in the constellation of porn: "I'm a star, a star, a big bright star." Upon her return to Paramount Pictures, Norma Desmond haughtily declared, "Without me there would be no Paramount," and Mark asserts his place to his betraying cohorts. "Without me you wouldn't be anywhere."

     A scene of dual violence is choreographed. While Mark is being assaulted by gay-bashers, a porn actress beats up a would-be client on another street. The scene of gay-bashing is ritualized into a crucifixion, emphasized by a church in the background; a deep blue Los Angeles sky is somber. The music uniting the alternating sequences is grave, funereal. Later, a wild man on drugs becomes a demented ballet dancer.

     A porn entrepreneur trespasses into kiddy porn and is ostracized, then beaten in prison. The husband of a porn queen kills her for indulging in off-screen sex.

     This film's ultimate comment on performance occurs at the very end when Wahlberg as Johnny-Holmes reveals his what is supposed to be a legendary penis. Instead, it's an obvious prosthesis, a limp, rubbery fake.

In ending, I would like to inject a most personal note: I cherish this city so often maligned, a city that despite all the ridicule it is too often the object of, can inspire films like "Chinatown," "Sunset Boulevard," "L.A. Confidential," "Boogie Nights," and many others, including, of course, "It's Alive, Part One."

     A favorite time of mine occurs at the beach in Santa Monica during late summer. That is when the "blue hour" drapes the world tints the world in a purplish blue haze created by a conspiracy of haze, clouds, fading sun. Film-makers often wait for this light to shoot their most memorable scenes. It is a time between dusk and night, a brief, mysterious transition during which, mythology claims, things are at once the clearest and therefore the most ambiguous.

     That is how Los Angeles emerges finally in films, clear one moment, ambiguous the next, bold and subtle, always mysterious, as real as movies, as unreal as the city itself.

John Rechy
March 2003
Los Angeles, California

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Original material by John Rechy appears frequently on these pages.