Out There Beyond the Horizon

In a megalopolis as sprawling and resistant to definition as Greater Los Angeles, any claim for its exact geographical center would be disputed. But for purposes of discussion, perhaps the location of my bank would do: on Fairfax between Beverly and Third, across the street from the CBS studio complex--a spot roughly equidistant from the beaches and downtown, from North Hollywood to South Central. Last Monday, during lunch hour, the lines at the teller windows were long and a full complement of staff was hard at work. There were, more or less, 40 people in view in one large space, constituting as good a random sampling of Angelenos of all types and standings as you’re likely to find.

What was striking was that from this peaceful work-a-day gathering of Angelenos you could trace a line of migration and ancestry to virtually everywhere in the world: Africa, Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Pacific Islands, the Middle East--as though the World Wide Web had leapt out of your computer and filled the room with living representatives of a 21st-century transformation.

The Internet is an apt metaphor for Greater Los Angeles. It has no center and no hierarchy. Many influence it, but no one dominates it. There are no universally respected taste-makers, and no single effective governing body to appeal to. No one knows how many come and go, where from and where to. It’s rife with unsettling contradictions. Lots of people take credit for it, but no one’s accountable. Everybody talks about it, but no single person or committee of people can possibly know it from end to end, meaning no one fully knows what’s going on in it, to what purpose or what effect.

L.A.’s impact on the world is pervasive and inescapable, impossible to block or monitor, but everyone’s image of it is at best partial and self-referential--which doesn’t prevent anyone, even me, from talking about it in authoritative terms that ultimately say more about themselves than about what they’re supposedly describing. To some it’s addictive, to some it’s anathema. Everyone agrees it’s transformative--but no one is sure how. Many insist it’s headed for an apocalyptic end, others say it’s the embodiment and engine of the future. Above all, it’s unpredictable.

And everyone is trying to define it. But no definition has ever stuck.

The people who’ve tried hardest to define Los Angeles are writers based here and, for some reason, in New York. (Why New Yorkers should attempt this is a mystery to me, but it may have to do with how many New Yorkers move here and how few Angelenos move there.) People aren’t continually trying to define New York, Baltimore or New Orleans--such cities have a character, a personality, that no one questions. But every few years there’s some ballyhooed and controversial new book that claims to finally pin down Los Angeles. One can see why as knowledgeable a Los Angeles writer as Joan Didion threw up her hands, in effect, and called the city “the intersection of nothing.”

This recurrent attempt at defining L.A. is, fittingly enough, perhaps L.A.’s most defining characteristic.

For definitions of a place are based on what, in its past, has become fixed. But here nothing is fixed, nothing is settled. Angelenos are famous for not valuing, much less preserving, what past we have--because the past, personal or collective, is not what this city is about. People move to New York to become New Yorkers, and if they don’t take on some characteristics of a “New Yorker” they tend not to rise far. But people move to Los Angeles to become something they couldn’t be anywhere else, and there is no set of characters or manners (or the lack of same) for them to take on. Their uncertain project is met with an uncertain setting, and this very vagueness, multiplied by several million, gives the city its air of endless but uncertain possibility.

The past doesn’t matter. The present only matters as a springboard to the future. And the future, being unknown, is whatever you imagine it to be. Welcome to L.A.

A place with no geographical or conceptual center also has no fixed horizon line. With the desert on one side and the sea on the other, and tectonic plates constantly shifting beneath, here the horizon is endlessly ahead of us and endlessly changing--depending on where you happen to stand and what you happen to want.

Los Angeles seems never to have heard of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” written to mark the closing of the frontier. Turner postulated that because the continent was now fully settled by European American from coast to coast, a sense of possibility, a sense of frontier that had been central to the American imagination, was gone forever. Turner wrote that when this city was just a dot on the map. No one would have predicted that a mere 20 years later the eyes of the entire world would be insatiably fixed upon movies made here; no one would have predicted that Greater Los Angeles would create 46 miles of harbor waterfront, to become the busiest port in America--citing only the two most obvious examples of how the people who’ve become Angelenos refused to recognize the closing of the frontier.

In 1939, Nathanael West, in the most telling passage of his novel, “The Day of the Locust,” took his readers on a tour of the Hollywood back lots to see every symbol and structure of Western history in a chaotic prism of impacted imagination. We always go back to that book because West was the first to see that L.A.’s endless sense of frontier, its wide-open invitation to all comers and its constantly receding horizon, could and would absorb everything that preceded it. And it would throw it back at the world with the unspoken challenge at the heart of every Hollywood movie: Be what you imagine, don’t let the past hold you back.

For better and worse, that call has driven the old establishment culture crazy.

And its not a strictly American message--however much the rest of the country enjoys claiming it. It’s not what you hear, it’s not how you’re raised, in places like the Midwest, the South or New England. And it’s not a politically correct message--it doesn’t care about conserving anything or reforming anything (at least not really deeply and not for long). It’s a frontier message from a city where the frontier never closed.

Los Angeles is a city that won’t stay fixed and can’t be defined because its central energy and only currency is imagination. So the imagination of each successive wave of immigrants--whether from Iowa or Guatemala--reshapes the place according to its needs, weaknesses and strengths.

So I might pick my bank on Fairfax, between Beverly and Third, for as good a central point as any in L.A . But that’s partly because, across the street, there’s a massive TV studio with its enormous satellite dishes pointed toward the sky--the only horizon that counts around here.

We may argue about what L.A. broadcasts skyward, both as entertainment and as the unsettling, disruptive vibe of the city itself. It may be crazy, it may be unreal and it may undermine both the presumptions and assumptions of those who’d like things to be orderly--but that’s what imagination always does. And imagination is all that finally defines L.A. *