How Los Angeles made the modern world

It is an odd thing to say of a bilingual city with a Spanish name, but Los Angeles established English as the ruling language on Earth. The films that came out of there in the past century conquered territories that had withstood even the British empire. True, the writing was on the wall (and the parchment) for French when the Versailles treaty was drafted in Woodrow Wilson’s native tongue, not just Georges Clemenceau’s. But French put up a fight until the screen age. Thank Hollywood for ending the contest. Thank Disney for not having to master le subjonctif.  

My favourite American city is in trouble: with Donald Trump, who sent the National Guard there this month; and with the elements, which set fire to whole neighbourhoods at the turn of the year. No one ever confused LA’s public spaces with those of Zurich, but the pandemic led to a further coarsening of things, and not just in downtown. High-profile deserters include Joe Rogan, now of Texas. Brian Wilson made the ultimate departure last week: his death all the more poignant because he fixed LA in the world’s mind as the cloudless Shangri-La it isn’t. 

The city can turn things around. San Francisco to the north is getting better under a mayor who has brought such whimsical innovations as enforcing the criminal law. In the meantime, it is worth underlining what is at stake: the west’s most important city. Or at least the one that has done the most to shape how people live now. 

Count the ways. The “other” film sector, porn, whose base of operations is the San Fernando Valley — because which of us wouldn’t look better in that light? — has had even more effect on this century than Hollywood. It is hard to imagine the decline in real-life sex without the ubiquity of the screened version.

In architecture and design, much of the world has converged on a style — smooth lines, airy interiors, warm colours in white or mock-industrial spaces — that is LA-inflected. And so your hip local café or glassy apartment block aims at a lightness and lucidity that makes more sense in West Hollywood weather than wherever you are. 

Even in politics, LA has had bizarre influence for what is not even a state capital. The radicalisation of the American right in the past century, whose spillover effects are global, has origins in Orange County, among other sunbelt suburbs. Nixon and Reagan were southern Californians by upbringing or choice. It is unthinkable but true that LA was once seen as a Wasp haven from the “ethnic” east. Cold war hardliners weren’t out of place in a region whose wealth has always rested as much on Northrop Grumman as on Paramount Pictures. I wonder how much of Trump’s animus comes in part from a sense that LA is lost conservative ground.

And for all the intellectual condescension towards LA, the most cited, if not understood, idea of recent decades came from a former analyst at Santa Monica’s RAND Corporation called Francis Fukuyama. (Though he was also a Washington hand. Perhaps no argument, let alone “The End of History?”, can take full shape when a beach is two blocks away.)  

You will object that a lot of these impacts on the world aren’t for the better. But negative influence is still influence. If our present civilisation falls, and is dug up in some future renaissance, the proper excavation site will be LA. New York, London and Paris are “better” cities but how much has each done to change the human experience in the past half-century? Their role has become to contain things — almost literally all things — rather than originate them. This is what Werner Herzog was getting at when he cited LA’s “substance” as his reason for living there.

That substance might be running out. Hollywood seems creatively spent. The serious end of tech has never made the dash from northern to southern California that is forever in the offing. But the half-life of the influence that LA has exerted until now will run on for decades. The fundamental change that we are living through, from a culture in which the written word is central to one where the image is central, traces back to Hollywood. Perhaps another city is limbering up to take over as the moulder of the world. Until then, we all live in LA.