MArch UD 2009-2010 History and Theory “L.A. Fictions” essay
Magnolia Paul Thomas Anderson 1999
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SYNOPSIS
Content
Magnolia is a 1999 American drama film, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, followed his critical and commercial breakthrough Boogie Nights (1997) “ On one random day in San Fernando Valley, a dying father, a young wife, a male caretaker, a famous lost son, a police officer in love, a boy genius, an ex-boy genius, a game show host and a estranged
Introduction
daughter will each become part of one story. Through coincidence, chance, human action, past history and divine intervention they will weave through each other’s lives on a day that build to an unforgettable climax .” This movie depicts characters in nine different places: Patriarch and TV producer Earl
1. Historical context and time
Partridge (Jason Robards) lies on his death bed. His young wife Linda (Julianne Moore) sets out to fulfill his last wish and goes searching for his lost son Frank. Frank T.J. Mackey (Tom Cruise) rallies shy men in his TV show “Seduce and Destroy” to show those fucked up pussies what’s what - and hates
2. Geographic context and environment.
his father to the point of self-abnegation. Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), the host of Earl’s “freak” show in which beastly child smarty pants are paraded, learns that he’s got cancer - and is crudely turned away by his daughter Claudia (Melora Walters). Claudia is a coke-snorting crippled soul. And Donnie
3. Urban culture, social interaction, emotion.
Smith (William H. Macy), too, is a broken man ever since the child he once was, the Quiz Kid, was struck by lightening. Once he was smart, now he’s dumb. And with so much love to give. Two angels
4. Infrastructure
in the truest sense move through the stories of the fallen angels near Los Angeles. One is a cop, Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly), who does good, thinks good, is good. The other is the wunderkind Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), the long-running hero of the quiz show with the most blue, poetic eyes
5. Built form, architectural typologies
ever seen. Stanley is the only one who gets out in time, right in the middle of his life, before the onslaught of lies. He suddenly doesn’t want to play anymore, doesn’t want to answer any more questions and has only one request: That his father will be nice to him. But his father feels robbed of sleep and doesn’t
6. Public open space
realize that children are angels. At the end of this day, a traumatic one for all of them, something totally unexpected will happen to bring them together. It’s suddenly raining frogs down on Magnolia. This storm is so grotesque one can’t help but break out in fits of hysterical laughter. Bizarre catharsis,
7. Comparative Analysis
bursting with poetry and so disorienting that director and screenwriter P.T. Anderson was besieged by hand-wringing critics begging for an explanation. Fortunately, he deftly avoided giving one and said: “ We just wanted to be cool. No. We actually wanted it to rain cats and dogs but we couldn’t afford
Conclusion
them.” So, it’s raining frogs. An incredible coincidence - or fate after all?
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overlapped on a street map of the San Fernando Valley. This blast of images announces the technique (and the theme) of overlapping that the writerdirector will use over in the three hours of the film: superimposing tragedy on comedy, the moral over the commercial, and the marvellous upon the mundane. Magnolia is both the blossom and the boulevard. The Magnolia blossom layer is psychological, all the characters are inextricably entangled in one’s another’s past and fates: Donnie Smith was once a contestant on What Do Kids Know?; Stanley Spector is the show’s current champion; Jimmy Gator has been the host for decades; Earl Partridge is the former producer; Frank is his son. On the other hand Magnolia as Boulevard is the
Introduction
cultural layer, the failure of dominant and dead-end consumer industrial
Magnolia is my 1990s favourite movie, it shows deep emotions, pain, wounds
culture against agony, rage, fear, shame and grief of real life.
and desperation, and still avoids resorting to kitsch, but rather to the grotesque
The film opens with a series of antiseptically shot depictions of bizarre,
in the best sense of the word.
somehow enlightening deaths in three different historical times. In one of these
It builds on a clever and wise screenplay and is guided by a director full of ideas
stories a narrator describes that on 1958 in downtown of Los Angeles, a young
like Paul Thomas Anderson. And Finally, almost without exception, Magnolia
man jumps off the roof of his apartment building, only to be shot accidentally
is populated by impressive performances.
by his mother as he plummets past his parents’ living room window. The man
In this movie people are actively producing a false reality ( working as they do
falls into some construction netting at the base of the building. It would have
in L.A. at making a television program ) or sometimes they teach you how to
broken his fall, he’d be alive if he had not been shot. The mother ends up in
create a fake identity. Earl’s son, under the name of T. J. Mackey, has become,
jail for murdering her son while he was attempting to kill himself. The narrator
a mack, giving motivational lectures to horny geeks about the secrets of getting
wonders if this conflux of events was a coincidence or if, in the cosmic scheme
laid, including “how to fake like you’re a nice, caring guy.” (His slogan “respect
of things, it was somehow meant to happen.
the cock, tame the pussy” sums his act up well.).
These 3 stories are urban legend reported as true stories and used to introduce
The main title sequence of Magnolia begins with a bud hutching into bloom
the fiction of Magnolia about matter of chance.
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As tension goes up ( Julienne Moore screams something like “This is so fucking over the top that it’s unreal!” ) the film brings out to show the fictional signposts that we use to judge life, such as the TV Commercial, Entertainment Tonight-style shows, TV Game Shows, Pop Music, motivational lectures, and the romantic ideals of its characters who have been taught to believe they do deserve a big happy ending. “Of course the post-modern bit here, is that the characters saying this stuff are characters in a movie, so they do get the obviously left-field, only-in-a-movie ending that they feel entitled to, via the frogs”. Along the first part of the movie all the characters pretend to convince the audience that this is the real life even though it “sounds silly and might sounds ridiculous like this the scene of the movie where the guy tries to get a
Magnolia is, as Anderson promised, “the mother of all movies about the
hold of the long lost son but this is the scene and I think they have those scenes
Valley”, the valley of the shadow of death and dirty reality.
in movies because they’re true, because they really happen”(1)
The suburbs periphery has been depicted by these people dialogue and stories,
In the third hour Magnolia’s world becomes not a reality, but a movie where
so the audience catch the sense of the city without seeing a lot of urban form
reality is supposed to exist, but things are playing out as in a movie. We descend
and structure of L.A. The director deliberately sets the image of media fake
(ascend?) literally into a musical, and the film climax in a reality which is
reality against the valley cultural and human crisis, there is no need to show
disconnected from what was shown on screen before.
the city physically cause we can learn of it from characters words, movements
This essay attempts to examine some aspects of Magnolia L.A. to emphasize
and miserable lives. The intent of this essay is to explore deeply the contrast
the fast-approaching crisis of cultural delusions. Fake reality built by media
of fake image of life and dirty reality to climax in the urban design theme of
poorly fails when characters are forced to face mistakes coming from the past,
Hyperreality(2) in Los Angeles.
mundane sins proliferate. There’s (especially of children) dissolute abuse of trust, and plenty of casual greed and insensitivity. Dishonesty is inextricably
1) Historical context and time
linked to the chronic infidelity we see and hear about. Both Earl Partridge and
If Paul Thomas Anderson with the precedent Valley movie, Boogie Nights(3),
Jimmy Gator confess to having habitually cheated on their wives.
used the porno industry as a microcosm of American changes in the late 70’s,
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with Magnolia describes the reality of commercial television industries and motivational lectures business. San Fernando is home to numerous companies involved in motion pictures, recording and television production like, for instance, CBS studio centre, the Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. On the other hand the Valley in 1970 became the pioneering region for producing adult films. Since then it earns the monikers of “Porn Valley”, “San Pornando Valley” and “Silicone Valley”. Nearly 90% of all legally distributed pornographic films made in the United States are either produced by studios based in San Fernando Valley. Magnolia is a 24 hours story set in L.A. suburban San Fernando Valley, the time of the fiction overlaps the time at which the film was made. In the flow of the movie the passage of time is represented by the elapse
past. These two movies give together a comprehensive view of more than 30
of one day, from the early morning till night. As the day goes by, the pretended
years in the Valley recreating the ethos and mentality of an era.
reality of Magnolia vanishes into a real fiction, where falseness has been shown
Magnolia characters really act with the time, as they are paying in the present,
in the darkness of the Valley night.
for mistakes coming from the past. They deal with the themes of reconciliation
In Boogie Nights, Anderson plays in a different way with the time. His ability
and forgiveness, revealing what the parent’s past actions have wrought upon
is to capture the feel and mood of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the hairdos,
their children. Everything happen in this reality – fiction is a consequence or
clothing, decor, and attitudes of the era, and you have an effective re-creation
a kind of punishment for actions coming from the past. Certainly, this is the
of recent history. Anderson also does a wonderful job of delineating the
subject of Earl’s incredible death bed monologue as he confesses his “sins” to
differences between the late ‘70s and the early ‘80s. The first half of Boogie
Phil, telling him he walked out on his wife and son, leaving Frank to tend to his
Nights, which takes place between 1977 and late 1979, is lively and energetic,
dying mother. As voice after voice—first Jimmy’s(5) then Donnie’s(6) — repeat
with the focus on parties and good times(4)
in this movie ( echoing the theme of Chinatown(7) ), “We may be through with
We cannot find any particular mutation in San Fernando urban space of
the past, but the past is not through with us.”
Anderson movies, only people life style has changed, but not their need to
The past persists in the compulsion to repeat it, and we should understand the
escape dirty reality through the fake life of media, and face up their shamefull
engraved instruction “Do Not Duplicate”, which appears in extreme close-up
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on the keys which Donnie miserably turns over to his boss Solomon Solomon. Just as his parents lavished his winnings years ago, so Solomon Electronics uses Donnie’s fading child-star image to sell appliances. Stanley, by contrast, rebels against his own exploitation: we see him escaping back into books while Donnie has fired. Using his illicitly he made duplicate keys, Donnie breaks into his former employer’s store, very nearly locking himself into one more failure. In a not-quite-too-late moment of lucidity, Donnie screams at himself, “What am I doing? What the fuck am I doing?” He’s too confused by his past to be sure, but unlike TV baron Earl Partridge (who succumbs to his cancer still moaning “What did I do? What did I do?”) Donnie is earning a chance to recover. This juxtaposition of change-or-death operates consistently in
Magnolia L.A. is the city where people life is dominated by film and television
Anderson’s pairings of characters, and at the same time introduces the broader
industry, where it’s difficult to distinguish the truth from the fiction, and the
cultural message that without transformation we’re all condemned.
question can be stated as “What happens when things don’t happen as they do in the movies?” The film is named for Magnolia Boulevard, one of the Valley’s
2) Geographic context and environment.
main east-west thoroughfares. Many scenes are acted in Burbank and also the
As Boogie Nights wasn’t a movie about porno and Magnolia not only about
television studios of “What do the kids know” are located in this part of the
coincidence and chance, Paul Thomas Anderson made these two films mostly
Valley which is famous as the place where many media and entertainment
about people, in all their sad, mad, wildly messed-up glory, grappling for
companies are headquartered. Jim Kurring is caught by the unexpected frog
whatever human connection they can forge in a world changing faster than they
deluge when he drives along Reseda Boulevard.
can keep up with. That is the L.A. human geography where every characters
The ‘Solomon & Solomon’ store, where he spots Donnie trying to climb a
can be a Hollywood stereotype (dying millionaire, baby wise, unfaithful wife,
telegraph pole after the clumsy robbery, is L.A. Popular Alliances, 7222 Reseda
a fanatic preacher, lost girl, unworthy father, good cop).
Boulevard at Sherman Way in Reseda. It’s in downtown Los Angeles itself
All these characters face the same challenge, in different forms; to face up to
that you’ll find the nine-stores building where the unsuccessful suicide of the
their pasts, to open their eyes, to change or die horribly.
prologue becomes a successful homicide(8). Accordingly to the unpredictable
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weather of Magnolia, immediately after one title card forecasts “Light
Near the end of the film there’s an absolute hysteria running throughout the
Showers,” the Good Lord’s rain slashes down on Rick and Stanley as they hurry
cast and everyone has being hit by the consequences. Magnolia’s world becomes
into the studio.
not a reality, but a movie where reality is supposed to exist, but things are
Stanley’s direct interest in such strange events is highlighted when he asks
playing out as in a movie. The visible wealth of fame, fortune and happiness are
the studio assistant “whether people use outside meteorological services or
replaced with drugs, dis-functionalism and deceit. One of the characters who
have in-house instruments?” During the heavy rainy night, someone says “It’s
mainly stands out in the movie is Claudia. She is an abusive cocaine addict.
raining cats and dogs” but rain it’s not only a climatic condition but a way to
What is shown on the surface of her character is that typical of a drug addict.
clean souls from their sins.
As the movie progresses, the audience finds out what really is behind the
The only characters seen truly getting clean in this film are Jim and Claudia,
addiction. She is the daughter of a famous game show host who was raised
whose morning shower and pre - date shower, respectively, are both shot
in the Hollywood lifestyle. Later, it is revealed that she was sexually molested
through the pebbled glass of shower-stall doors. The connection they establish, with Jim affirming their deal to tell all the painful truths, thus enabling him to see Claudia as “a good, beautiful person,” is the clearest example we have of hope for a wider awakening. Out of the cleansing tears and streaming rain, we glimpse the difficult path to a future good.
3) Urban culture, social interaction, emotion Televisions are constantly present in almost all Magnolia movie scenes. They are switched on to act with movie players. Paul Thomas Anderson continues to reference the lying media with the exposure of consecutively greater misdeeds, such as the phony Jimmy Gator news story, the “Seduce and Destroy” lecture, and the quiz show which feeds on the preciousness of its child geniuses. This narrative stretching does not continue unchecked.
Douglas Suisman’s “Comparison between Wilshire Boulevard and the Linear City”
In the third hour the film seems unable to contain itself and almost explodes.
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and has a decidedly apocalyptic undertone, from the opening scene full of helicopters spraying potentially dangerous insecticides over a sleeping city, to the earthquake and murder at the conclusion. As Mike Davis points out Los Angeles is one of those cities that cinema takes pleasure in destroying. Altman plot comes from nine Raymond Carver short stories (plus one narrative poem) that expressed the desperation of ordinary people in plain, blunt language. Anderson shares with Carver a sharp ear for contemporary idioms. “Bottom line?” Frank T. J. Mackey asks his hyped-up “Seduce and Destroy” clientele. “Language! The magical key to unlocking any woman’s analytical ability and tapping directly into her hopes, wants, fears, desires—and her sweet little by her famous father during her childhood. Dysfunctional activities, such
panties.” Set against the transparent appeals of Frank’s linear rhetoric, the
as sexual molestation, do not come into your mind when you think about
speech of Anderson’s more honest characters constructs a densely woven and
someone famous or their child. It makes you wonder why would someone who
steadily escalating meditation upon the troubled layers of human identity—the
seemingly has everything on the outside, is so fragile on the inside.
psychological, the cultural, and the spiritual.
All these characters’ life represents the pathologies of fame and success in the media industry: the career pressure, the competitiveness, the stress, the lying,
4) Infrastructure
alcoholism, drug addiction, and at last the broken confidence of fallen glories
Some of Magnolia characters experiment movement and kinetic experience
and defeated spirit of shame.
driving on Reseda Boulevard in San Fernando Valley(10)
As the most famous precedent of Short Cuts(9) Magnolia is a motion picture
According to Banham concept of the forth ecology, Autopia, the boulevard, as
that stands as an important sociological artefact of late 20th century Los
physical infrastructure and being tributaries to the freeway system, represents a
Angeles life. Altman still took 20 Los Angelenos lives twisting them together
state of mind and a complete way of life.
just for the fun of how they play out and connect up.
Banham describes driving in Los Angeles as mental experience with futurist
The two movies depict a “dirty reality” where cruelty and bad luck run through
sensibility saying that the motorway driving is a special way of being alive and
most of the stories. Short Cuts in particular doesn’t stand for good feelings,
the extreme concentration required brings the driver on a state of heightened
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awareness that someone finds mystical. We learn that officer Jim Kurring does good, thinks good and is good mostly from its monologue driving his car which is the place where Angelenos generally spend the two calmest and most rewarding hours of their daily life. Magnolia boulevard is known for its antique shops, boutique, thrift shops, corner markets and occasional chain stores. It’s settled centrally in the community of Magnolia Park area which is bordered by West Verdugo Avenue to the South and Chandler Boulevard to the North. According to Suisman researches, about symbolic and spatial implications of linear public spaces such as Wilshire Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles boulevard “makes arterial connections on a metropolitan scale”,
Shane writes in his “Recombinant Urbanism” about the concept of armature :
“provides a framework for civic and commercial destinations” and “acts as a
(...) in the Cine Città, urban actors constantly worked to increase the capacity
filter to adjacent residential neighbourhoods”. Consequently density and urban
of the armature...The sectional development of the armature in the nineteenth
disposition corroborate the explication of boulevard and the Wilshire Boulevard
century allowed many mechanical systems to be incorporated into the street or
in particular, as nascent linear city. Even though Magnolia Boulevard, Reseda
boulevard axis, leading to the concept of the linear city or city as armature”(11)
Boulevard or the most famous Ventura Boulevard in San Fernando Valley are not linear cities, the many satellite downtowns like Burbank, Van Nuys,
5) Built form, architectural typologies
Magnolia Park, the Universal Studio or Ventura made this morphology a
Manly of the scenes are acted indoor. Every character plays in a different urban
dreamy possibility. Suisman in Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-rays of the
environment into specific architectural typologies and thanks to that, it’s also
Body Public (1989) divides the city into 8 colourful allegorical sections
possible to get their individual walk of life.
following the route of Wilshire Boulevard, those sections that could be easily
For instance at the beginning of the movie in one of the urban legend, it’s
applied to Magnolia or better to the Ventura Boulevard to reinforce the notion
shown an apartment into a nine strores tower block in downtown Los Angeles.
of this infrastructure as the city’s spine. To reinforce the idea of approaching
After that the camera moving along Stanley house following him in leaving his
the boulevard as linear downtown, it’s useful to report what David Grahame
house to get to school which is shortly set in the main prospect with it’s gated
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playground. Stanley lives (at 8.02)(12) in a detached house with garage while Earl in a big luxury villa presumably on Santa Monica Hills with a big living area where is set his set and a patio to which there is access from the kitchen. (at 30.30)(13) Claudia lives in a light-deprived one bedroom apartment littered with dead flowers, a place that exactly represents the character pain and loneliness. In Donnie’s dreary childhood-haunted apartment, by contrast, looming on the wall above the Cocoa-Pebbles and the Honey-in-a-Bear is a blown-up photo of a check for $100,000 from First Mutual Trust/ Main Branch/ Hollywood, California. It’s signed by Jimmy Gator and made out “For: Superior Knowledge.” But this is only the stolen money awarded for a “head full of useless knowledge” over which Donnie grieves at the Smiling
The studio place and the scenes of “What do the kids know” shooted there give
Peanut bar. Other two interesting architectural typologies which appear often
perfectly the director idea of overlapping those two opposite realities.
in L.A. iconography are the oil station where Jim the cop and Donnie repair
In front of the camera in his studio, in his fake reality, Jimmy Gator is not
during the frogs rain and the Solomon and Solomon electronic shop where
the father who ruined Claudia’s life and her daughter reptilian predator who
Donnie crushes into.
repeatedly cheated on his wife but a famous game show host for decades loved by the public and respected father family.
6) Open space
Anderson frames his shots with the characters in the middle and follows the
The Nature plays a marginal role in Magnolia. Further it seems that doesn’t
character around the environment. He only shows as much exterior as needed
exist any open space in this fake reality except for the big studio of “What do
for the character to move around. For example when Stanley Spector goes to
the kids know”.In the quiz studio there is one camera that often stays to shoot
the TV studio, Anderson only shows the doorway and a little bit of the parking
the audience, while another shoots host and contestants.
lot. The Audience has no idea what the whole building looks like.
The set design of the television studios is the tipical quiz show scenography
In Boogie Nights several characters followed around by one camera in
with contestants acting in front of the cameras which follow them also into the
one continuous shot were in the beginning of the film, used mainly as an
backstage. We have again the contrast of fake and dirty reality.
introduction to all of them. In Magnolia it is used in the set for the game
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show. The purpose of the shot seems to illustrate the frantic fast-paced life of
Anderson’s self-awareness in Magnolia, his acknowledgement of the implausi-
a misunderstood child.
bility of certain interactions and the absurdity of some scenes, gives perfectly the idea of overlapping reality and fiction.
7) Comparative Analysis Magnolia inserts itself into a genre of ensemble films set in Los Angeles which tracks daily lives and interactions of a large cast of apparently unrelated characters. This tradition of L.A. ensemble films can be traced back from Crash(14) to Altman’s Short Cuts which further emphasizes the link between its formal innovations and its geographical setting. These three movies to which I would add also Boogie Nights, share a number of common themes and formal strategies and they focus more exclusively on interpersonal, sexual and psychological issues. L.A. ensemble also share a fascination with class stratification and racial tension, the mundane perils of driving in L.A. and the unifying terror of the city’s natural disasters. If Magnolia climaxes with a torrential downpour of frogs onto the streets and automobiles of San Fernando valley, Short Cuts begins with a Medfly epidemic and ends up with an earthquake while Crash presents both a series of car accidents and the final surreal meteorological phenomenon of snow falling over L.A suggesting some kind of benediction or token of grace. All these movies aim to trace the economic, spiritual and physical connection among their bounce of characters and eventually surrender to their dirty reality and rely on L.A.’s rich assortment of natural and unnatural disaster to purify them from their sins. Like Magnolia, Crash is filled with coincidences and contrivances, but instead of calling attention to them, its director tries to make them seem “real” raising value to his script. P.T.
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Conclusion This movie, as others shooted in the Valley, offers every day reality as a “dirty reality” where people easily try to reinvent themselves in new identities to create their own fiction. Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia and Boogie Nights shows the “the blandness of the San Fernando Valley and the malaise of living on the extremity of the so called city of LA”. The same dirty reality comes through Tarantino movie Pulp Fiction(15): To what extent does Tarantino enable us to read reality more perceptively? In Pulp Fiction, it is not so much the filmic montage of sound and image, but the misè en scene that induces us to comprehend everyday reality as a “dirty realism”. The film is set in the city periphery. It is a pulp movie with an architecture without architects. It tells
what you thought/ When you first began it / You got what you want / Now
strange stories that come across as completely realistic.
you can hardly stand it / Though by now you know / It’s not going to stop.”
Magnolia like Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down, Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and
The fake reality of media crashes into the crisis of values and real pains of
Altman’s Short Cuts produce L.A. as a city where individual actions and causes
everyday lives when the movie climaxes with biblical raining frogs.
and effects are localised and often disconnected. Bubbling beneath (or in Falling
What has particularly interesting me of Magnolia vision of L.A. is investigate
Down’s case over the top) the surface of these films is the idea that the actions
the fake reality produced by media, as real urban spaces are distorted by
of an individual are significant and have the power to produce a profound effect
studio space passing from dirty reality to Hyperreality. In the essay “Travelling
on the milieu or community in which that individual is situated. In this way
Hyperreality” dated 1975, Umberto Eco says that we create realistic fabrications
all these films realise that the dream of the American City as melting point is
in an effort to come up with something that is better than real. All fiction and
only a fantasy borne out of a repression of racial diversity and rage. Anderson’s
culture give us things that are more exciting, more beautiful, more inspiring,
attention to the fast-approaching crisis of American cultural delusions flows in
more terrifying, and generally more interesting than what we encounter in
the coral song of “Wise Up”.
everyday life.
It’s about the dead-end direction of an entire culture which can’t stop
Put these ideas together and you have a succinct characterization of the age,
consuming itself into psychosis—and so now races toward oblivion: “It’s not
which is forever offering us something that seems better than real in order to
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sell us something.
overlapped to the exciting old city. While the scenario of Camelot and secession
Umberto Eco takes a reader across America in search of Hyperreality or the
of San Fernando Valley simulate a realistic political scenario for Los Angeles in
world of “the Absolute Fake,” in which imitations don’t merely reproduce reality,
the next hundred years, another imaginary station “which feed reality, reality-
but try improve on it. When he travels the artificial river in Disneyland, for
energy, to a town whose mystery is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal
example, he sees animatronic imitations of animals.
circulation: a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions. As
But, on a trip down the real Mississippi, the river fails to reveal its alligators. “...
much as electrical and nuclear power stations, as much as film studios, this town -
You risk feeling homesick for Disneyland,” he concludes, “where the wild animals
Camelot - which is nothing more than an immense script and a perpetual motion
don’t have to be coaxed. Disneyland tells us that technology can give us more reality
picture, needs this old imaginary made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms
than nature can.” He also discovers something else in Disneyland: a place that no
for its sympathetic nervous system”
longer even pretends it is imitating reality, but is straightforward about the fact that “within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced.” “The Main Street facades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter
Notes (1) To See this scene go to 01 h. 11 min. 49 sec. (2) Hyperreality is a means to characterise the way consciousness defines what is actually “real” in a world
them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively,
where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience. Both Umberto Eco
believing that you are still playing,” he writes. He similarly finds in Disneyland,
and Jean Baudrillard refer to Disneyland as an exemplar of hyperreality. Eco believes that Disneyland with
“An allegory of the consumer society, a place of absolute iconism, Disneyland is also as place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like robots.”(16)
its settings such as Main Street and full sized houses has been created to look “absolutely realistic,” taking visitors’ imagination to a “fantastic past.” This false reality creates an illusion and makes it more desirable for people to buy this reality. Disneyland works in a system that enables visitors to feel that technology and
Passing through the dirty reality of Magnolia and the Valley to approach
the created atmosphere “can give us more reality than nature can.” In his work Simulacra and Simulations,
the theme of Hyperreality in Urban Design, Sliding city for Patchwork City
Baudrillard argues the “imaginary world” of Disneyland magnetizes people inside and has been presented as
exercise and Camelot for L.A. Urban scenario are the attempt to create on
“imaginary” to make people believe that all its surroundings are “real”. But he believes that the Los Angeles area is not real; thus it is hyperreal. Disneyland is a set of apparatus, which tries to bring imagination and
one hand an authentic fake reality and on the other hand the simulation of
fiction to what is called “real”. This concerns the American values and way of life in a sense and “concealing
something which never really existed.
the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”
The idea of making a new city system within a light three-dimensional frame structure which works as infrastructure for urban and interurban transportation with movable buildings settled on top aims to develope a fake reality
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(3) At Boogie Nights centre is Eddie Adams, a young man working in a nightclub, who is discovered by porn director Jack Horner, who soon puts Eddie, renamed Dirk Diggler, and his “talent” on the top of the pornography industry. But when the 1980s arrive, Dirk and his colleagues in the porn industry have to cope with a new era as well as the baggage they bring with them from the 1970s.
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(4) Following a pivotal sequence at a 1979/80 New Year’s Eve gathering, Boogie Nights’ tone shifts to something more grim and contentious. The porn industry goes into a downward spiral with mass-market video supplanting carefully-made movies, and the actors and directors are sucked down with it. Drugs and death run rampant. No one dies during the movie’s first half (although there is a drug overdose), but the final hour features a body count.
creating another kind of fantasy environment that is starting to look a lot like fake reality.
Filmography “Chinatown”, Roman Polanski, (1974) “Short Cuts”, Robert Altman, (1993)
(5) To See this scene go to 01 h. 02 min. 03 sec.
“Falling down”, Joel Schumacher, (1993)
(6) To See this scene go to 01 h. 44 min. 52 sec.
“Pulp Fiction”, Quentin Tarantino, (1994)
(7) Chinatown is Roman Polansky movie of 1974. The plot is a labyrinth of successive revelations having
“Two days in the valley”, John Herzfeld (1996)
to do with Los Angeles water reserves, land rights, fraud, and intra-family hanky-panky, climaxing in Los Angeles’s Chinatown on a street that seems no more mysterious than Flatbush Avenue. (8) The Bryson Apartment Hotel, 2701 Wilshire Boulevard was seen also in Stephen Frears’ excellent The Grifters. (9) Short Cuts is a Robert Altman movie of 1993, inspired by nine short stories and a poem by Raymond Carver. Substituting a Los Angeles setting for the Pacific Northwest backdrop of Carver’s stories, the movie traces the actions of twenty-two principal characters, both in parallel and at occasional loose points of connection. The role of chance and luck is central to the film, and many of the stories concern death and infidelity.
“Boogie Nights”, Paul Thomas Anderson, (1997) “The Big Lebowski”, Joel Cohen, (1998) “Mulholland Drive”, David Linch, (2001) “Crash”, Paul Haggis, (2004)
Websites http://www.exampleessays.com/viewpaper/79043.html http://www.customessaymeister.com/customessays/Culture%20and%20Mythology/12313.htm
(10) To See this scene go to 02 h. 16 min. 39 sec. or to 02 h. 35 min. 54 sec.
http://www.moviemartyr.com/1999/magnolia.htm
(11) Recombinant Urbanism, Conceptual Modelling in Architecture Urban Design and City Theory, Shane
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/revicontent_209_p.htm
David Grahame, London: Wiley Academy, 2005, p.222
http://archives.cnn.com/1999/SHOWBIZ/Movies/12/17/review.magnolia/
(12) To See this scene go to 00 h. 08 min. 02 sec.
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/kino/0,1518,64306,00.html
(13) To See this scene go to 00 h. 30 min. 30 sec.
http://www.sydfield.com/featured_magnolia.htm
(14) Crash is a 2005 American drama film, co-written, produced, and directed by Paul Haggis. The film
http://www.americassuburb.com/gone.html
is about racial and social tensions in Los Angeles. A self-described “passion piece” for director Paul Haggis, Crash was inspired by a real life incident in which his Porsche was carjacked outside a video store on Wilshire Boulevard in 1991
http://www.imdb.it/title/tt0175880/locations
Bibliography
(15) Pulp Fiction (1994) is an American crime film directed by Quentin Tarantino, who cowrote its scre-
The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Banham Rayner, Los Angeles: London: Allen
enplay with Roger Avary. The film is known for its rich, eclectic dialogue, ironic mix of humor and violence,
Lane, 1971
nonlinear storyline, and host of cinematic allusions and pop culture references. (16) Los Angeles, the city, now includes Los Angeles, the themed mall, with facades that re-create the city’s
Collage City, Rowe Colin & Koetter Fred, Cambridge Mass: MIT, 1980
famous neighbourhoods. Even the movies, where America’s love affair with illusion started, are beginning
Learning from Las Vegas, Venturi Robert, Scott-Brown Denise, Izenour Steven,
to surround audiences with electronic images and stage sets, in a new generation of special effects theatres,
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1980
Caterina Avitabile MArch Urban Design 2009-2010
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Travels In Hyperreality,Umberto Eco,New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986 Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard, in Selected Writings, Mark Poster, ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-rays of the Body Public, Douglas R. Betsky, Aaron (editor); Hubert Christian (editor) Suisman, 1989 City of Quartz. Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Davies Mike, New York: Vintage Books, 1992 The Situationist City, Sadler Simon, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1999 Reyner Banham, Historian of the Immediate Future, Whiteley Nigel, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002 Shaping the city: studies in history. Theory and urban design, El-Khoury Rodolphe, Robbins Edward, New York 2004 Recombinant Urbanism, Conceptual Modelling in Architecture Urban Design and City Theory, Shane David Grahame, London: Wiley Academy, 2005 Sensing the 21st – Century City: Close up and Remote, Architectural Design review, guest edited by Brian McGrath and Grahame Shane, 2005
Caterina Avitabile MArch Urban Design 2009-2010
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