A Real Phony

In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Holly Golightly is referred to as a “real phony.” That is the way I thought of Los Angeles when I went there for the first time last month. In contemporary culture it is almost as if everyone has vicariously been to Los Angeles due to the amount of media produced and featured there. Los Angeles was strangely familiar. It felt like I was in a movie, or a type of suspended reality, a type of dream. At least this was my impression, being a non-native with most of my knowledge of the area established through film.

Thus, I looked at L.A. through the lens of film. One of the best classes I took in college was Film as Art, which was structured by Stephen Lapthisophon around the theme of “Movies About Movies.” Among many other films, we watched Sunset Boulevard (1950), Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Day of the Locust (1975), and Body Double (1984). All of these films have L.A. as their setting, one might even argue as a character. In some films the area and its atmosphere was portrayed as a very dark character. 

The L.A. of movies is backed up by concrete streets and places and vistas, but the reality is that most of the stories are inventions of someone’s imagination. David Lynch described L.A. as “the city of dreams” when speaking of his film Mulholland Drive (2001). As I travelled down Mulholland Dr. in the dark listening to the movie's main theme, it was surreal. It was a perfect cocktail of both reality and fiction. The experience was a microcosm of L.A.

This design does not match my words above, but one thing that is definitely real about L.A. is its beautiful foliage, flowers, and fruit. This little sketch is based off of a picture of a lemon tree that was on my hotel room’s porch.