I am currently toying with the idea of doing (sort of) a comparative analysis of how California manifests in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The image of Hollywood and the Golden State is fascinating, and I’m intrigued by how both writers represent California as a place whose cultural image has overtaken its material reality, perhaps honing in on how this consistent generation of an image produces paranoia. In general, I gravitate to counterculture and postmodern era American culture and the paranoid energy of the time is something I definitely want to dive into.
In my mind, California is somewhere one goes to become someone else (Westward expansion, Hollywood, good weather, celebrities, wealth, beauty, et cetera). I see a lot of Baudrillard in this, the state becoming what could be a simulacrum. Its cultural representations constitute what “California” means. Hollywood is especially troubling because California manufactures the image through which California itself is imagined, if that makes sense—Hollywood produces the fantasy of California, people come to California to pursue that fantasy, they perform identities that are supplied by said fantasy, Hollywood turns those performances into more images of California… It's a frighteningly wonderful and weird paradox. There isn’t necessarily one “original” California sitting underneath it all, marking the state as something overwhelmingly human.
In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion is interested in people living inside American stories that no longer seem capable (?) of organizing reality (i.e., the opening, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”). Her prose is especially attentive to surfaces/materials (highways, houses, weather, clothes, newspapers, architecture, et cetera), which I found interesting, as I felt like they were placed to make California more “readable,” in a sense. She also writes in a fragmented sort of form that reads paranoid in itself. Her collection of items alongside her prose style seems to ask what connecs everything together, which is a similar question I feel Lynch is trying to answer through what he makes the viewer do in Mulholland Drive, which turns the viewer into a paranoid spectator, where Betty, the protagonist, arrives at LAX performing the young-actress-arriving-in-the-city, and she’s already familiar not because we’ve seen her before, but because we’ve seen her type before. In a way, Betty, like California, is made from cinema.
Next steps… well, I have to finish rereading the Didion and do a rewatch of the Lynch. Things I’m grappling with: Does Didion's California lead to Lynch's Hollywood? Didion observes the unraveling of postwar American narratives from within California in the 1960s, while Lynch gives spectators California decades later as a paranoid dreamscape populated by people desperately trying to discover the hidden mechanism governing their lives (if my memory serves me right).
Side note: I am not from California. I should go, probably.