It’s clear that there’s little if anything natural about LA.
Photo by Jean-Francois Bourdic.
“Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation. It’s no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.” — Jean Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra, 1981
I.
You don’t have to be a French philosopher like Jean Baudrillard to grasp the unreality of LA. Indeed, the outlook that once belonged largely to Parisian intellectuals is now commonplace. “I don’t think anything in LA is real or natural,” quipped a young mother with a real baby in a real baby carriage. She and I were walking around the real canals in Venice, a short distance from the Pacific Ocean. I was admiring the arrangement of water and land and houses, too, that must cost a fortune. She was a stranger, at least to me, but she looked savvy so I couldn’t help but ask her about the canals.
To my naked eye they looked too regular, too predictable, and too shapely to be made by nature, but I wasn’t sure. Much the same might be said of LA itself, which strikes me as the capital of the artificial, though Las Vegas with its neon and glitter isn’t far away and offers stiff competition.
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