My recent visit to La La Land was surprisingly un-woke. Has LA discovered that virtue-signaling doesn’t sell?
Hollywood, the city that launched the golden age of the motion picture industry, has long epitomized both the realization and the death of dreams. Literature and popular culture have reflected Tinseltown’s cruel paradox that every success story is matched by a thousand stories of disappointment and dissipation, collectively contributing to the broader decline of civilization. In his 1939 novel The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West tells the story of a Yale-educated artist who was commissioned to create a painting of Los Angeles on fire: “He wanted the city to have a gala air as it burned…. The Angelenos would be first, but their comrades all over the country would follow. There would be civil war.” West’s depiction of the elites’ inciting a violent uprising seems eerily relevant to today’s culture wars. More recently, even La La Land, the 2016 film that played homage to Hollywood’s classic musicals, echoed this dark perspective with Sebastian, the character played by Ryan Gosling, commenting, “That’s LA. They just worship everything and value nothing.”
