This week, I started watching Vanderpump Rules, which is catnip because but it features one of my favorite tropes: utterly delusional young people, yelling at each other. Coming from an environment that communicates disagreement strictly in veiled slights, out-and-out shouting has always fascinated me. I’m glued to the clean and clear confrontations between Jax and Stassi; Stassi and Scheana; Stassi and the Juilliard-educated Laura-Leigh. I’m tuned all the way in for their endless appetite for emotional sabotage between shifts at Sexy Unique Restaurant, all while wearing heinous spandex cotton dresses and wedge heels.
The most compelling part of season one so far is the peek into their lives — people chasing fame and recognition while living in popcorn-ceiling apartments with communal pools. They’re depicted as strivers, yearning for the larger lives they eventually get, but the grittiness of the locations in season one is so unintentionally glamorous: their coke-soaked battles taking place at the Grove, their popcorn-ceilinged WeHo apartments, the Roxy. It’s like my favorite part of Heat — it’s not the LA we’re used to seeing onscreen, with its palm trees, blonde wood mansions, and blue waves. That’s only exists in Santa Barbara. Theirs is the LA I’ve grown to love, resolutely and completely, over the course of seven years.
I’ve always been drawn to California. It’s perhaps alternate-reality wish fulfillment, because I was born here and then relocated to Texas at two — a begrudged upheaval felt hard, with some of my first sentences were complaints about the mosquitoes and asking when they were going to bed. With the gold rush of California-based content in the early aughts, I was ready to indulge visions of what could have been. I even lied about moving back here (sorry, Abby) and made my screen name LAbaby90210. Shoutout to early manifestation before it was cool — I made it!!! (not to 90210, but close enough)
Needless to say, I was the prime audience for depictions of California in media. Laguna Beach was formative for me, cluing me into the erotic appeal of eyeliner, side bangs, thin little chokers, and most crucially, layered tank tops and Abercrombie & Fitch denim skirts. However, Orange County didn’t hold a candle to the siren song of The Hills, which featured the same brigade of blonde women now thrust into nightclubs and rooftop bars and places frequented by Brent Bolthouse and Ryan Cabrera. When my friends and I got to “intern” in Los Angeles in January 2010, we made pilgrimages to these Australian-coded, overpriced bars, restaurants, clubs — living in alignment with everything we’d come to know as Los Angeles: the promise of celebrity, overpaying for green juice, catty subterfuge, Chateau Marmont, the Griddle — endless streams of proper nouns.
Maybe I got that tendency from my hangover obsession with Bret Easton Ellis and his vapid, sunglasses-wearing characters, styled after growing up in LA during the ‘80s. In recent years, he’s been tweeting about “the end of empire,” as if the country — and most prominently, Hollywood — is in the midst of a long, inevitable downward spiral, like any civilization ever worth its salt. I can’t disagree with him. I, too, believe that our cultural export was once the key to a lot of international goodwill. Its disintegration isn’t doing much for morale. We are, at the end of the day, a vibes-based country.
In the most recent Mission: Impossible, the president (Angela Bassett) is asked by Nick Offerman to sacrificially nuke an American city. My brother aptly pointed out that it would indubitably be LA. New York was already done, Washington too difficult or too obvious — LA would be the one we’d be fine with losing. It’s a less funny observation now than two weeks ago, but it’s easy to try and dissociate this way, thrusting Los Angeles into the hypothetical line of fire — there’s an insularity and lack of connection here that can charge alienation, making you want to punish it for existing. On the other side of the coin, the cheeky dreams and subversive humor alive in the streets can help us manifest a mutual fever dream — a ketonic release — might be the end of empire, but sugar, we’re going down swinging.
It’s been six months since fires wiped out people’s homes and livelihoods. That alone would be enough. But then you add the absence of real state oversight, the queasy sensation of targeted national derision, the industrial bleed from corporate mergers pushing productions north to Canada. Everything feels like it could tip. That’s when I find myself most delusional, yelling about this place that isn’t a place at all (but a state of mind….you crazy if you think I’m making it through this without one Lana reference). It might just be me, but this is when I become most attuned to its moments of deranged, exposed beauty. Like the radically honest waiters at SUR, LA shines when it’s at its worst — when the pain is visible, loud, and unapologetically alive in all of us.
All of the wheels are off all of the buses, and we’re all just walking around like this now, fragmented into our own microdramas. This week alone: I saw a group of DePop younglings, holding a rooster on a string outside a bakery in Hollywood, cradling it like a baby. I passed a man, swiveling around and around in a computer chair at the top of Griffith Observatory, who asked a blonde woman ducking eye contact if she was Adele. I saw my friend’s face light UP when she spotted Noah Wyle at the grocery store, where I also saw a pair of adult twin women in matching haircuts muttering about how “something is suspicious here.”
Walking down Beverly Blvd the other day, passing window after window of closed furniture stores, I saw two young people in Ray-Bans inside a vintage car, straight off the cover of Less Than Zero. They spotted a man asleep on the sidewalk, his belt pink, studded, clasped with a rodeo plate. His cardboard sign read: “It wasn’t always like this.” The Ray-Ban couple dug in their center console for cash, but in the end lamented the lack of it — wondering aloud why he didn’t have a QR code instead. At least they tried.
Maybe we’re not the epicenter of good vibes making anymore. Maybe we never were? Maybe we’re just the set, like at the end of The Hills, when the camera pulls back and you realize how much of it was staged, preordained, out of our control.
Maybe our lives are just in reaction to the never-ending churn, and there’s not a prescription for how to act. Maybe that’s the beauty of it — that the show always goes on: servers shrieking on rooftops, drive-by prophets in ergonomic chairs, twin oracles at Lazy Acres muttering bad omens near the salad bar.
End of empire, sure — but like Tom Cruise did in Mission: Impossible, maybe we’ll pull it out in the third act.