The Outsider

LOS ANGELES was boosted into existence by a mixture of several things. Los Angeles initially emerged as a result of the land boom that was made possible by the rail lines leading into Southern California. It grew over the next several decades as a white Protestant community paving over the Mexican Catholic heritage that came before it. As a network of highways and roads were built and the separate neighborhoods became connected by the automobile, the city began to grow into what we know today as Los Angeles.

After reading about the history about Los Angeles, it seems to me that most of perceptions and writings about LA sprung out of the physical geography of the land. As a diverse, widely spread out city, many people became frustrated with how to describe or summarize such an assorted group of neighborhoods. With the beach, mountains, and desert all rolled into one it was difficult to characterize the city as a whole.

Another characteristic of LA that seemed to both bother and puzzle people was the lack of a single type of architecture. With the influence of Hollywood, much of the architecture seemed to be model a movie set. Rather than having a uniform style of architecture like New York or San Francisco, the landscape for Los Angeles was built more on a “propensity for fantasy creation,” as David Fine puts it in his book Imagining Los Angeles. Even today, one of the most iconic places in LA is Randy’s Donuts, where a giant 23-foot doughnut sits atop a tiny drive-in. This is the architecture of Los Angeles.

What I found personally illuminating about Fine’s piece was when he was discussing the reason for why LA literature was virtually nonexistent until around the 1920s. It wasn’t because there was nothing to say about the city or there were no gifted writers, it was simply because virtually everyone was new to Los Angeles. The writers in LA were themselves outsiders, newcomers to the land, and therefore unconnected to the city. Fine uses the great example of Mark Twain. Though Twain began his career in San Francisco, all of his writing were reflective of his home back in the Midwest. Fine describes the literature of the city perfectly stating, “The distanced perspective of the outsider, marked by a sense of dislocation and estrangement, is the central and essential feature of the fiction of Los Angeles.”

You can still see that evidence of the outsider everywhere around LA. Being on a campus where almost half the students come from out of state you can see how most of LA’s population consists of people caught between, “a Southern California present and a past carried from some other place.” Because L.A. lacks a sense of uniformity or its own sense of style, it becomes a struggle to grasp the concept of city or describe it in a single way, which is why so many people are frustrated with Los Angles.

However, I believe that this absence of style is in itself, the “LA style.” As Fine, so perfectly describes it, “In the absence of a dominant style, every style and manner [has] found a place.” LA is indeed a place where anything goes; where nobody fits in but everybody fits in. LA is the outsider portrayed in so many of the movies produced on its land. It’s the newcomer, the underdog. And although it’s had its fair share of struggle, LA has become the hero for so many other outsiders looking for a place to belong.

-- Megan McMurtrey

caption: "griffith" (the old zoo at griffith park)

credit: OmarOmar, flickr creative commons