Book Notes

(from the California HISTORIAN)

Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles
By William Alexander McClung
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2000, 277 pages, $35.00

Reviewed by Ruth E. Sutter
Independent Scholar, San Francisco

The identity of a place is usually most closely related to the image people have of it. “Los Angeles” conveys an image but as a whole seems to have no identity. The parts collected into the name, the localities with their own names, the districts, the neighborhoods, have more comprehensible identities.

So how does one write about Los Angeles? McClung does so by drawing on “vehicles of the imagination” (architecture, landscaping, literature, photography, painting). He composes an “Arcadia” impelling efforts to restore a paradise and a “Utopia” impelling efforts to invent one, both with the goal of improving the place.

He defines his area of study as “what is usually meant locally,” Los Angeles County and parts of the adjacent counties that are “under its cultural and economic sway.” In the first chapter, “Inventing Utopia,” he presents a variety of images of landscapes as places ready for “cultivation and shaping.” These appear most clearly in the promotions of boosters and property developers. The second chapter, “City of Metaphor,” draws on fiction, from Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona in 1884 to the Hollywood novels of the 1930s and 40s, and literary criticism. “A Usable Past,” the third chapter, explores the several pasts of Los Angeles through Anglo (non-Native American) images of them: pre-Spanish, Mexican, Anglo, or—otherwise considered—wild, cultivated, urban. His illustrations here are mainly architectural, so that readers might be led “to think of history as a sequence of places rather than periods of time.”

In the centerpiece chapter of the book, “The Shapes of L.A.,” McClung analyzes six categories of “phenomena”: wilderness, countryside, park, village, acropolis and road. He looks at architectural design of courtyard housing blocks, stuccoed boxes, condominiums, college campuses such as that of Caltech in Pasadena, “clustered communities” based on shopping and civic centers, and even Disneyland.

Finding tensions between imagined pasts and imagined futures helps to explain some of the conflicts among city planners, for example. The model can even be applied to such limited but culturally telling acts as finding and “restoring” an old house but right away installing a dishwasher and a garbage disposal in the kitchen and several electrical outlets in every room.