Dream State

California in the Movies

Mick LaSalle

• Publisher: Heyday
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781597145329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

An eminent film writer looks behind the curtain of the California dream It hardly needs to be argued: nothing has contributed more to the mythology of California than the movies. Fed by the film industry, the California dream is instantly recognizable to people everywhere yet remains evasive for nearly everyone, including Californians themselves. That paradox is the subject of longtime San Francisco Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle's first book in nine years. The opposite of a dry historical primer, California in the Movies is a freewheeling journey through several dozen big-screen visions of the Golden State, with LaSalle's unmistakable contrarian humor as the guide. His writing, unerringly perceptive and resistant to cliché, brings clarity to the haze of Hollywood reverie. He leaps effortlessly between genres and generations, moving with ease from Double Indemnity to the first two versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers to Boyz N the Hood to Booksmart. There are natural disasters, heinous crimes, dubious utopias, dangerous romances, and unforgettable nights. Equally entertaining and unsettling, this book is a bold dissection of the California dream and its hypnotizing effect on the modern world.

CHAPTER ONE

The Wizard of Oz Is a Movie
about Hollywood

The wizard in The Wizard of Oz originally hailed from a quiet, dull place in the Midwest, and yet he ended up in a colorful, beautiful land where the light was lovely and the weather was always nice. Once in this new place, he did what any self-respecting megalomaniac might do: He decided that he should be boss. He tricked the credulous people of Oz by claiming to be all-powerful, and by becoming a phony on a grand scale, he got to live in a palace.

Now it’s years later. Dorothy and her three friends arrive in Oz, and they go straight to the wizard’s palace, hoping he will grant them favors. He agrees, but on one condition. In L. Frank Baum’s original book (1900), the condition is that they kill the Wicked Witch of the West. In the movie, the condition is that they bring back the witch’s broom, which amounts to the same thing but has the advantage of sounding softer and providing a visual—always good in a movie.

We must assume the wizard has done this before. We don’t know this for sure, but it stands to reason. The man has no power. He can’t grant anyone a favor because he can’t do anything. Yet his subjects will keep coming to him, begging. His solution: When people ask him to do something difficult, he just tells them to go kill the one person all but guaranteed to kill them, i.e., the witch. The wizard, though he later claims to be “a very good man . . . just a very bad wizard,” is just not a nice guy.

Of course, as we all remember, Dorothy melts the witch and she and her three companions return to Oz’s palace to claim their prizes. That’s when the wizard is revealed as a fraud. What can he do then? In the book, he gives them each a phony version of the thing they want—fake versions of a brain and a heart for the Scarecrow and Tin Man, respectively, and a bogus courage potion for the Cowardly Lion. He counts on them being stupid enough or generous enough to settle for little.

In the movie, however, he does something subtly more interesting. He can’t give the Cowardly Lion courage, so he gives him a medal. He can’t give the Scarecrow a brain, so he gives him a degree. He can’t give the Tin Man a heart, so he gives him a testimonial. He gives each of them, in a sense, fake evidence that they possess the one thing they want but don’t possess at all.

Is this coming into focus now? Can you see why Hollywood might have been attracted to this story of a man who goes to a gorgeous place and becomes the biggest thing in town by conning everybody? Clearly, this aspect of the wizard was so appealing to the filmmakers that they accentuated it in the ending of the Wizard of Oz film. In the book, he merely talks the hapless trio into accepting less than they want, but in the movie he gives them actual lessons in fraudulence. The three men come to him wanting items of deep, internal, personal value, and he more or less tells them forget it, you don’t need it, just take the stuff I give you and go off and fool people. In this world, you don’t need to present yourself truthfully. You just need a good front.

THE WIZARD OF OZ IS A GREAT FILM. This much has been recognized since at least the 1950s. It debuted to good reviews in 1939 and was considered important enough to be nominated for an Academy Award. But it was not until it started being screened annually on television—back in the days when all TVs were black-and-white—that The Wizard of Oz established itself as a classic.

It has an absolutely enchanted first hour, a serviceable third act, and one of the great sequences in movie history (the one that begins with Dorothy’s crash landing into Oz and ends with her departure on the yellow brick road). And it features what must rank as one of the best lyrics of all time:

You’re off to see the Wizard

The wonderful Wizard of Oz.

You’ll find he is a whiz of a wiz

If ever a wiz there was.

If ever, oh ever, a wiz there was

The Wizard of Oz is one because

Because because because because because

Because of the wonderful things he does.

You’re off to see the Wizard,

The wonderful Wizard of Oz.

That’s a beautiful, festive, flowing, and intricate little rhyme, even if its contents make us wonder, later, why the Munchkins are so bullish on the wizard’s omnipotence. Does he have a publicist feeding fake items to the Munchkinland press?

Yet for all the attention the film has received in the decades since its release, and all the writing that has been done on the subject, not enough has been said about the movie’s relationship with its birthplace—which is to say not Kansas, where the story begins, nor upstate New York, where Frank Baum was from, but Hollywood. This is odd because, in a way that seems incredibly obvious, the 1939 Wizard of Oz is a movie so much of Holly-wood that it’s practically about Hollywood. Whether conscious, unconscious, or semiconscious in its origins, the finished product is yet another Hollywood film about itself.

Seen today, what’s generally astounding about the movie is that the means of it are both intricate and visible. The level of craft is considerable but clearly unreal—artisanal-looking. This works to give the movie a timeless, postmodern feel, as though one were looking at handmade puppetry.

Dorothy lands in Munchkinland, where you can see the five o’clock shadows on the Munchkins. They all look vaguely sinister, and the strangeness—more than a fairy tale strangeness, but rather the strangeness of the truly uncanny—is compounded by the beautiful, toy-like sets. Judy Garland, who played Dorothy, was a sixteen-year-old playing a girl who, according to the book, is no more than twelve. So we have a teenager masquerading as a young child, which is weird—a weirdness made achingly poignant by Garland’s soul of disturbing vulnerability. The fact that we now know that MGM was binding her breasts and stuffing her with amphetamines projects an extra shadow onto the on-screen event.

So this is Hollywood’s version of the Garden of Eden, a place where the Tin Man’s eyes are notably bloodshot. Dorothy meets Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, Jack Haley as the Tin Man, and Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, and you can sense the tired vaudevillians underneath the surface of the extreme costumes. They all do really good work—timeless work, work that has guaranteed them their own slice of screen immortality. But what gives it all a campy creepiness is the sense of strain that comes across. One gets the same impression from Billie Burke as Glinda, who is a good twenty years too old for the part and plays the role as though she were, in some hard-to-define way, mentally defective. The old pros are all in there swinging nonetheless, muscling their way to another honest day’s work on the entertainment chain gang.

Like sweat making rivulets down the face of a clown, the interface between tawdry and pretend is all too visible, and yet the imaginative effort is total. Past the age of innocence, you are never not aware of the factory that made the movie, even if you can occasionally push that awareness to the edge of your mind. As with a circus, you watch both the performance and the strenuousness of the investment.

The movie, which seems to resonate on a level of real time and real place, feels like it’s talking more about itself than about Baum’s book. The Tin Man wants a heart, but he pronounces it “hot,” as though he were from Boston. The Cowardly Lion is clearly not from the forest but from New York City. And the Scarecrow sounds like he’s from a part of the country where they might actually have scarecrows. The actors all bring their real voices to the proceedings, which further makes you aware of this gathering from distant places to the dream machine, which is the film itself. What an epic effort it was to make it, almost as if Munchkins died during the filming. They didn’t, but Buddy Ebsen, the original Tin Man, almost did. The aluminum dust in the Tin Man makeup put him in the hospital, and he had to be replaced. Even not knowing that, one can feel something grim and ritualistic about the movie, that it’s by and about a place where dreams turn into nightmares.

IN BAUM’S BOOK, DOROTHY REALLY GOES TO OZ. In the movie, she just dreams that she did. In Dorothy’s dream, the people she knows in real life are turned into things they are not, with some grotesque and disturbing distortions—such as the dismemberment and reassembly of the Scarecrow and the partial burning of the Scarecrow. He is the character Dorothy loves best, and he’s the one the audience invests in the most. He’s the first friend she makes on the road to Oz, and the face that is most available and accessible to us through the costume.

So just to summarize: The movie tells a story in which Dorothy leaves home, but then turns back. During a tornado, something hits her on the head, and she proceeds to have an elaborate dream that scares the hell out of her. Afterwards she resolves never to leave home again. That about covers it, except . . . why does she leave home in the first place? It’s important to remember this—the one thing that, by the end, entire audiences invariably forget.

If you recall, Dorothy starts the movie in a frenzy. Miss Gulch, the richest and most evil human being she knows, has resolved to kill Dorothy’s dog. It gets even worse: As we soon find out, the authorities—perhaps reluctant to offend the town’s richest citizen—have issued an order for Toto to be seized and, as Miss Gulch puts it, “destroaaayed!”

What does Dorothy’s family do about it? Well, they’re useless. Auntie Em and Uncle Henry are both close to a hundred years old, and both are terrified of authority. What’s worse, the Uncle is terrified of Auntie Em. How Dorothy ended up not with parents or even grandparents, or even people that look like siblings of her parents, but with what seem to be relatives of her grandparents, is never explained, but it implies a serious and disturbing death rate in Dorothy’s family. In any case, Uncle Henry is a genial waste of space, and Auntie Em is just plain nasty. With one exception at the end, Auntie Em never lets Dorothy finish a sentence. She is constantly cutting her off. And when the crisis comes—when Miss Gulch and her minions in the local government decide to kill Dorothy’s dog—Auntie Em and Uncle Henry do nothing.

So, of course, Dorothy runs away—and we get the tornado, the head injury, etc.—until finally, after a long (fantasy) adventure, she wakes up in her own bed. Dorothy tries to tell everyone her dream, but, as you may have noticed when you’ve tried to tell people your dreams, no one wants to hear them, ever. (Here’s a pro tip: When people’s nostrils flare as you talk to them, it means they’re suppressing a yawn.) Finally, the movie ends with Dorothy’s announcement that she is never leaving Kansas, and that there’s no place like home, and everyone who has ever watched the movie gets a warm feeling inside.

Except, it must be pointed out . . . nothing has changed since yesterday. The witch is dead, but Miss Gulch is alive, and no bucket of water will get rid of her. Five minutes after the movie ends, they probably come and kill Dorothy’s dog.

But hold on, you might think: Isn’t Dorothy more equipped for dealing with Miss Gulch as a result of her imagined adventure? There’s an obvious answer to that: No. She has no ruby slippers. She has no power at all.

But what about Auntie Em? Won’t she fight harder for Toto now that Dorothy has shown a willingness to leave home over the issue? Again, no. Nothing in Auntie Em’s behavior indicates any deepening of awareness, and even if she were motivated by pure self-interest—a desire to see Dorothy not run away again—that concern is now off the table. Dorothy has already said she is not leaving, and she looks like she means it.

Of course, we can interpret the ending of The Wizard of Oz in a more fanciful way. One might say, for example, that Kansas is no more home than Oz is. Home is knowing that you are enough. Home is knowing that the quest that takes you into the realms of fire and ice is internal, and that being enough in oneself is the overarching message. The dog and Dorothy’s affection for him can even be seen as emblems of the unadulterated true self.

Yet none of that eliminates Dorothy’s problem as spelled out in the first scenes. And whether or not you believe that the movie ends with Toto just days or hours away from a pair of unwanted injections, this much is certain: In Kansas, someone is determined to kill Dorothy’s dog, while in Oz the one person who wanted to kill Toto has gone where the goblins go, below, below, below . . .

Why dwell on this? Quite simply, because the truth of the film—the truth of its message—is contained in this thunderously important yet often ignored and unnoticed plot detail. Here is a Hollywood movie from 1939 that insists on telling us all, children and adults alike, that home is so wonderful that we should never leave it—ever. Yet it presents home as the place where they want to kill your dog, and it forgets to resolve that plot detail.

Resolving it would have been easy. Professor Marvel, when he sticks his head in and checks on Dorothy, could have mentioned that a house fell on Miss Gulch. That would have taken care of her. But the filmmakers chose not to do that, because the whole real point of the movie is that Dorothy has it exactly wrong: Home is horrible. Oz is horrible, too, populated by evil witches, oblivious good witches, useless charlatans, menacing munchkins, and evil flying monkeys. But at least it’s in color. At least it’s exciting. At least the law won’t side against a dog. At least you don’t have a team of ancient relatives lurking about to make you feel guilty for wanting to breathe.

All these years later, it’s impossible to know for sure if this was the intentional message of The Wizard of Oz or if it’s simply a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Wizard of Oz Is a Movie about Hollywood
• Chapter Two: The Glory of Youth
• Chapter Three: Fame
• Chapter Four: A Wonderful Past and a Nightmare Present
• Chapter Five: Junk Food for the Soul
• Chapter Six: Hollywood and Pearl Harbor
• Chapter Seven: Romance
• Chapter Eight: Heinous Crime
• Chapter Nine: Real Noir Is California Noir
• Chapter Ten: Natural Disaster
• Chapter Eleven: Utopia
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author