Hopscotching Through a Thick Los Angeles
“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of dirty and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world--such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define” (Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 9)
For many years now, I have been sitting with this quote in my head. I first read it during a class I took at Kenyon College, my liberal arts, undergraduate institution. The rural campus was surrounded by corn fields on one side and soybean fields on the other, which perhaps helps to explain why this passage caught my eye. Four years of desolate, icy winters left me longing for the city, the crowd, the hustle and bustle of urban space. At the time, I had only a vague idea of what the words meant, to me personally and within their historical context, that of 19th century, French, bourgeois society. I have lost, sold, or gifted most of my books from my time in college, but I have always held onto my copy of The Painter of Modern Life (1964). I would pick it up now and then, re-read this particular passage in the hope that this mysterious (wo)man of the crowd, and her/his flanuering ways, would help me navigate, exist in, and feel at home at, “the center of the world” (Beaudelaire, 9). Whatever that meant….
I write this essay as my final contribution to a course titled, L@tino Noir, a literary and digital exploration of the Latinidad and the city of Los Angeles through the genre of noir. For me, the cornerstone of the class was the concept of “thick mapping,” both a technical and theoretical device used to excavate forgotten secrets of the past, in service of a more enlivened present and future. The act of vertical cartography brings to the surface an infinite number of counter-stories, and in doing so, exposes history as an unending narrative in a constant state of becoming. It was through the notion of thick mapping that I finally saw clearly the mission of the flaneur. It was not Baudelaire's ambling man of the crowd, nor the “digital dandy,” of HyperCities, which merely dives downward into the past. No, the flaneur that interested me most was more of a nepantlera/o, one who sees “through serpent and eagle eyes,” (Anzaldúa, 78-79) in order to glimpse the multiplicity of the past, as well as the co-existing present(s), real and imagined.
Shifting away from the theoretical and towards the technical, how then does this flanuering nepantlera/o move between temporal and material space? And how can we use the lessons of this border-crossing flaneur to better navigate an increasingly globalized Los Angeles? Two L.A.-centered texts, one literary and the other cinematic, suggest that non-linear movement, one that I will refer to as “hopscotching,” can be used as a corporeal and psychological tool to make sense of the spatial realities and fantasies of both past and present. First used in Julio Cortázar’s counter-novel Rayuela (1963), hopscotching is offered by author Karen Tei Yamashita in Tropic of Orange (1997) and film director David Lynch in Mulholland Drive, as a mode of navigating an ever thickening map of Los Angeles and it’s surrounding areas. While Tropic of Orange gives the reader greater agency over the movement of hopscotching, and Mulholland Drive does the hopscotching on the viewer's behalf, both texts expose the fantastical layers that make up the imagined and material space of Los Angeles at the dawn of the new millennium.
Flipping through the first few pages of Tropic of Orange, the reader is given a choice: Contents, or HyperContext. Choose wisely, because this decision determines how you, reader, will move through the rest of the novel. You may choose to move through the narrative linearly, beginning with chapter 1 and ending neatly with chapter 49. Alternative you may accept the challenge to hopscotch your way through the Tropic of Orange, which means the “HyperContexts,” will act as your roadmap as you move through the narrative both vertically, by character, and horizontally, by days of the week. The physical act of hopscotching enables the reader to move quickly through the narrative. In a mere seven chapters, you’ve seemingly traversed the entirety of the book, from the title page to the back cover. Each Monday through Sunday sequence centers a singular character, beginning with Rafaela, a Mexican mother of one who navigates a complex romantic and spatial reality, one that contracts and expands with her movement between Mazatlán and Tijuana.
At various points throughout Rafaela’s journey, we are introduced to a variety of characters, some who may be peripheral to Rafaela’s story, but who will later be centered in their own narrative. When the reader finishes Rafaela’s story, one which ends with a sensual reunion with her husband Bobby, we think we know the entirety of her narrative, her movements, her desires and her motivations. Yet when we move to the next sequence, which is narrated from Bobby’s sphere of reality, we see that Rafaela’s story was just one of multiple, co-existing perspectives to which we have access. Objects, or characters that we think we understand from the first sequence, take on a new, more complex meaning during the subsequent hyper-contextual sequence.
For example, Rafaela’s story introduces a poem titled “sun-kissed.” (Yamashita, 181) We learn that the poem is written by Arcangle, a side character in this story, but the protagonist of his own later story. The poem is initally handed to Rafaela and then to her son, Sol. Beyond offering aesthetic and thematic texture, the poem remains a two-dimensional object for the remained of Rafaela’s story. As we hopscotch into the later parts of novel however, the poem resurfaces and takes on new, three dimensional meaning. By way of a fax machine, the poem comes into Bobby’s possession and becomes the necessary roadmap that will eventually reunite him with his wife and son. This is literary thick mapping at it’s finest, when the author, reader and characters work in tandem to create an ever deepening plot, exposing the infinite possible spheres of reality that can frame and (re)frame a singular object. The act of hopscotching through Tropic of Orange allows readers to move circuitously and dynamically through a sequence of time that would otherwise be linear. It is then up to the reader to employ the hopscotching maneuver outside the literary and learn to embody the flanuering nepantlera/o within their day to day, lived reality.
Screening Mulholland Drive is a more visual, less tactical experience of hopscotching through a thick map of Los Angeles. At the conclusion of the film, the spectator is left to ponder whether director David Lynch is responsible for the fragmented, deepening narratives, or if the split haunting realities and fantasies are a byproduct of the Hollywood industry itself. On the surface, the film presents us with two, bisecting stories: the first, a wish fulfillment fantasy, complete with a kitchey, glossy and overacted aesthetic that we’d expect from a long dream sequence. The viewer is introduced to the character Betty, a seemingly naive, blonde bombshell and recent Angeleno transplant. The counterpart to this female dichotomy is Rita, the mysterious, amnesiatic, femme fatale who comes to depend on Betty for every move. Part one ends with Betty’s acting career on the brink of major success, and a blossoming romance between the two women.
The change between part one and two, the movement between fantasy and “reality,” is signaled when the lighting and makeup are darkened and the cinematography becomes agitated and fragmented. We learn that Betty and Rita are fictional character’s in Diane Sawyer’s fantasy. Part one is in fact an imagined, reworking of the failed relationship between Diane and Camilla Rhodes, the manipulative, unattainable Hollywood star. If we are to consider hopscotching a form of corporeal and psychological agency, or rather, a strategic way to navigate disparate, co-existing social spheres, Diane loses her navigational grip between parts one and two. Instead, a multiplicity of darker realities take over, flipping and twisting the binary framing of the central female characters. Diane and Camilla move in and between the innocent/guilty, or virgin/whore dichotomies, a visual hopscotching that exposes how Hollywood casts women within one of two rigidly constructed roles. The film is an unsettling one, and even more so when viewed from the space of Los Angeles. We are left to question the profound implications of Hollywood as a factory of dreams, and to what extent our quotidian realities are an extension of, or departure from, the omnipresent fantasy that has fueled the city of Angels since its inception. Herein lies the necessity of the flaneuring, border-crossing, nepantlera/o; the one who hopscotches through the crowd, the urban multitude, excavating the seemingly lost stories of our city’s thick reality and even thicker imagination.
Works Cited:
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print.
Baudelaire, Charles, and P. E. Charvet. The Painter of Modern Life. London: Penguin, 2010.
Print.
Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux.
Imagine Television, 1999. DVD.
Presner, Todd Samuel., David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano. HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the
Digital Humanities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014. Print.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. 1997. Print
“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of dirty and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world--such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define” (Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, 9)
For many years now, I have been sitting with this quote in my head. I first read it during a class I took at Kenyon College, my liberal arts, undergraduate institution. The rural campus was surrounded by corn fields on one side and soybean fields on the other, which perhaps helps to explain why this passage caught my eye. Four years of desolate, icy winters left me longing for the city, the crowd, the hustle and bustle of urban space. At the time, I had only a vague idea of what the words meant, to me personally and within their historical context, that of 19th century, French, bourgeois society. I have lost, sold, or gifted most of my books from my time in college, but I have always held onto my copy of The Painter of Modern Life (1964). I would pick it up now and then, re-read this particular passage in the hope that this mysterious (wo)man of the crowd, and her/his flanuering ways, would help me navigate, exist in, and feel at home at, “the center of the world” (Beaudelaire, 9). Whatever that meant….
I write this essay as my final contribution to a course titled, L@tino Noir, a literary and digital exploration of the Latinidad and the city of Los Angeles through the genre of noir. For me, the cornerstone of the class was the concept of “thick mapping,” both a technical and theoretical device used to excavate forgotten secrets of the past, in service of a more enlivened present and future. The act of vertical cartography brings to the surface an infinite number of counter-stories, and in doing so, exposes history as an unending narrative in a constant state of becoming. It was through the notion of thick mapping that I finally saw clearly the mission of the flaneur. It was not Baudelaire's ambling man of the crowd, nor the “digital dandy,” of HyperCities, which merely dives downward into the past. No, the flaneur that interested me most was more of a nepantlera/o, one who sees “through serpent and eagle eyes,” (Anzaldúa, 78-79) in order to glimpse the multiplicity of the past, as well as the co-existing present(s), real and imagined.
Shifting away from the theoretical and towards the technical, how then does this flanuering nepantlera/o move between temporal and material space? And how can we use the lessons of this border-crossing flaneur to better navigate an increasingly globalized Los Angeles? Two L.A.-centered texts, one literary and the other cinematic, suggest that non-linear movement, one that I will refer to as “hopscotching,” can be used as a corporeal and psychological tool to make sense of the spatial realities and fantasies of both past and present. First used in Julio Cortázar’s counter-novel Rayuela (1963), hopscotching is offered by author Karen Tei Yamashita in Tropic of Orange (1997) and film director David Lynch in Mulholland Drive, as a mode of navigating an ever thickening map of Los Angeles and it’s surrounding areas. While Tropic of Orange gives the reader greater agency over the movement of hopscotching, and Mulholland Drive does the hopscotching on the viewer's behalf, both texts expose the fantastical layers that make up the imagined and material space of Los Angeles at the dawn of the new millennium.
Flipping through the first few pages of Tropic of Orange, the reader is given a choice: Contents, or HyperContext. Choose wisely, because this decision determines how you, reader, will move through the rest of the novel. You may choose to move through the narrative linearly, beginning with chapter 1 and ending neatly with chapter 49. Alternative you may accept the challenge to hopscotch your way through the Tropic of Orange, which means the “HyperContexts,” will act as your roadmap as you move through the narrative both vertically, by character, and horizontally, by days of the week. The physical act of hopscotching enables the reader to move quickly through the narrative. In a mere seven chapters, you’ve seemingly traversed the entirety of the book, from the title page to the back cover. Each Monday through Sunday sequence centers a singular character, beginning with Rafaela, a Mexican mother of one who navigates a complex romantic and spatial reality, one that contracts and expands with her movement between Mazatlán and Tijuana.
At various points throughout Rafaela’s journey, we are introduced to a variety of characters, some who may be peripheral to Rafaela’s story, but who will later be centered in their own narrative. When the reader finishes Rafaela’s story, one which ends with a sensual reunion with her husband Bobby, we think we know the entirety of her narrative, her movements, her desires and her motivations. Yet when we move to the next sequence, which is narrated from Bobby’s sphere of reality, we see that Rafaela’s story was just one of multiple, co-existing perspectives to which we have access. Objects, or characters that we think we understand from the first sequence, take on a new, more complex meaning during the subsequent hyper-contextual sequence.
For example, Rafaela’s story introduces a poem titled “sun-kissed.” (Yamashita, 181) We learn that the poem is written by Arcangle, a side character in this story, but the protagonist of his own later story. The poem is initally handed to Rafaela and then to her son, Sol. Beyond offering aesthetic and thematic texture, the poem remains a two-dimensional object for the remained of Rafaela’s story. As we hopscotch into the later parts of novel however, the poem resurfaces and takes on new, three dimensional meaning. By way of a fax machine, the poem comes into Bobby’s possession and becomes the necessary roadmap that will eventually reunite him with his wife and son. This is literary thick mapping at it’s finest, when the author, reader and characters work in tandem to create an ever deepening plot, exposing the infinite possible spheres of reality that can frame and (re)frame a singular object. The act of hopscotching through Tropic of Orange allows readers to move circuitously and dynamically through a sequence of time that would otherwise be linear. It is then up to the reader to employ the hopscotching maneuver outside the literary and learn to embody the flanuering nepantlera/o within their day to day, lived reality.
Screening Mulholland Drive is a more visual, less tactical experience of hopscotching through a thick map of Los Angeles. At the conclusion of the film, the spectator is left to ponder whether director David Lynch is responsible for the fragmented, deepening narratives, or if the split haunting realities and fantasies are a byproduct of the Hollywood industry itself. On the surface, the film presents us with two, bisecting stories: the first, a wish fulfillment fantasy, complete with a kitchey, glossy and overacted aesthetic that we’d expect from a long dream sequence. The viewer is introduced to the character Betty, a seemingly naive, blonde bombshell and recent Angeleno transplant. The counterpart to this female dichotomy is Rita, the mysterious, amnesiatic, femme fatale who comes to depend on Betty for every move. Part one ends with Betty’s acting career on the brink of major success, and a blossoming romance between the two women.
The change between part one and two, the movement between fantasy and “reality,” is signaled when the lighting and makeup are darkened and the cinematography becomes agitated and fragmented. We learn that Betty and Rita are fictional character’s in Diane Sawyer’s fantasy. Part one is in fact an imagined, reworking of the failed relationship between Diane and Camilla Rhodes, the manipulative, unattainable Hollywood star. If we are to consider hopscotching a form of corporeal and psychological agency, or rather, a strategic way to navigate disparate, co-existing social spheres, Diane loses her navigational grip between parts one and two. Instead, a multiplicity of darker realities take over, flipping and twisting the binary framing of the central female characters. Diane and Camilla move in and between the innocent/guilty, or virgin/whore dichotomies, a visual hopscotching that exposes how Hollywood casts women within one of two rigidly constructed roles. The film is an unsettling one, and even more so when viewed from the space of Los Angeles. We are left to question the profound implications of Hollywood as a factory of dreams, and to what extent our quotidian realities are an extension of, or departure from, the omnipresent fantasy that has fueled the city of Angels since its inception. Herein lies the necessity of the flaneuring, border-crossing, nepantlera/o; the one who hopscotches through the crowd, the urban multitude, excavating the seemingly lost stories of our city’s thick reality and even thicker imagination.
Works Cited:
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print.
Baudelaire, Charles, and P. E. Charvet. The Painter of Modern Life. London: Penguin, 2010.
Print.
Mulholland Drive. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux.
Imagine Television, 1999. DVD.
Presner, Todd Samuel., David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano. HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the
Digital Humanities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014. Print.
Yamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. 1997. Print