Los Angeles Labyrinth

Reading Los Angeles as the Classical Noir City

On thinking about Hell, I gather

My brother Shelley found it was a place

Much like the city of London. I

Who live in Los Angeles and not in London

Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be

Still more like Los Angeles. Bertolt Brecht1

From Mount Hollywood, Los Angeles looks rather nice, enveloped in a haze of changing colors. Actually, and, in spite of all the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it is a bad place – full of old, dying people, who were born old of tired pioneer parents, victims of America – full of curious wild and poisonous growths, decadent religious cults and fake science, and wildcat enterprises, which, with their aim for quick profit, are doomed to collapse and drag

This image of the noir city as a labyrinth dominates the conceptualization of Christopher's book, and he defines his use of the word first by saying that the term labyrinth includes the actual physical maze of the city, with its streets, tunnels, and docks, its offices, apartments, and tenements [STILL]; second by evoking with the word a human condition in which the films' characters intersect and interact with complex plot twists, bound by enmeshments of time, space, and chance; and third, by examining the hero's inner workings, which are imaged as a corollary of the city's own inner workings: its politics, languages, cultural crosscurrents, sewers, and other networks and

Separation replaces concentration, distance supplants proximity, and the highway and the automobile supersede the street and the pedestrian. Where cenripetality facilitates escape or evasion by facilitating invisibility in an urban crowd, centrifugality offers the tactical advantages of speed and superior knowledge of territory.12

Billy Wilder's noir masterpiece, Double Indemnity (1944) starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson, is undoubtedly a film that displays L.A.'s centrifugal space, however as Dimendberg writes, there is often an interplay between the two. According to him, centrifugal spaces should not be construed as incompatible with centripetal space, for many elements of the built environment reveal both. A shopping center with a pedestrian mall located on the outskirts of a city is one example of a centering activity brought to the edge of a